At eleven o'clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The Armistice, signed at Compiègne in the early hours of that day, had come into effect — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — and four years of war were over. Today, 11 November 2026, is the 108th anniversary of that silence, and it is still marked across Britain with two minutes of quiet at eleven o'clock. Two years after the Armistice, on the morning of 11 November 1920, London witnessed a funeral unlike any other in British history. An unidentified British serviceman, dug up from a battlefield in France, was carried through the capital with the honours of a field marshal and buried among the kings in Westminster Abbey. He had no name, no rank and no regiment that anyone could prove. That was the point. He stood for all the men who had died with no known grave, and whose families had nowhere to mourn them.
Photograph by Horace Nicholls, Imperial War Museum (Q 31514), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
A war that left no grave
The First World War produced a new kind of loss. Before 1914, it had been the fate of the ordinary soldier to be forgotten; there was no system in place to mark or care for the graves of servicemen. By the end of the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission — founded by Sir Fabian Ware and established by Royal Charter in 1917 — had identified some 587,000 graves, but a further 559,000 casualties were registered as having no known grave. Of the roughly one million British and Empire servicemen killed in the war, over half a million have no known grave. Some lie anonymously in war cemeteries under headstones bearing the words "Known Unto God". The rest lie scattered across the old battlefields, in graves that were obliterated as the front lines moved back and forth, or in bodies destroyed beyond recognition by shellfire. Their names are carved on great memorials to the missing — more than 72,000 at Thiepval alone, over 54,000 at the Menin Gate at Ypres — but for their families there was no grave to visit, no place to lay flowers, and often no certainty about how or where a son, husband or brother had died. The Unknown Warrior was Britain's answer to that absence: one man, chosen at random from the unknown dead, given the funeral of a hero, and laid to rest in the nation's most honoured church so that every bereaved family could feel that he might be theirs.
The chaplain's idea
The idea came from a chaplain at the front. The Reverend David Railton was born in London on 13 November 1884, the son of George Scott Railton, the first Commissioner of the Salvation Army. He served as an Army chaplain in France, where in 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for saving an officer and two men under heavy fire. That same year, in a back garden at Armentières, he noticed a grave with a rough cross on which were pencilled the words "An Unknown British Soldier" — in his own account, "An Unknown Soldier of the Black Watch". The sight stayed with him. "How that grave caused me to think!" he later wrote. After the war, Railton became vicar of St John the Baptist at Margate, and in August 1920 he wrote to Herbert Ryle, the Dean of Westminster, proposing that an unknown British soldier be brought home from France and buried in the Abbey with full honours. Ryle took up the idea, and with the support of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, won over King George V. The King, who had lost so many of his own subjects, agreed. The burial would take place on Armistice Day, 11 November 1920, two years to the day after the guns had stopped.
The choosing at St Pol
The choosing was done in the strictest secrecy, so that no one could ever say the man had been picked for his regiment, his rank or his place of death. Bodies were exhumed from the battlefields and brought to the chapel at St Pol, near Arras, on the night of 7 November 1920. Westminster Abbey's own account says the body was chosen from unknown servicemen exhumed from four battle areas — the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres — and notes that some sources say six bodies, but that confirmed accounts say four. The remains lay on stretchers in the chapel, each covered by a Union flag, with no mark to show which battlefield it had come from. Brigadier General L. J. Wyatt, the General Officer in charge of troops in France and Flanders, went into the chapel alone with Colonel Gell. They had no idea from which area the bodies had come. Wyatt selected one, and the two officers placed it in a plain coffin and sealed it. The other three bodies were reburied. In the morning, chaplains of the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Nonconformist churches held a service in the chapel before the body was escorted to Boulogne to rest overnight.
The coffin was then placed inside another, sent over specially from England, made of two-inch thick oak from a tree which had grown in the garden of Hampton Court Palace and lined with zinc. Within the wrought iron bands of the outer coffin had been placed a sixteenth-century crusader's sword from the Tower of London collection. The coffin plate bore the inscription: "A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914–1918 for King and Country." Over the coffin lay the flag that David Railton had used as an altar cloth during the war — the Padre's Flag, as it came to be known — which had covered the fallen on the Western Front and now covered the Unknown Warrior. It was a coffin fit for a king, made for a man nobody could name.
The journey home
On 10 November 1920 the destroyer HMS Verdun carried the coffin across the Channel to Dover, and from there it was taken by train to Victoria station in London, where it rested overnight. The ship's bell of HMS Verdun was later presented to Westminster Abbey, and it still hangs near the grave. The next morning, the coffin was taken from Victoria station to begin its last journey through London. At the station, the coffin was placed by the bearer party from the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards on a gun carriage drawn by six black horses of the Royal Horse Artillery, and the procession moved off through streets lined with silent crowds, by way of Admiralty Arch to Whitehall. The bands played Chopin's Funeral March. Behind the gun carriage walked the King, members of the Royal Family and ministers of state, and among the pall-bearers were the most senior soldiers and sailors in the land: Admirals Lord Beatty, Sir Hedworth Meux, Sir Henry Jackson and Sir C. E. Madden, Field Marshals Lord French, Lord Haig, Lord Methuen and Sir Henry Wilson, Generals Lord Horne, Lord Byng and Albert Farrar-Gatliff, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard.
Frank O. Salisbury, Parliamentary Art Collection (WOA 2957), CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The funeral: Cenotaph and Abbey
The procession's first stop was in Whitehall, where King George V unveiled the Cenotaph — the permanent stone memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to replace the temporary wood-and-plaster monument of the 1919 victory parade. The King placed his wreath of red roses and bay leaves on the coffin, with a card in his own hand: "In proud memory of those Warriors who died unknown in the Great War. Unknown, and yet well-known; as dying, and behold they live. George R.I. November 11th 1920." The Last Post was sounded, and the two minutes' silence was kept. Then the carriage moved on to Westminster Abbey, where the choir had been singing "O Valiant Hearts" while the Cenotaph ceremony took place outside.
