On 11 January Dick Richards described the final journey of the Unknown Warrior to his burial in Westminster Abbey on 11 November 1920.

The idea had come to David Railton, an army chaplain, in July 1916. In the garden of his billet near Armentières he saw a grave marked by a rough cross inscribed ‘An Unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch’. That suggested to him his plan, which he hoped would comfort relatives mourning a warrior with no known grave. But he decided it would have to wait until the end of the war; and was then uncertain about who to approach. In August 1920 his wife said: ‘Now or never’. He wrote to Herbert Ryle, Dean of Westminster, suggesting the burial in the Abbey of the body of ‘one of our unknown comrades’ recovered from France.

Bishop Ryle liked the idea, and did know who to approach, up to and including the (initially reluctant) King George V. Lloyd George and Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson were enthusiastic. On 15 October 1920 the Cabinet approved the proposal, and appointed a committee under Lord Curzon to plan the event – in an astonishingly short time.

They took the utmost precautions to ensure that the warrior would be truly unknown. Four skeletons were exhumed from separate battlefields: maybe a scrap of khaki to show that the remains were reliably British but lacking any identifying badge or button. They were taken to a makeshift chapel at Army HQ, St Pol. Brigadier General Wyatt chose one, and the others were reburied along a roadside, so that it remained unknowable where the selected warrior had fallen.

The bones, in a simple pine coffin, were taken, with 6 barrels of soil from a French battlefield, to the Château at Boulogne. Here the simple coffin was placed inside a huge ceremonial coffin brought from England, decorated with a sword from the Tower of London. On the morning of 10 November British soldiers carried it through Boulogne to the quayside, watched by large crowds. At the quayside, Marshal Foch, present on his own initiative, joined the ceremony. The coffin was put on board HMS Verdun (chosen as a compliment to France), and taken to Dover. At Dover Marine station it was loaded into the luggage van that had previously been used to convey Edith Cavell’s body. A plaque on platform 8 at Victoria station records the Unknown Warrior’s overnight stay there.

On 11 November huge crowds watched the procession from Victoria to the Abbey via Constitution Hill, The Mall and Whitehall. The sergeant in charge of the bearers was Harry Ivey, great uncle of a History Club member. The King unveiled the new Cenotaph in Whitehall and laid a wreath there. He had also placed a wreath of red roses and bay leaves on the Unknown Warrior’s coffin: ‘In proud memory of those Warriors who died unknown in the Great War. Unknown, and yet well-known … George R[ex] I[mperator]’.

The procession continued to the Abbey, entering by the north door. Tickets for the service had been allocated by ballot, except that 99 widows who had lost both their husband and one or more sons were guests of honour. The Union Flag which had served David Railton in France as an altar cloth, and sometimes as a shroud, was used as a pall, and still hangs in the Abbey. The grave was filled with the French soil.

You can watch a short (silent) Pathé News film of scenes from the journey.

Reports of earlier meetings

On 14 December, Radley resident Victoria Bentata Azaz recounted by Zoom how Einstein and many other refugee scholars enriched (especially) science at the University of Oxford in and after the 1930s.

By 1900, Germany was pre-eminent in science, thanks to many dedicated research institutes and the outstanding Technische Hochschulen (specializing in science and engineering). German scientists dominated the first Solvay conference of world-leading physicists, held in Brussels in 1911, attended by the young Albert Einstein (naturalized Swiss), and Frederick Lindemann, British son of a German-born father.

Einstein’s work on ‘special’ and ‘general’ relativity explained motion, light, and gravity by rigorous but perplexing mathematics. Einstein was eccentric and self-effacing, and became much admired in England. In 1919 the British astronomer Eddington made an expedition to the island of Principe to observe stars near the sun during a total eclipse. He found that Einstein’s mathematics correctly predicted the bending by the sun’s mass of light from the stars.

By the 1930s, ‘Aryan’ German scientists were disparaging Einstein’s work as ‘Jewish’ physics, and published a book 100 authors against Einstein. Einstein remarked that, if he had been wrong, one would have been enough.

Meanwhile, until 1919, physics was badly taught and little researched at Oxford. From 1919 Lindemann revived it – facing down the assertion that ‘anyone with a first in greats (classics) could get up science in a fortnight’.

In 1931 Lindemann persuaded Einstein to come to Oxford, and arranged a ‘studentship’ (teaching post) for him at Christ Church. In May 1931 Einstein gave 3 famous public lectures (in German). Some of his equations chalked on a blackboard were (and still are) preserved, including what Einstein later acknowledged were mistakes.

