In October 1920 Railton heard that his idea had been accepted by the Government. A committee headed by Lord Curzon, the then Foreign Secretary, was arranging for an unknown "warrior" to be disinterred in France and brought to Westminster Abbey. On 7 November 1920 six, or according to other accounts four, working parties visited the battlefields of Ypres, the Marne, Cambrai, Arras, the Somme, and the Aisne, where units of the Royal Naval division as well as the Army had died: each party exhumed an unidentified body which was examined to ensure that it was British before being placed in a plain coffin.