On the night of 29th December 1940,
German bombers struck London with a vengeance.
AIR RAID SIREN WAILS
NEWSREEL: 'For miles around, the sky was a bright orange red.
'St Paul's Cathedral,
'all around it the flames were leaping up into the sky.'
At this darkest of hours,
Britain's Prime Minister recognised the huge importance
of saving one building.
Winston Churchill immediately realised the symbolic significance
and ordered that, at all costs, St Paul's must be saved.
As fire crews fought the flames all around,
a photographer grabbed his camera.
He pressed the shutter and, snap,
he had a front-page photograph,
which has come, for many people, to sum up for ever
something of the spirit of the country they live in.
CHORAL SINGING
A quarter of a century later,
Sir Winston Churchill was back in St Paul's,
at the centre of a magnificent funeral ceremony.
No-one who saw it has ever forgotten the farewell the nation gave him.
It was so grand but it was also so personal.
In the building he'd helped to save,
the nation gave thanks for a man considered its saviour
and who's been revered ever since as a national hero.
When I saw his coffin, I thought, "God, the man's gone,
"what the hell are we going to do now?"
There were many in my parents' generation,
the war generation, who worshipped Churchill.
But times change.
Is he any longer a great national hero?
Or is he irrelevant?
Churchill was entranced by new ideas and new machines.
He would be a terrific blogger
and a self-googler of epic proportions, I expect.
No other commoner in modern times has had a send-off
like the one we gave Churchill
that bleak January day in 1965.
And 50 years on, for better or for worse,
we still live in the great man's shadow.
CHATTING AND LAUGHTER
The cult of celebrity has a shrine in central London.
Here, you can admire, embrace, or sometimes scorn, the people
whose tinselly presence we cannot avoid.
LAUGHTER
For 200 years, Madame Tussauds has been making wax figures
of the famous and the infamous.
Today is the launch day of their latest attraction -
the actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
Big smiles. One, two, three. Perfect.
As in real life,
celebrity isn't restricted to the world of entertainment.
Of course, the politics section isn't the most popular bit of the
attraction but what's interesting is who makes it here and who doesn't.
Of course, people like President Obama,
there are up to 2,000 people a day posing for a photograph with him,
and people like Mahatma Gandhi and other world leaders,
of course they're here. British prime ministers, though?
Well, there's the current one
and the man who swears blind he doesn't want his job,
and there's Mrs Thatcher.
There is no sign, though, of any other British politician here.
Intriguing.
With one exception.
And that one exception is Winston Churchill.
The first figure that we made of Churchill was
put into the exhibition in 1908.
- 1908? - 1908, yes.
That's almost unrecognisable as the Churchill that we know from
- the wartime photographs, isn't it? - Yes, he's quite unique
in the sense that few people actually
relate to the young image of him. But, of course, he was young.
So, one way or another,
- he's been on display here for over 100 years. - Yes.
Well, we modelled Churchill seven times through his lifetime.
What we would do is we would
refigure him every time there was a marked moment in his life.
The last portrait we did while he was still alive was at his easel
and painting and this was put out the year he died.
What's the one on display now?
The one on display now is him in the height of the '40s.
And that is because, of all the impressions of Churchill
in that very, very long life,
- that is the strongest one that people identify. - Exactly.
So, 50 years after we laid him away
with all the pomp the nation could summon,
Churchill remains almost as real as his latter-day imitators.
Call someone Churchillian
and most think you're paying them a deep compliment.
He's colossal.
He's the Everest of British politicians.
He is miles bigger in scale,
in construction, than any politician
out of the politicians I've studied.
I mean, Margaret Thatcher, the lot of them,
they're absolutely dwarfed by Churchill.
And if you look at what Churchill achieved every day,
it is absolutely mind-boggling.
He was running on a different kind of petrol.
MUSIC: My Generation by The Who
# People try to put us d-down
# Talkin' 'bout my generation
# Just because we get around... #
By the mid-'60s, as Churchill's life was drawing to a close,
another Britain was being born.
The new country was pushy, noisy and brash.
It looked forward to fun, not back to past glories.
Youth culture rejected the rule of fools in old-style hats and coats.
Why be grand when you could be cool?
In the course of his long career,
Churchill had opposed votes for women
and been pretty sceptical, to say the least, about immigration.
By the time of his death in 1965,
the permissive society was already being born.
I wonder what he'd have made of the miniskirts on the King's Road,
the counterculture, the rise of multiculturalism.
