Dan Snow's History Hit - The Unknown Warrior

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

In the western nave of Westminster Abbey, nestled between illustrious tombs and beneath a slab of black Belgian marble, lies the body of an unidentified soldier of the First World War. He is remembered as the Unknown Warrior, a symbol of the half a million Commonwealth servicemen who went missing between 1914 and 1918, their earthly remains lost to the chaos of conflict.As Remembrance Day approaches and guided by John Nichol, former RAF navigator and author of 'The Unknown Warrior', we journey from the horrors of the Western Front to Westminster Abbey. He explains the profound importance this monument held for the many millions suffering from collective grief after the incomprehensible losses of World War One.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, buddy. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On October 30th, 1914, at around 6am,

German guns opened up on a British position just outside the town of Ypres in Belgium. The village was called Zandvoorde. Defending, hastily dug trenches, poorly positioned trenches I should say. On the forward side, on the German facing side of a gentle slope, was C Squadron of the First Lifeguards, a very fancy elite cavalry regiment from the oldest units in the British Army. Its officers recruited from the upper echelons of British society, plenty of aristocrats among them. They had arrived in Europe hoping to gallop around, win glory on the battlefields, on horseback, but today they were crouching in

muddy trenches, rifles in hands, fighting like any other infantryman in the war, their horses far to the rear. This was now a war of artillerymen, of infantrymen, of rifle, machine gun, bayonet, digging trenches and holding on to them for the last bullet. At 7.30am, the German infantry attacked and they overran these positions. Much of the first lifeguards retreated, drew back, but C Squadron, well, they almost entirely went missing. Became one of the great mysteries of 1914. C Squadron had gone into the war with around 120 troopers. Their numbers had been diminished in the first few days of campaigning. But as the first lifeguards rallied, having withdrawn, they realised that only around 10 members of C Squadron

had made it back with them. The overwhelming majority were never heard from ever again. It's now thought that the makeshift trenches in boggy ground, ill-sighted, ill-dug, it is thought that there had been a landslide, effectively a mudslide caused by German artillery had simply swamped much of C Company. Their names would be carved into a panel in the Menin Gate, on which the names of all those who are missing in the Ypres battles are commemorated. Among them was my children's great-great-grandfather, just one of the many missing of the First World War. At the end of the war, the scale of the losses and the changing politics of Britain meant that

there was a demand for a different kind of commemoration, different kind of remembrance. And so a plan to repatriate an unknown warrior from the battlefields of France was adopted. That warrior would be reburied in the heart of Westminster Abbey, Britain's national church, among kings, queens, scientists, writers, luminaries. That bail took place on Armistice day 1920 and it's one of the great moments in british public life one million people visited the site in the week after the tomb was sealed you can still go and see the unknown warrior today he lies right at the entrance to westminster abbey on his tomb i carved these 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, 11th of

November 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 1914-18 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 towards God and towards his house. It remains today one of the most powerful places that I've ever been in the UK. And it's very special now that the Unknown Warrior has got a new history book, a new treatment from the wonderful John Nicol, a former RAF tornado navigator who

was shot down, who was made a prisoner of war during the Gulf War. He's now a best-selling author. He's been on this podcast many times, written wonderful books about tornadoes, spitfires, Lancasters, and much else besides. He's coming on to help me trace the journey of the unknown warrior, from its idea to the selection of the body on the Western Front, or the former Western Front, and its former Western Front, and its journey home, its remarkable journey home that ended in Westminster Abbey. Here's John Nicol.

T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. dispersed and blank unit. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. John, great to see you again, mate.

Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me back on, Dan. Always a delight to be with you, mate. John, what's going on with the First World War? You know, the Crimean War or earlier wars, if you're a common soldier or sailor, you stay where you lay. Unless your family was wealthy and you're well-connected, your body might be brought back. But suddenly now in the First World War, these men are being commemorated. Their burial place are being

respected and remembered. What do you think's changed? Well, I mean, I think that it was the first where we had some sort of a media where people were getting real time or not real time by today's standards, casualty figures in the clearly first day of the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 dead in one day. Those figures were being published so people knew about it. You'd mentioned previous wars. And of course, what you have to remember is that nobody had ever been brought home unless you were important. And so for the common soldier, if you look at some of the old pictures, if you look at some of the old descriptions, they would be burnt in pits. They'd be buried in mass graves. I was staggered when I was doing

the research for this book to find that during Waterloo. If you look in the dental magazines for the very early 1900s, you could get what were called Waterloo dentures, Waterloo teeth. And so there were sets of dentures that had been made with the teeth of dead servicemen. So they'd gone onto the battlefield and they'd pulled their teeth out. Their teeth were packed up and sent home to be used by dental technicians and their bones were ground up. Again, if you look in the records, you'll find ships going to ports like Hull, full of the ground up bones of servicemen who died on the battlefield to be used as fertilizer on the field. So bodies not coming

home in the First World War was somewhat controversial, but the treatment of the dead was less controversial than had been. Is it because we were seeing these as fellows? Is it the age of democracy that we're seeing their personhood, their manhood now? We recognise them as equals and everyone at home realised they needed to be given a decent pay or commemorated? Well, I think it's a little bit different to that, Dan, because I think that people had a voice. So people had a voice after the First World War. They could go and complain. There were people taking up the case. If you go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years earlier and more, if you were a miner's wife in Durham or a fisherman's wife in Cornwall and your husband had died on the battlefields of the Somme or Ypres or Ene or

whatever, you had a voice for the first time if you knew how to express it. And people did. There were campaigns to have some of the dead returned home. The rules stayed the same. But for the first time, people had a voice that they hadn't had previously. And that made the difference, I think. And so you get the astonishing graveyards, cemeteries that we all still go and visit and marvel at and are overwhelmed by. What is the genesis for the idea of the unknown warrior? So it's the unknown warrior because the whole point was that it could be anybody. So it could have been anybody. So you had the naval, as you know, the naval division fighting in the early part of the war. You had the Royal Flying Corps. And so the theory was it could be

anybody, which was why there were arguments about it, which is why it was called an unknown warrior. So the simple facts, the brutal facts, just over a million British Empire servicemen dying during the First World War. And of that million, just over half a million with no known grave. Half a million. That's a staggering figure. Half a million men with no known resting place. So either buried in the great cemeteries that you mentioned there, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and you'll have seen and many of your listeners will have seen those beautiful white headstones, a soldier of the Great War known unto God. And there are, I think, if my memory serves me correctly, there's 190,000 of them. So 190,000 buried unidentified. So we don't know who we buried. They were unidentifiable for various reasons we might come on to.

And then there are the missing on the great monuments. So I think you've been to Thiepvaldan, to the missing of the Somme and the Menin Gate, to the missing of the battles around Ypres. The Somme, the missing of the Somme, not thepres, the Somme, the missing of the Somme, not the dead of the Somme, the missing of the Somme alone lists, I think, top of my head, just over 70,000 missing, never found, never the missing. And so that proved to be a huge problem in the aftermath of the First World War. And there were campaigns. A, people wanted their loved ones home. And obviously the edict was that that was not going to happen. And if it wasn't going to happen, they wanted somewhere to memorialise the dead. And that is

how the scheme of the unknown warrior came about. One man to be brought from the battlefields to rest in Westminster Abbey amongst the kings and the queens to represent all of the missing. John, let's just talk a little bit, if it's not too gruesome, about the nature of the First World War and why so many unidentified bodies. Obviously, in the Peninsular War and the Napoleonic War, people would have gone missing, they'd have absconded, or they would have dropped out the line of march and just died in a ditch along the way and been buried perhaps in a shallow grave by the Spanish villagers in the area. But what is it about the First World War that you just see industrial numbers of people who you don't know

who they are? Well, you used the word industrial there, Dan, and it's a really important phrase. It was industrialised warfare. For the first time, really. We'd had the American Civil War with large use of artillery, but the First World War. So in the run-up to the Battle of High Wood, which was one battle in a very short, maybe half a square mile of the Battle of the Somme, which was one four-month battle of a four-and-a-half-year war. In the run-up to the Battle of High Wood, which I use as an example in the book, the artillery were firing about a third of a million shells a day. A third of a million shells a day in the run-up to that battle. And so the phrase that comes about regularly in the accounts that you read is blown to atoms, blown to atoms. And so

