Total Visits

Thursday 22 January 2015

THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S STATE FUNERAL


THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL’S STATE FUNERAL


Peter Hitchens has written a superb nostalgic piece in the Mail on Sunday which I couldn’t better, so I have re-posted it below.

I can however add a personal element, which is that my Father, then a Captain, was one of the Officers of Churchill’s old regiment, the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, who carried his medals, orders and decorations in the funeral procession. My Father is shown in the centre of the above picture above the coffin and immediately on the left of one of the heralds.

The one thing (but rather an important omission) that is missing from Peter Hitchens’ article is the conclusion to be drawn from his final comments. He is right that Britain isn’t that country now but he doesn’t mention that it now serves no useful purpose for the English Nation. It is high time to be rid of it and for England to re-emerge from its choking embrace!

Here is Peter Hitchen’s article:-

So uniquely British, but funeral tells a tale of a different country

What a strange thing it is to see my own memories harden into history, and what is, for me, a vivid and living experience, turn into a blurred and fading piece of film.

Half a century ago, at my strict-regime boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, we were let off our normal Saturday morning lessons of Latin grammar, French vocabulary, rivers and capitals of South America, mostly taught by fierce, bristling gents with military or Naval ranks.

Instead, we were instructed to sit in rows on hard chairs as the school’s one small black-and-white TV was hoisted on to a high shelf. And for three utterly memorable hours we watched in silence as the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill passed slowly through London.

Outside (and no opportunity was normally missed to make us go outside) it was a freezing day of steely skies and pitiless winds, no small matter if you were forced to wear short trousers, as we all were.

Inside, in the comparative warmth, most of us were, I think, mesmerised, so that we forgot we were watching on a screen not much bigger than a breadboard. I certainly saw and remembered the event as a huge panorama.

Afterwards, we knew, quite simply, that something important had passed from the earth for ever, and that our small country was diminished and bereft.

Nobody who came afterwards would be as we had been before we watched it. By comparison, the assassination of President Kennedy is nothing in my recollections.

Last week, I managed to watch a rare, hard-to-find recording of Sir Winston’s funeral. It is the wrong shape for a modern TV screen, and sometimes the picture swims or blurs.

It is, of course, in black and white, but that only increases the feeling that you are watching something impossibly long ago.

The London of January 1965 is almost as distant from me now as the outbreak of the First World War was from us then. Most of the people who appear in the film are now dead, or impossibly old.

The actual procession looks, at many moments, like one of those jerky old films from the Austro-Hungarian empire that they show to illustrate how hopelessly old-fashioned the pre-1914 world is.

Bluejackets in the sort of uniforms they wore at Jutland pull the gun carriage on which the heavy coffin rests (a tradition in state funerals since the Army’s horses kicked over the traces at Queen Victoria’s obsequies, and sailors ran forward to take over the task).

The cortege moves at a mesmerisingly slow pace, swaying strangely to the music of a dozen military bands, thumping out dirges – occasionally interrupted by those uniquely British parade-ground yells, echoing for miles in the freezing air, as sergeant-majors keep their men in line.

The male members of the Churchill family walk behind the coffin, wearing what must surely be the last black silk top hats seen in London, like a Bolshevik caricature of greedy capitalists.

Lady Churchill, vastly veiled in black, rides in an enormous, sombre coach (lent by the Royal Family, but not from their better-known fleet of gilded carriages).

The coachman riding atop it is cloaked and muffled like something out of the Pickwick Papers, reaching back into a past that some of those present would still just have remembered.

From even further back come the Heralds of the College of Arms, most of them ancient men on sticks, looking a little like animated playing cards in their medieval tabards.

A huge drum horse, loaded with war-drums, leads the bands as its ancestor must have done at Blenheim and Waterloo.

The dead man’s orders and medals, borne on cushions, are carried behind him and arrayed by his coffin when it reaches St Paul’s Cathedral, where it is greeted by a man holding up the City of London’s mighty, ancient, black Sword of Mourning.

