As Churchill's coffin passed, I cried and tried to hide my tears

I was 15. We had watched his funeral on a grainy black and white TV whose screen was far too small for the 30 or so in my class for all of us to see clearly.

The distorting trumpets. The pomp. The crowds. The trip along the Thames. Even in those bleak televisual conditions it was clearly a great moment in history – the passing of the man we had been taught had been our wartime saviour.

It was well into the afternoon on that cold January afternoon that we left our classrooms in north Oxford and trooped across the playing fields and down across the canal to Port Meadow, the great expanse of boggy common ground that spread out between the railway line that tracked along the side of the canal and the River Thames.

Colour film of the Churchill funeral from the ITN archive

There were perhaps 500 of us boys and teacher. We boys each held our straw boaters in our cold gloveless hands as we waited for Churchill’s final journey to join his parents graves at Blaydon, a few miles north of us.

As we waited, I looked along the line towards Oxford. The next crowd were men in blue boiler suits and flat caps who had poured out of the Morris radiators factory next door to our school. There, in one turn of the head, was the British class system on parade: middle-class kids with our straw boaters, and the workers. Even though we never exchanged a word, we were drawn together in this one signal act of gratitude.

Some of them knew war, some of our teachers had served, too. But we were all bulge babies who had grown up, not to the sound of bombs but to the constant references to “the war”.

I heard the train’s whistle wailing long before I saw the engine. The steam enveloped the dreaming spires. Expectation, sorrow, history and moment combined with the bitter cold to render this unlike anything we had ever experienced before.

The stoker was hurling coal into the engine’s furnace. And then he was there. His coffin draped. Four guards, one at each corner of the open flat truck bearing him to his resting place. I cried and tried to hide my tears.

Soon only the steam clung to the leafless trees. He was gone. We traipsed silently back to resume our teenaged years.

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