if you are hit by an artillery shell, your body ceases to be, there is nothing. There's one account that I use, and it is gruesome, but it's important to talk about. One officer was hit by an artillery shell and all that remained was a bloodied foot in a boot that they buried, named, because they knew it was him. So he was buried named, but it was a foot. It was a foot and he was buried named, but many of them were blown to atoms. And so there was nothing to bury. So there was nothing to exist. And the ways a man could become lost were incredible. So you could be lost in the mud of the battlefield. So the famous photographs from Passchendaele,

where the men are up to their waists in mud trying to recover the dead and recover the injured. You could be lost to the mud. You could be lost simply because there was no time to bury you. And there's a number of cases of this. And I've used a photograph in the book where in 1919, so that's a year after the war, There are skeletal remains lying around high wood. They'd just never been collected. They had no time to collect them. There was just not the time to collect and bury the dead. You could be lost because your body was buried in a shell hole and somebody had perhaps turned a rifle upside down. Somebody had penciled something on a piece of wood and stuck it in. But then as the battles ebbed and flowed, as the front lines moved back and forwards, the shelling would blast the dead from their resting place and

scatter their remains. So the dead were lost, their registration was lost. There's a couple of cases I use in the book where they have almost a semi-formal service for somebody. Tom Kettler, an Irish nationalist who fought alongside the Brits, he died and he was buried at the edge of the battlefield in a hasty cemetery, in a hasty grave. And the man recording all of this, who writes to his wife, said, Boyd collected all of his possessions. So they got all of his stuff out of his pockets, his letters, his wallet, his watch. And he said to his wife, Boyd collected them all for you. And then Boyd was hit by an artillery shell. And so Boyd was blown to atoms. All his possessions were lost, but they knew where

the grave was. But then at some point, it says the Welsh guards buried Mr. Kettle. And then at some point during the fighting, the battles, the shelling, Tom Kettle's grave was lost and nobody knows why. It just disappeared. And if you think about that on those small individual cases with one man or two men, and then multiply that by the vastness of the Battle of the Somme, the vastness of the three battles around Ypres, those huge battles where tens, hundreds of thousands of men were moving back and forwards,

you can see how so many men disappeared, simply ceased to be. You've got vast numbers of people missing. You've got vast numbers of people unidentified. Tell me about how the unknown warrior, the idea of bringing one home, where did that stem from? So that came about Reverend David Railton, who was a padre, as we in the military would call them, with one of the huge regiments. He'd been in a number of different battles. So he came up with the idea in 1920, two years after the war. But he'd had the thought in 1916 at one of the first battles that he'd been witness to, and he'd been burying the dead as he did. And he talks in his letters

about burying the dead and writing to the dead's family if he could do that and how important it was to try to identify those they buried and mark their graves. But he came back to his digs, his billet, a little way away from the battlefield one evening. And it was a house. It was a shelved house, a wrecked house. But he went in and in the back garden, somebody had buried a soldier.

And he said in his letter, as a paraphrase now, it was a recently buried, marked with a white cross on which were marked the words, an unknown soldier. And I think it was the Black Watch. So he describes it. He said, I thought and thought and wrestled in thought. And out of the mists of thought came this idea to bring him home. Who did he belong to? I thought about his mother. I thought about his father, his fiance, his family. Bring him home, carry him across the sea to represent the missing. And so that was 1916. And four years later in 1920, second anniversary of the armistice is approaching. And this idea, he's been wrestling with this thought for years. And he decides that now is the time to do this because the second anniversary of the armistice was when the

cenotaph, so the cenotaph that you and I now know on Whitehall, it had been a temporary wooden plaster one for a year. And the brand new one that we see now was being unveiled. He thought, I'm going to try and get this idea forward. And he wrote to the Dean of Westminster Abbey, to Herbert Ryle, proposing the idea for, as he called it, an unknown comrade to be brought across the sea. Herbert Ryle agreed with it, who took it to the Prime Minister, which is amazing if you think about it now. The Prime Minister took it to the King. The King was not in agreement. The King, George, said initially, again, paraphrasing, I don't think we should be continuing with this commemoration, with this constantly looking back to the dead. before the second anniversary of the armistice and the parade for Whitehall and the Cenotaph, they decided that this scheme was going to be carried out to bring back one of the dead,

