It is some time since this site has noted significant dates and it is time to do so again. Yesterday was the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of Spanish Succession and gave Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain. As we know, Gibraltar is still British and its population has no desire to be anything else. Next year we shall all be celebrating the 300th anniversary.
Today, on the other hand is an anniversary of greater sadness: the death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965. The idea that any readier of this posting might not know a great deal about him is preposterous (though there is no need for all those bogus quotes). The picture is not of him but of his funeral, the cranes of London docks bowing as the Havengore takes his body to Waterloo station, a moving and unforgettable sight.
ADDENDUM: I have just been reminded of something I ought to have remembered anyway. Today is also the anniversary of the death of Lord Randolph Churchill, who died exactly seventy years before his son.
I’ll provide a Churchill quote, if I may, that encapsulates so much of my current thinking, not only with respect to the monarchy but also in relation to the misguided plans to ‘democratise’ the House of Lords: ‘The Crown is important not so much for the power it wields, but for the power it denies others.’
Do you have a source for it, Stephen?
Oh, dear! I may have been scammed. I thought the quotation enjoyed the imprimatur of the Churchill Centre’s Twitter feed, but upon closer examination it was posted by the British Monarchist League on its Facebook page. My bad.
Not sure I accept their imprimatur.