During the First World War, government policy dictated that the bodies of all unknown soldiers killed in battle were never returned to British shores. Two years after the conflict ended, officials decided to make a symbolic commemoration in their memory by exhuming one body from the Western Front and transporting it between Boulogne and Dover in a coffin draped in a Union Jack.
In a procession on the second anniversary of the armistice which officially drew the war to a close, the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey after a procession through Whitehall, going on to draw more than a million visitors in a week to a site which remains one of the most visited war graves in the world. This show tells the stories of six soldiers who lived on the route the Unknown Soldier took to his final resting place, taking two men each from Dover, Chatham and London.
The stained glass centrepiece of the show
The stories of Sergeant Richard Monty Daniel, a shipwright from Chatham Dockyard who died while serving with the Royal East Kent regiment, and Private James Brill, a member of the Royal Marine Light Infantry Chatham battalion, are told in a narrative set against the national focus for grief the Unknown Soldier gave the country.
