Financial arrangements encouraged Churchill to indulge his love of the continent, because money earned in America could be spent in France without the tax man getting involved. Thus Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris and the Hôtel Roi René in Aix became regular haunts. So too did the private villas of friends, including Beaverbrook’s La Capponcina at Cap d’Ail and Emery Reves’s villa La Pausa near Roquebrune, where Churchill began an important friendship with Aristotle Onassis. Between 1958 and 1963, he stayed eight times on Onassis’s yacht Christina, playing games and reading in luxury away from strangers and overbearing guests.
Painting now occupied more of his time than ever before. He exhibited annually at the Royal Academy, showing the bold, colorful canvases depicting seas, skies, and fine buildings. The postwar years brought requests from all around the world for Churchill to loan or exhibit paintings, which were generally refused. In 1958, he allowed an exhibition tour of America at Eisenhower’s suggestion, which continued on to Canada and Australia and then to London. At the Royal Academy, the collection of sixty-two Churchill works was viewed by 141,000 people in five months. On March 13, 1959, Clementine wrote to Winston to tell him that the “One Man Show” had opened and that 3,210 people had seen his exhibition on the first day, compared with a mere 1,172 who had attended the first day of a Leonardo da Vinci exhibition the year before.
His work was widely acclaimed. On a visit to the studio at Chartwell, the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Wheeler, remarked, “I can’t think how you have found time in your life to do anything else but paint.” Churchill replied that “if it weren’t for painting, I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.”2 Reviewing Churchill’s output after his death, Sir John Rothenstein, sometime director of the Tate Gallery, wrote that “the astonishing fact about Churchill the painter is that in spite of obstacles that would have prevented other men from painting at all, he painted a number of pictures of rare beauty.”
But, having emphasized Churchill’s continuing, post-“retirement” activity, there is no doubt that part of his being died as soon as he left politics. The depression that he had managed extremely well throughout his life became more prominent, and, according to Anthony Storr, “The last five years of his life were so melancholic that even Lord Moran draws a veil over them.”3
Churchill remained politically engaged during the final decade of his life, serving as a member of Parliament until 1964, though his parliamentary appearances were rare and often accomplished in a wheelchair. Churchill was distressed by the Anglo-American breach caused by the Suez Crisis and was consulted by the queen on the choice of Anthony Eden’s successor as prime minister. He devoted energy to supporting causes calculated to maintain and improve Britain’s standing in the world. In 1958, for example, he launched a trust to help produce technological and scientific experts, leading to the foundation of Churchill College, Cambridge. This was partly motivated by Churchill’s desire to create a British equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the college became a national memorial to him. In May 1959, he made his final visit to America, staying at the White House as of old, and over the radio, Clementine, back in London, heard his voice “strong, clear and resonant” as he greeted the president.
In the final decade of his life, Churchill suffered numerous strokes and endured the indignities of the aging process, as well as sadness brought about by the loss of friends. There were also family tribulations and tragedies, including the broken marriages of two of his children and the suicide of his daughter Diana in 1963. He found it increasingly difficult to write “in my own paw” and complained that “original composition is a greater burden than it used to be.” “An anti-slobber device,” as he called it, could be put around his cigars, and he struggled with a hearing aid. It was, Clementine admonished him, “just a question of taking a little trouble, my dear. Quite stupid people learn to use it in a short time.” This sally led him to twinkle and pat her hand affectionately.4 His mobility declined markedly. At such an advanced age, even the most rudimentary ailments could lay him low. In February 1958, for example, he developed a chest cold that turned into pneumonia while staying in the south of France and was not well enough to return home from the Villa La Pausa until April. In March 1959, he wrote that he was finding it difficult not to drop food while eating, and in the following month, he had another small stroke. In November 1960, he fell down at Chartwell and broke a vertebra on the top of his spine. A fall in Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris in the summer of 1962 led to a broken hip and an operation at Monaco Hospital, and it was widely held that he was never the same again after this accident. On January 15, 1965, Winston Churchill suffered a serious stroke. Just after eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday, January 24, seventy years to the day after his father’s death, he passed away in the presence of his family.
