Tony Benn on the last State Funeral: Winston Churchill 1965
How people are remembered (or indeed forgotten) changes in each generation but Winston Churchill remains a controversial figure in Britain’s past
It is interesting to reflect how he was remembered at the time of his death in 1965 by Tony Benn.
Benn records in his Diary that Churchill had been in touch with the family in the 1940s and had been a supporter of his campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage and become an MP again in 1963.
Perhaps it is not surprising that on the day of Churchill’s death Benn wrote in his diary that he was ‘one of the greatest Englishmen of our time’. Partly Benn had not yet fully made the move to the left that he took in the 1970s. Indeed in 1965 he was Postmaster General in Harold Wilson’s Labour Government.
Benn records that politics would be put into ‘cold storage’ for a week and it was probably the case that Churchill was the last political leader- partly because of his wartime role- where there was some degree of national agreement on the significance of his life and death. Certainly there were none of the protests and dissent seen when Mrs Thatcher died.
The Postmaster General’s first move was to approach Wilson with a plan to issue a commemorative stamp featuring the picture of the Queen and Churchill. It related to Benn’s campaign to remove the monarch’s image from stamps altogether and it is clear that even with a figure like Churchill, Wilson regarded the idea as doubtful.
Later in that final week of January almost 60 years ago Benn took his family to see Churchill lying in state at Westminster Hall. He notes that young Joshua Benn thought he was going to a Lyons Steak house and was perplexed as to who Churchill was.
Benn returned to this theme on the day of the funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral which he attended with Caroline Benn. He notes in his diary that ‘there were thousands of troops standing there and the crowds on each side were extremely heavy’.
His regard for Churchill notwithstanding Benn noted that the funeral made him feel uneasy. It was attended by an array of world leaders but Benn thought it the ‘last great Victorian festival’ and left as soon as decently possible.
Some might argue that 50 years on Britain is now a long way off the imperial era represented by Churchill, yet the State pomp and circumstance seen at his funeral is still very much part of the way the British Establishment goes on. The same monarch remained on the throne until very recently and politicians with very much the same kind of class and educational pedigree of Churchill himself sit in the Cabinet.
As the Sex Pistols noted in 1977 ‘there is no future in England’s dreaming…’
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