I suspect that he'd have harrumphed.
But the irony is, of course,
that by leading the fight against fascism he'd given us all
the chance to choose what sort of society we wanted to live in.
As Churchill's physical strength ebbed in the last years of his life,
he fought the black dog of depression
by taking breaks abroad with friends and family.
In June 1962, Churchill was staying at the Hotel de Paris
in Monte Carlo when he fell from his bed and broke his hip.
His private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne
and his grand-daughter Celia were sent for.
We got to the hospital and he looked awful,
absolutely awful.
And Grandpapa just dismissed
all the medical people in the room.
Whether they were doctors or nurses,
he said, "Would they all go out of the room, please?"
And he turned to Anthony and said, "I want to die in England.
"You'll make sure of that, won't you?"
And Anthony said, "Yes,"
and then Grandpapa said, "You promise?"
And he said, "I promise."
Anyway, the next day,
Harold Macmillan sent an ambulance plane from the RAF.
My grandfather was on the stretcher bed in the middle of the,
I suppose, the body of the aeroplane and I was sitting on a chair
next to him, just holding his hand and hoping and praying he'd make it.
NEWSREEL: 'After 54 days in Middlesex Hospital,
'he was coming out and returning home.
'When has there been a man to compare with Winston Churchill?
'And what a crush there was to be among the first to see him.
'The old warrior was about again
'after the toughest fight of his life.'
The ambulance began the short journey across London
to Hyde Park Gate, where waiting crowds who cheered him home.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's decision to order the RAF
to fly home his ailing predecessor wasn't entirely
the spontaneous act of kindness that it seemed to many of the crowds
outside Churchill's London home here.
In fact, the Air Force had been working for years on a secret plan
to bring Churchill back home.
The only thing was that Operation Hope Not, as it was called,
didn't envisage returning a sick former Prime Minister
but a dead body.
The fact was that behind the scenes,
and without Churchill knowing,
the government had been preparing
for what they might do when he died.
..in this file here,
there had actually been an enormous amount of planning.
It starts in January 1958,
a full seven years before the state funeral,
and what you're looking at here are the very first plans
drawn up by Anthony Montague Browne,
Sir Winston Churchill's private secretary,
working with his counterparts
in the Cabinet Office and in the Palace.
This is almost exactly seven years before he died.
Why had they started then?
Well, of course, you have to remember that Churchill is already
well into his 80s by this point.
His health is starting to fail
and I think there is a fear amongst his inner circle
that the worst could happen at any time from now on.
Did the family know that these plans were being made?
What we've got here is a wonderful handwritten letter
from the summer of 1958,
so we're still very early on.
And what you're seeing here is Anthony Montague Browne writing
what must have been a very difficult letter to Clementine Churchill,
Lady Spencer-Churchill.
"The Queen's intimated that
"if it is in accordance with the wishes of the family
"there should be plans for Sir Winston to have a state funeral.
"It is suggested there should be a lying in state
"in Westminster Hall, followed by the service at St Paul's.
"This is thought to be more fitting than Westminster Abbey
"as St Paul's has the precedence of comparatively recent
"great national heroes such as Nelson and the Duke of Wellington."
So, suddenly, this is becoming a huge enterprise.
And it's at that point, of course, that the operation
is given its codename, which is Operation Hope Not.
And then the end saying, "I'm bidden to seek your views.
"You will realise how I hate distressing you with all this
"but I know you will understand the desirability. Far off may it be."
So at first she knows that her husband is going to be buried,
effectively, by the state.
A state funeral at St Paul's was a way of the nation saying
thank you and, in the entire 20th century, Winston Churchill
was the only commoner to be given this honour.
What was less known, though, was that the Dean of St Paul's
some years previously had suggested he actually be buried
in the very building he fought so hard to save from German bombers.
In the crypt beneath the great cathedral are memorials
to many of the admirals and generals who led British forces
during World War II -
a Valhalla filled with the commanders whom Churchill had known
at the height of their powers.
It's the tombs of the Duke of Wellington
and Admiral Lord Nelson which dominate this place.
There had been talk of Churchill having his own tomb here, too.
But he had other plans.
Churchill had fallen in love with Chartwell,
a country house in Kent, in the 1920s.
Over the next two decades, he made it his family home.
"A day away from Chartwell," he said, "was a day wasted."
It was the place he most loved in the whole world.
It was his headquarters
for everything that he did.
For painting, writing,
for seeing his political friends.
You know, for everything. Chartwell was his headquarters.
He loved it.
He loved the garden.
He was, he said, "At peace in my own habitation."
Scarcely a weekend would go by at Chartwell without Churchill
surrounded by his children, grandchildren
and his beloved animals.
Chartwell, I think, meant everything in the world to him.
He felt that
the burdens of the world
were lifted from his shoulders
when he went through those gates at Chartwell.
Like most politicians, Churchill wasn't overburdened with
a sense of modesty, yet he told his family that
when he died he didn't want a grand funeral
with mausoleums and monuments,
he wanted his last mortal remains to end up on the lawn.
Churchill cared enough about mortality to change his will
several times after the war.
But he never wavered in his desire to be cremated
and to have his ashes strewn at Chartwell.
Specifically, he wanted his ashes scattered near the croquet lawn,
next to the graves of his dogs, Rufus I and Rufus II.
In the 1930s, the period known as his wilderness years,
Churchill had spent much time here at his desk at Chartwell,
warning of the rise of Nazi Germany and the need for rearmament.
Chartwell looked out across unmistakably English countryside
and it was in the skies above the Kentish Weald that young pilots
fought the Battle of Britain.
CHURCHILL: 'Never in the field of human conflict
'was so much owed by so many to so few.'
Churchill, the new Prime Minister, rallied the nation during the Blitz,
encapsulating an idea of a people standing alone
and refusing to surrender.
CHURCHILL: 'If the British Empire and its Commonwealth
'last for 1,000 years,
'men will still say, "This was their finest hour."'
In time, and at huge cost, survival became victory.
With that came pride in being a nation willing,
if necessary, to stand alone.
Bloody-minded perhaps, but certain.
CHURCHILL: 'What kind of people do they think we are?
'Is it possible they do not realise that we shall never cease to
'persevere against them until they have been taught
'a lesson which they and the world will never forget?'
APPLAUSE
It was Churchill's genius to find the words that
spoke for England at a very, very difficult time in its history.
How resonant those words are that, 50 years after his death,
they still seem to conjure up an idea of who we are.
It is this identification of man and nation
that gives Churchill his unique status.
But the country he led has become a very different place.
He would have been depressed by the way Britain
seemed to have been reduced. He said towards the end of the life,
"I've worked so hard and achieved so much only, in the end,
"to achieve nothing." I think he was basically fishing for compliments.
But I think he did regret the loss of empire, the loss of India
and all the rest of it but I think he would have been very, very amazed
by how people live today.
But as far as young people are concerned,
he doesn't mean anything much nowadays.
I don't think that's true. I think that...
Yes, you read the statistics that, yes, everybody thinks he's the dog
in the insurance advertisement.
I think that actually he's a very powerful figure in
the imaginations of many young people
because they identify him as the guy who won the war
and beat Adolf Hitler.
As he approached his death, Churchill told a friend
that he had "no appetite for life"
and that "when it comes to dying I shall not complain".
He knew his reputation rested on his wartime premiership,
particularly 1940.
Much of the remainder of his life was a catalogue of failure.
His misgivings were expressed in a story he wrote,
which was discovered only after his death.
In 1947, Churchill was painting here in his studio at Chartwell.
He was trying to do a copy of that portrait of his father,
Randolph Churchill, when suddenly he became aware of another presence
in the room and there, sitting in that red leather armchair,
he said that he saw his father.
His father asked his son what had happened in Britain
since he'd died at the end of the 19th century
and Winston Churchill gave him a potted history
of the first few decades of the 20th century -
the Boer War, income tax, the First World War -
but he hadn't got as far as the Second World War
when his father interrupted him, saying,
"I'm surprised you didn't go into politics.
"You could have done something to help.
"You might even have made a name for yourself."
And then, just like that, he was gone.
With no time to talk of his wartime achievements,
Churchill's dream highlighted a deep sense of unease
over a troubled relationship
with a father who had died when Churchill was only 20.
I think that he was...
In the back of his...
very back of his consciousness was
the thought of his father
and how he could have pleased him,
was with him all his life.
That's a remarkable thing, though, by the age...
by the time you knew him, he was into his 70s,
- that that should still be present in his mind even then. - Yes, yes.
- That's remarkable. - I think it was an overwhelming...
..affection and maybe it was also an anxiety
that he hadn't done enough to please him.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
There's little doubt that this troubled relationship
with his dead father would remain with Churchill till the end.
As an old man, he changed his will again.
Instead of having his ashes scattered besides his pets
at Chartwell, he decided he'd be buried at Bladon in Oxfordshire,
in the shadow of Blenheim Palace, where he'd been born.
Significantly, the place he chose to be buried
was next to the grave of his father.
In the last five years, I think, he was definitely getting tired
and probably tired of life.
How did that show itself?
Well, he would sit
looking into the fire
and he would sit looking at the view.
I mean, he was quiet.
And then suddenly he might... you know, he would be more energetic.
But on the whole, the last few years were definitely...
..quiet, peaceful and...
..really contemplative, I suppose.
I mean, he'd had his 90th birthday party only six weeks before
and we all knew that this couldn't go on much longer.
By the lights of modern health puritans,
it was astonishing he had gone on for so long.
But his life was testament to the benefits of luxury.
In 1911, Churchill had co-founded The Other Club
where, over the years in this room,
he indulged his enormous capacity for work and for pleasure,
insulated from a changing Britain
by decorative panelling, silverware and fine food.
So much of Churchill's life seems to come
straight from the pages of an Edwardian ripping yarn.
He'd fought on the North West Frontier,
he'd taken part in one of the last British Empire cavalry charges,
he'd been a prisoner of the Boers
and then later he'd been in the trenches during the First World War.
Politically, he had been both Prime Minister
and he had been an MP,
over six decades.
As 1964 drew to a close,
Churchill had finally given up his seat in Parliament.
CORK POPS
But he wasn't going to give up every pleasure in life.
Churchill had a gargantuan appetite.
He's reckoned to have smoked over a quarter of a million cigars
and who knows how many countless gallons of champagne he drank?
His diary for early 1965 includes an engagement for dinner in this room.
It was an appointment he was unable to keep.
On Sunday January 10th, 1965,
Churchill suffered a stroke at his London home
from which his doctors believed he was unlikely to recover.
It wasn't long before the news leaked out
and, in the following days, Hyde Park Gate was under siege
from both the press and well-wishers.
Among the family visiting that January were Churchill's son
Randolph and his son Winston,
as well as Churchill's daughter Mary Soames
and her 16-year-old son Nicholas.
I remember it very, very well.
It was an extraordinary period of time
and my siblings and I
came to say goodbye to him.
Hyde Park Gate was absolutely crammed with people.
Very...immensely quiet and respectful.
And it wasn't a sad death, really.
You couldn't be sorry for him.
Throughout the vigil, Lord Moran - Churchill's doctor -
provided regular bulletins about his patient,
who was now close to death.
NEWSREEL: 'After a restless start,
'Sir Winston has had a peaceful day...
'..but he has lost ground.'
We sort of gathered round the bed.
I remember that, um...
my grandmother was sitting on one side holding his hand,
with the doctor beside her,
and Randolph and Winston were the other side,
and my two aunts and I, we all knelt at the bottom of the bed,
and, um...
..there was... He was breathing,
there was a sigh and, literally,
without one noticing,
no-one knew when, actually, the difference between life and death,
but my grandmother turned to Lord Moran and said, "Has he gone?"
and he said yes.
NEWSREEL: 'We announce the death of Sir Winston Churchill.
'The announcement came from 28 Hyde Park Gate a few minutes ago.
'It said that Sir Winston died
'shortly after eight o'clock this morning.'
'Here in the Soviet Union,
'the Soviet government is sending condolences to Sir Winston's family
'and to the British Government...'
'Australian regard for Churchill's sheer greatness,
'courage and vision as wartime leader and postwar prophet...'
In accordance with the tradition of state funerals,
Churchill's body was placed on a catafalque in Westminster Hall.
He would lie in state for three days before the funeral.
Over 300,000 people came to pay their respects.
My mother said, you know, from the moment his coffin left
Hyde Park Gate to come here to lie in state,
she said to us, "He doesn't belong to us any more.
"He belongs to the nation."
It was, above all,
intensely moving...
er, I suppose, principally, because I'd known him,
I felt a very close connection there,
but also, it was the grandeur and the ceremony of Westminster Hall,
with the soldiers with their arms...
round the coffin.
I went many times,
just to pay my respects.
NEWSREEL: 'The people waiting tried to keep warm
'by stamping their feet,
'huddling ever closer into their overcoats and scarves
'and blankets. Some of them had to wait two-and-a-half hours...'
