CHEERING
After five years of war, Churchill was with the allied armies as they crossed into Nazi Germany.
"Forward on wings of flame to final victory!" he told the troops.
I got word that Churchill was coming.
This was because we had captured part of the Siegfried Line -
the so-called dragon teeth, the concrete emplacements.
It was on Germany's frontier. It was both strategic AND symbolic.
You were penetrating Germany.
There he was with his cap and cigar, trooping around
and inspecting all these tank traps.
And it came time to have a pee. I was standing right next to him
and I could see the glint in his eye and this puckish grin
when he said, "Let's do it on the Siegfried Line!"
And that was absolutely marvellous.
There was all of us lined up - all these generals and me and Churchill -
peeing on Hitler's Siegfried Line!
Two months later,
in May 1945, Britain was celebrating the first day of peace in Europe.
CHURCHILL: We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing.
Today is Victory in Europe Day. Tomorrow will also be Victory in Europe Day.
CROWD SINGS: "Yankee-Doodle Dandy"
Strangely enough in this great hour of victory, when they had been through so much together,
my mother wasn't there to share in the VE Day celebrations
because she was in Russia for her Aid to Russia Fund.
So my father, in his hour of victory, was rather alone.
God... God bless you all.
This is YOUR victory.
Victory of the cause of freedom.
The victory Churchill had promised in the darkest days of 1940 was now a reality.
For us in Britain he later wrote,
"Weary and worn, impoverished but undaunted, and now triumphant, we had a moment that was sublime."
# Land of hope and glory
# Make thee mightier yet! #
Churchill hoped the coalition govt would last until the defeat of Japan, but Labour demanded an election.
He didn't want an election at all.
He would have liked to continue on his pinnacle of a coalition govt, the great national leader,
and, you know, with nobody standing up to him, and running things all his own way.
But he had to come down into the hurly-burly of party politics.
Our theme is the revival of the greatest of Britain and of the British Empire.
But we mustn't use the word "empire". It's naughty.
Nothing but a bloody warmonger!
My father found it very difficult to come to terms with his role as a party leader
as opposed to being the leader of a great wartime coalition.
In fact, he found the change quite disagreeable.
I think he'd probably rather lost his touch.
I ask you straight out to give me the chance I need to try to finish this business
and bring the ship safe into port. And I have steered her through a very rough and stormy voyage.
To many voters, Churchill was the great war leader, but not the man to lead Britain in peacetime.
His personal popularity was still enormous.
Churchill was touring London and went to a meeting
and when he got there, he found the big meeting area was surrounded by Labour posters.
They said they were Labour posters.
They carried four words: "Cheer Churchill. Vote Labour."
Now that was the mood of the Labour people throughout the land. And they were grateful to Churchill.
But it was not the past they were thinking of. It was the future.
CHEERING
They said, "We want a Labour Government and we want Winston to be Prime Minister."
I said, "You've got to choose."
They said, "It's a free country. We'll vote for what we like!"
Churchill campaigned on the theme
that socialism was a form of communism. He even identified Labour with the Nazis.
Socialism is not only an attack upon the British enterprise
but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely
without having a tyrannical hand clapped over their mouth and nose.
No socialist system can be established without having a political police,
a form of Gestapo.
Here he was, saying if you get the Labour Government back you get a Gestapo.
Clem Attlee had been in his War Cabinet running a Gestapo!
The attempt to associate the Labour Party with the Nazis and the Gestapo, with Hitlerism,
was regarded as being utterly ridiculous.
My mother read the speech before he made it and said to him, "You shouldn't use that phrase.
"It will cause enormous offence and do a lot of harm."
My father was obstinate. He thought it was quite all right.
We're going to win! HURRAH !
I can feel it... I can feel it in my bones. We're going to WIN !
There were over a million servicemen abroad whose vote could be decisive.
They all felt that if they voted for Attlee, they would get demobilised much more quickly.
And also, as there was a shortage of cigarettes, that the supply of cigarettes would be much greater.