From 1933 Hitler assumed dictatorial power. Scientists (and others) with one or more Jewish grandparents were summarily dismissed. William Beveridge founded the Academic Assistance Council to bring academics fleeing Nazi persecution to Britain. In October 1933, shortly before taking up a post at Princeton, Einstein gave a speech (in English) at the Albert Hall in defence of academic freedom: ‘without such freedom there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Faraday, no Pasteur and no Lister.’

Lindemann and others attracted many distinguished refugee academics to Oxford. They played key roles, notably in the ‘Tube Alloys’ project to develop the atomic bomb, and in neurosurgery at Stoke Mandeville. They included fascinating eccentrics such as Nicholas Kurti, the ‘physicist in the kitchen’, and Eduard Fraenkel, who gave what was surely the longest ever series of graduate seminars on a Greek play.

Beveridge’s Council is still operating, now as the Council for At-Risk Academics, and Oxford University continues to be enriched by many staff and students from overseas.

Reports of earlier meetings

On 9 November (appropriately near Armistice Day), Stephen Barker described events in Oxfordshire during the second world war.

From September 1939, Oxford City Council workmen were already constructing public air raid shelters. Over the weekend 1–4 September, 16,000 children were evacuated to rural Oxfordshire. Some enjoyed new experiences, such as seeing rabbits and growing vegetables. Others desperately missed their parents, including one whose subsequent angry letter to her cruel ‘hosts’ survives in the Banbury archives.

Local Defence Volunteers (later renamed the Home Guard) were formed to resist the feared invasion. At Bicester, one volunteer, when asked what steps he would take if paratroopers landed at a local airfield, replied ‘Big ones, sir!’

German bombers were deceived into attacking a mock factory built outside Banbury, instead of the real factory vital for the production of aluminium airframes. However, on 3 October 1940 bombs devastated Banbury gas works and railway goods yard.

Women ‘land girls’ replaced farm workers. Jean Procter, founder of the British Women Land Army Association, vigorously disputed their depiction in Angela Huth’s novel Land Girls: ‘… this stupid story comes along about us getting off with the farmer’s son. There were no farmers’ sons; we’d replaced them.’ There were however tales of flirtations with American servicemen and German prisoners of war.

In 1942, American servicemen were issued with a guidebook of instructions on British customs. They were warned, for example, against saying ‘bloody’ in mixed company.

Women led the success of ‘make do and mend’, and Banbury girl guides won a county prize for organizing waste paper collection.

Units from Oxfordshire led the capture of the Pegasus bridge on D-day in June 1944, and took part in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. On VE Day in the Bartons, for example, the feeling around the bonfire was more of relief than celebration.

Answering questions after his talk, Stephen Barker explained that there is no evidence for the (always implausible) claim that German bombers spared Oxford because Hitler wanted it as the capital of occupied Britain.

Reports of earlier meetings

On 12 October, via Zoom, Mark Davies (local historian and author of Alice in Waterland) described and illustrated the adventures in Oxford of some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, and their encounters with Thomas Combe, Printer to the University, philanthropist, and art collector; and Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In 1850 John Millais and Charles Collins were experiencing what Millais described as ‘Bottleyonian privations’, receiving poor fare at a boarding house near Wytham Woods. Through James Wyatt, an Oxford art dealer and picture framer, they met Thomas and Martha Combe. Martha supplied them with a meat pie; and Thomas assisted Millais in locating the shoes of the child model for The Woodman’s Daughter, so that Millais could paint them accurately. Collins later painted the flowers for Convent Thoughts in the garden of the University Press in Jericho, where the Combes lived.

The Pre-Raphaelite ‘Brotherhood’ in Oxford expanded to include Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones. They attempted, without proper preparation, to paint murals of Arthurian legends in the Union Society’s  library. The daughters of Mrs Lipscombe, landlady of the Trout Inn, Godstow, were noted ‘stunners’. Rossetti persuaded Morris to journey to Godstow to ask one to model for Isoude. He met with a heated refusal, and returned crestfallen to Oxford.

Charles Dodgson was also in the Combes’ circle. His photographs are particularly valuable because he carefully identified and dated them: for example Holman Hunt and Thomas Combe in 1860, Millais in 1865, and Rossetti in 1863.

St Frideswide’s well at Binsey, which would probably have been known to the Pre-Raphaelites from sketching and walking over Port Meadow, was the inspiration for the treacle well in Alice. And the ‘Drawling-master’ is said to be based on John Ruskin. He and others, especially the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, advised Dodgson not to use his own drawings, which led to him engaging Tenniel as his illustrator.

Martha Combe inherited Thomas’s collection, and bequeathed much important Pre-Raphaelite art to the Ashmolean Museum. Search for ashmolean.org to look at it online, and check about visiting.

Reports of earlier meetings