Reporting for the BBC was a young journalist, Martin Bell.
I just described
the size of the crowd
and the quietness
and the sense of purpose,
and they were going to stay there for as long as it took.
What was it that they were turning out for?
Obviously, it was a funeral, but was it something more than that?
I think they were turning out because they recognised
the passing of someone very special in the life of the nation.
I don't think the sort of revisionist historians
had really chipped in by then,
and I think people had probably forgotten the wilderness years
and the errors of judgment and all the things that
now are in every history. We just remembered the passing of
a very great man, and this was the last time to pay tribute to him.
I would have thought that that event -
the funeral, the lying in state, the great crowds -
they represented the passing of the old Britain.
General salute!
COMMAND SHOUTED
On 30th January, 1965,
the coffin of the man who had led Britain through the war
emerged from Westminster Hall.
7,000 servicemen waited for the start of the biggest procession
London had witnessed
since the Queen's Coronation 12 years earlier.
Commanding the bearer party
carrying the coffin was a young lieutenant - Anthony Mather.
The bearer party consists of eight bearers,
with the tallest at the rear and the shortest in the front,
and on this occasion,
because it was a state occasion,
there was warrant officer in front
and I was bringing up the rear,
giving the words of command and encouraging them
to do as they were trained to do.
Among the bearers was Lance Sergeant Lincoln Perkins.
The guardsmen were astonished by weight of the burden
on their shoulders.
The coffin, we were led to believe
by the undertakers,
was lead lined.
We all said, "Wow!
"We've not practised with a weight like this before."
It was just a surprise that he was so heavy.
NEWSREEL: 'There have been funeral processions before,
'there have been state funerals of...'
Narrating the television coverage for the BBC
was the veteran broadcaster Richard Dimbleby.
'There has not been, I think,
'in the whole history of our land
'a state funeral or an occasion
'which has touched the hearts of people
'quite as much as this one is doing today.'
RHYTHMIC TICKING
BIG BEN CHIMES
At 9.45, Big Ben chimed to mark
the start of the procession to St Paul's.
The bell would remain silent for the rest of the day.
MILITARY BAND PLAYS
There had been seven years of planning beforehand.
The state funeral was organised in six days.
I marched behind the coffin with my father and my younger brother Jeremy.
I always remember, Jeremy was...
12, I think, and he was the only one who didn't wear a top hat.
He wasn't old enough to wear a top hat.
And it was a freezing-cold day
and I thought he must have frozen alive.
Strangely enough, you are very focused on what is going on
in front of you, and your eyes are not swivelling around
seeing too much, but it was patently obvious that every side
of the road, the crowds were 10, 12 deep, very sombre
and very respectful of the coffin as it passed them.
Just marching down Whitehall, you saw these extraordinary faces.
I mean, I've never seen such collective grief
and, of course, people 10, 20 deep on the pavement the whole way.
It was just sort of heartbreaking, really.
It was just so moving.
My sister and I were sitting in the carriage together
and you could practically touch the people if you'd wanted to,
and you could see their faces. I mean, it was extraordinary.
I mean, you could see the tears pouring down their faces,
you could... I mean, the emotion that we saw on that journey,
I mean, it was true raw emotion,
and I mean not just tears trickling,
I mean...with real anguish on their faces.
Over 3,000 people had been invited to St Paul's
for the funeral service.
111 countries would be represented,
including five monarchs, six heads of state
and 16 prime ministers.
The family wanted the funeral to have
as personal a feel as possible,
so a seat was found for the woman
who baked Churchill's birthday cake every year,
another for Odette Pol-Roger, the woman whose company had made
so much of the many gallons of Champagne that Churchill had drunk,
and another, because he enjoyed building brick walls at Chartwell
and carried a union card, for a representative
of the National Union of Bricklayers.
Churchill wasn't just Britain's hero.
International statesmen, like former President Eisenhower
and President de Gaulle, came too,
recognising Churchill's role in
saving the Western world and democracy.
Churchill's comrades from the country's finest hour
tottered in too - the politicians who'd schemed and dreamed
that one day they'd replace him,
and the unlucky ones who did, and were found wanting.
The hour had made the man,
and the hour, thank God, has not come again.
It was from this bunker, deep beneath the streets of London,
that Churchill commanded armies, navies and aircrew
all over the world.
It was decisions made here and implemented here
that determined the future of the world.
