A STATUE OF WINSTON

“And in an age when people are pulling statues down…” said Sir Winston Churchill’s great grandson, rather grandly, “We’re putting one up!”

The small crowd of onlookers cheered. Sammy and I looked at each other, silently contemplating. I have a feeling we know people who would think rather differently to Winston Churchill’s great grandson about whether the world needed another statue of the great man. Or indeed, whether Sir Winston was really even that great in the grand scheme of things.

But this was the grounds of Blenheim Palace, and here in a small circle of gravel under a yew tree, a bronze sculpture of Sir Winston was being unveiled, applauded, and quite appositely, given three cheers.

In fact quite a few of his great grandchildren had come for the ceremony. You could spot them because weirdly, they sort of looked exactly like him. And in ways that I never can quite believe is purely down to the tincture of one’s blood, they also carried an air of long-forgotten aristocracy - and nothing marked out the Spencer-Churchills quite like that did.

We had tagged along. I really wanted to know why there were so many folks in tweed and ties about, and certainly why a young Blenheim Palace employee was testing a small PA system out next to a yew tree and a large object under a cloth. We quickly worked out that it was 150 years since the birth of Winston Churchill, and that clearly the small  collection of lookalikes must have had something to do with it. So we nosily joined in, during our day at Blenheim, looking just about as out-of-place as it gets.

In a way, Churchill straddles two distinct worlds. One, the old Imperial Britain, into which he was born, and the other, the more modern Britain that we live in, the one that gave way to a new Western world of America and Cold War and a flickering East. It’s no wonder he’s divisive. He sits at the fulcrum point between the two, rooted in an archaic sort of belief system, fitting the war for the right of everything to change.

Now here he was in bronze, sculpted as an artist, posed forever painting the view ahead of him. The crowd applauded. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough bristled with pride, and Sir Winston Churchill’s great grandson safely joked about putting up a statue in a world where people were pulling them down. He knew his audience. Of course he did.