The Final Journey
The journey to Oxfordshire was deliberately slow. Across the south of England, people scrambled to catch sight of the train, just as their London compatriots had crowded to see the funeral procession and the launch on the River Thames. Football matches around the country observed a two-minute silence. The platforms of all the stations through which the train passed were lined with people. “A Thames lock keeper, all alone, came to attention and saluted. The winter fields had little groups of people—families with their children and dogs; a farmer, taking his cap off; children on shaggy ponies—all waiting in the chill of a winter’s afternoon, to watch Winston Churchill’s last journey home.”5 As the train steamed through Oxford, the Great Tom bell in Christ Church was muffled. In Yarnton, people crowded the bridge and the railway platform. The locomotive’s cross-country trek ended at the tiny railway halt of Long Hanborough, where the coffin was met by a hearse for the short journey to the neighboring village of Bladon, half a mile down a road lined with people. Throughout the entire journey from London, the bells of the Church of St. Martin, where the Churchills rested amid three hundred moss-stained graves, rang Plain Bob Minor 5,040 times, the ring half-muffled at the precise moment of the interment.
For three days previously, Churchill had lain in state in the Great Hall of Westminster, cavernous, dark, and empty except for the catafalque and Union Flag–draped coffin flanked by six tall amber candles in gilt candlesticks and four guardsmen, “heads bowed, hands clasped on the hilts of their naked swords.”6 On the coffin, on a black silk cushion, rested the collar, garter, and star of the Knights of the Garter. At the catafalque’s head stood a gold and jeweled cross. Over 320,000 people streamed by noiselessly along a carpeted path, “the mesmeric effect of a river flowing past.”7 The funeral was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, yet, fittingly, the interment took place in Bladon, a stone’s throw from the room in which Churchill had been born. Winston had for a long time wished to be buried at Chartwell (“under the croquet lawn,” he once told Harold Macmillan), but, on a visit to Blenheim a few years before he died, he had walked in the graveyard of the Church of St. Martin, where his parents and brother, Jack, already lay. Here he changed his mind and told Clementine that he would like to be buried there with them, and his last will contained this amendment.
But before the burial, there was the funeral to be considered, and Churchill’s achievements since becoming prime minister in 1940 had guaranteed him a state funeral. A funeral on this scale—the “last burial in the British tradition of imperial ceremony”—took years of preparation. Queen Elizabeth II told the government in 1953 that he should have “a public funeral on a scale befitting his position in history—commensurate, perhaps, with that of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington.”8 In 1957 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan commissioned research into the funerals of Nelson, Pitt the Younger, Wellington, and Gladstone. In March 1958, the Cabinet Office drew up its first detailed master plan for the funeral, known privately as Operation Hope Not. Many revisions were to come, because, as Mountbatten noted, “Churchill kept living and the pall-bearers kept dying.” The BBC prepared to make it
a fittingly grand event, and when the day came, over forty cameras lined the route of the funeral procession, with Richard Dimbleby providing a dignified commentary.
“On the morning of 30 January 1965, the wind was full of daggers of ice. The day kept the quality of a persistent dawn: numbing, grey, empty, flattened, drained of color by the dull shroud of nimbus pressed down upon it.”9 By 9:45 a.m. the pallbearers had arrived at the West Door of St. Paul’s. They were twelve in number, the youngest, Lord Mountbatten, sixty-four years old, the eldest, Lord Attlee, eighty-three. From the lying in state at Westminster Hall, a bearer party from the Grenadier Guards carried the coffin to a waiting gun carriage, drawn by naval ratings. Churchill’s son, Randolph; son-in-law Christopher Soames; other male family members; and his secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, followed behind. Clementine and the ladies rode in five of the queen’s carriages, given rugs for their knees and small hot-water bottles for their hands in order to combat the chill. As Big Ben struck ten, the Duke of Norfolk, charged with the task of organizing the funeral at the queen’s command, led the procession out. The funeral music of the bands and drums accompanied the procession, along with the sound of horses’ hooves, and as it passed St. James’s Park, a ninety-gun salute crashed out, one for each year of Winston’s life, and the only time that a commoner had received more than seventeen.
