The remains of the unknown soldier were laid to rest in a solemn national ceremony on Armistice Day (November 11), 1920, in a service attended by King George V and his family. The following year, the US government announced that it was awarding its highest military decoration – the Congressional Medal of Honor – to the man whose remains are buried here. That medal may be seen today in a frame hanging on a pillar a little way from the tomb.

The idea for this commemoration came from an Army chaplain, David Railton. While serving with the British Expeditionary Force in 1916, he came upon a private garden in Armentières, where a rough wooden cross had been erected, across which had been pencilled “An unknown British soldier”. After the war was over, he proposed to the Dean of Westminster, Herbert Ryle, that a tomb containing the remains of an unidentified British soldier might be installed in the Abbey as a symbolic memorial to all who lost their lives in the great conflict, but who lacked any lasting monument.

The journey begins

Selection of the body took place in France in 1920. The remains of four men were exhumed from war graves in four of the principal battlefields in France and Flanders: Arras, the Somme, the Aisne and Ypres. These were taken to a chapel in St-Pol on the night of November 7, and covered with Union flags. Serving officers Brigadier-General LJ Wyatt and Colonel Gell then entered the chapel together. Without having been told which was which, Wyatt chose one of the bodies at random, and the two officers placed it in a plain coffin.

The coffin began its journey the following morning. It was first escorted to the Channel port of Boulogne. On November 10, the coffin was sealed inside another, more ornate one, made of oak wood from the estate at Hampton Court, and incorporating within its iron bands a 16th-century crusader’s sword taken from the collection of the Tower of London. It was then loaded on to the destroyer HMS Verdun, and carried to Dover. Transferred to a train, it then made its way to Victoria station in London.

Final resting place

For the ceremony on Remembrance Day, the coffin was mounted on a gun carriage and drawn by six black horses through crowd-lined streets, via Whitehall, where the King unveiled the Cenotaph memorial, to the Abbey. It was handed towards its final resting-place by 100 recipients of the Victoria Cross. King George scattered a handful of earth from the French battlefield over the coffin after it had been lowered into the tomb. A temporary stone was used to seal the tomb a week later.

A year later, on Remembrance Day 1921, the present black slab, of Belgian marble from a quarry near the town of Namur, was dedicated during a further special service. The full text of its inscription, composed by Dean Ryle, reads as follows:

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

The Westminster Abbey tomb was by no means the first ever to an unknown soldier (the idea appears to have originated with a Danish memorial erected in Fredericia in the 19th century), but it did inspire a whole host of other such memorials throughout Europe and the US. There is an unknown French soldier of the Great War beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and unknown soldiers from several wars in the US national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia.