August 2, 2015

Finest Hour 167, Special Issue 2015

Page 26

By Robert Courts


On the day of the funeral, the coffin, carried by members of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, approaches  the lychgate, where the public aspect of the funeral came to an end and gave way to the private family interment.On the day of the funeral, the coffin, carried by members of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, approaches the lychgate, where the public aspect of the funeral came to an end and gave way to the private family interment.It takes a big event to shake Bladon from its stride. The sun climbs slowly to illuminate the village in the shallow valley, as it has for a thousand years. A red kite floats lazily over the Church tower. The River Glyme flows through Blenheim Park round past the yellow sandstone cottages. The children walk to school and enthusiastically play in the schoolyard, as they did when Lord Randolph was buried and as they did through the whole of Winston Churchill’s long life. The Bladon Home Guard has come and gone: pubs, shops and dukes of Marlborough too. Yet, Bladon remains much the same: a small, quiet country village, the last resting place of a very great man.

Churchill’s burial in 1965 was Bladon’s day of days. Best estimates suggest that 900 policemen were on guard the day of the funeral—probably more than the village population then. Upwards of 125,000 people visited in the days and weeks after the funeral. The village had seen nothing like it before, and never will again.

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And so while inevitably kindling “with pale gleams the passion of former days,” Bladon revisits its moment in the spotlight from fifty years ago. Once again there have been BBC journalists in the village, radio interviews, and television cameras at the Church. Frank Hall, then the verger, published some previously unseen photographs of the gravesite in the Daily Mail. The commemorations started at the beginning of January with steady media coverage of the Memorial Window appeal [See FH 166.] A private service of remembrance for the Churchill family took place on the twenty-fourth, the day of Sir Winston’s passing. But most memorable was the anniversary of the funeral on the thirtieth.

There are always a few visitors to the grave each day, even in winter, but on this fiftieth anniversary, there came a steady stream. They came from all over the world, from Tennessee to Tasmania, and from China to Denmark. As in 1965, whilst the Havengore made her way up the Thames, the BBC reported live from the graveyard, and as Richard Dimbleby noted then, there was a disproportionate number of young people present to pay their respects. Fittingly, in 2015 the primary school displayed a collection of children’s work illustrating their visions of Churchill. This was not a remembrance of the old and fusty for yesterday’s forgotten man. This was a living remembrance of a  great man.

The most striking gestures have been the floral tributes in thanksgiving for Churchill’s life and service. There was not a small mound of flowers as there was in 1965, but the grave has been well-covered, and the writing difficult to read. To complete the week of commemoration, on Saturday the thirty-first the Church bell ringers repeated the ringing tribute from a half-century before “in 2 hours and 40 minutes, a peal of 5040 Plain Bob Minor.” It has been a fitting and striking remembrance of the village’s role in what Lady Churchill called not a funeral but a “triumph.”

But when the crowds have gone and the Churchwardens move the flowers from the grave, the river will still flow, the children still play, and Bladon will continue to watch, remember and quietly guard the memory and last resting place of Sir Winston Churchill.
 St. Martin’s Church, Bladon St. Martin’s Church, BladonThe Churchill family gravesiteThe Churchill family gravesite

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