Martin Williams
Member
Having just made this post, I'm now thinking of another occasion for national mourning - the burial of the 'Unknown Soldier' in Westminster Abbey in 1920. Coming so soon after the Great War, emotions were still painfully raw and this event really did transcend every barrier of class, creed and colour. Of course, there were dissenters - those who criticised the very idea of 'an Unknown', for reasons political, social or even aesthetic - but, by and large, the public reaction was quite overwhelming. The highest in the land came to do homage to this one man without a name and the entire country ground to a halt as Great Britain paid her last respects to an individual who, for so many, might - just conceivably - have been a lost loved one. I suppose the difference with this event was that not a single individual had remained untouched by the War and personal resonances across the nation were inevitable. Neil Hanson has recently written a splendid book on the subject of 'the Unknown' and I frankly confess that, at several points during his descriptions of the funeral procession and the burial service, I choked - the little girl who wrote to Lord Curzon, begging for a seat in the Abbey, because the dead man 'could be my daddy'; the elderly cleaning lady who brought a crumpled bunch of roses to the graveside with a card reading simply, 'My Alec'. Nothing has ever brought home to me more effectively the individual, agonising grief of so many millions lying behind the grandiose ideas of patriotism, sacrifice and duty.