It is all so old that it was archaic in 1965, and I doubt it could be done now with a straight face. Yet it would have been as normal in Winston Churchill’s youth as it is outlandish now.

The sense of a last moment of something that is passing is emphasised by the figure of the Queen, not as she is now, but a woman coming to the end of her youth, worn by cares and powerfully moved by the heavy panoply and drapery of death on display.

Beside her, Prince Charles is still an awkward schoolboy.

But in one way the most moving faces are those in the crowds – of men and women then young, now pensioners, and above all, those of the soldiers in the bearer party who struggle, with increasing strain and tension, to lift, carry and lay down the weight of the lead-lined oaken coffin.

These are the days before pizza, milkshakes and sugary drinks fattened and blurred all our features into a bland and puffy sameness.

They look so British, in a hollow, hungry, wartime way, that it almost breaks the heart to see them.

The country they and I grew up in has entirely ceased to exist.



Here is a link to the original Article>>> PETER HITCHENS: So uniquely British, but funeral tells a tale of a different country | Daily Mail Online







8 comments:

  1. I think this was one of the last occasions when policemen faced in the same direction as the crowds too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robin. Thanks for catching up with my comment that you had failed thus far to mention Winston's passing; a strange irony now that much of England and its culture, especially its music and as was pointed out by David Starkey, has more to do with those young West Indians whose proud parents gave their sons his name than with our famous wartime leader.

    Indeed, as I have previously said, Winston is due for a Marxist revisionist mauling for his determination, which he was unable to achieve due to failing health, to prevent wholesale immigration from the New Commonwealth. He hoped that his successors would take up the torch and keep Britain white but they never had his courage and his passion for the old England. And he was very dismissive of Islam, despite an attempt recently to claim that he wanted to be a Muslim. He would view that gathering storm over Islamification in Europe with absolute incredulity.

    Like Peter Hitchens the sight of the funeral fills those who remember that time with a churning in the stomach and an anger in the breast. I was a bit older then, in my early teens. Peter may think it all looks very staid and old fashioned but it was England and was very different from the Americanised materialistic multicultural monoculture which has no buried it due to the "modernising" zeal of the Left and the obscene money grubbing psychopathic greed of the one per cent. Churchill would be aghast at the architectural desecration of London at the behest of turbo-capitalism. It is now anybody's whore to do what they will with from all over the world.

    I am reading an excellent book on the handover of Heligoland to Germany by the Crown Corporation in 1890 in exchange for German colonial land in Africa which would give us the key to Egypt and the Suez Canal. Heligoland was Danish and when Napoleon took over Denmark we acquired it in 1809. The people never had anything to do with Prussian dominated Germany. We ran it benevolently with just three bobbies keeping order and the Heligolanders commemorate the handover with great sadness every year. The off his rocker Keiser militarised it in true Prussian fashion. What struck me was that the Heligolanders, who spoke a form of Frisian whose closest equivalent was English, certainly not
    German, despite what the Keiser said and not even Danish, were very like us in appearance and temperament. They are our racial and linguistic cousins. But sadly like the English they were too placid to put up enough of a fight. It struck me that Heligoland was England in miniature and that the Crown Corporation has destroyed us in the same fashion by handing us over to the same sort of psychopaths as the Keiser.

    Finally, we hear that David Davies, the only honest man left in parliament, too honest to be the pm he should be, is to try to get parliament to vote for the release of the findings of the Chilcot Enquiry prior to the election. In view of what the Labour Party suspect happened to Robin Cooke because of his opposition to the Iraq War, we just hope that he doesn't meet with an accident of the sort that Ken Livingstone described. The same probably happened to David Kelly whose death has never been subject to an inquest.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The saying "As milk is to cheese, are English and Fries" describes the observed similarity between Frisian and English. One rhyme that is sometimes used to demonstrate the palpable similarity between Frisian and English is "Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries.", which sounds not very different from * "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.."

