socialmedian: The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker

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The Last Veteran: Harry Patch and the Legacy of War by Peter Parker

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 07, 2009

Summary

Harry Patch's history confounds stereotypes, says Nigel Fountain

On 9 November 1920 Britain's Unknown Warrior, having been duly saluted in Boulogne by Maréchal Foch, supreme commander of allied forces on the western front, set sail on a Royal Navy destroyer for Dover. Three months earlier David Railton, a frontline padre, had sent his idea for what Peter Parker calls "this representative of all the dead" to the Dean of Westminster, who had put it to George V. The king didn't like it, but the prime minister, Lloyd George, did, and having claimed the scheme as his own, got it through Cabinet that October. On 7 November, four unidentified bodies were exhumed from battlefield cemeteries and one randomly selected for a state funeral, at Westminster Abbey, on 11 November, 1920. Thus was a caravan set in motion that rolls to this day.

The Unknown Warrior provided a chance for the Church of England to reassert itself, writes Parker in his meditation on 90 years of British remembrance and commemoration of the first world war. The focus of grief at the 1919 anniversary o

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