EVEN DIMBLEBY HAD A CRACK IN HIS VOICE...
Television brought 350 million to watch the funeral as 26 commentators from european networks described the scenes from Tv monitor sets.
The best way to be part of the occasion was to be there, but multiplied by 85 cameras, Tv’s view of it provided a superb translation of the spectacle.
in panorama and in close detail, it caught scenes that nobody who saw them will forget:
The view from the top of st Paul’s looking down on those slow-moving oblongs of men in Fleet street; Churchill’s son Randoph, suddenly looking more like his father than anyone had ever seen him; the drum horse planting his feet as though he were pulling the whole procession; the gun crew pulling off their hats in a single collective movement; the curiously irreverent men in cloth caps, and girls taking snapshots; the old statesmen waiting on the cathedral steps; and all the sounds of harness, wheels, bands and drums, dominated by the rhythm of 65 boot-falls to the minute.
Two scenes stood out; that shot of the line of cranes lowering their necks as Churchill’s barge went by. And the shot in st Paul’s when a camera swung up from somewhere through the layer of arc lamps, to pick up the trumpeter in the Whispering Gallery.
iTv stayed with the procession from start to finish. The BBC cut in to it to show the bigwigs arriving at st Paul’s. iTv’s commentary included a good deal of Churchill’s own langauge, spoken by sir laurence olivier and Paul scofield over pictures that seemed appropriate.
The BBC invited Australian premier sir Robert Menzies and President eisenhower to speak farewells ( ike, as always, was touching in his good will and sincerity), but throughout stuck to sir Richard Dimbleby’s description.
iTv ended its commentary at Waterloo, with another wonderful shot of the train steaming between the buildings along that corkscrew track. The BBC went on from Waterloo to give a preview of Bladon churchyard, showing the open grave still with a spade in it.
The commentaries were the weakest part. Both men talked too much at the beginning, and Dimbleby in partic- ular seemed unable to distinguish between detail which is relevant and that which is merely pettifogging.
But like all popular colourists, Richard always manages to find the words that express popular feeling. As the coffin was being painfully inched forward at Waterloo, he said, his voice breaking for the first time as an interpreter of state events: ‘We shall not see it again after it has gone in ...’
The old Heralds hobbling outside st Paul’s in their traditional finery seemed to embody a past that was in the coffin with Churchill; and there is nothing left but an idiotic civilisation of Juke Box Jury and plastic chicken factories.
so said the crack in Dimbleby’s voice. it is a feeling inseparable from the funerals of the really great. The papers wrote about it in 1852, when england buried the great Duke with, as Tennyson put it: ‘An empire’s lamentation.’ But Churchill was waiting in the wings.