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Hello, hello and welcome to Dance Knows History hit. Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the internment, the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. It was the first time, well, it was joined first. The French were conducting a similar service. So it's the first time that a common soldier, an unidentified casualty of war, was brought back and entombed in the heart of an imperial capital. With all the pomp and splendor of an empire at its zenith, the king led the mourning field.

Marshals and admirals of the fleet were the pallbearers. 100 Victoria Cross winners formed a guard of honour as the great and good looked on over the last hundred years as Britain's empire. Over the last hundred years is the United Kingdom was fractured. Britain's empire declined. Britain's political settlement, our heritage, our history, royal family, our constitution has been much fought over. But the unknown warrior seems to remain above all that. It is uncontested and has remained so ever since that day one hundred years ago.

Joining me on the podcast now on this Armistice Day special is Juliet Nicholson. She is a wonderful writer. She's been on the podcast before. She's written about her own illustrious literary family. But she's also written a book on living in the shadow of the Great War and the casualties and the impact that loss caused on families back home. She joins me now to talk about those remarkable events 100 years ago, the back story of the unknown warrior. All of our content on history hit TV today with the first of all, was free at the moment.

That means you can watch our new documentary on The Unknown Warrior when I go and visit the exhibition at the National Museum. You can watch that entire for free. You can also watch our documentary on John what's visit the plane in which his father was killed eight years ago. All that content is free. No emails, no logins, no codes, nothing. Please get a history TV and enjoy all that. In the meantime, everyone here is an Armistice Day special featuring Juliet Nicholson on The Unknown Warrior.

Juliette, good to see you again. Lovely to be here, Dan, really lovely to see you, too.

Well, it's good to have you back this time on the podcast to talk about the Unknown Warrior, which I always think is such an important part of our national story. This was a revolutionary moment in some ways, wasn't it?

The burial of the Unknown Soldier was unprecedented revolutionary in that there had been no burials during the First World War because none of the bodies were repatriated. The process of repatriation is such a scale of death was considered by the government too daunting. So the decision was made very early on in the war that irrespective of your status as a soldier sailor and later as an airman, if you died, you would be buried where you fell. So this left the country with an inability to hold a funeral, to have a grave, to have a place to go to mourn.

This, as everybody knows, is an enormously disturbing way for somebody who wishes to commemorate somebody they loved who died. So there were, you know, families of three quarters of a million people unable to mourn their loved ones. And there was a void in the country of despair about this recognized by the government, who the year before the Unknown Warrior was buried, had decided that a two minute silence would be a way of bringing the focus onto this scale of death.

And it worked. It was an extraordinarily clever and simple idea to have two minutes at 11 o'clock at the moment that the guns had fallen silent in 1918 to have every year to minute as Big Ben strikes 11 o'clock of national silence and reflection. But the trouble with that was that it lacked humanity and it was the human aspect of death that people were missing so much, the actual visualisation of a coffin of a grave.

And so this brilliant idea by a vicar, a padre and British vicar who had served at the Western Front and noticed that when a soldier died and his identifying marks had been blown away or disappeared, there's a simple cross would be put up by his colleagues and it would just say an unknown soldier. And this tribute to somebody, even someone without a name, struck this vicar, David Railton, as something significant, helpful in the morning process and a way in which to dignified death.

So he after the war in 1920, two years after the armistice, he suggested to the dean of Westminster that a body, one body should be brought back to Britain to be the symbolic body of all of those who had died. And his idea was put to the King George, the Fifth, who was originally quite reluctant to go along with this being a sort of cautious man, thought this might be a bit mawkish, that this might provoke some sort of wild hysteria around the country.

But gradually the idea and his advisers and the government persuaded the king that it would be a wonderful thing to do. And so full bodies were disinterred from four different battlegrounds in Europe. And the head of the army was asked to pick one of these four bodies, none of which had any identifying marks on them. No one had any idea who any of them were. But there were four chosen just to make sure that this was a random choice.

