There can be no doubt that memories play tricks with the truth.
One thing I remember from school days is watching the state funeral of Winston Churchill on the black and white screen of our little television in our small back room (the television was actually a big chunky thing but the screen was small, 12 or 14 inch, I cannot remember. The date was30/01/1965, I didn’t remember it, but looked it up. It was a weekday and I was not at school because I was being sick a lot with a wash up bowl on the floor to catch it beside the couch I was laid on. I was watching it alone because others in the household were going about daily things, there may well have been a degree of disaffection with Churchill anyway.
I was sure that I was in the lower school at the time and would have thanked Churchill for getting me off school for the day. In fact in January 1965 I was in the Lower Sixth form, which goes to show what is stated above. I sort of remember seeing the guncarriage transporting the coffin through some London streets but don’t know if the service in St. Paul’s Cathedral was televised.
He, a few earlier interments and some later interments, was buried in a family vault in Bladon churchyard, Oxfordshire. Bladon is a village near the market town of Woodstock, close by Blenheim Palace and grounds. Blenheim Palace was the birth place of Winston Churchill, a descendent of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough. Despite the First Duke’s spectacular military victories on the continent in the War of Spanish Succession be, and his wife Sarah, only got to live in a wing of the Palace for the last three years of his life, the rest of the building programme unfinished. Winston had the run of the place. The Palace is a ‘heavy’ form neo-Classical architecture, quite ugly in my opinion. With the Palace as home and military victories in the blood Winston was destined for great things, I guess.
Have you read Boris Johnson’s biography of Winston? Neither have I.
It’s interesting to think that the Chiltern hills of Oxfordshire have the same bedrock, the same landscape and form part of the same geological formation as the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. Just a bit further from Oxford University and the Palace of Whitehall.
The above picture shows a drawing of the pre-1802 parish church at Bladon, accreditation = By Motacilla-own work, CCBY-SA 3.0 The present church is a rebuild of c.1805 plus ‘restorations’ later in the 19th century. See the re-set Norman doorway in the south porch and the two-light clerestory windows.