one of the unknown, to be buried in Westminster Abbey amongst the kings and the queens. And that is when the scheme started and it culminated in bodies being selected, and we can talk about that if you want to, and then brought back with great ceremony, and then massive parade through London on that day, on the 11th of November, 1920, and interment in Westminster Abbey. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. The process was seriously involved, wasn't it? And all sorts of precautions were taken that no one would be able to identify who it might be. Take me through that process. Yeah. So people have tried to analyse this in the aftermath. You know what historians are like,

Dan. They try to work out what happened because we know some of the orders that were issued. So we can see some of the documents, not all of them, we can see some of them. And the instructions were that a body should be selected from as far back as possible, unidentified, with no markings, no ranks, no clothing that would be able to identify who he was, where his regiment was, what his background was. And so historians now kind of go, so well, okay, so if that order was carried out, then we can presume it was this kind of area or this kind of era. But what you've got to understand is that that order was written on paper and sent to somebody else who came up with an order to order his men to do something. And I have carried out orders before that have come from on high. And when they come down to you as the bloke on the ground or the woman on the ground, you do your own thing as long as you get

the job done. So I would say that just because we've got a sense of how it was planned, we don't really know. But the reality was that Brigadier General Louis Wyatt, who was the senior officer in charge of France and Flanders just after the war in 1920, his headquarters was at Saint-Paul-sur-Tournois in northern France. He was involved in still collecting the bodies. So the dead were still scattered. An amazing figure that I'm going to go off on a diversion, if you'll permit me. So in 1920, two years after the war, they were still finding 1,000 scattered bodies a month.

1,000, two years after the war. And from 1929 to 1937, they found another 10,000. So 1937, two years before the start of the Second World War, they were still finding the dead from the First World War. And that tells you how many bodies were missing and how unrecovered they were. So General Louis White was in charge of this kind of process. So he wrote a very brief letter to the Telegraph in 1939, because again, rumours had come out about who did what and how it happened. And he said, this is what happened. I'm the bloke who did it. Well, as a general, he didn't say, I'm the bloke who did it, but this is what he said. So he said, paraphrasing, I ordered four teams to go out to the four great battlefields,

so the Somme, Arras, Aisne and Ypres, to go out to the four great battlefields where we were burying the dead and to recover the body of one grave marked unidentified British soldier. And he said, those four remains, so all over the Western Front from four completely different areas, they were brought back to his headquarters in St. Paul on the night, midnight, on the 8th, 9th of November, 1920. And so he then again describes the process. He said, I went into the chapel at midnight on the 8th, 9th, so the early hours of the 9th. Four stretchers were in the chapel. They had the remains on them. Each was covered by a union jack. I selected one of the remains. There was a temporary coffin, a little pine coffin. And we placed it in the pine coffin, myself and Colonel Gell,

who was his assistant. We screwed down the lid. And that is all he says, apart from, I do not know from which battle area the remains came. Nobody else can know it. And so the unknown warrior was selected, placed into that simple pine coffin. And then on the 9th of November, that simple pine coffin was taken by a motor ambulance to the great castle in Boulogne, Dan, I think you've been there, where a grand casket, a beautiful casket of two-inch oak from Hampton Court Palace Gardens, hammered iron decorations on it, a crusader's sword and a grand plaque. And the pine coffin was placed in that. It was guarded by the French overnight. And then on the 10th of November,

so one day before the ceremony in London, it was paraded. And you can look at the footage, the old Pathé footage through Boulogne to the harbour, placed on Verdun and sailed across the Channel before being taken to London, ready for the ceremony on the 11th. And there were all sorts of crowds and school kids. I mean, it really did strike a nerve, this, didn't it? and school kids. I mean, it really did strike a nerve, this, didn't it? Oh, I mean, Boulogne had seen so many of the troops coming through its port during the war. You know, the French had lost, what was it, a million and a half or two million of their own soldiers during the battle. So Boulogne came out and you look at the crowds. Obviously it's silent, but we know what the music was because that is listed. And so if you play Champagne's funeral march next to the, so you've got the French fire brigade with their polished helmets,

