Brigadier Louis Wyatt cradled the Unknown Warrior, wrapped in a Union Jack, in his arms

THE TWO MEN gently lifted the body wrapped in a Union Jack from a stretcher holding it in their arms as they slowly placed it in a bare wooden coffin in front of the altar.

Then they slowly closed the lid and screwed it down before silently reflecting on the moment that would forever be part of their nation’s history. 

A few strokes before midnight on November 7, 1920, in a quiet chapel at St Pol, Northern France, Brigadier General Louis Wyatt chose the unidentifiable remains of a single British soldier to be the Unknown Warrior. A symbol of the unknown dead from the First World War, for which the Daily Express had been campaigning. 

The British Tommy’s body was picked from British servicemen exhumed from four battle areas — the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres. Their remains were brought to the chapel where Wyatt, the officer in charge of troops in France and Flanders, and his aide, Colonel William Gell, were waiting.   

The soldiers had died early in the war, so that their decomposition meant they were completely unrecognisable. Wyatt had no idea who the remains were. They had been examined for any identifying marks to make sure that no one ever knew,

The Unknown Warrior picked by Wyatt is taken to a British warship in Boulogne, for the journey home

The coffin was taken to Boulogne and placed inside another made of oak from Hampton Court and sent over from England. Its plate bore the inscription: “A British Warrior who fell in the Great War 1914-1918 for King and Country”.

The second coffin had a 16th Century sword, taken from King George V’s private collection, fixed on top and the body was then transported to Dover on the destroyer HMS Verdun and taken by train to London.

On the morning of November 11, two years to the day after the war had ended, the Unknown Warrior was drawn in a procession through London to the Cenotaph. This new war memorial on Whitehall was then unveiled by George V.

At 1100 there was a two-minute silence, and the body was then taken to nearby Westminster Abbey where it was buried, passing through a guard of honour of 100 holders of the Victoria Cross. An estimated 1,250,000 people visited the Abbey to see the tomb in the first week.

The fate of some of the other soldiers removed from the battlegrounds that historic day is now a mystery. The men were reburied, but it is now not clear exactly where.  

THAT FATAL FIRST DAY 

ON THE first day of combat at the Battle of the Somme, 19,240 Tommy’s lost their lives. But this was heralded in the British Press as a “day going well for Britain and France”.

The job of a journalist covering World War I was difficult because less than a week after Britain declared war on Germany, parliament passed the Defence of the Realm Act without debate. 

There were only five accredited war correspondents who were forbidden to write about action unless censors agreed. To keep them in check, Lord Beaverbrook was appointed Minister or Information and Lord Rothermere, Director of Propaganda.      

Express reporter John Irvine described the first day.

“The great day of battle broke in sunshine and mist. Not a cloud obscured the sky as the sun appeared above the horizon – in the direction where the German trenches lay …  I witnessed the last phase of the bombardment, which preceded the advance. 

“It was six o’clock. The guns had been roaring furiously all through the night. Now they had gathered themselves together for one grand final effort before our British lions were let loose on their prey … A perceptible slackening of our fire soon after seven was the first indication that our gallant soldiers were about to leap from their trenches and advance against the enemy. 

“Non-combatants like me were not permitted to witness this spectacle, but I am informed that the vigour and eagerness of the first assault were worthy of the best traditions of the British Army. I have heard within the past few days men declare that they were getting fed up with the life in the trenches and would welcome a fight at close quarters.

“We had not to wait long for news, and it was wholly satisfactory and encouraging.”

Truth was that nearly 20,000 men died that morning. 

 

DID YOU KNOW? 

In 1887, Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie who was to become a great friend of Lord Beaverbrook, founded an amateur cricket team for friends of similar poor playing ability. He called it The Allah Akbarries, thinking that Allah Akbar meant: “Heaven help us!” in Arabic. Which summed up the talents of the team (and not “God is great”).

Some of the best known British authors from the era played for the side at various times, including H.G.Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, Jerome K Jerome and Owen Seaman, editor of Punch. All friends of Beaverbrook of course. They played together until 1912. 

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DAY CHURCHILL LOST HIS TRUNKS

I wrote last week of how Churchill recuperated at Beaverbrook’s villa across the bay from Monte Carlo on the French Riviera in 1949, following his first heart attack. I hope you will enjoy another snippet I found about his stay with The Beaver and his companion Brigadier Michael Wardle.

Apparently from the moment the great man arrived it was clear he was in a holiday mood. He immediately put on a pair of long blue, flapping bathing trunks and hurried down through the villa’s enchanting garden of bougainvillea, orange trees and roses.

When he got to the Mediterranean lapping at the rocks, he jumped in. Wardle takes up the story. 

“He wallowed like a porpoise; blew spouts of water like a whale and swam around like a schoolboy. He turned and twisted so much that his baggy bathing drawers came off and floated away. Beaverbrook was watching and laughed.”

Clambering out, naked Churchill was rubbed down by his manservant and wrapped in a towelled dressing gown. He started to climb the hundred steps home, stopping new and then to sit and rest, talk and refresh himself from a waiting decanter.

