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Articles
Remembrances: A Young Irishman at Sir Winston’s Funeral
- By CHARLES LYSAGHT
- | October 5, 2023
- Category: Explore Personal Matters
A funeral presence
I was up at Cambridge when Sir Winston died in January 1965, aged ninety. All England stood still in the week between his death and the funeral. Memories of his heroic life, and British triumphs under his leadership, were recited endlessly, making it a time of celebration rather than of sorrow.
Almost the only discordant voice came from Ireland. President de Valera said that Churchill might have been a great Englishman, but he had been a dangerous enemy of the Irish people. Twelve years previously, in 1953, the two men had met for the first time. Their lunch, held in 10 Downing Street, went well. Afterward, Churchill told friends how much he liked the man. Dev was less forgiving and his words, spoken on the morrow of Churchill’s death, sounded ungenerous. First reports, happily not fulfilled, were that our government would not even send a minister to the funeral. I decided that I, at least, would keep faith and be there.
Personal inspirations
Unlike many Irish children of my generation, I was brought up to admire Winston Churchill. My father, although nationalist enough, always uttered his name with reverence. He believed that he had saved us as well as the British from the evil Hitler. Churchill’s defiant orations, received at home in those perilous years on our crackling Telefunken wireless, had made a deep impression.
All that might not have impinged on my childhood mind had I not had an unfortunate speech defect. This exposed me to teasing at school. “Lysaght, you speak like a baby,” some boys told me hurtfully. “Don’t mind them,” my father reassured me. “Winston Churchill also has a lisp and, apart from James Dillon, he is the greatest orator in the world.”
To encourage me, my father gave me recordings of Churchill’s speeches. I listened to them over and over again, absorbing their rolling rhythm. I learned passages by heart and used phrases from them at school debates. Churchill became my unlikely hero.
On the night of Churchill’s death, that consummate stylist Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister, rounded out the tributes on television. He looked even more doleful than usual as he peered out from the screen. “None among us,” he concluded, “can be without a sense of personal loss that the greatest heart in England beats no more.”
A sombre London
On the morning of the funeral, I was up at six in the morning. Given a lift to London, I joined the throngs lining the route of the funeral procession. In a biting east wind beneath a steel grey sky, we waited for hours on Ludgate Hill, just below St Paul’s Cathedral. We saw the leaders of a hundred nations mounting the steps to Wren’s magnificent building. Most striking was the tall, erect, solemn figure of Charles de Gaulle, President of France. For all their wartime rows, he was the Frenchman whom Churchill had esteemed above all others.
Meanwhile, the funeral procession wended its way along the ancient road to St Paul’s from Westminster Abbey. There the body had lain in state for three days and four nights. The route was lined with young soldiers, their heads bowed over their rifles in respect. The bands played old military tunes. Each minute, we heard the distant echo of the ninety-gun salute—one for each year of Churchill’s long life.
The sailors, soldiers and airmen in all their panoply advanced past us, marching in measured rhythm. Then came the oak coffin, borne on an open gun carriage pulled along by a phalanx of naval cadets. The chief male mourners and pall-bearers, attired in top hats, followed. They were led by Churchill’s ailing son Randolph, struggling uphill on foot.
The vast silence
So quiet was the crowd about us at that moment, that one heard only the crunching footsteps of the naval escort on the sanded road, as they marched in step beside the gun carriage. In the awe and emotion it expressed, the hushed silence was more eloquent than any words. It was certainly more moving than the applause that has become commonplace at modern funerals. I shall never forget it.
The tension subsided as Churchill’s widow, his beloved Clementine, and other female mourners, followed in horse-drawn carriages. The silence was broken in our party when one of the girls turned to me excitedly: “It makes you proud to be English, doesn’t it?” As an Irishman I could not be quite sure about that. But I was, and remain to this day, mighty proud to have been there.
Also by Charles Lysaght
“Great Contemporaries: Eamon de Valera and a Long, Fraught Relationship,” 2021
The author
Charles Lysaght is an Irish lawyer, columnist, and prominent writer of obituaries for British and Irish newspapers. This piece was originally written for the Irish Times. His book, Brendan Bracken, published in 1979, remains the definitive biography of the man who was Churchill’s closest and most loyal friend in politics, and Minister of Information during the Second World War. Brendan Bracken: A Biography, has recently been republished as an e-book.
A magnificent man,