And I told him this. He was very surprised.
He said, "How COULD they do a thing like this to me after all I've done?"
The results were delayed three weeks while the service vote was counted.
Churchill flew to Potsdam - the last meeting of the Big Three.
Truman was now the US President after Roosevelt's death.
Churchill wanted the best settlement possible with Stalin on Europe.
Churchill wouldn't read the briefs.
We would sit up all night writing briefs which he'd never look at.
Stalin was always VERY well-briefed and he'd put a sharp question
and Churchill would turn round and say, "What's the answer to that?"
We'd hiss the answers at him which he couldn't hear and the whole thing was a shambles.
Churchill knew that now the Red Army occupied E Europe, Stalin held all the cards.
At Potsdam it was quite clear that we were not the important player in that game.
Alec Cadogan, the Head of the Foreign Office, said, "This is a two and a half power meeting."
Even half was overestimating our weight. The real negotiation was between Russia and America.
The Potsdam Conference set the seal on the new map of E Europe,
which was to remain under Communist rule for nearly 50 years.
The world was now dominated by the Soviet Union and the United States.
Churchill left Potsdam to return to London for the election results,
confident that he would remain Prime Minister.
NEWSREEL: 'Whoever imagined such a result?
'Labour landslide.
'Labour will now have a majority over all parties in a House of 640.'
By voting for the Labour Party, they had voted Churchill out.
But there was no doubt there was a sense of guilt about that.
The day after the election, people were almost hangdog about it.
They were saying, "What a way to treat a man who has carried us to victory."
Nobody had realised that they were chucking Churchill out.
He couldn't realise that they had been quietly making up their minds
that he was a great wartime leader but he wasn't the man to win the peace.
He sat down at the Cabinet table and I sat directly opposite
and he started reminiscing about all these perilous trips we'd taken together during the war,
the places we'd visited and the outcome of the war.
And then he got very sad. You could tell by his expression.
And he said, "And now the British people don't want me any more."
Tears were rolling down his cheeks and I'm not ashamed to say they were rolling down mine, too.
After what he described as the longest week of his life, Churchill went on holiday.
Exhausted by six years of war, crushed by the election defeat,
Churchill flew here to Lake Como.
It was a time of recovery and peace. "I am much better in myself," he wrote to his wife.
"Here it is all sunshine and calm.
"I paint all day and have banished care and disillusionment to the shades.
"This is the first time for many years that I have been completely out of this world."
He spent many days at his favourite pastime - painting.
Churchill wrote,
"Painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life's journey.
"Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely."
His love of bright colours comes through in his paintings.
He wrote, "When I get to heaven I expect even more gorgeous colours.
"I shall demand a palette with bright colours that I can employ.
"I shall spend my first million years learning how to paint."
In his fantasies, he wanted to make life more colourful,
more exciting, more adventurous.
It fitted in with his romantic view of the world.
Even on holiday, Churchill's thoughts were soon to return to world affairs.
He was already preparing for his future mission - to warn the West of the Soviet threat to world peace.
In March 1946,
Churchill was invited to speak at Westminster College, Missouri.
He warned them of Soviet Communism.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic
an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe -
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.
And all these famous cities and the population around them
lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
His thinking was that the Soviets needed very close watching.
It was not dissimilar from some of the messages he had tried to give
but which had not been heeded during the run-up to World War II.
Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts - facts they are -
this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up.
Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.
Churchill urged an alliance between Britain and the US as the only way to contain Soviet expansion.
He was again the warmonger - this time launching the Cold War.
Churchill preached the same message in W Europe,
where he was celebrated as the saviour of western civilisation.
Here on Lake Geneva, he prepared the Zurich speech on a united Europe.
I wish to speak to you today about the tragedy of Europe.
Over wide areas, a vast, quivering mass
of tormented, hungering, careworn and bewildered human beings
gape at the ruins of their cities and their homes
and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror.
That is all the Germanic races have got by tearing each other to pieces
and spreading havoc far and wide.
Suddenly there is a great voice of Churchill,
who is...the great victor of the war,
who says, "You Europeans, don't desperate.
"Unite and you'll be strong again." And he gave hope.
We must build a kind of United States of Europe.
The first step in the recreation of the European family
must be a partnership between France and Germany.
There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France
and a spiritually great Germany.
Therefore I say to you, "Let Europe arise!"
Churchill repeated his call for a reconciled and united Europe in every western capital.
'The new song "Europe Unite" was sung as he drove through the city.'
CROWD SING AND CHEER
We hope to see a Europe where men of every country
will think as much of being a European as of belonging to their native land.
He had spoken so eloquently that people got the wrong impression.
His concept was a Britain based on world position,
close ties with America, centre of the great Commonwealth,
and playing a major role but not directly involved in Europe.
I don't think that Churchill really saw Britain
as an equal partner with the other European countries.
He was, after all, the head of what had just been a victorious country
faced with one country which had been defeated and another which had been occupied.
I think he had a rather patronising attitude towards the Europeans,
and a very great desire that they should never do this again.
They should sink their differences. But WE should not get too deeply into it.
The world stage held much of Churchill's attention.
At home he attacked Labour's nationalisation plans.
Attlee's government was staggering from crisis to crisis. Churchill blamed socialism.
# There's a homefire smoking From Windermere to Woking... #
If we sink through socialism into moral and economic decline and collapse,
not only will our own sufferings be intense,
but we shall carry many other nations with us into chaos and communism.
In the wings was Churchill waiting to do the maximum mischief to the national cause of economic recovery.
And he was able to say to the people, which he did quite unscrupulously,
"All these difficulties are due to the socialist government, socialist extravagance.
"And they're unnecessary. The hardships are unnecessary."
In Opposition, Churchill had found it difficult to change "from a life of intense activity
"to one of anti-climax."
He was a rather intermittent Opposition Leader.
He would make a great speech about the world - remember the Fulton Speech? -
and he'd make a great speech in the Commons.
But asking Opposition questions, and so on, bored him to tears.
He'd got a strong team and he left that to them.
In the House, he was not an effective Opposition Leader.
Opposition is a difficult and not very rewarding activity.
He wouldn't take any initiative.
I remember him saying in the Commons, "What we want is two years of tranquillity and peace."
He meant two years of doing absolutely nothing.
We shall surely find the way
under a faithful and tolerant government
to those broad uplands where plenty, peace and justice reign.
During his five years in Opposition, Churchill often escaped to Chartwell to write his war memoirs -
the first documented account of World War II and the only account written by one of the Big Three.
He worked with a small team of researchers.
He had to write a piece about the Blitz - you know, the German raid on London in 1940.
And he got an expert to produce a brief of about 150 pages.
And he said to me, "Well, cut it down to two and a half pages."
So I worked like stink. I produced about two and a half pages and I thought it was quite good.
And I sat beside him and he took out his red pen and he started to correct.
And all my sloppy sentences were tightened up and all my useless adjectives were obliterated.
In the middle of it all, he said to me very gently, "I hope you don't mind my doing this."
And I said, "Thank you, sir. You're giving me a free lesson in writing plain English."
The sales were enormous. The six volumes earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Writing a book is an adventure.
To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement.
And then it becomes a mistress. And then it becomes a master.
And then it becomes a tyrant.
And the last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude,
you kill the monster.
During that dinner he said to me, "You know, five wasted years."
He said, "You and I have just been playing with the shadows of the past writing history.
"I could have done so much if I had still been in office."
Churchill suffered from periods of deep depression. He called it his black dog.
I found myself sitting one mealtime with Mr Churchill
and General Parnell, who was his advisor on the military side of the war memoirs.
And Gen. Parnell and I were having a lighthearted chat about suicide.
It seemed Mr Churchill was deep in thought and wasn't listening.
But suddenly he jerked up and said, "Stop it! You mustn't talk like that. It's not right!
"Once I almost thought of throwing myself under a train."
Well, you can imagine, silence after that. It was such a shock.
He said to his doctor
he didn't like staying in a room with a balcony in case he threw himself off.
He couldn't stand near the edge of a train platform. There was a constant preoccupation with death.
He feared a mood might overcome him and he would throw himself off.
One of his consolations was his love of animals.
There was a time when he was being told that he should entertain more backbenchers at home
shortly after the war.
And one backbencher didn't quite understand that Winston wasn't really in the habit of talking
until he'd got one or two courses of food into his tummy.
On this occasion, he was particularly taciturn.
His first sign of life was to take a great lunge across the fellow saying, "Darling!"
But of course it was the cat who had come into the room,
and Winston felt, "There's somebody I really love. Why must I put up with this backbencher?"
I once went to see him when he was working in his bed during the morning.
And there was Rufus - either Rufus 1 or Rufus 2 -
lying across his ankles.
There was his ginger cat on his lap.
And Toby the budgerigar was sitting on his head.
And there he was dictating away some immensely important document to a secretary
and three animals were hopping round him. Very moving.
Churchill loved watching films in his own cinema at Chartwell.
His favourite actress was Vivien Leigh.
He invited Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to lunch.
I remember going into the dining room and seeing Vivien Leigh sitting beside Churchill
and he was just looking at her.
And he said to her, quite naturally, "All I want is just to look at you."
And you realised that he was spellbound by her beauty.
In February 1950 there was a General Election. The Conservatives lost.
Clementine had warned him that he had not been giving of his best.
She wrote, "I have felt chilled by the knowledge that you do only as much as will keep you in power.
"That is not enough in these hard and anxious times."
Within 18 months, there was another General Election.
The changing mood of the country pointed to a change of government .
'They made a night of it, sensing a Conservative victory was on the way.
My mother viewed another term for him as Prime Minister,
and for her as the wife of the Prime Minister, with misgiving.
She felt that my father wasn't what he was.
The strain of the war had been tremendous and it took its toll.
She accepted what the ballot-box said with, I think, a sinking heart.
I changed at the end of October 1951
from being Private Secretary to Attlee to being Private Secretary to Churchill.
And, of course, people said to me, "You must find a great difference between the two Prime Ministers."
And I had a party-piece all ready. I'd say, "Yes, a great difference.
"You can hardly imagine it. On the one hand - decisive, firm, quick, rapid.
"He will say, 'Very good!' 'Certainly!' or 'No.'
"And then on the other hand, someone's saying, 'I think I'll look at that later.'
"Or 'Bring it down to Chartwell'."
When I said "Chartwell", there'd be a sort of double-take.
And suddenly they'd realise it was Churchill putting things off
and Attlee who was decisive and quick.
He assembled a new staff but stuck to his old habits.
There'd be a call for a secretary to come to the bathroom
and you'd identify yourself outside by a cough.
And he'd say, "Don't come in!" and you'd think, "I don't WANT to!"
And you'd stand outside and you'd hear wonderful bathroom noises.
You'd envisage the sponge being squeezed over the head.
And he'd call out, "Don't go away!" and you'd say, "I'm still here!"
And the bathing would go on. And sometimes one wasn't needed. He'd forgotten what he wanted to say.
I was putting things on his desk or something in the study,
which was just outside his bedroom at Chartwell,
and a voice yelled out, "Miss, I'm coming out in a state of nature. You'd better watch it!"
And I fled as fast as I could, because there were some things one really...
We were all of us quite young girls at that time.
There was no air of salaciousness.
And he would go into his bedroom, which was next door,
and he would be wearing his siren suit for work.
He always wore that, with the zip up the front.
And I was allowed to help him get it off his shoulders.
He would unzip it down to the waist and I would help him get it off.
Then the rest he did himself.
He was so sweet.
I remember one night he said to me, "You're very young. Are you 21 ?"
I wasn't. And he said, "When you're 21, I'll let you take the whole of my siren suit off."
ORGAN MUSIC
In June 1953, the new queen was crowned.
She persuaded Churchill, now Sir Winston, to accept the Knighthood of the Garter.
