And here's another take on Paxman's (on the whole) fair approach to Churchill. ----------------- In January 1958, the British government began working on the significantly titled Operation Hope Not: its plans for what to do when Winston Churchill died. The plans, it turned out, wouldn’t be needed until January 1965 — but the intervening seven years were obviously well spent, because, as Churchill: A Nation’s Farewell (BBC1, Wednesday) made resoundingly clear, the farewell in question was a triumph. London came to a standstill and Big Ben fell silent as huge crowds watched the procession of the coffin from Westminster to the spectacular state funeral in St Paul’s — and its boat journey along the Thames afterwards.
For the 50th anniversary, Jeremy Paxman talked us through the day with the aid of some of those who took part. A member of the bearer party recalled how, going up the steps of St Paul’s, the coffin had begun to slide off the bearers’ shoulders — and how he’d said aloud, ‘Don’t worry, sir, we won’t let you down.’ Asked about the many tears he’d provoked, the cathedral trumpeter explained with some satisfaction that, ‘The “Last Post” always gets them.’ One of the bellringers remembered nipping out on to a gallery for a look at the service, and being confronted with the unexpected sight of a garden shed — inside which Richard Dimbleby was doing his TV commentary. The programme also featured the memories of the Churchill family, and several contributions from Boris Johnson, who claimed that these days Churchill would be ‘a terrific blogger and a self-Googler of epic proportions’. Paxman himself supplied the somehow melancholy news that Churchill and Mrs Thatcher are now the only former prime ministers in Madame Tussauds. But despite these many treats, the most surprising aspect of the programme was possibly inadvertent. In the approved BBC way, Paxman regularly emphasised how much the country has changed since Churchill’s death. And yet, in between times, both the tone and content of almost everything else wouldn’t have been out of place 50 years ago. If you just read the transcripts, in fact, it would often have been hard to distinguish Paxo’s words from those of Richard Dimbleby. Admittedly, Paxman probably wouldn’t, as Dimbleby did, refer to St Paul’s as ‘the great mother church of the Commonwealth’. Dimbleby probably wouldn’t choose, as Paxman did, to tell us what Britain was like in the 1960s (pretty swinging, apparently) while driving a Mini that he could barely fit into. Nonetheless, Paxman’s line was essentially that we shall never see Churchill’s like again, and that ‘when the nation needed it, he expressed the determination of a bulldog’. (On a particularly old-school note, he also used ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ interchangeably.) At one stage, Paxman met an ex-docker who declared that, like most working-class people, he didn’t like Churchill much and revealed that his colleagues had to be paid to lower the cranes that bowed so movingly towards the boat carrying Churchill’s coffin. But even when faced with such a spoilsport, Paxman didn’t hesitate for long. Churchill, he pointed out, may have been no friend to the trade unions, but ‘he did lead the fight against German fascism’. And with that, it was back to the eulogy. All of which made Martin Bell’s contribution seem distinctly odd. Wearing what he clearly (if a little tragically) still regards as his ‘trademark’ white suit, Bell remembered covering the day as a young reporter. The funeral, he concluded ringingly, ‘represented the passing of the old Britain’ — a verdict that rather suggests that he didn’t see the rest of the programme. > On Jan 29, 2015, at 5:34 AM, 'Antoine Capet' via ChurchillChat > <[email protected]> wrote: > > For those who watched J. Paxman's BBC programme last night : comments in The > Guardian : > > Winston Churchill defended as Paxman calls him ‘ruthless egotist’ > > http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/20/winston-churchill-anniversary-jeremy-paxman > > > Antoine CAPET, FRHistS > Professor emeritus of British Studies > University of Rouen > 76821 Mont-Saint-Aignan > France > [email protected] > > 'Britain since 1914' Section Editor > Royal Historical Society Bibliography > > Reviews Editor of CERCLES > http://www.cercles.com/review/reviews.html > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "ChurchillChat" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ChurchillChat" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/churchillchat. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
