CENTENARY OF UNKNOWN WARRIOR’S LAST JOURNEY
TRAVELLERS passing through London Victoria may have noticed a small plaque beside platform 8.
It commemorates the station’s role in bringing back to the UK the ‘unknown soldier’ from the First World War. Similar small memorials exist at other places in the journey from France – at the former Dover Marine (Western Docks) station in Kent and outside the station at Saint-Polsur-Ternoise, in northern France.
A century ago, on November 10, 1920, a train arriving from Dover at platform 8 at London Victoria was greeted by a military honour guard.
The train was carrying the coffin holding the body of the ‘Unknown Warrior’, which had been brought from the battlefields of France for burial in Westminster Abbey exactly two years after the First World War had ended.
It was fitting the last journey was by rail as it was very likely the soldier, like most of his compatriots, had set off to the war in France by rail in the first place, many of them from Victoria. The coffin, which
