'It was probably the greatest state funeral ever held, a magnificent imperial occasion in the twilight of Empire. No monarch has had a state funeral on the same vast scale’, Alistair Lexden said at a commemorative lunch in the Carlton Club on January 30, the fiftieth anniversary of the day on which Churchill was laid to rest in Bladon churchyard in the Oxfordshire countryside following hours of grand ceremonial in London.
Over the previous three days his coffin had lain in state in Westminster Hall ; more than 300,000 people filed past it. Richard Crossman, a minister in the Labour government that had taken office 100 days earlier, noted in his diary: ‘ One saw even at one o’clock in the morning the stream of people pouring down the steps of Westminster Hall towards the catafalque. Outside, the column wound through the garden at Millbank, then stretched over Lambeth Bridge, right round the corner to St Thomas’s Hospital’.
On January 30, Big Ben was silenced for the day. The great drum-horse of the Household Cavalry, drums swathed in black crepe, led the vast procession solemnly through the streets of London to St Paul’s, while band after band across the capital played the Dead March from Handel’s Saul , and the soldiers lining the route bared their heads and reversed their arms. ‘I want masses of bands playing’, Churchill had said. He got them.
Five Field Marshals, four Prime Ministers, an Admiral of the Fleet and a Marshal of the Royal Air Force were among the pall-bearers when the coffin, draped with the Union flag and accompanied by the flags of the Cinque Ports and of the Spencer-Churchill family, was carried up the great steps into the cathedral. A hundred nations were represented there. Casting aside all precedent, the Queen, Duke of Edinburgh and senior members of the Royal Family came to honour the great statesman. They sang his favourite hymns; ‘my, how they sang them’, one of his secretaries noted.
After the funeral the coffin was brought down to the Thames. There, as the pipers played ‘ The Flowers of the Forest’, six tall guardsmen carried it on board a river launch; and away up the great river it sailed towards Westminster, escorted by black police boats. ‘ Rule Britannia’ rang out from the shore, fighter aircraft flew overhead, farewell guns fired from the Tower of London, and as the little flotilla disappeared upstream, watched by the mourning crowd below the cathedral, all the cranes on the riverside wharves were dipped in salute, providing the day with a moment of particular poignancy.
In the evening the great statesman’s body was placed on a train bound for the family churchyard in Oxfordshire. Sir Leslie Rowan, one of Churchill’s wartime secretaries, wrote: ‘ on that last journey by train from Waterloo to Bladon, after the great crowds of London, two single figures whom I saw from the carriage window epitomised for me what Churchill really meant to ordinary people: first on the flat roof of a small house a man standing to attention in his old RAF uniform ,saluting; and then in a field, some hundreds of yards away from the track, a simple farmer stopping work and standing, head bowed, cap in hand’.
Churchill’s obituary in The Times expressed the nation’s conviction: ‘his renown is assured so long as the story of these islands is told’ . Fifty years on, there is a need to bring home the magnitude of Churchill’s achievement to young people in particular—a point to which those attending the lunch attached great importance. Alistair Lexden expressed regret that the proposal made by Anthony Eden to establish a Churchill Day had not been taken up. It should, Eden had said, be ‘ connected with some day in that summer of 1940 when Churchill’s leadership and this country’s will to resist, whatever the cost, both expressed themselves so gloriously’.
Alistair Lexden concluded by quoting words sent to Churchill by his youngest and favourite daughter, Mary Soames, on 8 June 1964, seven months before his death. She wrote: ‘In addition to all the feelings a daughter has for a loving and generous father, I owe you what every Englishman, woman and child does—liberty itself'.
***
The lunch was attended by over 50 members of the Carlton and guests. The Club Secretary, Jonathan Orr-Ewing, emailed Alistair Lexden afterwards to say ‘ the enthusiasm and rapt attention given to your talk were echoed in comments to me afterwards’.