Reverend David Railton MC: The Chaplain Behind Britain's Unknown Warrior
Reverend David Railton was the Army chaplain whose experience of an anonymous battlefield grave helped inspire Britain's burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. The power of the memorial came from a simple problem shared by thousands of families: what do you do when someone is dead but there is no known grave carrying his name?
Chaplain on the Western Front
Railton was a Church of England clergyman who served as an Army chaplain during the First World War. In 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross for saving an officer and two men under heavy fire.
An unknown grave
Westminster Abbey records that in 1916 Railton saw a rough battlefield grave near Armentières marked simply as an unknown British soldier. The experience stayed with him. The grave represented not only one unidentified man but the families for whom no named resting place would ever be found.
The proposal
In August 1920 Railton wrote to Herbert Ryle, Dean of Westminster, proposing that an unidentified British serviceman should be brought from France and buried in the Abbey. The idea received support from the Dean and, after initial hesitation, from the King and government.
Selection and burial
Unidentified bodies were brought from four major battlefield areas: the Aisne, Somme, Arras and Ypres. Brigadier-General L. J. Wyatt selected one coffin without knowing from which battlefield the remains had come. The body was brought to Britain and buried in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920.
The same day King George V unveiled the permanent Cenotaph in Whitehall. The sequence joined two forms of national remembrance: an empty tomb for the collective dead and an actual unidentified serviceman buried among the country's most famous figures.
Why the Unknown Warrior worked
The grave's anonymity was its meaning. The body could not be privately claimed as one known individual, so it could represent those from the British Isles, Dominions and Colonies whose remains were missing or unidentified. The Abbey's account also makes clear that the Unknown Warrior could have come from any of the three services.
The military habit is to identify people precisely—name, unit, role, location. The Unknown Warrior reverses that. His identity is deliberately unknowable, and that is exactly why families could see their own missing person in the grave. Railton understood something very human beneath the administration of casualty lists.
