The following was read by Headmaster, Joe Silvester, at the School's Act of Remembrance.

In preparing to speak to you all today, I have learned of the many different sacrifices that have been made by Old Albanians. That across time and different conflicts, individuals from this School, both known and unknown, have lost their lives fighting for their country. I am also aware that in the telling of their stories, we can draw inspiration to reflect on our own lives as well as pausing to give thanks.

However, as this is my first Remembrance service here as the Headmaster of St Albans School, and I am on a journey of getting to know the School, I would like to take a slightly different approach this year. Although the School, the pupils, the staff, the governors, parents, and OA community are all becoming known to me, there is much that remains unknown. And it is this sense of not knowing that gave me cause to think about two things.

Firstly, those individual OAs whose names are unknown to us, and whose sacrifice will not be recognised publicly, and also the tomb of the unknown soldier that is in Westminster Abbey in London. This is a memorial with a difference, and that difference is the lack of names of individuals upon it. Unlike our memorial cross in Upper Yard around which we will gather shortly, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior is not inscribed with the thousands of names of the fallen. 

The School has, as far as we know, at least 25 individuals connected to us who died in action in the Second World War but whose identities remain hidden or unknown.

From our historical records, what we do know is that from the First World War onwards, the School had a standing connection to the Special Intelligence Service’s foreign division that was a forerunner of today’s MI6. In both the First and Second World Wars, we know that the School helped with operations by initially providing cover for agents to pretend they were teachers. In the Second World War, we know that some of the agents who were active actually were members of staff or pupils, who were in different capacities operationally active between 1937 and 1947.

If they died in action, we do not know where or when they fell, and so these men may not have received posthumous medals, nor wider recognition of their ultimate sacrifice. These 25 listed names are St Albans School's Unknown Warriors, who were truly ‘Born Not for Themselves’.

This anonymous service and sacrifice links to my wishing to speak to you about the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, about how it came to be, and to share with you a poem written about it 100 years after it came into being.

Just because this piece of history, this national monument, is not about an identifiable individual does not mean it is without import or relevance. Far from it, in fact. I believe that it has great value precisely because of the lack of names, and thus is an apt theme for me to speak to this morning, to perhaps share with you some information about something you were previously unaware of, and to provide you with something to consider as we take time to pause and reflect on the human cost of wars past, and current conflicts.

So, what is it, and how did it come to be? The grave of the Unknown Warrior is in Westminster Abbey and is the final resting place of an unknown British serviceman who is buried there.

During the First World War, most of those who were killed in action were not returned to the UK. You can visit many different cemeteries in France that contain the headstones of the soldiers who were killed in action. Where the body of a soldier could not be recovered or identified, their name was added to one of many different monuments and memorials.

Reverend David Railton was an Army Chaplain who had served on the Western Front during the war, and, towards the end, had been moved by the sight of a grave marked with a rough wooden cross and written on it in pencil was the inscription ‘An Unknown British Soldier’.  

In 1920, after the end of the War, he wrote to the Dean of Westminster to suggest that an unidentified British Soldier from the battlefields of France be returned to England and buried in Westminster Abbey, as he said ‘amongst the kings’ to represent the many hundreds of thousands of dead. The idea was strongly supported by the Dean and also David Lloyd George, who was the Prime Minister at the time.

Arrangements were made accordingly and following a selection process the body of a soldier was transported with great ceremony from the battlefield where it had been exhumed to the castle at Boulogne. Once in Boulogne, the body was watched overnight by members of a French regiment who kept vigil. In the morning, two undertakers from England attended to the body. The coffin was placed in a casket made of the oak timbers from trees at Hampton Court Palace, it was banded with iron and a crusaders sword from the royal collection was fixed to the top.

The procession from Boulogne castle to the harbour was led by 1,000 schoolchildren, the body transported on a coach drawn by six black horses, and the French cavalry trumpeters played as the bells of all of the churches in Boulogne were tolled.

Following transport from Boulogne to Dover, and then on to London, the casket arrived at Victoria Station on the evening of 10 November 1920. On the morning of 11 November, a funeral cortege drew the casket through huge silent crowds to Westminster Abbey.

In the Abbey, the unknown warrior was granted a full state funeral, and this is the only time this honour has been bestowed on an anonymous person or representative of a whole group of people. The service to inter the casket was, heartbreakingly, attended not just by the King and royal family, and ministers of state, but by 100 women who had lost either a husband or son in the War.

The gravestone was a piece of Belgian marble, and the inscription was engraved with brass from melted down wartime munitions.

Following the service, military servicemen stood guard whilst tens of thousands of mourners filed silently past.

100 years after this ceremony, the then-Prince Charles marked its anniversary, and the poet Laureate Simon Armitage composed a poem for the occasion. If you carefully read the poem, you will identify many of the things I have just talked about, but shared not in lengthy sentences, but in sparse and evocative verse that draws forth the emotion and sacrifice bound up in the monument.

The Unknown Warrior is a powerful representation of the lives of many distilled into a single point of focus and it seems to me to be an appropriate image and idea to focus on in a moment of meditative silence. As a school with pupils that hail from a diverse range of international backgrounds, it is important that we have considered the initial establishment of Remembrance Day and it associated traditions, but also that we acknowledge, as a community, the much wider, continuing, and sadly somehow inevitably nameless human cost that is wrought by conflicts across the globe.

The Bed, by Simon Armitage

Sharp winds scissor and scythe those plains.
And because you are broken and sleeping rough
in a dirt grave, we exchange the crude wooden cross
for the hilt and blade of a proven sword;
to hack through the knotted dark of the next world,
yes, but to lean on as well at a stile or gate
looking out over fens or wealds or fells or wolds.
That sword, drawn from a king’s sheath,
fits a commoner’s hand, and is yours to keep.

And because frost plucks at the threads
of your nerves, and your bones stew in the rain,
bedclothes of zinc and oak are trimmed
and tailored to fit. Sandbags are drafted in,
for bolstering limbs and pillowing dreams,
and we throw in a fistful of battlefield soil:
an inch of the earth, your share of the spoils.

The heavy sheet of stone is Belgian marble
buffed to a high black gloss, the blanket
a flag that served as an altar cloth. Darkness
files past, through until morning, its head bowed.
Molten bullets embroider incised words.
Among drowsing poets and dozing saints
the tall white candles are vigilant sentries
presenting arms with stiff yellow flames;
so nobody treads on the counterpane,
but tiptoeing royal brides in satin slippers
will dress and crown you with luminous flowers.

All this for a soul
without name or rank or age or home, because you
are the son we lost, and your rest is ours.