When those dignitaries processed into St Paul's Cathedral
in January 1965, they were paying tribute to the leadership
of this country at a time when the rest of the world
critically depended upon it.
But had the events of the early 1940s ever really been forgotten?
When we venerate Churchill,
do we, in a sense, expect to maintain for ever
the position at the top of international affairs
as we had when he was Prime Minister?
Doesn't he represent an idea of Britain
in the world that is actually profoundly unhelpful?
Actually, I think that
Churchill's vision of Britain's role
in the world is the most valid
and useful guide
for how we should think of ourselves.
He wanted, obviously, Britain to have a close relationship
with the former imperial countries of the Commonwealth, sure,
but he also thought that Britain should be deeply intertwined
with the United States, but he also thought
that it was our destiny to be
involved in what took place in Europe.
Winston Churchill was one of the founders
of the idea of the European Union.
He was one of the great campaigners,
and that vision of Britain as the centre of these three
interconnecting sets - Europe, the Commonwealth, America -
that's still a very powerful and attractive vision
of how this country ought to position ourselves.
MILITARY BAND PLAYS
NEWSREEL: 'Back again. St Paul's Cathedral at the moment.
'You can see the first arrival of members of our own Royal Family.
'The Queen. With her, the Prince of Wales,
'who has come from school at Gordonstoun for this day,
'and, of course, His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh,
'in his uniform as Admiral of the Fleet.
'Passing the gorgeous tabards of the heralds,
'the darker greatcoats of the Household Cavalry.
The bearer party,
now carrying the coffin from the gun carriage to the cathedral,
were about to face potentially huge public embarrassment.
We had difficulties, occasionally,
particularly on the steps of St Paul's -
that was really the worst time -
and we brought in on that occasion two swing men at the back,
who helped to keep it steady on the shoulders,
so not letting it slip downwards.
Just ahead of the bearer party was Lord Attlee,
the former Labour Prime Minister,
who'd insisted on attending the funeral against medical advice.
Halfway up the second flight of stairs, when Lord Attlee stumbled...
This was going into St Paul's?
Yes, going into St Paul's,
and we had to come to a stop...
..and it did actually slide off the two front shoulders
of the two bearers, and it was very lucky that we'd got the two gentlemen
at the back, who were pushers, what we call pushers,
who push us up.
What went through your mind?
Telling Sir Winston Churchill,
"Don't worry, sir, we'll look after you."
Of course, I was really talking to myself
but apparently I was talking out loud,
because you could actually feel him sliding off the shoulders.
If we had have dropped him, we'd have been...
I don't know what we'd... It would have been very embarrassing.
But we didn't.
NEWSREEL: 'And in a huge oaken coffin surmounted by a Union Jack,
'the body of Winston Churchill is borne for his funeral service
'into the great mother church of the Commonwealth.'
CHOIR SINGS
High up in the cathedral that morning
was the St Paul's bell-ringer, Jim Phillips.
We went up into the ringing chamber,
where we ring the bells,
made ourselves comfortable
and then we went along the triforium
to a gallery under the dome
to watch the funeral from there.
It was quite interesting - we passed a garden shed,
and there was dear old Richard Dimbleby in this garden shed
doing the commentary from there.
NEWSREEL: 'So the setting is complete
'as the sentences come towards their end.'
The service was...
It wasn't harrowing,
because it was
just magnificent, really.
# ..Then fancies fly away
# We'll fear not what men say... #
It was very, very moving and overwhelming with these great hymns.
It was so grand but it was also so personal.
There was Winston Churchill
in his coffin...
..and he was with us.
I mean, there was a great sense
of his presence at the ceremony.
Brethren, we are assembled here to join in prayer
on the occasion of the burial of a great man
who has rendered memorable service to his country
and to the cause of freedom.
CHOIR SINGS
Of course one cried, I suppose,
but we were swept along on this tidal wave of splendour
and splendid grief.
The most wonderful, wonderful music
I've ever heard anywhere in my entire life.
TRUMPETER PLAYS LAST POST
And when the Last Post was played, I mean, you know,
there wasn't a person in that... in St Paul's Cathedral
who wasn't just standing bolt upright.
It was just extraordinary.
- Good morning. - Good morning, sir.
Nice to see you. Thank you for coming.
How does it feel to be back?
Yes, it's all coming back, actually.
'There were two trumpeters playing at the funeral that day.'
..From what I can remember, anyway.
