Necropolis: London & it's Dead (34 page)

The following year, the funeral and burial of The Unknown Soldier represented one attempt to commemorate the millions who died unidentified and to assuage the grief of their families.
³
This extraordinary event harked back to the heraldic funeral in its sombre pomp and circumstance. On one level, it may be seen as an exercise in top-dressing–a cynical attempt to manipulate the sorrow and pain of the British public; but it was also unique in the annals of great London funerals in that it saw an unknown man suddenly elevated to the status of a war hero.

In 1916, the Reverend David Railton was serving as a chaplain to British forces at the Front, when in a garden at Armentières one day, he noticed a makeshift grave, marked by a rough cross, on which somebody had written:
AN UNKNOWN BRITISH SOLDIER
. He never forgot this sight and, four years later, wrote to the Dean of Westminster, Dean Ryle, describing the scene. As a result, the Dean decided that an unknown casualty should be buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Four bodies were disinterred from the four different battlefields of Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres, and taken to St Pol in northern France on 7 November 1920. Brigadier General L.J. Wyatt, Commander of All British Troops in France
and Flanders, entered the chapel where the bodies lay, each covered with a Union flag. He chose at random one casualty to become The Unknown Soldier of the Great War, and the body was placed in a coffin and sealed. The remaining bodies were reburied at a nearby military cemetery.

The following morning, a service was conducted to commemorate the sacrifice of The Unknown Soldier, officiated by Anglican, Roman Catholic and Non-conformist chaplains. The body was then escorted to Boulogne under a French honour guard, drawn by a wagon with six horses and followed by a mile-long procession. On 9 November 1920, the plain coffin was sealed inside another, constructed of oak from Hampton Court, and secured with a sixteenth-century Crusader’s sword from the Tower of London. The coffin plate read:
A BRITISH WARRIOR WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR
1914–1918
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
.

Escorted by six warships, the coffin travelled to Dover on the HMS
Verdun
, and was greeted by a nineteen-gun salute. Six Warrant Officers from the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Royal Air Force and the Army bore the coffin to be taken by train to Victoria Station, in London. Six barrels of Yprès soil accompanied The Unknown Soldier back to England, so that he might lie on the soil where so many of his comrades had lost their lives.

On the morning of 11 November 1920, Armistice Day, six black horses drew the carriage of The Unknown Soldier through the streets of London, pausing at the Mall, Whitehall, where King George V unveiled the new Cenotaph. The King, his three sons, members of the royal family and Ministers of State then followed the coffin through the streets to the north entrance of Westminster Abbey.

At the west end of the nave, The Unknown Soldier was laid to rest after passing through an honour guard that consisted of 100 recipients of the Victoria Cross. Following the hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, George V sprinkled soil from the battlefield of Yprès. After the coffin had been lowered, the congregation sang ‘Abide with Me’
and Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ (‘Lest we forget, lest we forget’). Reveille and Last Post were sounded, and the grave covered with a silk funeral pall.

The tomb remained open for the next seven days, as thousands of mourners passed by to pay their last respects. According to the
Daily Mail:

Most impressive of all was the night scene in Whitehall. The vast sweep of the road was almost silent save for the ceaseless murmur of footsteps. Under the brilliant glare of the lamps that were softened by the foggy air, the long, dark lines of people stretched from Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph, from whose base they could be seen vanishing in the distance, two narrow lines of slowly moving people separated by a wide pathway on which stood here and there vague figures of policemen on horseback.
⁴

On 18 November, the tomb was sealed with a temporary stone bearing the words:
A BRITISH WARRIOR WHO FELL IN THE GREAT WAR
1914–1918
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
.
GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN THIS
. A year later, on 11 November 1921, the tomb was sealed forever with a slab of black Belgian marble.

