REVEREND DAVID RAILTON

In the present text, we are going to analyse some articles about Reverend David Railton.

First of all we are going to tell who the Reverend was.

 David Railton (1884 – 1955) was a Church of England clergyman, a military chaplain and an important figure about the unknown soldier’s history.

Now, we are going to tell about his life. He was the son of George Railton, the first Commissioner of the Salvation Army and second in Command.

Having joined the Church of England, he was ordained in Liverpool in 1908. In 1910 he became temporally chaplain to the British Forces. He received the Military Cross in 1916 for saving an officer and two men under heavy fire.

After that, we are going to discuss about this idea of creating a war memorial. During the WW1, in 1916, he was serving as a chaplain to the second Battalion of the Hon Artillery Company on the Western Front in France.

One day, in Armentieres, he saw a make-shift grave marked by a rough cross across which was written “An Unknown British Soldier”.

In 1920 he wrote to the Dean of Westminster about the possibility of giving a national burial service to unidentified soldier in Westminster Abbey and the Dean took up the idea.

Railton later tried to explain why it was so important to commemorate the soldier.

It was important to give respect to the fallen of the Great War who had no known grave. After the war, Railton retired in 1945. In June 1955 he accidentally fell from a moving train at Fort William railway station and died from his injuries.

In all the texts analysed, the writers use a formal language to explain the facts in a simple and objective way and to facilitate the divulgation of the information. Indeed, they are informative texts.

In conclusion, thanks to these documents, the reader is able to connect in the correct way the figure of the Reverend David Railton to the ritual of the Unknown Soldier.