'Peter Wilson and Basil King haven't seen each other in 50 years
'since playing together here at St Paul's.'
Did you feel this was a special occasion?
Oh, this was definitely special. Definitely special.
Did you get a sense you were being part of history?
No, I didn't, no. No, no.
All I was worried about
was my knocking knees.
THEY LAUGH
After Peter had finished the Last Post,
Basil answered with reveille.
It's the very easiest thing in the world to crack a note
playing these type of trumpets,
As people say, it's easy
to crack a note on them,
and his was superb,
and I thought, "Well, mine's got to be exactly the same,"
so I fixed my eye on something on the wall
and got the nod to go
and there it was, and it went very well, thankfully.
There were lots of people in the congregation that day
among the mourners, particularly family members,
who cried when they heard you two play.
Did you get any sense of how people were reacting to hearing you play?
The Last Past always gets them, doesn't it, really?
It doesn't matter where you are,
or what funeral, the Last Post, they start to cry. Yeah.
MUFFLED BELLS PEAL
NEWSREEL: 'The muffled bells of St Paul's,
'rung by the Ancient Society of College Youths,
'the bell-ringers of the cathedral,
'ring out now high above the church over London.'
Oh, it was tense, very tense. It was an atmosphere,
an atmosphere of sadness, this great man had gone.
When we pulled the bells off to peal them,
every sinew and muscle was strained
and my legs were shaking.
The world was listening to us.
The focus was on St Paul's at that particular hour.
It was one of those things we had to do for the man,
and I think we did it very well.
From St Paul's, the gun carriage travelled to Tower Bridge,
where the man who'd been First Lord of the Admiralty in two world wars,
was carried onto the Havengore,
a Port of London Authority launch now waiting at Tower Pier.
The state funeral was about to end
and the private ceremony for the family would shortly begin.
River traffic on the Thames had been stopped for an hour
as the Havengore pulled out and headed upstream.
What was the Havengore's role in the funeral?
Well, this was the final part of the state funeral.
It was moving the coffin
from Tower Pier
up the river to Waterloo Station,
a journey of some 15, 20 minutes.
And this is the plaque which says this is where the coffin was?
- That's right. - Was the coffin alone on the boat?
No, there was a bearer party,
to obviously carry the coffin on board and off.
There was also the chief mourners, so that was Lady Churchill
and the immediate members of her family, in this cabin here.
Above the Havengore that day, as if from nowhere,
roared 16 Lightning aircraft -
a tribute from RAF Fighter Command.
Of the many emotional scenes on that charged day,
one sight which really stuck in the minds of those who saw it
was the spectacle of the cranes of the Port of London
lowering their jibs as the barge passed.
It seemed a spontaneous gesture of respect
from a people in a part of Britain
that had really suffered from Hitler's bombers during the Blitz.
We were all undone by the cranes dipping in salute to his coffin.
That was just... I mean, that undid us all, really.
What an emotional sight that was, to finish off,
so everybody's paying their respects
by doing a half-mast crane.
Amazing sight.
Marvellous.
Tear to the eye.
Those Thames cranes have long since gone,
but one of the workers from the time
remembers the dockers' gesture somewhat differently.
You know the scene at the funeral
- when the dock cranes lower their jibs? - Yeah.
Talk to anyone who watched the television coverage in particular,
that's the thing they remember
- and they all found it very, very moving. - Yeah.
- Hmm. - Do you find it moving?
Not really, cos I knew what had happened.
- What had happened? - The didn't like Churchill...
I think I can speak for most of them,
they didn't like him
and when they were asked to do it, the atmosphere was no,
but then when they were paid to do it,
because we didn't work Saturday afternoons.
They wouldn't have been there.
- So that was not a spontaneous gesture of... - No way, no way.
They were paid to do it?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
What was the feeling among the dockers
about the men who were prepared to operate the cranes, then?
I know that there was a lot of arguments and rows about it
and the atmosphere... or the attitude seemed to be,
if you respected a man you would have done it for nothing,
if you didn't respect him you shouldn't have done it at all.
The atmosphere was that Churchill wasn't a working-class person,
he wasn't a working man's representative at all. Absolutely.
I mean, we were going to...
I remember going to school with holes in my shoes and bits of cardboard,
and we used to see him with a great big cigar in one hand
and sometimes a drink in the other.
It just didn't associate with us at all.
But it was a very moving gesture.
- It was, yeah. - Were you moved by it?