During the First World War, over 3,305 merchant ships were lost, together with a total of over 17,000 lives. At Tower Hill, Lutyens’s
Memorial
commemorates the ‘…men of the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets who gave their lives to preserve the life of the nation and have no grave but the sea.’ It stands on the south side of the garden of Trinity Square. Built of Portland stone, it consists of a vaulted corridor, 21.5 metres long, 7 metres wide and 7 to 10 metres high, open at either end. The names of the dead are arranged alphabetically under their ships, with the name of Master or Skipper first. Unveiled by Queen Mary on 12 December 1928, it commemorates 11, 919 names and bears the following inscription:
⁵

1914–1918
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND TO THE HONOUR OF
TWELVE THOUSAND OF THE MERCHANT NAVY
AND FISHING FLEETS
WHO HAVE NO GRAVE BUT THE SEA

By the end of the war, every town, city and village in Britain had its war memorial, a collective expression of grief which replaced the individual graves that war had made impossible. In London, the cemeteries reflected the carnage of 1914–18. At Highgate, the Cross of Sacrifice of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorates 310 dead from both world wars, of whom 95 have unmarked graves which are commemorated on the Screen Wall memorials; 53 graves are marked by Commission headstones and 162 are private memorials.
⁶

In 1917, by arrangement with the Brookwood Necropolis Company and the War Office, an area of Brookwood Cemetery was set aside as a military cemetery for the burial of soldiers, sailors and nurses who died in the London Military District.

The design of Brookwood Military Cemetery is similar to that used by the Commonwealth War Grave Commission elsewhere in the world: the large Cross of Sacrifice, with its bronze Crusader’s sword (designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield), and Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance. Brookwood, uniquely, contains two sets of these features. All headstones are of a uniform size and design. The top includes the national emblem or the service or regimental badge; this is followed by the rank, name, unit, date of death and age, if known. There appears the appropriate religious emblem, and, in many cases, an inscription chosen by relatives.
⁷

As well as the United Kingdom (602 burials) men and women of the forces of the Commonwealth were buried here, as well as Americans who had died, many of battle wounds, in London. Siegfried Sassoon, who had witnessed the horrors of war at first hand, condemned war memorials as ‘a pile of peace complacent
stone, a sepulchre of crime’.
⁸
But, as Stamp argues, these memorials were not mere imperial bombast. There is nothing triumphalist here, among the silent acres of graves. Even on the brightest of spring days, Brookwood’s military cemeteries are a sombre sight. The vista of plain white headstones lining up into the distance reflects the terrible nature of war, while individual accounts testify to heroism and sacrifice.

At the outset of the First World War, mourning traditions were still strictly upheld among the lower middle and working classes. The social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer recalled that ‘the parade of funerals–horsedrawn, of course, with black plumes and all the trimmings–was a consistent feature of street life; and we children had to keep an eye out for them and take off our hats or caps for the whole time that the funeral procession passed us; it was very
rude
not to.’
⁹
In 1915, Gorer’s father had been killed on the
Lusitania
, heroically, after giving up first his seat in a lifeboat, and then his lifebelt, to two female passengers. Gorer had black crape armbands stitched to his sleeves, but, when his mother came to visit him at school, she was: ‘A tragic, almost a frightening figure in the full panoply of widow’s weeds and unrelieved black, a crape veil shrouding her (when it was not lifted) so that she was visibly withdrawn from the world.’
¹⁰
At first, Mrs Gorer was conspicuous in her widow’s weeds–but not for long. By the summer of 1915, widows in mourning became increasingly numerous in the streets. ‘Mother no longer stood out from the crowd.’ Almost every family was affected by the death or wounding of a relative or friend; of the young men of every class, a generation disappeared for ever.

By 1918, a reporter for the
Illustrated London News
was lamenting the dress code at a private view of a Royal Academy Exhibition:

Over all social functions war has thrown its blight, and such ‘fixtures’ as continue are bereft of most of the oldtime glory…This year not one solitary costume was in any way remarkable. Where is there not a person who is not suffering family and financial
losses that make display and frivolous expense seem folly…In the hall I met a peeress–one of the richest women in England–but a bereaved mother wearing an old-fashioned black satin dress made with a train to lie a few inches on the ground.
¹¹

The old traditions were being eroded by the war, which put civilians on the front line for the first time and made mourning dress expensive and impractical–particularly for women, who were being pressed into service in almost every occupation. With their lives in danger on the Home Front, they had little time for the Victorian paraphernalia of ‘warm black crape’.

