Information Related to "First the End of an Empire - Now the End of Britain?"

Audio/Video

First the End of Empire
Now the End of Britain?

Are we witnessing the end of the nation whose people, "relative to their numbers, contributed more to civilization than any other people since the ancient Greeks and Romans"?;

by Melvin Rhodes

I can still remember when the news came over the radio. It was a Sunday morning in late January 1965. Sir Winston Churchill had died.

His funeral was the following Saturday. He was only the second commoner in the history of Great Britain accorded a state funeral, normally reserved for royalty. The first had been for the duke of Wellington, the military genius who thwarted Napoleon's plans for world conquest at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, thereby ushering in a century of Pax Britannica.

Sir Winston had defeated an even greater evil, Hitler's Third Reich. He didn't do it single-handedly, of course, but without him the outcome could have been entirely different.

I remember the silence after the funeral. It was the only time I can remember all the television and radio stations closing down in honor of the great old man to whom Britons owed so much.

Buckingham Palace, London residence of the queen, symbolozes the former gretness of the British Empire. Questions abound about the future of Britain.

People were truly thankful that Winston Churchill had led them to victory in World War II-at a time when everybody else seemed inclined to compromise with
Nazi Germany.

Churchill rejected the honor of a dukedom and turned down the opportunity to be buried in Westminster Abbey along with many other famous Britons. Churchill's funeral was, for Britain, the end of an age.

Ironically, his death came at the end of a 20-year period that had seen the nation reject just about everything he stood for.


Postwar Britain

It had started 20 years earlier, shortly after VE Day. With the European war ended, Churchill called an election. Almost everyone thought his Conservative Party would win. People the world over were shocked when the results came in: The Labour (socialist) Party won by a landslide. Although grateful for Churchill's role as a wartime leader, people had decided they wanted change; they longed for a different world. They didn't want their young men fighting wars in far-off places they had never heard of, nor did they want them coming home to low-paying jobs or unemployment.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn32/endofbritain.htm