Jan 19, 2019 3 min read

Winston Churchill, the man who, as much as anyone, is responsible for the Allied victory in World War II, and the man the British people say in poll after poll is the greatest British statesman ever, died this week (Jan. 24) in 1965 at the age of 90.

Late in his life he had said he was prepared to meet his maker but wasn’t sure if his maker was prepared for, as he put it, the “ordeal of meeting me.” Whatever he meant by that – his colorful personality, his enormous ego, his penchant for ingesting large quantities of alcohol and equally large quantities of food, or, most probably, his worry that the Almighty might object to his cigar smoking (no doubt he planned to take several boxes of Romeo y Julieta cigars to Heaven with him) – it is a safe bet his maker indulged him in all of his habits.

And his country gave him quite a sendoff. More than 320,000 people filed past his coffin, which Queen Elizabeth officially decreed would lie in state in Westminster Hall for three days.

Churchill’s funeral – he was the only commoner given a state funeral other than the Duke of Wellington in 1852 and William Gladstone in 1898 – was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral and was the largest state funeral held to that point. An estimated 350 million people, including 25 million British citizens, watched it on television, with emissaries from more than 110 countries in attendance. In addition, although King William IV had not attended Wellington’s funeral, nor had Queen Victoria attended Gladstone’s, Queen Elizabeth II attended Churchill’s.

His body was then transported on a motor launch from Tower Pier on the Thames River, passing by the famous Pool of London shipping docks, where, in tribute to Churchill, the crane jibs that moved boxes from ships to the docks were lowered as his launch went by. He finally reached Waterloo Station, where he was transported in a special train – hauled by the locomotive Winston S. Churchill – to the Oxfordshire village of Bladon. There he was buried in the family plot at St. Martin’s Church, just a stone’s throw from his family home, Blenheim Palace, where he was born.

Today he is joined by his wife, Clementine, and children, and also buried in the plot are his mother, Jennie, and father, Randolph, whom he revered and whose political career he had sought to emulate but far surpassed.

And on that note, on Jan. 24 approximately a decade earlier, Churchill had remarked to his aide, Jock Colville, “It is the day my father died. It is the day I shall die, too.”

Which he did, 70 years later to the day.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.