      Another rhyme on this theme, "Bûter, brea en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin is gjin oprjochte Fries". In English, "Butter, bread and green cheese, whoever that not say can (can't say that) is no upright Frisian", was used, according to legend, by the 16th century Frisian freedom fighter Pier Gerlofs Donia as a shibboleth that he forced his captives to repeat to distinguish Frisians from Dutch and Saxons.

      As a nation, we need to recover true English.

      Pronunciation:
      * ie = ee, ii = ee, oe = oo, ts = ch, û = oo, j = y (gjin = gyin, rjocht = ryocht [English - 'right')].

      Delete
    2. Grien is dat land,
      Roed is de kant
      Witt is de sand,
      Dat is de flagg vun't Hilligeland.

      Green is the land,
      Red is the cliff,
      White is the sand,
      That is the flag of t'Heligoland.

      Delete
  3. Apparently, the BBC is to show parts of the funeral on television next week - in colour!! Peter Hitchens says he has got hold of a black and white recording. I assume that this has been made from the videotape which the BBC must still hold in its archives. The colour version, as with the Coronation, would be a cine version made for sending abroad or showing in cinemas in this country. I look forward to seeing it. Doubtless, those younger than we will be able to witness first hand how England has changed. It would be nice to think they would not just smirk but realise the scope of the ethnic and cultural destruction. I was talking to a Breton friend last year about the custom of clapping at funerals and where it came from. Despite being a citizen of a Latin nation, although he would staunchly insist he was a Celt and not a Latin, he said that this ridiculous custom had arrived in France - from Italy as I had suspected - as it has here. Apparently, the French, too, previously observed a respectful silence. I first remember it at that very un-English affair that was Princess Diana's funeral, initiated by foreigners. Having recently travelled in a funeral cortege I was angered but not surprised to see how other drivers cut into the cortege thus splitting it, showing no respect for the deceased. No time for that in their busy, busy money grubbing lives. It makes you long for a time when people stopped walking and stood still when the hearse passed and the men removed their headgear. There is no longer any order, respect, self-respect, discipline, self-discipline. Personally, I believe that clapping as the cortege passes should be outlawed; but it won't happen. I don't know what happened at Maggie Thatcher's funeral as I thought it was an outrage that she was given a state funeral in the first place and an insult to Churchill.

    I wonder whether Heligoland could now be policed by three British bobbies, probably not as the Heligolanders now are outnumbered by drunken German day trippers. The German forces behaved in much the same way when they took over the island during the First World War and deported the islanders to concentration camps near Hamburg where the elderly died, probably of homesickness.

    Finally, Tim Berners Lee tells us, with regret, that England is now the most spied on country in the world; what would the bobbies at Churchill's funeral think or the masses there who had fought the War for our freedom? His hope was that his invention would bring the peoples of the world together. The irony is that this is happening and this is why the psychopathic hegemons are so worried as the last thing they want is for us to rebel. You can see the first glimmerings of such a rebellion now and the look on Tony Blair's face - a frightened rabbit comes to mind - as he faces the possibility of the Chilcot Enquiry's findings leading to his being called to face the ICC. It won't happen of course as the great and the good ( or not ) will all close ranks against us and the truth.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A bit off topic, I was interested to learn on RT last night that a majority of UKIP supporters do not take kindly to the prospect of Ed Milliband becoming the first Jewish prime minister since Disraeli. In a way, the French, despite their simmering anti-Semitism have done better with two Jewish presidents, as I recall, Leon Blum and Szarkozy. Interestingly, there has never been a Jewish president of the US as far as I am aware.
    If this poll among UKIP members was genuine then it was interesting.
    I wonder what they would have said to a Muslim pm or any ethnic minority candidate. If this is true, they have probably have already sussed, as that poster brandished by Cameron or Clegg showed, that they are on their way to becoming the ethnic minority and don't like it.