I was. I was, to be honest, I was, even though...
- You didn't like Churchill. - No, no, I didn't like Churchill.
- You were moved by the gesture. - I was moved by that, yeah, yeah.
I was moved by the whole funeral, but I didn't like him at all.
Churchill had certainly been no friend of militant trade unionism
and had even sent in the Army against strikers,
but he had led the fight against German fascism.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS
Churchill's coffin would leave London by train
on the next stage of the journey
towards the small Oxfordshire churchyard
where he was to be buried that afternoon.
Appropriately, the engine chosen to pull the funeral train
was a steam locomotive from an earlier era.
It was named Winston Churchill.
The engine has been restored
by a group of railway buffs in Hampshire
to mark the anniversary of Churchill's death.
At Waterloo Station, a new bearer party,
made up of soldiers from Churchill's old cavalry regiment,
bore his coffin onto the train waiting at platform 11.
Just after 1.30 in the afternoon,
the funeral train and mourners pulled out.
It was the start of a 70-mile journey,
which would take two hours,
to reach the tiny station of Hanborough,
close to the churchyard at Bladon.
The moment that we left Waterloo,
we saw so many people,
thousands and thousands of people,
along the line,
in some of the strangest places,
even in the countryside. They were in the fields,
all along the line,
and that was the most telling thing, I felt, personally, about it,
but the other thing was all the old soldiers,
all in their battledress, saluting as that train went by.
Quite something. Never forget that.
I remember going down in the train to Bladon.
There was a lockkeeper, I remember,
with all his medals on, standing there, saluting.
At Bladon, they had been preparing for the burial
from the moment, six days earlier,
when they first received news of Churchill's death.
The passing of an historic figure merited an ancient village rite.
When you heard the news,
you came across to the church and tolled the bell?
- Yes. - Why did you do that?
Well, it used to be the old-fashioned way,
that when anybody passed away in the village,
you used to go and toll the bell
and you used to toll the bell three threes for a man
and two threes for a lady,
and anybody in the village then knew that somebody had passed away
and it was either a man or a lady.
Was that because you thought
that Churchill belonged to the village, or what?
Well, I thought it was a respect,
to let people know that Winston had died, you know,
cos we always knew that he was going to be buried here,
cos that was what he always said.
He was coming back to... with his mother and father.
'For the day of the funeral, Lady Churchill had
'asked for the press and cameras to keep away from Bladon.
'Only villagers were allowed to witness
'the arrival of the coffin for the private burial.'
Now, where's this picture?
This must be one of the very last photographs taken at the funeral.
That is. That was right here, where we're standing.
That is, there, because there's the house, there.
Here's the coffin, coming down...
It came down here and stopped here.
So, it's taken from that window up there?
Taken from that window, and this is the wall that's coming down here.
This is the coffin actually going into the churchyard.
That's right, that's right.
I don't know how I got them
but different people usually give you different photographs.
And then these little photographs here,
these tiny, tiny ones,
these must be the last photographs of the lot, I suppose?
That's right, as they went from here through the lych gate.
- Into the churchyard. - Yeah, yeah.
Were you very moved that day?
Yes, I was. Yes, I was.
I bet you were, actually.
It was the most beautiful day, beautiful, beautiful ice-cold day,
and he was committed...
..with his whole family standing around him.
And as the coffin was lowered into the grave,
a Spitfire flew right over his head.
I've never forgotten that.
So the journey that had taken him all over the world
ended in an English country churchyard.
There's no grand monument, no eternal flame,
no ringing declaration,
just a stone slab inscribed with his name
and that of his wife, who joined him a few years later.
On that icy January day, back in 1965,
more than a million people lined the London streets
to honour the passing of a man who had stood firm
when others might have buckled.
He WAS just a human - mortal and fallible like the rest of us -
but the people had seen in his spirit
something they hoped to see in themselves.
History isn't made by great men
but sometimes a man or woman
may so come to express the spirit of the age
that they become great.
Winston Churchill was such a figure.
He looked a bit like a bulldog and, when the nation needed it,
he expressed the determination of a bulldog.
Sure, he was a chancer, an egotist, a workaholic
and sometimes a bit of a charlatan,
but in this age of political miniatures,
there is no-one who can hold a candle to him.
For the sake of the nation,
we must hope that the old cliche about never seeing his like again
isn't true because, one day, we may need his like,
but in the 50 years since his death,
there has been no sign of such a figure.