The first Zeppelin raid on London, on 31 May 1915, killed twenty-eight people and injured over sixty. By 1916, 550 Britons had been killed in Zeppelin raids. Propaganda posters urged:

IT IS FAR BETTER TO FACE THE BULLETS
THAN TO BE KILLED AT HOME BY A BOMB.
JOIN THE ARMY AT ONCE
AND HELP STOP AN AIR RAID.

On 26 August 1916, young Margaret McMillan and her sister Rachel were bombed by a Zeppelin in London. Margaret glanced out through her bedroom window to see ‘something bright and sparkling in the sky’. While the girls stared, fascinated, their friends ran upstairs to warn them. ‘It’s a Zeppelin, dropping bombs!’ As they rushed downstairs, the house was struck by a terrific blast, and an explosion shook the building to its foundations. Looking up, Margaret realized her sister was still upstairs. She called as Rachel appeared on the landing, carrying blankets. Rachel just had time to escape before a third crash blew out all the windows.

Proximity to such exciting, if terrifying events, made it clearer than ever that the majority of women would not shrink back into heavy Victorian mourning. As the war progressed, it became impossible to observe the niceties of traditional grief. Labour
shortages caused by recruitment and conscription sent women out to work, many for the first time in their lives, in hitherto male bastions such as munitions factories, mines and railways, fire stations and the police. Others were nursing, or running charities. Geoffrey Gorer’s widowed mother, for instance, trained as a physiotherapist.

This potential army of widows had no time for the archaic seclusion demanded by Victorian convention, and they were reluctant to act as if their lives were over for good. ‘The holocaust of young men had created such an army of widows; it was no longer socially realistic for them all to act as though their emotional and sexual life were over for good, which was the underlying message of the ritual mourning.’
¹²

For all its horror, the First World War brought women of all classes a degree of social and sartorial freedom which they would be reluctant to relinquish when Peace arrived. Clothing became practical, or ‘mannish’; jewellery was military, with a trend for wearing the regimental badge of one’s deceased husband or sweetheart as a mark of respect. Public morale was another issue: the last thing young men wanted to see, when they returned from the Front, was thousands of women swathed in black from head to foot. After 1919, the sales of Courtaulds black crape went into irreversible decline. The Great Victorian funeral suffered the same decline, as almost every available man, and horse, was sent to the Front. And the appearance of funerals had been changing before the war started. On 1 January 1914, the British Undertakers’ Association was urging ‘the trade’ to discontinue the practice of placing plumes on horses’ heads as it caused ‘unnecessary suffering’.
¹³

As the First World War drew to its close, and exhausted soldiers made their way home, the spirit of death still hovered above London. Another, even more terrible enemy emerged, deadlier than the cholera epidemics which had laid waste the city between 1832 and 1849.

The first symptoms–headaches, loss of appetite–had appeared in the trenches in early 1918, but most patients made a swift
recovery within three days. Doctors referred to the virus as ‘Three Day Fever’, and the soldiers called it ‘Spanish Flu’, except in Spain, where it became ‘French Flu’.
¹⁴
Its origins were vague, but it was commonly supposed to have started in China, India or the Middle East, the very spots where bubonic plague, with its variants of pneumonia and septicaemia, had originated, centuries earlier.

The Great War spread the virus around the globe. Soldiers from Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia arrived in France for the first time, and took it home with them. Cases began to appear in London, but patients quickly recovered.

However, in the summer of 1918, as families welcomed their sons home and victory celebrations broke out, ’flu patients succumbed to bronchial pneumonia or septicaemia. Others developed ‘heliotrope cyanosis’, a dusky blue-grey pallor indicating that they were suffocating from a build-up of fluid and cells in their lungs. They began to die.