You could see the difficulty in assembling a programme to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death. How to convey something of the vast, emblematic spectacle that was his funeral through the medium of sound? In the event, William Crawley’s half-hour (23 January) concentrated on the highly unpretentious churchyard at Bladon, Oxfordshire, where, in the company of several other Spencer-Churchills, he was laid to rest – a notably understated tomb (although Blenheim, it must be said, was visible through the trees) and, as one of Crawley’s interviewees remarked, “everything he was not”.If the thought that Churchill lies buried across the way from a pair of unnamed local children was in sharp contrast to the pageantry that attended his
29 January 2015, The Tablet
Summoning ghosts
Churchill’s Grave, BBC Radio 4
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