you've got injured French veterans, and they lead a thousand school children. And you can see the thousand school children and then 15,000 French soldiers carrying their regimental colors aloft. French soldiers carrying their regimental colours aloft. And when you look at that, and that parade arriving at Boulogne, and the coffin being taken aboard, and then the grand ceremony of it being taken aboard, and then sailed, and the 19-gun salute as it leaves, and the 19-gun salute as it arrives, it is just this man, this unknown man, who was nobody, yet everybody, was being accorded the status of a king and a queen. And afforded the status of a king or a queen by being buried among them as well. Exactly so. Exactly so. So the coffin arrived at Dover. It was paraded along Dover

Harbour. And again, the pictures are astonishing when you look at them. And then it was put on this grand railway carriage that had actually carried the body of Edith Cavell, the nurse who'd been executed by the Germans. And it was taken to London that night. And when you read the newspaper reports about how the crowds came out in their thousands at all of the stations from Dover, all the way up the tracks to Victoria Station, crowds, thousands and thousands and thousands at every little station. So veterans parading with their colours, scouts parading, school children parading, widows, mothers dressed in black in mourning. Just standing in the rain for a glimpse, for a glimpse as a train goes past. And it arrives in Victoria Station at Platform 8,

and there is still a ceremony there every year. The Western Front Association hold a ceremony there every single year at 8.20pm on the 10th of November, commemorating the moment it arrived at Platform 8. If you look at Platform 8, there's a small plaque. There's a small plaque on a fence that says, in 1920, the body of the unknown warrior arrived here. Blink and you miss it, but it's there. And the crowds outside Victoria Station were massive. And the newspapers report, you could hear people crying. You could hear them weeping. Why? Because at last they could say, and you could see the coffin if you look at the picture in the corner of the wooden railway van. And people could say, that might be my dad. That might be my brother. That might be my son. It could be. And there's one letter that I use in the book from a young boy, I think he's 11 or 12. And he had written, applying for tickets to the ceremony the next day. And he said at the end of his letter, and I want to comment, et cetera, because the man in that coffin might be my daddy. And that tells you all that you need to know

about how important that was. The man in that coffin might be my daddy. There was a full state funeral as well when the body was interred. Amazing. So first thing in the morning, again, thousands upon thousands, veterans, military came out and you can see some of the old orders from the guards. And it was paraded through London, up Grosvenor Place, up towards High Park Corner, along up the Mall, and then down to Whitehall. Again, you can see Pathé News footage of that. And it's astonishing. And the crowds now are in there, hundreds of thousands. I think somebody estimated that there might be a million people on the streets throughout the course of the whole day. And it arrived at the Cenotaph. So the Cenotaph had been built, ready to be unveiled

that day. So it was a perfect day for the ceremony for the unknown warrior. So the royal family was there. The king was there in front of the cenotaph. So the warrior arrives on his gun carriage, reminiscent, Dan, compare it to the funeral for an unknown man, just over 100 years earlier, you get a sense of how important it was in 1920 because he was afforded the status of royalty. And so the king placed a wreath on his coffin and saluted. And then at 11 o'clock, the cenotaph was unveiled. As an actual fact, the Cenotaph is shrouded in two massive Union Jacks. And if you watch closely, when the king presses the button, one of the Union Jacks falls immediately and one doesn't. And so a man in a suit and a hat runs forward, grabs the corner and pulls it off the Cenotaph. So not everything went perfectly. And then after the two minutes silence and the last post, the unknown warriors then paraded the last six minutes to Westminster Abbey. And again,

the newspaper report says the crowd is now openly weeping. So the crowd is weeping. It's a report, it says, and a lady could be heard to shout, goodbye, goodbye, waving her hand and she's waving at the coffin that could be her son that could be her son home at last and then it arrives at westminster abbey to the most astonishing congregation awaiting what in fact was a very short burial service you listen to dan snow's history. Don't go anywhere. Stick with us. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. I was struck in your book by that congregation. Again, it seems to me as changing of the times that the guests of honour, if you like, were not necessarily the mightiest in the land, but were widows and mothers and decorated veterans of the war. Yeah. If you look at the letters that go back and forwards, there was a sense at the beginning, especially in the armistice the year before, that in actual