Inside the Abbey, a congregation of around 1,000 mourners waited, among them Queen Alexandra, the queens of Spain and Norway, the Duke of Connaught, Lloyd George and Asquith. The coffin was borne to the west end of the nave through a guard of honour of one hundred holders of the Victoria Cross, drawn from all three services and under the command of Colonel Freyburg VC — the bravest men in the country, standing guard over a man whose bravery nobody would ever know. The hymns "O God our help in ages past", "Lead kindly light" and "Abide with me" were sung, the 23rd Psalm was read, and the two minutes' silence was kept at eleven o'clock. Then the King stepped forward and dropped a handful of French earth onto the coffin from a silver shell as it was lowered into the grave, in soil brought from the battlefields of France. The service closed with Kipling's Recessional and the Reveille sounded by trumpeters. The Unknown Warrior had been given a state funeral — the only time that honour has been given to an anonymous person — and he was buried among the kings because, as the inscription over him says, he had done good toward God and toward His house. That same day, France buried its own unknown soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, so the two nations honoured their unknown dead together.
The tomb
The grave was filled in using one hundred sandbags of earth from the battlefields on 18 November 1920, and covered at first by a temporary stone. A year later, on 11 November 1921, the present stone was unveiled at a special service: a slab of black Belgian marble from a quarry near Namur, seven feet by four feet three inches, with its inscription engraved in brass made from melted-down wartime ammunition. It is the only tombstone in Westminster Abbey on which it is forbidden to walk. The inscription, composed by Dean Herbert Ryle, reads:
Mike from England, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY
OF A BRITISH WARRIOR
UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK
BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG
THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND
AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY
11 NOV: 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF
HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V
HIS MINISTERS OF STATE
THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES
AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION
THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY
MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT
WAR OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT
MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF
FOR GOD
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE
FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND
THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD
THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD
HIS HOUSE
Around the main inscription are four shorter texts: "The Lord knoweth them that are His", "Greater love hath no man than this", "Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live", and "In Christ shall all be made alive". The Padre's Flag, which had covered the coffin, was formally dedicated at the same service on 11 November 1921 and hoisted on a pillar above the grave; it now hangs in St George's Chapel.
What the Unknown Warrior means now
The Unknown Warrior may have been from any of the three services — Army, Navy or Air Force — and from any part of the British Isles, the Dominions or the Colonies. That uncertainty was deliberate, and it is why the grave still matters. He represents all those who died with no other memorial or known grave, in the First World War and in every war since. A year after the burial, on 17 October 1921, General Pershing, on behalf of the United States of America, conferred the Congressional Medal of Honor on the Unknown Warrior; it now hangs in a frame on a pillar near the grave. On 11 November 1921 the American Unknown Soldier was in turn awarded the Victoria Cross, presented by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty on behalf of King George V. The two nations had exchanged their highest honours for bravery between two men neither could name.
Other traditions have grown around the grave. When the Duke of York, later King George VI, married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in the Abbey in 1923, she laid her wedding bouquet on the grave as she entered, in memory of a brother lost in the war. Every royal bride married in the Abbey since then has sent her bouquet to be laid on the grave after the ceremony, and Queen Camilla's coronation bouquet was laid there after the coronation on 6 May 2023. The annual Field of Remembrance outside the Abbey, where small wooden crosses are planted for the fallen, was started in 1928 by Major George Howson MC, founder of the British Legion Poppy Factory. On the centenary of the burial in 2020, the grave was the focus of national remembrance once more, and on the centenary of the Armistice in 2018 a service attended by Queen Elizabeth II and the President of Germany was held in the Abbey on the evening of 11 November.
A century on, the Unknown Warrior still does the work he was buried to do. Every November, thousands of people file past the black marble slab in the west end of the nave, many of them the descendants of men whose own graves were never found. They do not know who lies beneath the stone, and that is exactly why they come: because he could be anyone, he can stand for everyone. The men who chose him at St Pol took care that no one would ever know his name, his regiment or his battlefield. What they left behind is a grave that belongs to every family that never had one — and a reminder, kept in the heart of the Abbey, that the cost of war is measured not in victories but in the names we never learned.
Sources
- Westminster Abbey, "Unknown Warrior" — https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/unknown-warrior
- Imperial War Museum photograph Q 31514, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Unknown_Warrior_at_Westminster_Abbey,_November_1920_Q31514.jpg
- Frank O. Salisbury, "The Burial of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, 1920", Parliamentary Art Collection (WOA 2957), via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burial_of_the_British_Unknown_Warrior,_1920.jpg
- Photograph of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, 9 November 2010, by Mike from England, via Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tomb_of_the_Unknown_Warrior_-_Westminster_Abbey_-_London,_England_-_9_Nov._2010.jpg
- Imperial War Museums, "Unveiling of the Cenotaph and Funeral of the Unknown Warrior, Armistice Day 1920" — https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205067424
- GOV.UK, "WW1 United States of America VC recipient: The Unknown Soldier" — https://www.gov.uk/government/case-studies/ww1-united-states-of-america-vc-recipient-the-unknown-soldier
- Commonwealth War Graves Commission history: by 1918, some 587,000 graves had been identified and a further 559,000 casualties were registered as having no known grave.
- Royal British Legion, "The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior" — https://branches.britishlegion.org.uk/branches/shipston-on-stour/remembrance/the-tomb-of-the-unknown-warrior/
- Wikipedia, "The Unknown Warrior", used only as a lead for dates; it is not a cited authority.
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