"It has been a grand journey - well worth making once." –January 1965, possibly Churchill's last recorded statement
Winston Churchill died at age ninety on 24 January 1965 - seventy years to the day after his father's death.
Churchill's body lay in state in Westminster Hall where 300,000 mourners filed past his coffin. His State Funeral was the first given a commoner since the Duke of Wellington's death more than a century earlier. Big Ben, London's hallmark bell, remained silent from 9:45 am - the time the procession left Westminster Hall - until midnight.
Six thousand people, including six Sovereigns and fifteen Heads of State, attended the funeral service in St. Paul's Cathedral. From St. Paul's, a barge carried his coffin up the Thames to Waterloo Station as the Royal Air Force performed a fly-over. The funeral party then proceeded by train to the parish church at Bladon, Oxfordshire.
Churchill lies next to his parents and within sight of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. When Clementine Churchill died on 12 December 1977 she was reunited with Winston, her ashes placed in his grave.
“Leave the past to history especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