Crowds estimated at over one million lined the route from the City of Westminster to St. Paul’s in the City of London. They stood in silence as the massed ranks of uniformed men passed slowly by, many having arrived hours before, greeted by the aroma of bacon and eggs cooked on camping stoves. The Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars had a place of honor, Churchill having been colonel in chief of the regiment until the moment he drew his last breath. The Queen’s Own contingent were the fifth detachment of soldiers in the order of march, ahead of all the guards regiments. The cortege progressed up the Strand, along Fleet Street, “past a City church where the priest and his white-robed choir crowded out onto the church steps, golden cross held aloft in hope and blessing, and—at last—into the forecourt of St. Paul’s.”10
Here the ladies alighted. Randolph gave his mother his arm as they followed the bearer party up the steps and into the cathedral’s shining vastness, where three thousand people waited and the choir sang “I Am the Resurrection and the Life” as the coffin swayed gently along the aisle. “There for the first time up close were the eight Grenadier Guardsmen with their heads bare, their bearskins laid aside, and beads of sweat on their faces from the exertion that their duty cost them. The coffin is of solid oak. They laid their cheeks against the sides and took the weight on their shoulders and reached across each of them, under the coffin, to grasp a handful of greatcoat on the other side as an insurance against a slip.”
Breaking all precedent, the queen and her family awaited the arrival of this most renowned of commoners, as did representatives of 112 foreign nations. “Ever since his death we, his family, had realized that he belonged as much to others as he belonged to us—perhaps more—and that we were only a small part of the laying-to-rest of Winston Churchill,” wrote his daughter.11 For the service, Clementine and the family had chosen his favorite hymns. There was “Fight the Good Fight,” “He Who Would Valiant Be,” “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” and “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord,” “the words of which Winston knew from start to finish.”
Following the service, Churchill’s casket was embarked at Tower Pier and piped aboard the Port of London Authority launch Havengore for the journey down the Thames to Waterloo, still guarded by the Grenadiers. As it moved upstream toward Festival Pier, the cranes along the route slowly dipped their “giant giraffe-necks.” The band played “Rule Britannia” as the launch moved into the center of the river, and a seventeen-gun salute rang out. Overhead, sixteen Lightnings of Fighter Command flashed by. At Waterloo Station, a Battle of Britain train named “Winston Churchill,” pulling a freight car for the coffin and five cream-and-black Pullman cars for the family, waited to begin his final journey, and the guard was taken over by men from Churchill’s old regiment, the 4th Hussars.
Stress had been laid on the strictly private nature of the burial service at Bladon, including a personal request from Clementine that there be no press or television coverage for the last and private part of what had so far been a national event. This wish was scrupulously respected. The police sealed off the village; the international press stayed away. Reverend J. E. James, Rector of St. Martin’s, met the coffin and the Hussars Bearer Party at the lych-gate and led the way to the graveside. The only people present, apart from the priest and members of the family, were the Duke of Norfolk, Anthony Montague Browne, Jock Colville, Leslie Rowan, Lord Moran, and Grace Hamblin (the longest-serving member of Churchill’s secretarial staff). “After the committal and the lowering of the coffin into the grave, Clementine first of all, and then all of us one by one, filed past and bade our last farewell. . . . Before we left, two wreaths were placed on the grave: Clementine’s red roses, carnations, and tulips, bearing a card, ‘To My Darling Winston. Clemmie’; and a wreath of exquisite spring flowers from the Queen, with a card in her own hand, ‘From the Nation and the Commonwealth. In grateful remembrance. Elizabeth R.’”
As twilight fell, the family took their leave of Winston Churchill for the last time. Back at 28 Hyde Park Gate that night, as she prepared to go off to bed, Clementine turned to her daughter and said, “You know, Mary, it wasn’t a funeral—it was a triumph.”12 By ten o’clock on Sunday evening, 125,000 people had filed past the flower-strewn grave, and thousands more waited their turn, forming a line three abreast and a mile long that stretched far beyond the village. A ten-year-old local boy said: “I never realized what history was until we became part of history through the greatness of Sir Winston Churchill.”13
Epilogue
The memoirs and diaries of those who knew Winston Churchill intimately or had the chance to observe him at close quarters over extended periods of time provide the best measures of the man. Lord Moran’s books, for example, provide many colorful sketches: of breakfasts of omelette, grouse, melon, toast, and marmalade, and of Churchill’s focus, ambition, and egotism: “If I were ten years younger I might be the President of the United States of Europe,” he mused toward the end of the war.1 “He’s an egoist, I suppose, like Napoleon,” Clementine said to Moran. “You see, he has always had the ability and force to live life exactly as he wanted.”2 Perhaps this affected his judgment, which was often commented upon during his life, and Moran endorsed the view that he had “no nose for character; he is not very good at spotting a wrong ’un.”3 Moran noted that he “resented every moment taken from his work” and was often too “engrossed in his own thoughts to notice the mood of those around him.” This made him a poor companion to those who did not know him or matter to him: he was “the poorest hand imaginable at small talk, or even at being polite to people who do not interest him,”4 and presented “formidable ramparts of indifference,” especially to women.5 In interacting with his fellows, Churchill preferred to hold the floor—“they bat, and the other fellows field,”6 as Moran put it, or as Hastings remarked, furthering the cricketing analogy, “The PM can be relied upon to score a hundred in a Test Match, but is no good at village cricket.” Moran wrote that Churchill did not submit to inhibitions of any kind: “After all, they imply a desire to placate, and Winston is singularly free from that urge.”7
These eyewitness accounts also offer instances of Churchill’s humor: queried about the new A22 tank, he replied that it had “had many defects and teething troubles and when these became apparent it was appropriately rechristened the Churchill.” He had the following exchange with his valet:
Getting ready for his afternoon sleep, he cried out irritably: “Sawyers, where is my hot-water bottle?”
“You are sitting on it, sir,” replied the faithful Sawyers. “Not a very good idea,” he added.
“It’s not an idea, i
t’s a coincidence,” said the PM, enjoying his own choice of words, and without a trace of resentment.8
The portraits of Churchill painted by contemporaries and intimates can help isolate the qualities that made him so unique. One was the fertility of his mind: as his doctor wrote, “The PM has views on everything, and his views on medicine are not wanting in assurance.”9 Moran regarded his strength of will as his foremost quality, and wrote that “what his critics are apt to forget is that you cannot measure inspiration.”10 “I have seen him take a lot of punishment and not once did he look like a loser. Not once did he give me the feeling that he was in any way worried or anxious about the outcome of the fight. Gradually I have come to think of him as invincible.”11
Clement Attlee also provided illuminating insights. He believed that “if Winston’s greatest virtue was his compassion, his greatest weakness was his impatience.”12 His compassion was a virtue that “has never properly been appreciated. It was his compassion, coupled to his energy, that made him so ‘dynamic.’ Cruelty and injustice revolted him.”13 Attlee also saw fit to comment that Churchill’s “range of interests and curiosities was so vast that they seemed more those of a child than a grown man. Indeed, the idea of a child sometimes comes to mind when one considers many things about him. His naughtiness, for example, and his short-term sulkiness, which were soon followed by complete oblivion of who or what it was that had upset him.” Attlee also wrote that Churchill was “a generous enemy, perhaps the most magnanimous of his generation.”14
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