    But with my questioning mind, I began to wonder whether this is an anti-UKIP smear put out by Labour or even by Mr Cameron who is a friend of Israel. In fact he is also proud of his part-Jewish ancestry but said UKIP supporters may not be aware of this. It could just be the work of the security forces who view UKIP as a threat to the one world agenda they are being asked to bring about. In Greece, even if Syriza win then the Greeks have said they do not want to leave the EU or the euro. But unless they do then they will just have to continue to suffer from the same democratic deficit as the rest of us.

    Returning to UKIP, they, too, are friends of Israel. Either the UKIP members do not realise this or are choosing to rebel against it and support Palestine. In my book on Heligoland, It was pointed out that Balfour never sought the views of the Palestinians over the Zionist state, any more that his relative Lord Salisbury, sought those of the Heligolanders.

    Meanwhile, Westminster Abbey has got itself in a bit of a fix over the flying of the flag at half-mast for the death of King Abdullah of Saudi.
    Apparently, under wahabism flying the flag as such is blasphemy.
    But the Abbey, no doubt taking instructions for No 10, has said that it is to show respect for the late King's fight against terrorism. Obviously, they are unaware that the late King was not only funding but also arming the Islamic State and just pretending to fight them. But oil for arms is all that matters and any morality can go hang, even that of the supposedly Christian Westminster Abbey.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There is no doubt that UKIP is now under full-scale assault. Roger Helmer has gone over to the Tories. didn't he come from there in the first place? so was probably a plant who was destined to choose the worst possible moment, just before the election, to return to the Tories and vilify UKIP.

    I was interested to discover that the One World Agenda and one world government through the UN which I was told about 30 years ago may not have been as mad a conspiracy theory as I thought. On Truth tv last night on "Conspiracy Theory" we had American politician, Jesse Ventura, telling us about the man-made global warming scam. This has been engineered by a Canadian in the UN for nearly 30 years. It involves the fraudulent sale of carbon credits and is keeping us all in our place. The ultimate aim is a World Conservation Bank - a bit like the World Bank - and the IMF and will require the creation of a single world currency and a world government, probably based at the UN. A spokesman said that the same people are also behind the EU and the euro. Al Gore is making billions through doing their bidding and interestingly the gentleman at the top of the dung heap seems to be a member of a certain banking family hailing from Frankfurt am Main.

    So Syriza has won in Greece but we do not yet know what they are going to do. There was a poll which showed that the majority of Greeks do not want to leave the EU and the euro but is it genuine or another rigged poll? After all, many of us now suspect that the 1970s EEC poll here was rigged and we are sure that Cameron's EU exit poll will be.

    It seem that the Marxist revisionist attack on Churchill is about to begin.
    There is to be a programme put out by the Beeb next week asking whether he would still be voted the greatest Briton in a poll. No doubt they are going to point out his vow to keep Britain white and his views on Islam.

    I am reading a book on the Great Boer War by Byron Farwell. There is no doubt that the author, the book was written in 1976, has sympathy with the Boers. They strike me as being like the Icelandic Vikings of old, very courageous, very democratic, staunchly independent and very disputatious. I never realised that William of Orange fled to England when the Dutch Republic was formed and that we then took over all Dutch colonies, including I expect the Dutch East India Company, for safekeeping. In 1809 the Treaty of Amiens gave the Cape Colony back to the Dutch but we then stole it on the grounds of keeping it from the French and the Crown then took over South Africa and hounded the Boers until they defeated them. The Boers did not come across any blacks for 100 years after they arrived. We then allowed the blacks to flood south until they formed a majority and they have now been granted majority power even though they never were the majority. As Hanne Herland has pointed out whites are now under attack and both in Europe as in America we are on our way to being like the Afrikaaners are now, a beleaguered minority in what was once their country and fighting for survival. The writing is on the wall. And if we have one world government we are finished and slaves to the Oligarchic financier elite.
    I return to the Heligolanders whose slogan was better dead than a slave.
    We thought that Britons, or Englishmen, would never be slaves but we are on our way to becoming such.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thankyou to Robin for putting that piece by Peter Hitchins, and the following comments.
    Regards
    Stephen

    ReplyDelete