He'd been offered it in 1945 and had refused it with the words,
"I don't think it's appropriate to accept the Order of the Garter from my sovereign
"when his people have just given me the Order of the Boot."
But he did accept it the second time from the Queen.
Churchill's main concern was the military might of Russia.
His dream was to save mankind from a third World War.
His means - a Big Three summit.
When Stalin died in 1953, it was to his successor, Malenkov, he turned.
He really believed that he had a mission. This was the truth.
He had a mission to be as successful in peace as in war.
He had illusions about our potential power in the world, if only we'd managed it properly.
And he thought he could talk to the Russians as equals
and somehow persuade them to behave properly.
Winston's idea of a summit really was a meeting alone with Malenkov,
without officials and without agenda, he used to say.
This was thought a dangerous thing.
I think people were very much afraid he might give things away,
make concessions, weaken the resolution of the West and upset our main ally.
Churchill went to see Eisenhower, the new President of the US.
Churchill believed they could end the Cold War.
By June 1953, Churchill had exhausted himself again.
During a visit from the Italian PM, he was taken ill at a banquet.
When I went up to my father, I realised something was wrong. He was dazed and incoherent.
I'm afraid people thought he'd had rather too much to drink.
In fact, he had sustained a stroke.
Despite this, Churchill held a Cabinet meeting next morning, then left for Chartwell.
The secret of the fact that he had had a major stroke was amazingly well kept.
The reason, really, for it was that my father walked unaided from the door of Number 10 into his car,
but by the time he got to Chartwell, he had to be carried out of the car.
Then during the next few days, his stroke got...
the effects of the stroke became more marked and he became practically helpless.
He was partially paralysed. He couldn't use his left side.
So his walking was very, very... In fact, he could hardly walk.
His speech was slurred, but his brain was clear.
He recovered much quicker than what is thought.
He had his stroke on the Wednesday. Lord Moran said to me he didn't think he'd last the weekend.
But he started to make a remarkable recovery.
Newspaper owners agreed to keep the truth from the public.
I assumed, with everyone else, that he would now resign from office.
But then he said he would go on if he could recover well enough to make a good speech
to the Conservative Party Conference at Margate in October.
LADY SOAMES: We were all in a frightful sweat.
My mother longed for him to resign.
To make this an excuse - it would have been comprehensible to all.
A few years ago, nationalisation among socialists...
Everyone was looking at him, and those of us who were in the know even more closely.
You couldn't detect a thing. It was a very good speech.
If I stay on for the time being, bearing the burden at my age,
it is not because of love for power or office.
I have had an ample share of both.
If I stay, it is because I have a feeling that I may, through things that have happened,
have an influence on what I care about above all else: the building of a sure and lasting peace.
Churchill now redoubled his efforts to persuade Malenkov, the Russian leader, to agree to a summit.
It failed because the Russians sent such rude answers to his efforts.
Not for the first time, we were saved by Russian obtuseness. They just brushed him off.
Mind you, they were probably just as aware as we were of Britain's weak position -
that we were bankrupt and all that. And they didn't think it was such a big do to have the British PM.
They were interested in the US.
Churchill crossed the Atlantic again to press Eisenhower to hold a summit
but the Americans were no more interested than the Russians.
He now reluctantly accepted Britain's diminished role.
General Eisenhower is at the head of your country
at the time when your country has been called upon to become the head of the world.
On his 80th birthday, Churchill was given a Graham Sutherland portrait
by his former rival, Clement Attlee.
'On behalf of both Houses of Parliament, Prime Minister, I ask you to accept this portrait.'
WARM APPLAUSE
When it came to the actual unveiling of the portrait,
there was an audible gasp from the audience,
and clearly it was quite a shock to my grandparents.
And my grandfather, when he got up to reply, dealt with it in an absolutely brilliant manner.
The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art.
LAUGHTER
It was painted in sickly yellows and greens with a hint of a fly button undone.
And...it was very sad, in fact,
that such a splendid occasion should have been upset by this reaction.
