How strange that 40 years after the death of Winston Churchill, the BBC did not show so much as the edited highlights of his astonishing, overpowering funeral; a moment as pivotal in the memories of many British people as the death of John F. Kennedy is to Americans.
Churchill, unlike Kennedy, died in peace and full of years. But his life’s end marked an irreversible change in the way people lived their lives here, just as JFK’s murder did in the United States.
Many must have sat down in front of their televisions that morning, with a pot of tea and plate of sandwiches, expecting an enjoyable wallow in nostalgia, the rich heavy tones of Richard Dimbleby, a good parade and some fine music.
They would switch off, dry-eyed and tired, four hours later, realising bleakly that something important and irreplaceable had gone out of their lives, and out of this country, forever. It was a potent and significant moment, marked and recorded by the BBC in the days when the corporation was still a trusted friend for the whole British people. Surely it was worth bringing it up from the archives 40 years on?
Well, actually, the BBC did show it, which is evidence that it recognized it might be a good idea to mark the moment. But it did so in a shame-faced and surreptitious way, as if it did not really want to.
You needed the skills of Sherlock Holmes to discover this fact, hidden in the schedules of the Corporations modest Parliament Channel. And you might then have needed Holmes magnifying glass to watch, for this worthy digital station is so underpowered that, on Freeview, its pictures fill only a quarter of a normal TV screen. I am not making this up. I thought there was a fault and rang BBC headquarters to check.
In a way, that made the experience more like the first time, when millions of us gazed, rapt, at small black and white 405-line sets; the sort that took a minute or two to warm up, with tiny loudspeakers and a tendency to fizz and blink. Black and white is not right, actually. It was really a series of different shades of grey. You still had to use you imagination to make sense of the pictures. Would those accustomed to today’s huge, clear colour screens and perfect sound be able to cope?
You had to concentrate so hard that you forgot the rest of what was going on around you. And as I watched it begun to dawn on me why the corporation might have decided to miss such an opportunity.
While the occasion does not seem all that long ago to me, it turned out to be an almost shocking and painful journey into an almost entirely foreign country, lost and gone forever. I remember, as a child, watching the immensely remote films of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, or the buses and taxis of Paris heading out towards the Marne. Suddenly my own childhood looked like that; a vast parade of ghosts, legions of the dead, marching, singing, yelling commands, then in the full vigour of their prime, now elderly or gone, or living in exile in their own country.
Even the sound of the doddering recording was sometimes distorted, adding to the feeling that the whole thing was being transmitted from light years away, irrecoverable, impossibly distant.
And you could sense that many of those taking part knew perfectly well that it was not just Winston Churchill they were burying, but Britain as she had been and could no longer afford to be. As the BBC camera mounted on the dome of St Paul’s swung round the London skyline, you could see that the great city was already horribly disfigured by the brutal concrete architecture which has now all but obliterated it. The modern world was waiting, just on the edge, ready to take over completely once this Edwardian ritual was finished.
But just on this occasion, and for one last time, the forces of the past had the streets to themselves to parade in a final farewell to pride and Empire. And they did. There were real giants here, still alive and walking: Charles de Gaulle, Field Ismay, Lord Portal, Clement Attlee, Dwight Eisenhower, Sir Robert Menzies; men who had commanded fleets and armies beyond the imagination of modern defence ministries, men beside whom our breed of politicians would look like the pygmies they are.
And the ordinary soldiers and sailors were still imbued with the traditions of Waterloo and Trafalgar. They knew, as their grandchildren would not, who had fought at these battles, why, and where and when. The faces of the men were not padded and plumped by burgers and milk-shakes, and untouched by weather as they are now, but hollow-cheeked, wind-burned old fashioned English faces. Their uniforms – unmodernised – were well known and understood to all, because in those days before the IRA, Military and navel uniforms were often seen on the streets, in trains and pubs and on buses.
Perhaps that explains the damn-your-eyes, Hearts of Oak ebullience and confidence of them, quite unlike the marching troops of any other nation. You could imagine Patricia Hewitt, and people like her, pursing their lips hard as they watched, and muttering: ‘How inappropriate, how archaic, how non-inclusive.’
And they would have been right. Classless multiculturalist feminists would have fainted at the sight, if such people were allowed to faint.
The noble, aristocratic banner of the Spencer-Churchill family was borne in the parade as if nobility, heredity and ancestry still mattered. Male members of the Churchill family actually wore black silk top hats as they made their way to the cathedral, which must have been the last time anyone dared do such a thing in public in London. The women were veiled in mourning as none are anymore.
As for the funeral itself, it was the Church of England taking one last opportunity to show itself off in its full dark, chilly 17th century majesty. No soupy nonsense here about the dead having just gone into the next room, but raw, earthy heartbreaking prose about worms and corruption accompanied by cold, echoing chants to freeze the bones.
Even the hymns were different. The Battle Hymn Of The Republic had not been watered down in those days. They sang Julia Ward Howe’s original words: ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.’ Nowadays this is rendered as ‘let us live to make men free’, a thoroughly different wish. They also roared out the original Who Would True Valour See, complete with its hobgoblins and foul fiends, not Percy Dearmer’s milksop goblin free version. And no bad thing, given that if any man truly confronted hobgoblins and foul fiends coming across the fields to meet him, Churchill had done so.
And at the end, after having to find their way through the concrete dust and hoardings of the half-built South Bank to Waterloo Station, they all departed by train, a proper train hauled by a steam locomotive rescued from the scrapheap, out of a sixties London already suffering the plagues of modernity, past the people standing silently on the windswept embankments, out into the vanishing world of wayside stations and branch lines where on a good day you might still just find a whisper of what disappeared that cold, windy morning four decades ago. No, I don’t suppose it would have done much for the ratings.
