James Humes OBE

The Rev – formerly the Rt Hon, Jonathan Aitken – conducted the transatlantic Zoom funeral for James Humes.

Humes was the White House Special Assistant, who wrote speeches for Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George Bush Senior.

‘Jamie embodied the true Churchillian spirit of “We shall never surrender”,’ said Aitken, who knew Humes for 30 years and led the service from his garden in Earl’s Court. ‘He also emulated his great hero by having an inspired and instinctive feel for the nuances and cadences of the English language.’

‘When he was 18 years old, in his last year at Hill School, Pottstown, PA, Jamie won an English-speaking Union scholarship to Stowe School in England.

‘This was a life-changing year, which he later said gave him “a severe case of Anglophilia”.

‘Remarkably, Jamie, the visiting American teenager, was invited to the 21st-birthday party of Princess Alexandra of Kent, where he met the Duke of Edinburgh and danced with the Queen – an experience which most uncharacteristically left him completely tongue-tied and lost for words.

‘Jamie also went to Parliament, where he met Winston Churchill, then in his second term as Prime Minister.

‘Churchill advised Jamie at that encounter, “Young man, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.” ’

Humes wrote 37 books, several of them about Churchill. His bestseller Churchill: Speaker of the Century (1980) won him a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. He was given an honorary OBE by the Queen.

Several of Humes’s family took part in the service at the Chapel of West Laurel Hill Cemetery at Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. It was shown on a big screen in the National Cathedral in Washington.

James’s daughter Bailey Humes read The Brook by Alfred Tennyson. Grandson James Quillen read from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’ Grandson George Quillen read Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister in the House of Commons in June 1940: ‘We shall not flag or fail.’