Alessia Ongaro
CLASSE: 4ALS
ACTIVITY II

The present text is a summary of the documents provided by the English teacher about the history of the Unknown Soldier.

Reverend David Railton was born on 13 November 1884 in Stoke Newington London. He was a Church of England clergyman, a Military chaplain and the originator of the idea of a symbolic Tomb of The Unknown Soldier.
Railton was the son of George Scott Railton, a close colleague of General William Booth in the founding of the Salvation Army and his wife, Marianne Deborah Lydia Ellen Parkyn.
He was educated by private tutors before attending Macclesfield Grammar School as a boarder. After that David went up to Keble Collegein Oxford and was led to ordination in the Church of England. Having joined the Church of England he was ordained deacon in 1908 and priest in 1909 by the Bishop of Liverpool.
During the First World War he volunteered to serve there as an Army chaplain in France.
As a padre, David Railton would have buried the dead of his unit and he was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 for saving an officer and two men under heavy fire.
The idea of the Unknown Warrior came to him during this period, when in Erkingham near Armentieres he saw a grave marked by a cross by the quote “An Unknown British Soldier”.
The body of the warrior was reinterred in a military cemetery in France, but when Railton heard that his idea had been accepted by the Government, the Unknown Soldier was disinterred in France and brought to Westminster Abbey in London. So his dream become reality on 11 November 1920.
After the war he became Vicar of St. John’s Church at Margate in Kent and in 1920 he wrote to Herbert Ryle, Dean of Westminster, suggesting a permanent memorial to the fallen of the Great War who had no known grave.
He was killed in an accidental fall from a train in Scotland in June 1955.

The documents are informative because they describe and inform the reader about the history of the Unknown soldier. The language used is simple and direct because the texts are accessible to a average reader.
In the documents there are a lot of words linked to the memory and to the memorial. So the intelligent reader can understand that the message of the documents is linked to the symbolic value of the story.