Fifty years ago, the nation said farewell to Winston Churchill in a sombre state funeral that culminated with a dignitary-packed send-off at St Paul's Cathedral.
Over the years, the British bulldog had a long if unusual relationship with Leicester and Leicestershire. Cat Turnell has this potted history.
1 In 1923, Winston Churchill stood for election in Leicester. How did it come about? The truth was revealed as the great statesman was being buried.
WT Whittle, a farmer for Earl Dysart, at Leicester Abbey, was an Abbey ward Liberal councillor and a proud Churchillian.
It was him alone who wrote to Churchill, urging him to stand for Leicester West. Churchill, intrigued, invited Mr Whittle to his home in London.
After dinner, and a number of drinks and cigars, the seed was planted in Churchill's mind.
The story was relayed by Leslie Whittle, one of Mr Whittle's sons, of Sandfields Farm in Rothley. He also told the Mercury about his own part in Churchill's election campaign.
"I was 16 at the time. My father, of course, helped me a lot in the campaign and Mrs Churchill wanted to get quickly from a meeting at Ingle Street School to De Montfort Hall for the count.
"Three of us boys were in his car with my father, and we each took it in turns to run in front and show the way.
"Churchill thought it was great fun and laughingly pulled us into the moving car when we had to jump back in.
"After the election he sent me a letter in his own handwriting to thank me, but, unfortunately, it got lost over the years."
2 Churchill's campaign headquarters was based at the old Liberal Club in Bishop Street. He was fighting the Leicester West seat against the Conservative candidate Captain Arthur Instone and Socialist prospect Frederick Pethick-Lawrence.
A local song at the time went: "Vote, vote, vote for Pethick-Lawrence, chuck old Churchill in the sea."
A week ahead of the ballot, Churchill was speaking at a rally when he was urged to stand on a chair so he could be seen and heard more easily.
"I obey your demand," he responded, "and hope I may take this as a forecast of your decision to provide me with a seat."
His ambition was thwarted. It was Pethick-Lawrence, an Eton- and Cambridge-educated Londoner, who got elected. On polling day, December 6, 1923, he received 13,634 votes, Churchill received 9,236.
3 In 1910, at a Liberal rally headed by Winston Churchill, Leicester man Alfred Hawkins interrupted the meeting by speaking up for the suffragist cause, which was by then gaining slow momentum.
Alfred was unsympathetically dealt with by Churchill's lackeys. He was swiftly led from the meeting, physically picked up and thrown down a flight of stairs. The awful impact broke both of Alfred's legs.
The rally, at St George's Hall in Bradford, was held on November 26, 1910.
In the Leicester Chronicle and Leicestershire Mercury of Saturday, April 1, 1911, it was reported Alfred had received £100 damages for his injuries.
Alfred, of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage (sic), was a passionate social reformer. He was also married to Leicester suffragist Alice Hawkins.
4 It's a foggy Saturday in Melton in January, 1913. Two cars, each driven by a member of the local hunting set, collide, and from the wreckage of the write-offs emerges Mrs Clementine Churchill, with cuts all over her face.
Mrs Churchill, Winston's wife, was riding in Admiral Beatty's car when it struck that of Captain Burns Hartopp, travelling in the opposite direction.
"Mrs Churchill was on a visit to Admiral and Miss David Beatty at Brooksby Hall, their Leicestershire hunting box, and was accompanying Admiral Beatty and Mr Peto towards Melton," reads the report in The Dundee Courier of January 20.
"The cars were so badly wrecked that one had to be towed towards Melton and the other removed on a trolley. Mrs Churchill was fortunate to escape with a few cuts on the face."
5 After the city blitz of November 19, 1940, which left 108 dead, Leicester Chamber of Commerce wrote anxiously to Winston Churchill, asking for defences against the Luftwaffe. We don't know if there was a letter in response, but Leicester, very soon after, got its anti-aircraft guns.
6 It's wartime and a carriage carrying the prime minister pauses briefly at Leicester Railway Station. The surroundings are immediately familiar to Winston.
"Leicester! I once fought an election there," he says, looking out, "but they didn't want me."
7 In 1945, with the Allies emerging as victors of the Second World War, the Corporation of Leicester sought to bestow on Winston the title of Freeman of the City. It was not to be.
The motion in the late 1940s was turned down by a trio of Labour councillors.
8 The heavily mustachioed Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill was a son of the Duke of Marlborough. He was also an MP and the British Chancellor very briefly between August and December 1886. But, above all that, he was Winston's dad.
And old Randolph, it may interest you to know, once stood – presumably on a ladder or platform – on the corner of Pocklington's Walk and Millstone Lane in Leicester. He was there to unveil a plaque on the building which once housed Leicester's old register office.
"Imperium et libertas" reads the Latin engraving in the terracotta, which can still be seen until this day. "This stone was laid by the right honourable Randolph Spencer Churchill on the 21st day of June 1893."
9 During the election campaign of 1923, the Leicester Mercury declared its political independence.
But it took a brush between Winston Churchill and the Mercury's editor, Vernon Hewitt, to establish it. Churchill had met Hewitt and pleaded with him so the paper would give the Liberal candidate, aka him, its endorsement. Churchill promised that once the Liberals were in power he would give Hewitt whatever he desired. Hewitt, a real newspaper man, declined.
Hewitt had been in the job a matter of days after taking the position on the retirement of Harry Hackett, who had been editor for 45 years.
