The Spectator

‘We live as free men, speak as free men, walk as free men because a man called Winston Churchill lived’

This is the Spectator’s leader from 22 January 1965. Two days later, on 24 January, Winston Churchill died:

Since the first news was given of his grave illness, the attention of the world has been concentrated on a quiet house in Hyde Park Gate. Old men and children, friends and strangers, came to pay homage and to be near him as he fought his last battle. The Archbishop of Canterbury on Tuesday prayed for him ‘as he approached death’ and the world waited and joined in prayer. There is more pride than tears in our grief. We are a free people because a man called Winston Churchill lived. By some miracle of communication he was able to call us to greatness, and we in eager response man- aged from somewhere to find a strength that we did not know was in us.

He has lived a dozen lives and lived them all to the full. It is remembered that Sir Winston was Anglo-American, the child of both civilisations. It is remembered how he offered common citizenship to France in the terrible days of 1940. It is forgotten how when he was in Washington in 1943 he put forward to President Roosevelt his dream of a common citizenship between the United States and the British Commonwealth of Nations. No. doubt (in that particular form at least) the conception will never be realised. But the peoples of the two countries will surely draw closer and closer together, and some form of union, reaching beyond the demands of defence and trade, may one day be devised. If so, and it is ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished,’ Sir Winston may also be remembered as the man who laid the foundation stone.

His life swept across the years.

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