Monday 2nd February 2015

I took Friday off to view the funeral on the Parliament channel, broadcast at the exact same time as on Saturday 30th January 1965. So it was as if it were happening all over again. Absolutely broke down when they sang the Marching Song of the Republic. Strange because it wasn’t happening at all but was 50 years ago. I think I remember from the time the part where they went down the river.

But Churchill seemed now more dead somehow and the whole funeral service, which was brief and mainly the robust singing of hymns, a brave but hopeless gesture in the face of the blackness. Suddenly in the pulpit was Dean Matthews. Granny knew him at Exeter and the Gay Mother took tea at the San Paolo deanery during the War. There was a grumpy old man in the corner. Mrs Matthews, who spoke refayned, said he was such a nuisance having to have china tay. It was Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang, born 1864. Anyway, Dean Matthews was still Dean of St Paulo in 1965 and spoke the solemn words offering up the soul of Churchill to Heaven and providing a direct link between me, Adrian Edge, and the State funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.