PURPLE and green were the order of the day when Redditch’s Everywoman Circle commemorated 100 years of the Suffragette Movement.
The women went to their meeting at the Bridge Church memorial hall sporting the colours adopted by women all those years ago.
Their guest speaker was Ron Gallivan of Redditch Military History Society who told them how the tomb of an Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey came into being.
It was the idea of Reverend David Railton, who had served as a chaplain during the First World War. Six bodies (which had no identifying characteristics at all) were exhumed from each of the main British battle areas on the Western Front on the night of November 7, 1920.
One was picked and placed in a coffin which on the morning of November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the Armistice that ended the war, was drawn in a procession to the Cenotaph.
This new war memorial on Whitehall was then unveiled by George V. At 11 o’clock there was a two-minute silence, and the body was then taken to Westminster Abbey where it was buried at the west end of the nave.
