Unknown Warrior padre remembered - David Railton QC recalls grandfather and namesake

Published: 01 July 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN

“MY grandfather never really recovered from the trauma of the war,” a barrister from Westminster revealed during a poignant pilgrimage to a French town last week.

David Railton QC has childhood memories of his grandfather and namesake the Rev David Railton, who, though he never carried a gun, won the Military Cross for bravery in the trenches.

During the First World War, Mr Railton was billeted to Erquingham Lys, near the town of Armentieres.

The courageous padre called for the creation of a Grave of the Unknown Warrior when he conducted the burials of hundreds of soldiers.

Mr Railton QC and his family, who live in Maida Vale, un­veiled a plaque opposite the war cemetery where soldiers from the Liverpool Scottish Regiment who lost their lives lie in graves decorated with flowers. 

Speaking first in French, then in English, David Railton told the gathering: “I know my grandfather would be very pleased and proud of this memorial. Not because it recognises his idea which led to an Unknown Warrior being buried in Westminster Abbey – my grandfather was a modest man, and had no interest in personal acclaim – but because, nearly 100 years on, it confirms the importance to all of us of the Grave of the Unknown Warrior. 

“Like many padres on the front, it was clear to him that more distress was suffered by those who could not be told where their husband, father or son was resting, but who had at best a general map reference as to where he may have fallen. The Grave of the Un­known Warrior changed that. It provided a place of both comfort and grief.”

Mr Railton, vicar of St John’s, Margate, when he died in 1955, had to wait until 1920 to see the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior created as his original letter to the Dean of Westminster Abbey received little support.

On November 7, 1920, the War Office issued instructions for four unidentified bodies to be exhumed, from four different battlefield cemeteries, and that night they were brought to the village of Saint-Pol sur Ternise, in the Pas de Calais, all placed on Union Jack-covered stretchers in front of the altar of a military chapel.

Then a blindfolded brigadier chose one of them, the men who had brought the bodies being sent away so that there was no danger of anyone revealing from which battlefield the body had come. 

The following morning the coffin of the unknown soldier was ceremoniously brought across the Channel to London, where it received a 19-gun salute, the pall bearers taking the coffin into the Abbey made up of five admirals, four field marshals and two generals.