I'm sure the king did think it was mawkish, but was there something dangerous or most about it? You know, you got David Lloyd George, this common born prime minister. Now you've got common soldiers being elevated almost to the rank of kings. Is there something a little bit revolutionary about this, isn't it?

Yes, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it was a very off field idea. And of course, at the time, the class system was utterly rigid in Britain and officers tended to be public schoolboys almost exclusively, who also, if they had died, had not been repatriated. There had been no discrimination between rank and so already. There was some sense of equanimity and, of course, barrier in that way, having been abandoned, at least for the duration of the war, and it was extremely important, David Railton felt that this soldier, he may have been an officer, he may have been a public schoolboy, but he may not.

And it was very likely that he was not. And therefore, the population could invest this unknown soldier with the identity of their son, their husband, their father, their fear say it was obviously a man, but that was the scale of the war at the time. It was a male scale of death. And so this ability for him to be any man, anyone was, of course, the right thing to do. And the king. Yes, of course, the mawkishness.

But you're right. Also, do we really want an anybody? Because the soldier was to be buried in Westminster Abbey among kings and queens. He was to be given the most prestigious burial ground in the country. And that was, yeah, pretty revolutionary and absolutely brilliant.

Tell me about the way in which the body was brought back, because there was just symbolism at every single turn of this story.

Yes, the body was invested with the highest honors from the very moment in which the head of the army, General Wyatt, chose that particular body. A coffin had been sent, made from Britain and had been sent over by the royal undertakers, which was made of oak from Hampton Court, a sword that belonged to George.

The Fifth accompanied the empty coffin when it arrived in this little village of some platanos and immediately a guard of honour was assembled around the coffin as the body was placed inside it, wrapped in sucking the coffin began this ceremonial and hugely grand, as if it was indeed a royal person back to England across France on a boat across the channel, already sort of decked in the most beautiful flowers where Dover Train was waiting to carry the coffin into London and the carriage of the train had had its roof painted white so that as the train made its way from Dover up to Victoria Station in London, the light of the moon shone onto the carriage roof.

And these hundreds and hundreds of bystanders standing in this railway cuttings as the train went past knew that inside this particular carriage, with its white, gleaming roof lit by the light of the moon, contained the body of this young lad who may well have been a relation of their own. And the carriage was also lined with wonderful smelling herbs, with rosemary for remembrance and with bailiffs. And when it arrived in Victoria Station, again, a ceremonial guard greeted it and the coffin lay in state overnight on the night of the 10th of November, 1920 on Platform eight of Victoria Station.

Whenever I go there, I go to think of that coffin lying there with that young man invested with the significance of a king or queen. Maybe I could say on the morning of the 11th of November 1920, the coffin began its journey towards the Cenotaph and the Cenotaph was going to be on the monument, which was to commemorate, as it said on the Senate of the glorious dead monument built as a temporary structure the year before, designed by Edwin Latin's as a prop in a way, for a march passed to commemorate the end of the First World War had been such a hit, such a place of focus for grief that it was decided that by 1920 the Cenotaph would be turned into a stone.

Permanent structure was also unveiled on the morning of 1920 on November the 11th. And so the procession with the Unknown Soldier made its way through the streets of London that day and. The crowds had come out en masse because, of course, don't forget, there was not even radio, let alone television, in 1920. So if you wanted to see something to experience at that moment, something that really mattered to you, you needed to leave your home and come there.

And so the crowds were thick, thick, thick, 20 deep from Victoria Station all the way through to Whitehall. People were wearing their hats as they did. People were silent. People were holding little bunches of flowers, some brought from their own gardens, gathered together for the first funeral that many of them could remember, and certainly the first funeral since the ending of the First World War. And as the carriage bearing the coffin came nearer, it was this humanity that struck every single person in the crowd.