fact, it was the great and the good in the land who were going to be the guests of honor. And that's rightly so. But in Westminster Abbey, so you had a parade of 100 veterans or serving soldiers, Navy as well, and Air Force, who were called the 100 VCs. In actual fact, there was a couple of them didn't have Victoria Crosses, and there wasn't 100 because four of them were ill on the day, but they're called the 100 VCs. There was 96 service personnel there. And most of them wore the Victoria Cross on their chest. Most of them wore the Victoria Cross, our highest award for courage in the face of the enemy. And they paraded outside. There was a grand parade outside, an honor guard. And inside,

so there was the great and the good of the land, but there were widows and you could apply for tickets. I think there was about 1,600 tickets available. And you've got to remember, Dan, if you were a baker's wife from Blackpool, you couldn't afford to come to London on the train, get a bed and breakfast. So you had to save up to do this. But many were there. So there was many, many mothers who'd lost a son, mothers who'd lost a husband and a son, widows, who, and I use this inverted commas, who'd only lost a husband. But there was one group there, 99 women, distinguished by an unfathomable sense of loss. And they had been selected for seats of honor because every single one of them had lost her husband and all of her sons. So she had nothing. Husband and all. Can you imagine that in 1916, 1917? Every man in your house had gone. Nothing. And they had the seats of honor. So the coffin was brought in. The grave had already been dug. And there's an amazing picture from three nights

before where there's a literal X. They put an X on the spot where it's going to be dug in Westminster Abbey. The service is very short. The coffin rests on timbers over the open grave. There's a short service, short readings. And then the timbers are taken away and the guards hold the coffin steady on ropes, as you've seen many times before, and it is lowered into the grave. And as it lowers into the grave, the king is given a shell, a shining silver artillery shell, and it is filled with soil that has been brought back from the battlefield. So alongside the unknown warrior in his grand casket, they brought back barrels of soil because they're going to bury him in the soil of the battlefield. And so the king is handed a silver shell full of soil because they're going to bury him in the soil of the battlefield. And so the king is handed a silver shell full of soil. He sprinkles a bit onto the coffin and then tips the rest in,

and the dean, Antonio, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, insurance certain of resurrection. And that is kind of it. The crowd launches in to abide with me, and you can hear a recording if you want to listen to it, because one of the very first recordings on wax was made at that service. And you can hear it on the internet. Not very good recording, but they recorded using what was then brand new technology, wax discs, wires coming out with little microphones, cutting into the wax disc. It's astonishing when you look at the detail of what happened. And then the grave was covered with the actor's pall, which was the grand actor who died, and Padre Railton's battle-scarred Union Jack was covered. Fences, barriers went round and the guards took up their position. So if you remember Her Majesty's lying

in state in Parliament with the guards with their rifles reversed or their swords reversed with their officers. That happened then for maybe a week, two weeks. And millions of people went to see the grave because they'd been told it could be their father. It could be their son. And Dan, if you can indulge me for 30 seconds, there's some amazing stories of how that translated itself. So there's a newspaper report from East London of two children being hospitalized during a fight at school. Now, what have they done to get hospitalized? And it transpires that both of their mothers had said, that's your dad. Your dad's buried in Westminster Abbey next to

the Kings and the Queens. And this transpired at school. So they end up knocking seven bells out of each other saying, it's not your dad, it's my dad, it's not my dad, it's your dad, because their mothers had said, that's your dad. And that's what people did. And there's again, there's a quote in the book with all of the flowers around and a little voice being heard to say, what a lovely garden they've built for my daddy. That's how important it was. What a lovely garden they've built for my daddy. That's how important it was. What a lovely garden they've built for my daddy. During the right thing, but you reflect at the end on the importance of having a focus for grief and remembrance here in the UK when those losses occurred overseas. At the end of this process, what do you think about that? Why does it matter so much?

