Pic taken with Instagram
Looking South on Cornwall Road, London SE1 8TW from outside Konditor & Cook‘s Waterloo bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Under the railway bridge at Waterloo East looking North up Cornwall Street. Foreground: Konditor and Cook bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Spotted another Morris 1000 – this time a saloon parked on Whittlesey Street – an original Victorian London terrace that survived the wartime bombing of nearby Waterloo Station intact.
Anxious looking tourists sit down on the Northern Line tube at Waterloo, hoping they’re on the right train. They got out again at Leicester Square looking pleased and relieved…
Winston Churchill’s state funeral on 30th January 1965 – the biggest public event London’s seen in my lifetime – was covered live by BBC TV on an unprecedented scale with 36 cameras along the funeral route. “We were seeing London as it had never been seen before and perhaps as we might never see it again. Tears were never far away…” as the DVD blurb puts it.
The full four hours with realtime commentary by Richard Dimbleby is available on the BBC Archive pages and has fascinating glimpses of what London – and Londoners – looked like at the time. On the downside that footage is broadcast-quality, which back then meant the blurry, black and white, VHF 425-line resolution of BBC One. Throw in low-bandwidth Flash encoding for the web and half the time it’s hard to see any detail of what’s going on. So instead I’ve posted this clip from YouTube (above) which is better quality than Auntie’s Archive, though on the downside it’s savagely edited down to just under three minutes of highlights.
I was at school in France and got the morning off lessons to watch the coverage. It’s the final stretch of the funeral route that stays with everyone most vividly. Actually it’s almost impossible to watch with a dry eye – as Winston makes his last river journey by launch from Tower Hill up the Thames to Festival Pier and Waterloo. The dockers’ cranes dipping in salute, the jet fighter fly-past, the young soldiers standing stiffy to attention around the coffin.
And 1965 London as we’d never seen it before – and would never see it again.
