The casket of the Unknown Warrior was made of the oak timbers of trees from Hampton Court Palace. 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’.

On the morning of the 11th of November 1920, the casket was placed onto a gun carriage of the Royal Horse Artillery (N Battery RHA) and drawn by six black horses through immense and silent crowds. As the cortege set off, a further Field Marshal’s salute was fired in Hyde Park. The route followed was Hyde Park Corner, The Mall, and to Whitehall where the Cenotaph, a ‘symbolic empty tomb’ was unveiled by King-Emperor George V.

The cortège was then followed by The King, the Royal Family and ministers of state to Westminster Abbey, where the casket was borne into the West Nave of the Abbey flanked by a guard of honour of one hundred recipients of the Victoria Cross.

The guests of honour were a group of about one hundred women. They had been chosen because they had each lost their husband and all their sons in the war. ‘Every woman so bereft who applied for a place got it’.

When Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother) married Prince Albert, Duke of York (who became King George VI) on the 26th of April 1923, she laid her bouquet at the Tomb on her way into the Abbey, as a tribute to her brother Fergus who had died at the Battle of Loos in 1915.

Royal brides married at the Abbey now have their bouquets laid on the tomb the day after the wedding and all of the official wedding photographs have been taken. It is also the only tomb not to have been covered by a special red carpet for the wedding of the Duke of York, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

‘Battle doesn’t determine who is right. Only who is left. We destroyed fascists, not fascism; men, not ideas. Our triumphs did not serve as evidence that democracy is best for the world. The victory of the Bolsheviks is not the same as proving that communism is an ideal system for all mankind.  Only through our peacetime efforts to abolish war and bring a larger measure of freedom and security to all peoples can we reveal to others that we are any better than our defeated opponents.’  – Peter Bowman ‘Beach Red’.

WORLD WAR ONE IN A LINE ‘A lengthy period of general insanity.’   ~ Field-Marshall Lord Allenby.