GREAT BRITAIN: To a Faithful Friend

In the gloomy, Gothic grandeur of Westminster Abbey, Britain’s most hallowed shrine, Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee stepped up to a simple wrought-iron stand and drew back an American flag from a shallow niche beside the west door. They uncovered a three-foot-high marble tablet, crowned with an American eagle and inscribed:

“To the honored memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945. A faithful friend of freedom and of Britain, four times President of the United States. Erected by the Government of the United Kingdom.”

In a tribute unique in British history, Franklin Roosevelt had become the first head of a foreign state whose name joined those of Britain’s illustrious dead of seven centuries. * The tablet in the abbey is considered even more of a tribute than the statue of Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square visited by hundreds of Britons every day.

Churchill, in a brief speech, noted that Macaulay once described the abbey as a temple of reconciliation, where enmities of the past lay buried. Then, in a voice he could hardly control, Churchill said:

“Now it is not an ending of enmities we celebrate. This tablet to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaims a growth of enduring friendship and a rebirth of brotherhood between two great nations upon whose wisdom, valor and fortitude the future of humanity in no small degree depends.”

* Roosevelt’s plaque shares the wall by the west door with a statue of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, 1666-1732; a statue to William Pitt the Younger; a memorial to Jeremiah Horrocks, d. 1641 (who “detected the long inequality in the mean motion of Jupiter and Saturn”), and one to the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury.