Biography | Winston Churchill — Buried in This Village Churchyard at Bladon

People remember the state funeral at St Paul's and forget where the coffin actually stopped.

After the service on 30 January 1965, the body travelled by river to Waterloo, then by train to Hanborough, then by road to this churchyard above the village of Bladon.

Churchill had asked to be buried here, near Blenheim, among the Spencer-Churchill graves that already held his parents.

He had died on 24 January 1965 at his London house, ninety years old, seventy years to the day after Lord Randolph.

The London house is a private address and is not the pin.

The public pin is St Martin's, a parish church whose yard takes in Blenheim's village dead as well as dukes' younger children.

The burial itself was private, as Clementine Churchill wished. Relatives and close friends stood with the rector while a bearer party from the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars carried the coffin.

Clementine was laid in the same tomb in 1977.

The stone is plain. The church later added a south-side stained-glass window for the fiftieth anniversary of his death, because the interior had no memorial of its own.

The churchyard is open. Keep to posted hours, keep voices down, and do not photograph other visitors at the graves.

From the porch you can still see how short the road is back to the palace gates. The life that began in a side room at Blenheim ended, by his own instruction, in the village churchyard just outside the park wall.

Photo: St Martin's Church, Bladon, Wikimedia Commons