All the books I've written about Spitfires and Lancasters and tornadoes, and I always interview people who can help me understand the experiences, whether it's those who've used an injection seat or been shot down in a tornado, and their loved ones who wait at home for them. Clearly, you couldn't do that with this story. But what I did to try to understand was interview people who had been affected by similar conflict. So one of the ladies I interviewed was Mary Fowler. Her father had been lost on HMS Coventry during the Falklands conflict. When the ship sank, his body went down, obviously with the ship and could never be recovered. And she talked to me about the need to have somewhere to commemorate, to pray, to remember. And so his name is on the memorial in Portsmouth to the sea services, the sea forces who died during the Falklands.

And that's all they have, apart from some letters that were returned undelivered, because obviously he died. When you look at this, you begin to understand the sense of loss, the sense of grief and how it affects people. So this is a letter in an envelope that you write on in the old fashioned way with a stamp on it. And it's Petty Officer Michael Fowler, HMS Coventry, whatever. And it's been returned unopened and it's got a note stapled and the staple is rusty. And it says, regret to inform you that the addressee has died on active service. The Navy expresses its sympathy.

And you can buy what? Now they'd been told that he was dead clearly, but you get this back through the post. So it arrives on your doorstep, put back through the letterbox, undelivered. And when you speak to people about that loss and the importance of commemoration, you understand. speak to people about that loss and the importance of commemoration, you understand. And one of the other ladies I spoke to about death was Nikki Scott. Her husband, Lee, was killed in Afghanistan by an IED. I mean, it's amazing. She tells me what it's like to be told that your loved one is dead. So Dan, this is something I've done when I was an officer. I have turned up in a car, knocked on somebody's door, and when somebody opens the door and you're in your dress uniform with your service hat on,

they know. So in 1916, 17, it was the telegram boy on his bike. If the telegram boy arrived at your house because you didn't get telegrams if you were poor, you knew the worst had happened. Now it is the officer arriving in uniform in a car. And Nikki said she was coming home after taking her daughter to the park. She could see two cars arriving at her house with two men, one in a suit, one in uniform. And she said, I knew, I knew. As soon as I saw them, I knew. And she said, when you see it, you know that they've come for you and you know exactly what it means. And then she describes the process of being told. It's really personal, really brutal. Are you Corporal Lee Scott's wife? Yes. Come inside, please. And so she's coming inside.

She's saying, just tell me, just tell me. But she's trying to get the baby out of the buggy. And so the officer says, please give your baby to my colleague. And she's screaming, tell me, tell me. And then that's where, it's choking me up now. That's where they have to say, he's dead. And then Dan, this crushed me because I've done that before. Because you then go, you leave after you've told the loved one. And then they have to tell everybody else. So Nikki says, so she has to ring her husband's father on the phone hundreds of miles away and say, your son died this morning. And then she has to ring her mother and father. And then you have to tell the children. And so I've got an account in the book about a young boy whose father was killed in

1917. And he writes about how the telegram arrived, his mother collapsed and screamed, took to her bed for 10 days, not saying a thing. He was five. She took to her bed. And after 10 days, she called him in, turned him over and said, your father's dead. He won't come home. You are now the man of the house. And he said, I was five years old. And Nikki, obviously in a better way, had to tell her son that his father was never coming home again. And when you juxtapose those positions from 1917 to a hundred-ish years later, you begin to understand the depth of loss, the need to commemorate and the need to remember. And as someone who has come very close to death,

fighting for Queen and country, but as someone who's lost friends and comrades, on a personal level, why should we remember? Because these people gave their everything, they gave their all, they gave their lives for our nation. Now, it doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with individual conflicts or wars, young men and women since time immemorial have gone out to serve their nation. Whether you did that in 1917 or whether you do that today during operations over Syria or anything like that, young men and women are serving their nation. And the least we can do, the very least we can do is when they make the ultimate sacrifice is remember them, isn't it? Remember them, isn't it? Well, thank you, John, for coming on the podcast and talking about that and talking about your wonderful new book as well. Actually, what's it called?

Give us the full title. It is The Unknown Warrior, and it is called A Personal Journey of Discovery and Remembrance because that's what it became for me. It wasn't just me telling the story of The Unknown Warrior. It was me going back to the battlefields of the Somme, following the route all the way through, talking to people who could help me understand what it was like. So it became a personal journey. Thank you very much, John. Thank you for coming back on. Thanks, Dan. Really kind of you to have me. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.