SIR Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minister in 1940 to lead Britain’s successful war effort against the Nazis, died on January 24, 1965, aged 90.
He was to be buried in Bladon, a village near Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire where Churchill was born in 1874.
On January 30th, a funeral train of six carriages set out from Waterloo station in London - apparently Churchill’s own calculated reference to the famous battle in 1815 - behind ‘Battle of Britain’ class steam locomotive No. 34051, which in 1947 had been named in Churchill’s honour; No. 34064 ‘Fighter Command’ was the appropriate backup.
Hundreds of thousands of grateful British subjects — possibly as many as a million, old, young, and even babies in their prams — lined the route muffled in thick coats and woolly hats on a bleak and overcast day, as driver Alf Hurley and 22-year-old fireman Jim Lester carried Britain’s heroic and charismatic statesman to his final place of rest.*