It is just over 61 years since they brought a tiny TV set into the school dining hall, and hoisted it up on a high shelf so that we could all watch the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill.
There were about 120 of us at that establishment, old-fashioned even then. A modern co-educational version of it still exists, but it is more or less unrecognisable now, like everything else.
The staff and pupils of my time, confronted with their equivalents today, would be baffled by them and perhaps a little scornful at the softness of their lives. We were still being brought up for war and danger.
They would be appalled by us. We were mainly the sons of West Country farmers and of naval officers. Our lives were Spartan and chilly. We were hardly ever allowed to watch TV, which was still black-and-white – or rather, dark grey and pale grey.
But by some strange magic, I swiftly forgot that the picture was small, monochrome and blurred and the sound scratchy and feeble. The event is still lodged in my memory as if the mighty, Edwardian parade had been shown in bright colours on an enormous screen.
If I ever forget it, then I shall be dead to all intents and purposes. (I believe there is now a popular website in China called ‘Are You Dead?’ where you can check up on your status every two days, though I suppose it is harder to tell whether you are alive or not, in that ghastly police state, than it is here).
I realised, as I very often did in those days of rapid, noisy decline, that I was seeing something that could never be repeated.
It was that memory that compelled me, in September 2022, to queue for hours and miles in the gathering darkness to see the lying-in-state of Queen Elizabeth II.
Sir Winston Churchill’s coffin is carried down Whitehall during his state funeral on January 30, 1965
The event, which I watched on a tiny black and white TV set in the school dining hall, is still lodged in my memory as if it had been shown in bright colours on an enormous screen, writes Peter Hitchens
The recollection still burns and flares in my imagination, a glimpse of earthly glory. I knew it would be another valuable portal into a past which ought not to be forgotten, and so it was.
How very lucky I am to have so many such portals. I know what I just missed. It is as if I had arrived at some stately railway terminus and rushed on to the main platform, in time to see a beautiful, majestic train, full of fine-featured, upright and distinguished men and women, steam off into the past, slowly enough for me to see it clearly, but too fast for me to catch up and leap aboard.
This sort of thing gets me accused of thinking that the past was a Golden Age, which I am here to tell you that the 1950s and 1960s definitely were not.
I enjoy the comforts and scientific advances of my time as much as anyone else, and possibly more because I know what they have replaced. But that is not my point.
It is that in the thumping and wheezing of the military bands, in the slow rumble of the gun-carriage pulled by bluejackets, in the commanding yells and cries of the regimental sergeant majors, in the strained, thin faces of the soldiers who had to carry the old man’s lead-lined coffin up the cathedral steps, in the modest determination of old Clement Attlee, then 82, to attend the funeral of his friend and adversary, you could see and hear the last departing traces of actual greatness.
Since then we have been too small for it, and too comfortable, and maybe that is a good thing. But it did exist. And I’m glad that I saw it.
Jude’s perfect as a terrible tyrant
Jude Law as Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin… and the real president in Moscow
I doubt whether the film The Wizard Of The Kremlin, mainly about the rise of Vladimir Putin, will get much of a release here.
The brilliant book on which it is based, a storming bestseller in France, is little-known in Britain because our national loathing of Russia makes us foolishly uninterested in that important country.
I managed to see the movie last week in France, and was much impressed by Jude Law’s portrayal of Putin’s transformation from dreary secret police functionary into a sinister, fascinating tyrant.
Abolish mothers and you get this
Some years back I told the absurd boaster Piers Morgan, on his then TV show, that children were turning up at British
primary schools who did not know how to go to the lavatory. I thought this was an interesting measure of how our modern society was going downhill.
Mr Morgan either didn’t understand, or pretended he didn’t, though even then it was quite a well-known problem. Now I see more and more primary teachers are complaining that their time is wasted in changing nappies.
One told the Daily Mail last week: ‘I’ve dealt with children aged from four to seven who still aren’t toilet-trained almost every day of my career.’
The reason for this is obvious. The great feminist revolution, which has driven multitudes of young mothers to become wage-slaves outside the home, has deprived many of their children of huge amounts of what used to be normal parenting.
Instead, the young endure long hours in day-orphanages, tended by paid strangers who mind them rather than raise them. If they aren’t getting even this basic training, what else are they missing out on? A lot, in my view.
Why do Left-liberal types, normally suspicious of big business and all its works, support the recruitment of young women into what is often ill-paid and dreary toil? It is because they loathe the traditional family much more than they dislike grabby capitalism. Which is the key thing you need to know about the modern Left.
