Queen Elizabeth II broke precedent and protocol with the state funeral for Sir Winston Churchill

For people of a certain age today’s events will vividly recall the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill 57 years ago.

On January 12 1965 Winston Churchill suffered his final and most severe stroke. On the morning of Sunday January 24 the old warrior, at the age of 91, died.

Three hundred thousand people filed past his coffin as it lay in state in Westminster Hall – a tribute normally accorded only to members of the Royal Family – for three days.

Standing precedent on its head, Her Majesty the Queen suggested to Parliament that the nation’s wartime leader should be given a state funeral. In 1852 and 1898 Parliament had petitioned Queen Victoria to grant state funerals to the Duke of Wellington and Mr Gladstone respectively.

In the latter case, because Victoria thought Gladstone addressed her like a public meeting, she agreed only with extreme reluctance. Whereas Victoria viewed Gladstone with distaste, she was rather fond of Wellington but she chose to attend neither funeral.

Again, breaking with precedent, Victoria’s great-granddaughter attended in person, the funeral of her first and possibly favourite prime minister, along with virtually the entire Royal Family.

On the penultimate day of January 1965 naval ratings – as befitted a man who had been first lord of Admiralty at the outbreak of both the First and Second World Wars – hauled the coffin on a gun carriage from Westminster Hall through the streets of London to St Paul’s Cathedral.

Her Majesty the Queen broke with protocol in two other respects. The Queen was among the first to arrive at St Paul’s, making her presence even before the coffin and Churchill family arrived. It is customary that the monarch is always the last to arrive.

Furthermore, the convention is that the monarch is also the first to exit or end an ongoing event. At the end of the funeral service the Queen followed the Churchill family out of the cathedral.

The funeral service in St Paul’s Cathedral was attended by 6,000 people. In addition to the Queen, the kings of Belgium, Norway, Greece, and Denmark, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and the Grand Duke of Luxembourg were present. So too were the heads of state of some 15 nations. President de Gaulle, the man Churchill once dubbed his ‘Cross of Lorraine’, attended but significantly President Lyndon B Johnson of the United States did not. Johnson was no Anglophile and the ‘Special Relationship’ was at a low ebb in 1965 – in part because of Harold Wilson’s refusal to commit British troops to the war in Vietnam.

The coffin was taken by barge along the Thames, as the riverside cranes were dipped in silent tribute, to Waterloo station. From Waterloo the coffin was conveyed by train to rural Oxfordshire and the parish church at Bladon, where Churchill was buried next to his parents, Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill, and within sight of Blenheim Palace where he had been born two months prematurely on November 30 1874.

Clem Attlee, his wartime deputy and his post-war successor, described Churchill as ‘the greatest Englishman of our time – I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time’.

Churchill became prime minister at our country’s worst hour but he also made it our finest. Of the evening of May 10 1940, the day King George VI invited him to form a government, Churchill wrote in his ‘History of the Second World’: ‘I felt if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this trial.’

As Ed Murrow, the American broadcaster and journalist, observed: ‘He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.’

There is probably no finer example of that phenomenon than his speech in the House of Commons on June 18 1940. Churchill said: ‘What Weygrand [supreme Allied commander in France] called the “Battle of France” is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.’

Confronted with the prospect of an imminent German invasion, Churchill promised the British people: ‘We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’

He urged the British people to rise to the occasion: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour”.’

At the time – and since – Churchill’s funeral was regarded as a requiem for the United Kingdom as a great power. Lyndon B Johnson’s absence from the funeral underscored this perspective.

Fear of national decline haunted Churchill throughout his political career. Towards the end of his life Churchill even confessed: ‘I have achieved so much, to have achieved nothing in the end.’

Such pessimism was and remains excessive. The United Kingdom’s decline has been relative rather than absolute. The United Kingdom is still one of the largest and most vibrant economies in the world and continues to be major force on the international stage.