Don’t mention the war? Dream on. This country never seems to tire of the bloody thing. Even this year’s newly Oscar-nominated “The Imitation Game” has strong echoes of “The Dam Busters,” with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in many ways reprising the brilliant-but-unworldly wartime-boffin role pioneered by Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis almost 60 years ago.
And it’s not just the Second World War, either. Last year’s centenary of the First World War and the current build-up to this summer’s Waterloo bicentenary show how much Britain still revels in a martial commemoration. Our media, moreover, like nothing better than to pull out the stops to mark any kind of nice-round-number anniversary connected with the war against Hitler.
It is therefore a little surprising that the 50th anniversary of the death and funeral of Winston Churchill has arrived on the national doorstep from the blind side. This is not to say that the anniversary, today, will not be emphatically marked. There will be a parliamentary wreath-laying. Tower Bridge will be raised in a homage to the riverside cranes, all gone now, that dipped into the Thames in tribute 50 years ago. And the BBC plans to rebroadcast its Churchill funeral coverage in real time on January 30, while Jeremy Paxman — a schoolboy at the time, as I was — will anchor a documentary telling us what it all means now.
Before I offer my own take on that question, let’s be clear about one thing. At the time — Churchill died aged 90 on January 24, 1965 and received a state funeral in St. Paul’s six days later before being buried in Oxfordshire — this unquestionably felt like a massive event. It felt that way because that is what it was. As the last great public gathering of the victors of the Second World War, Churchill’s funeral was qualitatively grander and more international than anything since.
“England without Winston! It seems impossible. Not even the oldest of us can remember England without him as a considerable figure,” Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary on the day the death was announced.
It is hardly surprising that people like Macmillan thought that way. So did most other people of all classes. Churchill’s position in the public mind was untouchable then, and remains almost as untouchable now. Later in 1965, when A.J.P. Taylor published his Oxford History of England 1914-45 , the biographical footnote on Churchill ended with the potent words: “The saviour of his country.” Nearly 40 years later, Roy Jenkins finished his Churchill biography with the conclusion that he was “the greatest human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.”
There were always serious Churchill critics, and in a career that was long and by no means always triumphant, there was plenty to criticise. His foolish impetuosity was the other side of some of his bold, inspirational qualities. His role in the south Wales coal strike of 1910 was never forgiven in the valleys. Not even his greatest admirer defends his disastrous decision to take Britain back on to the gold standard in 1924. His imperialism was reactionary, unrepentant and lifelong.
Churchill was also a divisive figure, thrown out of power in 1945 by an electorate that did not trust him. Brought up in a communist household, one of my own strongest memories of 50 years ago is of the virulence, shocking at the time, with which the Daily Worker attacked the newly dead Churchill. As Simon Heffer, of all people, wrote in the New Statesman, the indispensable and nation-saving achievement of 1940 obscures very much else besides. But then so it should. That’s the point about Churchill.
If his funeral was an event to remember, it’s partly because he himself had made sure it would be. It is said, and I hope the story is not apocryphal, that the reason why Churchill’s coffin did not take the usual rail route to Oxfordshire from Paddington is that Churchill wanted to require that Charles de Gaulle, the most memorable single presence at the funeral, had to give his old rival one final salute — at Waterloo
But the Churchill funeral also marked the end of an era, as some of those who were there sensed. Yet it was not to be the end of an era. Britain stumbled forwards in 1965, but it began a journey it has never managed to satisfactorily complete. The old establishment survived, protected its privileges and, under Margaret Thatcher — who missed Churchill’s funeral on account of pneumonia — remade the legend of 1940 in their own image and for their own purposes. Labour governments from Wilson to Brown never quite found the way to put something alternative and persuasive in the old Britain’s place. Today, the nation is slowly and inexorably slipping apart.
January 1965 was a might have been. It might have been simultaneously the grateful farewell of a generation to a national saviour and the last recessional of the imperial age, which Churchill had been born into and which the governments of the 1960s did much determined good work to unmake. We could and should have let it all go, putting something more modern and more European in its place. But we didn’t.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
