The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was first conceived in 1916 by the Reverend David Railton, who was serving as an army chaplain on the Western Front. He wrote to the dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, in 1920 proposing that an unidentified British soldier from the battlefields in France be buried with due ceremony. The idea was strongly supported by the dean and the prime minister, David Lloyd George. Suitable remains were exhumed from various battlefields and brought to the chapel at Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise near Arras, France on the night of 7 November 1920. The body of the unknown Warrior was carried to London in South Eastern and Chatham Railway General Utility Van No. 132.
About The Unknown Warrior in brief
The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was first conceived in 1916 by the Reverend David Railton, who was serving as an army chaplain on the Western Front. He wrote to the dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, in 1920 proposing that an unidentified British soldier from the battlefields in France be buried with due ceremony in Westminster Abbey. The idea was strongly supported by the dean and the prime minister, David Lloyd George. Suitable remains were exhumed from various battlefields and brought to the chapel at Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise near Arras, France on the night of 7 November 1920. The casket was banded with iron, and a crusader’s sword chosen by King George V personally from the Royal Collection was affixed to the top and surmounted by an iron shield bearing the inscription ‘A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country’ The body of the unknown Warrior was carried to London in South Eastern and Chatham Railway General Utility Van No.
132, which had previously carried the bodies of Edith Cavell and Charles Fryatt. The cortege was followed by The King, the Royal Family and ministers of state to Westminster Abbey where it was borne into the West Nave of the Abbey flanked by one hundred recipients of the Nave. The tomb was unveiled by King-Emperor George V on 11 November 1920, a day after a similar interment of a French unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in France, making both graves the first to honour the unknown dead of the First World War. The remains were then placed in four plain coffins each covered by Union Flags: the two officers did not know from which battlefield any individual soldier had come, and remained overnight in Boulogne.
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This page is based on the article The Unknown Warrior published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 28, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
