WHAT: Edith Cavell Memorial:
WHERE: St Martin’s Place (map)
BY WHOM: Sir George Frampton
WHEN: 1920
Continue reading “Statues: the Edith Cavell Memorial”Statues: the Edith Cavell Memorial
The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior
If you should come into the Abbey through the West Door and into the nave, you will walk over the memorial to Sir Winston Churchill, but everyone, whether commoner or Queen, walks around the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
This is the last resting place of a British soldier, “known only to God” and is a commemoration of British war dead, conceived in the aftermath of WW1. The red flowers around it are paper poppies, a symbol of remembrance from a First World War poem – “In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row”. Poppies thrive in ground that has been churned up, so the bombed out land and the grave sites away from the front line encouraged their blooms.
Continue reading “The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior”FREE VIRTUAL TOUR: London’s WW1 Memorials
A virtual tour from www.uktoursonline.com where I look at some of the capital’s most significant and most poignant war memorials from the First World War, including the Cenotaph, the memorials to the Machine Gun Corps and the Fusiliers, the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.
Continue reading “FREE VIRTUAL TOUR: London’s WW1 Memorials”Reginald Warneford – first destroyer of a Zeppelin
In Brompton Cemetery stands a wonderful monument to Reginald Warneford, the first man to destroy a Zeppelin in combat, over Belgium on 7 June 1915. He didn’t shoot it down, but dropped bombs on it – the resulting explosion almost killing him in the process.
Warneford’s own account provides lots of colour:
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