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It had also in its time been a hall of fairs and festivities, a hall of the people—and never more so than last week. For 23 hours a day, a two-mile-long queue stretched from Westminster Hall along Millbank, past Horseferry Road and across Lambeth Bridge, then along the South Bank as far as County Hall. In the queue people chatted and swapped war stories of Winston, or told the younger ones what those days had been like. The atmosphere was not so much of sadness as of gratitude for what Churchill had done to save England. There were all sorts: working-class parents carrying their children, housewives and commuter husbands, young fellows and their girl friends, men in dinner jackets and women in evening wraps. Some took nips from hip flasks against the intense cold; others poured hot tea from thermos bottles. It was almost like the old days of the Blitz, when stranger talked to stranger as if they were neighbors.
Oaken Canopy. But on entering the great, drafty hall with its canopy of ancient oak, a great silence enfolded them. Footsteps were muffled by brown carpet, and the crowd divided into two lines, which passed on both sides of the catafalque. At the four corners stood tall candles and, nearly as rigid as the candlesticks, the honor guard, which solemnly changed every 20 minutes. As the people of Britain passed the casket, they dropped flowers—snowdrops, white carnations, daffodils. Before going out into Palace Yard, each one paused and looked back. Often dignitaries would enter the hall through another door. But though the queue shared the hall with Queen Elizabeth, with De Gaulle and Germany's Chancellor Erhard, there was never a stare or a flicker of recognition. Before the casket of Winston Churchill, all mourners were equal.
So it was also in St. Paul's, as the funeral service drew to a close with God Save the Queen. There was a long pause, and then from high in the Whispering Gallery a Royal Horse Guards trumpeter sounded the Last Post, its plaintive notes ascending and echoing round the dome itself. In answer, from across the cathedral, came the bugle call of Reveille played by a Royal Irish Hussar, a hearty and heartening last trump that would have stirred the old warrior's blood.
The great bells of St. Paul's pealed out as the coffin was returned to the gun carriage. Cannon again reverberated. Sixty salutes had already been fired; now came 30 more—one for every year of Churchill's life. Sixty Highland bagpipers from different Scottish regiments piped the coffin down to the wharf at the foot of Tower Hill where Beefeaters in full uniform stood guard. Against the backdrop of Tower Bridge the vast Pool of London lay as still as an inland lake. Across the river great cranes bowed low in touching, mechanical precision. To the piping of a bo'sun's whistle, the coffin went aboard the Havengore, a Royal Navy launch.