John Nichol – captured, tortured and paraded on television during the first Gulf War in 1991 – goes in search of a considerably less known warrior in his latest book.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor with Sussex Newspapers. An immense
00:07pleasure and privilege this afternoon to speak to John Nicol. Now John, you are embarking
00:11on your first ever theatre tour and you're taking in, in our area, Worthing, Portsmouth,
00:16Eastbourne and Crawley with your new book, The Unknown Warrior. And it's a fascinating
00:22sounding book, it's your personal quest to find out about that unknown warrior who is
00:28buried in Westminster Abbey and what he represented. What started you on this?
00:37Well it's a subject that I knew almost nothing about, Phil, to be perfectly honest. I was
00:43in Westminster Abbey at a ceremony and a World War II veteran was telling me about the reality
00:48of the tomb, why it was there, what it was there for. I'd seen it before but I didn't
00:53really know anything about it. And so, you know, when you read, when you read the inscription
00:57there is a body there, there's somebody buried in the, in the hallowed earth of Westminster
01:03Abbey. Where did he come from? I found myself asking, why? What were the reasons? And so
01:08my first little bit of research that told me that just over a million British Empire
01:14soldiers died during the First World War, with over half a million missing. So half
01:21a million with no known grave. So that slab in Westminster Abbey is somebody who is no
01:28one, yet somebody who is everyone, one man to represent half a million. And for me, I
01:33just found that fascinating. Yeah. And that was the focus.
01:38You've unearthed some fabulous contemporary accounts of just what that tomb meant to people
01:43at the time. And it did address that. It was, it was just reading the accounts of the
01:53time, reading people's diaries, the way that people revitated to the concept that the man
02:04in that grave could be anybody. So one of the things that when I was reading all the
02:07old archives and all the old newspaper cuttings from 1919 and 1920, there was a letter from
02:14a young boy. And he wrote, asking for tickets to the ceremony. He said, I want to go because
02:21the man in that coffin would be my daddy. And I found that almost heartbreaking. It's
02:27always emotional to just say it now. The man in that coffin would be my daddy. And that
02:33encapsulates the whole concept. He could be anybody. He represents all the missing.
02:40Goodness. And if that story weren't enough, the fact is that there is the extra dimension
02:45that it's you, John Nicol, who's writing it. And you were so famously missing, weren't
02:51you, during the Gulf War, before you were paraded in a, sorry, state on television.
02:59Is that part of your reason for writing this book?
03:03Yeah, I mean, so lots of your viewers, listeners, might remember that myself and my pilot John
03:10Peters were shot down during the first Gulf War in 1991, paraded on TV, looking, as you
03:16say, dishevelled, as citizens of war, after having a pretty tough three days. But my mum
03:22and dad were told that I was missing. That was the first thing that they were told on
03:26the day it happened, he's missing. And then the next thing that we're told, and they rushed
03:32to get to my parents, we think he's going to appear, he's going to be forced to appear
03:36on TV tonight. So they had to prepare themselves for that. And then those pictures were flashed
03:41around the world. And then they knew nothing for the rest of the, what, six weeks of captivity.
03:48And at one point, they'd been to church and came out of church, and there was a newspaper
03:53headline on one of those boards that used to write them on, do you remember them? That
03:57said, my body had been, I'd been killed, I'd been murdered, my body had been discovered.
04:02And that was, for them, obviously horrific for anybody. But it was their not knowing,
04:07obviously, I was one of the lucky ones, I came home. But can you imagine that concept
04:12of being missing and never, nobody, your parents, your loved ones, your mother, your brother,
04:18your father, never knowing, never knowing what happened to you. And there's one account
04:24that I use in the book and in the theatre show of one man from Canada, who mounted something
04:30like 60 missions to disinter bodies from the battlefields from 1918 to 1926, to try to
04:39discover the remains of his son who was missing. The cost, never mind the cost, but the emotional
04:46cost of digging up the long dead to try to identify your son. So 60, I think he had 60
04:55graves disinterred. That then gives you a sense of that one example, to try to explain
05:01the example of half a million families with missing loved ones, that must have been so
05:07tough.
05:08Extraordinary, extraordinary story and extraordinary personal account from you. John, really lovely
05:13to speak to you.
05:14Thanks very much.
05:15It's your first ever theatre tour to Worthing, Portsmouth, Eastbourne and Crawley in our
05:20area. Thank you very much indeed for your time.
05:22Thanks.