Because on top of the coffin, first of all, was the union flag, one that had been used by David Railton, the vicar whose idea this had been when he was on the battlefield and the flag was still covered in mud and blood stained. And on top of that was not only the king's sword, but there was also the soldier's wedding belt and his helmet, his faintly dented helmet. And this detail, these two tiny daily quotidien symbols of the reality of the man, anybody who had had a soldier in their life would have recognised that wedding belt and that sewed that helmet.

And it was the poignancy of his own private possessions that prompted the sobs that were rippling through the crowd as they watched the carriage pass free.

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And we're all the answer from the Hajazi by. I am also so struck by the fact they gathered together these old warhorses, the senior commanders of the British imperial war effort, by the way, many of whom actually hated each other. But for this key moment, yes.

I mean, it was it was a crowd mixed up of veteran soldiers of many, many, many civilians and of course, women and children, children who missed their father, maybe children who had barely even known their father or maybe their grandfather. And so it was a completely sort of cosmopolitan crowd of thousands and thousands of people for whom this moment was for many, I think, the most significant of their lives. And yet the chief mourner was the king who was himself humbled by the size of the crowd and by the significance that was given to this civilian soldier, this unknown soldier who may not have been born, almost certainly not born of royal blood.

So the contrast between the grandest figurehead, the king himself, and people who are from humbler backgrounds, standing together in joint commemoration and remembrance and praise for all of those who had died. And it was a beautiful day that day. The sun was. Shining, and it was said The Times wrote that day that there was a tenderness in the breeze, it was this absolutely let alone a kind of riot or a sort of hysterical, mawkish crying. There was this quiet, absolutely beautiful November day in which people gave respect to another fellow human being who had given his life for them.

So, Juliette, we get the king, Emperor George, the fifth member of the royal family. Senior commanders of the British Empire, a company there, is a cortege which goes around Hyde Park Corner Whitehall and eventually gets to Westminster Abbey. What happens there?

Well, in another sort of pretty revolutionary decision had been made in that the grave, the final resting place for the Unknown Warrior was to be right in the entrance to the abbey. And so the stone had been removed and a deep grave had been dug and filled with mud from Flanders, the mud in which the warrior had himself fallen. And at that service, that final burial service, a sort of very moving decision, had been made to invite women for it to become a focus for women.

So while the king indeed was there, along with Queen Mary, who was very distressed by the whole experience, visibly so very uncharacteristically moved, tearful along with them and the other dignitaries and military higher ups were a thousand women who were widows and mothers. And so the emphasis was for the mourning of that final moment was on the women, on the people who had carried their bereavement so nobly and with such difficulty. And as the coffin was lowered into the grave right at the entrance of Westminster Abbey Mud from the battlefields which had been brought specially over, scattered to the top of the coffin, the coffin was remained without this marble, a sort of lid on it for the rest of the day and into the following day, so that the crowds who were so enormous outside the abbey could file past to pay their final respects before the coffin was closed.

And this significance of putting the grave at the entrance to the abbey prevails today. The significance, because whenever a king or queen comes to be married, to be buried, to be crowned, the monarch is required to sidestep the grave. You need to walk round it before you resume your steps up the aisle of the abbey. It's always banked by poppies, whatever day of the year, and sometimes occasionally a glorious arrangement of spring flowers can be put around it.

But I notice that the Queen went last week to pay her respects on her own and the photograph of her on her own in the abbey with just one member of the Abbey staff and one military aid of her standing there. This small figure in black paying her respects to this unknown warrior is absolutely, heartbreakingly moving. I think so that 100 years later, our own monarch is still paying her respects almost to somebody who is or feels still 100 years later, the symbol of why we have our democracy, why we have our freedoms.

What's your latest book called Juliet? I've written this time nearly 50 years after we are talking about today. It's the story of a very cold winter in 1962 to three when the snow fell from Boxing Day and did not stop for three months. And we were paralyzed into a sort of lockdown. And when we emerged from that lockdown, everything was so much better.

Well, that sounds very topical. I'm looking forward to having you back on the podcast to talk about that. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been an absolute pleasure. I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you don't become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have your podcast.

If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough. Well, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.

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