The portrait was later destroyed by Lady Churchill.
My mother was perfectly dignified and simple.
She said, "I saw that it tormented your father,
"and I promised him that it would never see the light of day."
There were now rumblings that it was time for Churchill to step down.
He was finding it difficult to concentrate.
He certainly took less interest than before in detail and in matters he didn't find attractive,
and he left MUCH more empowered to other people.
They provided him with all the equipment they thought he needed
and one of them was a great series of tags which they put on his desk.
He'd used them greatly from 1940-45.
They said "Action this day" and had been put on a number of minutes.
But he never once used them in 1951-55. They lay there on his desk but were never used.
He was losing his grip and not really caring.
Of course he cared deeply for his country and so on,
but he was just like an old man who'd had enough, I thought.
But Churchill was in no hurry to go,
much to the frustration of Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, who was the acknowledged Crown Prince.
Anthony was getting extremely impatient.
He had been promised the office several times, but Churchill always found a reason not to go.
One being, "I have to go and talk to the Russian leaders."
He thought he was a better leader than his Crown Prince.
What was it he once muttered?
"I remind Anthony Mr Gladstone formed his last admin. at 81."
..and thus make easier the discussions of all the difficult matters and events
which will arise from month to month in the next few years.
Eden came to hate Churchill, and after the war, he hated him all the more for blocking him.
There was great ill feeling between the two, of which probably Churchill was not so conscious.
He put it to the back of his mind.
Churchill simply wanted to stay as long as possible,
because he thought he'd be very lonely without the daily boxes.
He was afraid of giving up because of the terrible depressions he had
when he did cease to be busy and in the full flood of activity.
I think Churchill found it impossible to give up
so long as he was capable, in his own opinion, of carrying on.
I remember Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, coming up in the lift...
He had been driven to the end of his tether by interference from Downing Street in foreign affairs.
And he was saying, "This time I will resign. This is resignation."
And we were all sitting on tenterhooks in the office, and the door was shut.
10 minutes later the Foreign Sec emerged and he had NOT resigned.
They all saw he'd had several strokes and he really ought to go,
but they none of them had the guts to go and say to him
that he should get out. It's difficult to understand
what a great man Churchill had been a few years before,
and how this made him almost like a god. You didn't talk to gods in a rough way.
'With a characteristic cigar clutched in his hand, Churchill sets out to tender his resignation
'to the young queen.'
In April 1955, Churchill finally decided to resign.
'The night before, he had been host to the Queen at 10, Downing Street.
'The statesman who had served as a subaltern in the reign of the Queen's great-great-grandmother
'and who had served in political office in the five reigns since...'
One dream remained unfulfilled - to see the end of Soviet tyranny. He'd prophesied communism would fail.
The soul of man, frozen in a long night,
can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where,
and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression
is on trial for its life. People in bondage need never despair.
Over the next few years, the South of France became a second home.
He stayed at the Villa La Pausa,
near Monte Carlo, as the guest of his publisher, Emery Reves, and his American wife, Wendy.
Wendy had a wonderful sparkle.
She devoted herself to his needs. A charming conversationalist,
she looked after him in a most delightful way.
Her nickname was "the champagne kitten". She was enormously bubbly and terribly fond of him
and did everything to make him happier.
I could call him, "Monkey-pie!" or "You bad boy!" I could tease him.
I would say, "Good morning, darling! How are you today?"
Or I would say, "My, are you hungry, eh?" I could tease him.
I could push him, I could pat him, I could shake him.
He liked it, you see. No-one ever did that. He felt terribly loved here.
She mothered him.
I remember once he was upset about something or other,
and she took his head in her arms and cradled him and he adored it.
He was so happy here that, as you know, he came back again and again.
The first time he came for 10 days. He stayed three weeks.
In the last years he was staying more here than in England.
Tongues had begun to wag, not only behind people's backs.
One day at luncheon, a female guest, seeing Churchill appeared to have nodded off, said,
"What a pity such a great man should end his days with Wendy Reves."
