Jan. 30, 1965 - Hundreds of thousands who watched Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral today in London said farewell to their own bright and desperate yesterdays.
Britons buried more than their greatest son. They buried, too, their strongest link with their youth, with great dangers shared and greats odds overcome. For them, there would never be anyone like him again.
As the crowds waited in Trafalgar Square for the body to come up Whitehall, one heard over and over the words “I remember.” They remembered the times he had reached out and touched their lives.
So, for a moment, it was not the prosperous builder talking, but the ardent young gunner lieutenant of 1940 remembering a night on Primrose Hill when a figure in a square derby appeared beside his anti-aircraft gun and growled, “Good hunting, Lieutenant.” For a time, it was not an elderly woman who had come up from the West Country but a much younger woman who recalled “how much just hearing his voice over the wireless helped.”
“Why, it was as good as a tonic to listen to him,” she said. “My Jim was in the desert then, and I always felt reassured when I heard Mr. Churchill.” Many in the square had been there since early morning. They endured the bitter wind without complaint.
“Little enough to do for him,” said a stout Cockney. “Think what he did for us. I’m Labor, mind, but we wouldn’t have got through if it weren’t for the old gentleman.
“What was I doing? The P.B.I. [Poor Bloody Infantry], France, Africa, Italy, the lot. I tell you, we wouldn’t have got through if it hadn’t been for him.”
The coffin on the gun carriage approached. Hats came off. Children were hoisted onto fathers’ shoulders.
“Now you can always say you saw his coffin,” one man said to his daughter. “You won’t forget this day.”

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