“I’ve bought a racehorse,” he announced to The Beaver on the way.

“So, I hear,” replied Beaverbrook.

“It’s going to run at Salisbury on the 24th,” said Churchill.

Silence.

“Do you think it a mistake?” he asked.

“Certainly,” answered Beaverbrook.

“Why?” asked Churchill.

“The public will back it, and it won’t win,” said Beaverbrook. “They will be upset.”

“Perhaps I’d better warn them,” Churchill said, discouraged.

“The only way you could win would be for every other jockey to pull his horse,” Beaverbrook joked. 

There was perhaps a trace of the bitterness that racing stirred in the newspaper magnate, caused by his own experiences of racing ownership that had ended 20 years earlier, said Wardle. He had called his horses after the rivers in New Brunswick, Canada, where he grew up … (Miramichi, Nipisiquit, Res-tigouche, Upsalquitch, and the rest of them — jawbreakers all). He upset his trainers because he would insist on giving all his jockeys the same racing orders: “Be first if you can. If you can’t be first, be second. If you can’t be second, be third.”

The inevitable result was that he lost so many races, he retired from the turf believing that everyone else on the racecourse was corrupt.

LEAVE MY BEAUTIFUL HANDS ALONE MISTER MUGGERIDGE!

“JUST LOOK at my hands! They are not mine; I have beautiful hands!”

These are the words of Winston Churchill, furious over Punch magazine’s issue of February 3, 1954. The magazine edited by Malcolm Muggeridge shocked readers with Leslie Illingworth’s cartoon sketch of the war leader for their weekly ‘Big Cut’ cartoon.

The portrayal of an ailing Prime Minister – rather than the man who had epitomised the British bulldog spirit during the dark days of the war – had the caption ‘Man Goeth Forth unto his Work and to his Labour until the Evening.’ And perhaps near death. The drawing showed him wrinkled and ill. 

It upset friends of the great man and the public. Churchill said: “There’s malice in it. Look at my hands – I have beautiful hands … Punch goes everywhere. I shall have to retire if this sort of thing goes on.”

Even his doctor, Lord Moran was angry and hit out at Muggeridge and Illingworth for making the politician look sick and ill. “His eyes looked hollow and tired,” he said. “It was a very un-English thing to do!”    

Churchill, then 80, was deeply offended, but it was Muggeridge’s policy to make nasty references to famous figures. He once boasted with satisfaction that a current Punch issue would get him into a lot more hot water.”

But for some time the Press, including the Express, had run pictures of Churchill wearing a hearing aid at dinners and state occasions. And Lord Moran admitted: “It does seem a long time since Winston did all the talking at every meal. 

“He can no longer hear what is being said. He is outside the round of conversation and not a part of it. When there is a burst of laughter, someone must explain what it is about.” 

But some praised the Illingworth drawing, calling the artist ‘the last of the great penmen in the line of English social satirists starting with Hogarth’ and ‘probably the most outstanding cartoonist Punch ever had’. 

That same year artist Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Winston Churchill was destroyed by Lady Churchill’s private secretary, Grace Hamblin, a few months after it was unveiled because it upset her husband. 

Churchill hated it. Just like the Illingworth cartoon. He called it “filthy and malignant” and believed it was part of a conspiracy to bring him down.

As for Muggeridge, who had worked for the Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph, the Punch owners who hired him to boost ailing circulation, found his editorial policy too controversial and he later ‘left’ his position. 

The former communist who became a British spy in Paris during the Second World War and converted to Christianity, died on 14 November 1990 in a nursing home in Hastings, aged 87.

He once saw The Beatles in Hamburg before they were famous and said: “They bashed their instruments and emitted nerveless sounds into microphones … their faces were however like Renaissance carvings of the saints or Blessed Virgins.”  

 

LAST FAREWELL TO A FRIEND

Capt Scott wrote a moving last letter to Barrie 

I am signing off this week with a story about friendship that many might know, but for those who don’t, I am pleased to tell it again. I have always thought about it over the years, and it involves J M Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, a lovely story which enthralled me as a lad like it did so many others. Oh, to fly, eh? The stuff of boys’ dreams.

I remember that author D H Lawrence once wrote of Barrie: “He has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.”  

That was certainly true of one great friend, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott. The two men became close friends after meeting at a high society party. So close, that as Scott lay dying in the cold in March 1912, he wrote a last letter to the author. 

It said: “I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I nothing.

“So, goodbye – I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had planned for our future … We are in a desperate state – feet frozen, no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent and hear our songs and our cheery conversation…”

When Barrie died on June 19, 1937, Scott’s letter was still in the breast pocket his jacket. He had carried it with him for over 20 years.

Such is love and real friendship. I value friendship highly, always have. And I have some very dear friends from my time in Fleet Street. Even though some more recent ones wore two faces.

By the way, I see Rosie Boycott is writing for The Oldie these days. It’s my favourite magazine.   

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TERRY MANNERS

 

10 March 2025