Suddenly one eye opened and Churchill said, "Wendy is three things you will never be.
"She is young. She is beautiful. And she is kind."
And then the eye closed. Inevitably, such gossip took its toll.
Churchill's family became unhappy with his long visits to the Reves's.
The family concluded he should take a break from that background
because he wasn't seeing enough of old friends and family.
The occasion for that was when he went for a cruise on Onassis's yacht.
The Reves were not included and, understandably, they were hurt.
Onassis had cabled me with a list of potential guests on the cruise.
I had to reply with, "This is quite OK, but Lady Churchill suggests the Reves should not be included."
I had to play the not very agreeable role of the surgeon.
As Churchill grew older,
his links with the past brought him happy and nostalgic moments.
He went to Harrow, his old school.
He was still honoured as a world statesman.
He was still an MP, returned by his faithful constituents in Epping.
Frail though he was, he would go regularly to the Commons, listening to debates, but rarely speaking.
In 1964, aged 89, Churchill retired. He had been an MP for 60 years.
I'd found him very unhappy and melancholy. He was sitting brooding.
I asked him why he was so unhappy. This was after his retirement.
And I pointed to his extraordinary achievements
both in politics and in the armed forces, having won the war.
If you can put it down to a single man, it was he.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, a large family who loved him, and he was popular.
He'd had a life given to few people. Why was he so gloomy?
And he said, "Yes, you're right.
"I have worked very hard all my life and I have achieved a great deal...
"in the end, to achieve nothing."
What he meant was that his ideal was a strong and united British Empire and Commonwealth
in a totally peaceful world.
Of his last year his daughter, Mary, wrote, "The pace of his life is like a weary river meandering on.
"Sometimes he withdrew a great distance from us.
"Who knows what thoughts crossed his consciousness from his long life."
He said he didn't like old age. "Old age is intolerable."
Oh, yes, I think he was very sad.
Fortunately, his eyesight was good and he was able to read.
He enjoyed Hornblower enormously.
I went to lunch with him in the garden,
and he was in a sort of reminiscing mood about things and happenings.
And...and he said to me, "I have done my bit.
"I should be allowed to depart in peace."
And it was terrible, because you realised that there was nothing any more that he could do.
Therefore he didn't want to go on.
The end was not the greatest time for him.
In January 1965, Churchill suffered a massive stroke and went into a coma.
The crowds gathered for news outside his home in London.
I chiefly remember the great sort of stillness in our house
and the throng of people outside.
A totally quiet crowd, but a very sad one.
And also the feeling as the days went by that, in a way,
the whole world seemed to be...with us.
And...um, inside the house it was very peaceful.
My poor father just really faded away over a series of days. He became deeply unconscious.
And yet I know that until a very short time before his death,
the nurses used to tell me that they knew that HE knew when my mother was by his side.
She used to sit there for hours holding his hand. It was a very peaceful scene.
He had a dear orange kitten, and that used to lie curled up on his bed,
and we used to come in and out, and the grandchildren came up to say their goodbyes.
My children were rather small, but I'm glad they saw him looking so peaceful.
One of them said, "I don't think I shall ever be frightened of death."
And then he died about 8 o'clock on Sunday 24th January, 1965.
MUSIC: "The Funeral March"
Approaching the West Door, I saw an enormous marble plaque on the floor
and on it the legend, "Remember Winston Churchill."
I thought to myself, "How could anyone forget him?
"The man who not only saved Britain, but saved the whole world from Nazi domination."
Last time I spoke to you
I quoted the lines of Longfellow
which President Roosevelt had written out for me in his own hand.
I have some other lines, which are well-known,
but which seem apt and appropriate to our fortunes tonight.
And I believe they will be so judged
wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies.
"For while the tired waves vainly breaking
"Seem here no painful inch to gain,
"Far back, through creeks and inlets making
"Come silent, flooding in, the main
"And not by eastern windows only,
"When daylight comes, comes in the light;
"In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
"But westward, look, the land is bright."