The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (504 page)

A
s 1964 came on, Churchill still served as the member of Parliament from Woodford, but only infrequently took his place on the front bench, below the gangway, where he had sat during the Wilderness Years of the 1930s. He visited the House of Commons for the last time on July 27, and soon thereafter announced that he would not stand for Woodford in that October’s general election. He left Chartwell for the last time in October, taking up residence at 27–28 Hyde Park Gate, where a ground-floor bedroom had been prepared for him. On November 30, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday in the company of his family, the Colvilles, and the Montague Brownes. Champagne flowed all day; a basket of Whitstable oysters was hauled in. Cakes arrived all day from well-wishers, and 70,000 cards and telegrams from around the world. By midafternoon, hundreds of Londoners crowded the street in front of the house. A news photographer snapped a shot of a smiling Sir Winston, attired in a siren suit, peering from behind a parted curtain. Dinner—and brandy and cigars—carried into the early hours of December 1. Ten days later Churchill made an appearance at the Other Club; it was to be his last.

Christmas was a subdued affair. Churchill’s gift to Montague Browne was his six-volume war memoir. A few days later, Montague Browne asked the Old Man to sign the books. Churchill managed to sign his full name in
the first volume; by the sixth he could only scrawl “W.” They were the last papers he signed. Now the Great Man did indeed spend long hours staring into the fireplace. Yet he still took lunch with Clementine, and he still took his cigar and brandy after dinner.
²⁵

But on January 9 he refused both.

His nurses helped him to bed that night. He was not to leave it again.

On the twelfth—Churchill was by then unconscious—doctors Moran and Brain diagnosed a stroke, and informed the family to prepare for the worst, which the doctors believed would likely come very soon. But they underestimated the strength of their patient. Days passed, and then a week. Old friends and colleagues came by to pay their respects. Violet Bonham Carter stopped in, but only for the briefest of moments: “Good-bye, Winston,” she said, standing at the foot of his bed. Then she turned and walked out.

Early on a January day about a dozen years earlier, Jock Colville brought a minor matter of state to Churchill’s attention, as the Old Man shaved. Churchill turned to Colville, and said: “Today is the twenty-fourth of January. It is the day my father died. It is the day that I shall die too.”

And on January 24, 1965, he did.
²⁶

C
hurchill’s coffin lay in state at Westminster Hall for three days and three nights. More than 320,000 people filed past the catafalque, the silent queue of men and women and children threading through Parliament Square and on across Westminster Bridge. On the bleak, cold morning of Sunday, January 30, the coffin, covered by the Union Jack, was borne from the hall on the shoulders of eight Grenadier Guards. It was placed on a gun carriage drawn by one hundred Royal Navy seamen and flanked by the guard of honor nearly one hundred strong, in bearskins and greatcoats. Randolph and eight young Churchill men took their places behind the gun carriage. Before and behind, companies of troops from storied regiments—from the Hussars, from the RAF, from the army, in khaki, and the Royal Marines, in blue—stood at attention awaiting the order to march. The Horse Guard in their red jackets waited on their impatient steeds. Hundreds of thousands of Britons lined the Strand and Fleet Street and the roads to Ludgate Hill and to St. Paul’s, where the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his purple robes, stood atop the steps and awaited the procession. Shortly after 9:45 the first of ninety cannons in Hyde Park fired its salute. The Earl Marshal of England, in greatcoat and cocked hat, raised his baton.

Then, to the haunting beat of a single drum, the procession began the
journey to St Paul’s. Only twice in the past 112 years had a nonroyal personage been so honored with a state funeral: the Duke of Wellington in 1852 and Gladstone in 1898. Queen Victoria attended neither funeral, but Queen Elizabeth II honored Churchill by her presence in St. Paul’s. She was joined by representatives from more than 110 nations, including four kings, a queen, five heads of state, and sixteen prime ministers. Charles de Gaulle, wearing a plain kepi and simple uniform, unadorned with insignia, medals, or ribbons, stood a head taller than all present as the great imperial ceremony began.
²⁷

From St. Paul’s, the coffin was taken by motor launch up the Thames to Waterloo Station. There it was put aboard one of five Pullman coaches hauled by the Battle of Britain–class locomotive
Winston S. Churchill
for the sixty-mile journey to the Oxfordshire village of Bladon and the little churchyard of St. Martin’s, within sight of the spires of Blenheim Palace, where the story had begun. Lord Moran, finding in the end his literary voice, wrote:

E
ight months later, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, at the request of the Queen and Parliament, placed a sixty-by-seventy-six-inch polished green-marble slab in the floor of that thousand-year-old monument to English history. All who enter cannot help but to see it there, in the nave, just a few feet inside the great west doors. Engraved upon it are the words:

Alan Brooke, Viscount Alanbrooke, excerpts from
War Diaries 1939–1945,
edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (Berkeley: University of California Press and London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.

Alexander Cadogan, excerpts from
The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M., 1938–1945,
edited by Donald Dilks (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.

Clementine Churchill and Winston S. Churchill, excerpts from letters from
Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills,
edited by Mary Soames. Copyright © Clementine Churchill. Copyright © Winston S. Churchill. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Master and Fellows of Churchill College Cambridge, the Estate of Lady Clementine Churchill, and the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill, excerpts from
The Second World War, Volume 2: Their Finest Hour; The Second World War, Volume 3: The Grand Alliance; The Second World War, Volume 4: The Hinge of Fate; The Second World War, Volume 5: Closing the Ring;
and
The Second World War, Volume 6: Triumph and Tragedy
. Copyright 1949, 1950, 1951, 1953 by Houghton Mifflin Company, renewed © 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981 by the Honourable Lady Sarah Audley and the Honourable Lady Soames. Copyright © by Winston S. Churchill. All reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and Curtis Brown, London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill. All rights reserved.

John Colville, excerpts from
The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955
. Copyright © 1985 by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

Josef Goebbels, excerpts from
The Goebbels Diaries,
translated and edited by Louis P. Lochner. Copyright 1948 by The Fireside Press. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

William Averill Harriman and Elie Able, excerpts from
Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 1941–1946
. Copyright © 1975 by William Averill Harriman and Elie Able. Used by permission of Random House, Inc., and Hutchinson Publishing Group, Ltd./The Random House Group Limited.

Hastings Ismay, excerpts from
The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay
.
Published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Harold Macmillan, excerpts from
Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950–1957
. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan.

Harold Nicolson, excerpts from
The War Years: Diaries and Letters 1939–1945
. Reprinted with permission of Juliet Nicolson.

Mollie Panter-Downes, excerpts from
London War Notes, 1939–1945
. Copyright © 1971 by Mollie Panter-Downes. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Seneca, excerpt from “Hercules Furens” from
Six Tragedies,
translated by Emily Wilson. Translation © 2010 by Emily Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.

Robert E. Sherwood, excerpts from
Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History
. Copyright 1948, 1950 and renewed © 1976, 1978 by Robert E. Sherwood. Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

William L. Shirer, excerpts from
Berlin Diary: The Diary of a Foreign Correspondent 1934–1941
. Copyright 1941, renewed © 1968 by William L. Shirer. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. Excerpts from
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
. Copyright © 1960 by William L. Shirer. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Walter Thompson, excerpts from
Assignment: Churchill
. Copyright © 1955 by Walter Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Charles Wilson, Baron Moran, excerpts from
Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965; Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran
. Copyright © 1966 by Trustees of Lord Moran. Reprinted with permission of Constable Robinson Publishers.