Hewitt had instead invited the three candidates to give a message on "Why I shall win," said the reporter tasked with collecting the candidates' words, revealed an article in 1964. Churchill was the only one to decline.
"My compliments to the editor," he said, "but I won't have anything to do with that matter."
10 It's Sunday, October 28, 1906. Winston is in Leicestershire at a concert in aid of the blind at Glen Parva.
The journeyman MP, then representing Oldham, told the crowd how he'd often heard it asked whether civilisation was wrong in caring for the weakest, and breaking the code for the survival of the fittest.
He said, with the greatest certainty, reported The Western Times, that the stronger the nation, the more it would care for those who are weak and the stronger it would become.
"What are we to think of science if it only produced larger cannons, greater heaps of gold and faster motor cars?" he asked.
"If that was all science was to give humanity, well," said Winston, "a lot of wise men have wasted a lot of time."
11 In the days after Churchill's death in 1965, readers paid their tributes in the Leicester Mercury.
"I cannot help thinking that the lovely sunny January day of Churchill's death, which made it almost like spring, was a tribute to Sir Winston Churchill," wrote Jessie Briggs, of Holmfield Road in Leicester.
"When Churchill came to Leicester in 1923, I was the little girl who presented a bouquet to Mrs Churchill as they alighted from the train.
"I remember most vividly her kissing me and Sir Winston shaking my small hand in his strong one, then walking out of the station into the yard.
"There, a great mob of people shouted: 'We don't want you here'.
"I was most perplexed, as a welcome had just been given.
"Perhaps the Mr Churchill of those days was not wanted as a Liberal MP for West Leicester, but later, the whole nation was to need him for their survival.
"I joined in Sunday's sunny but sad tribute to a great man, feeling proud I once held his hand."
12 On the day of the funeral, the Mercury reported, "lights went out all over Leicester Market as the people of the city paid a last silent tribute to Sir Winston Churchill.
"In the Market Place traders stopped serving and customers stood in homage. Just before the Town Hall struck 11am, the lights of the market were switched off and the busy, noisy scene slowly became silent and still.
"Men doffed their hats and women stood with their open handbags as, for the first Saturday morning for years, the chimes of the Town Hall clock was clearly heard in the market."
13 A letter written by Churchill went under the auctioneer's hammer at Christie's in the summer of 2010. It sold for £2,000.
The typed letter, dated August 24, 1909, was sent to Churchill's former assistant private secretary, Eliot Crawshay-Williams, who became MP for Leicester the following year.
Churchill was giving a talk on social reform at the Palace Theatre in Belgrave Gate on September 4 and growing increasingly anxious about it.
"The principal thing about which I am concerned for the Leicester meeting is the disturbances by women," he wrote. "I hope you will see that all proper precautions are taken, that no women are allowed in the meeting unless vouched for." He also warned of attempts to rush the doors. "This last [one] has been a feature of previous meetings."
He also gave detailed instructions for measures including "a sufficiency of stewards", a thorough search of the building, that "the roof as well as all cupboards and recesses being properly examined", and a police presence in the street.
14 Agnes Clarke was a writer and novelist. She was born in Leicester in 1870 and wrote for the Leicester Guardian, the Midlands Free Press and the Leicester Pioneer.
She was paid up with the Independent Labour Party and the Women's Social and Political Union. It was as a member of the latter organisation that she attempted to speak with Winston Churchill, during one of his visits to Leicester.
It didn't go so well. A policeman man-handled her out of the way. But not before Winston had seen the event and been appalled by it.
Many years later she recalled "being taken in charge by a tall policeman with red hair for the heinous crime of attempting to speak to Winston Churchill. Thanks to his kindly interposition on my behalf, I was released and felt very sorry for the abashed policeman."
15 The venue: Ingle Street School, Dane Hills, Leicester. The date Monday, November 25, 1923. The event: Winston Churchill is trying to improve his chances with the electorate. The upshot: An elderly lady was having none of it.
It had all started promisingly enough.
Winston had led an impressive speech on how the government had rushed to the electors "with the cry that Protection was the only cure for unemployment".
The Liberal party was against that policy, said Winston, so too the Socialistic remedy of a Capital Levy.
"If they took away from capital the suggested huge sum of 3,000 million there would undoubtedly be an enormous crash in credit."
And this, he said, wasn't a matter of theory. Oh no. This had already happened. In Switzerland. Last year. When their currency fell below the value of France's.
Mr Churchill, reported the Taunton Courier, was just about to continue.
"Let us have your programme: That is what we want," interrupted a woman. "You have not got one."
At this, there was laughter from the crowd. Churchill was not to let the matter go without a response.
"Here is a lady who not only comes to listen," he said, "but to dictate what I am to say."
Cue more laughter.
At this, another person spoke up, "She is right - it's your programme we want."
Churchill responded by saying he would deal with the Labour, Liberal and Conservative programmes in his own time - but no sooner had he begun he was interrupted by another man.
"She the woman has hardly stopped in one moment and in that one moment you shove your oar in," he said, exasperated.
The crowd laughed harder at this.
"If you don't leave the lady alone I will soon settle you," piped up the voice of another woman.
The laughing continued, but Winston continued on his speech about the perils of Protection.
"It would not only mean higher cost of living and greater difficulties for every home, but in addition there would be falling off of employment."
At this the whole room burst into laughter and derision, reported the Taunton Courier.