Britain the End

I can still remember when the news came over the radio. It was a Sunday morning in late January 1965. Sir Winston Churchill had died.

His funeral was the following Saturday. He was only the second commoner in the history of Great Britain accorded a state funeral, normally reserved for royalty. The first had been for the duke of Wellington, the military genius who thwarted Napoleon's plans for world conquest at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, thereby ushering in a century of Pax Britannica.

Sir Winston had defeated an even greater evil, Hitler's Third Reich. He didn't do it single-handedly, of course, but without him the outcome could have been entirely different.

I remember the silence after the funeral. It was the only time I can remember all the television and radio stations closing down in honor of the great old man to whom Britons owed so much.
People were truly thankful that Winston Churchill had led them to victory in World War II-at a time when everybody else seemed inclined to compromise with
Nazi Germany.

Churchill rejected the honor of a dukedom and turned down the opportunity to be buried in Westminster Abbey along with many other famous Britons. Churchill's funeral was, for Britain, the end of an age.