Crowds cheered the Former Prime Minister's coffin as it was driven to Palace of Westminster yesterday
Private memorial service for family and senior MPs held in Chapel of St Mary Undercroft beneath Parliament
Chaplain kept overnight vigil with coffin as parliamentarians given chance to pay their respects to Thatcher
At last, she was coming back to where she belonged.
Through busy streets, past some of the landmarks of her time in office, Baroness Thatcher was returned to Parliament yesterday, scene of some of her greatest triumphs.
After so long out of the public eye, the former prime minister was allowed to take centre stage again on this, the first leg of her final journey.
There were no military bands, no massed crowds lining the streets, and none of the pomp and ceremony that will accompany her funeral today.
But the 30 minutes it took to transport her coffin across London was a prelude to Lady Thatcher’s last stand – her return to the Palace of Westminster, the battleground where she made her name.
It began with her coffin being placed into a standard hearse at a funeral directors’ headquarters in North London and draped in a Union Jack.
Then five motorcycle outriders and a shadowing police helicopter escorted it through the capital’s busy weekday traffic to a splendid, temporary resting place in readiness for the big day.
In defiance of the anarchy threatened for her funeral, the journey was punctuated by simple ripples of applause, and even provoked a few cheers along the way.
Cars came to a standstill as drivers realised this was no ordinary procession.
Tourists, passers-by and a scattering of spectators suddenly found themselves witnessing a moment in history.
Untypical among them was artist Kaya Mar, 57, holding a symbolic painting of Lady Thatcher and what he called ‘Britain’s haves and have-nots’.
He arrived in Britain more than three decades ago from Turkey and France when the Labour-run country was crippled by strikes and left stinking with uncollected rubbish on the streets.
‘I am a socialist,’ Mr Mar told me. ‘But I know Margaret Thatcher had no choice but to do what she did to get the country running again. One day, sooner or later, England will need another Margaret Thatcher.’
In the distance as he spoke, the hearse was about to pass within sight of Downing Street before driving slowly up to the Lords’ entrance to Parliament.
Here, maybe only by chance, the Iron Lady lay briefly in the shadow of a bronze statue of Richard the Lionheart.
An undertaker lifted a large wreath – a circle of white roses with a hand-written card inscribed: ‘Beloved Mother, Always in our Hearts’ – from the coffin to allow four pall-bearers in black ties to carry the casket inside.
And then, moments before Big Ben sounded the hour, she was gone from public view.
Once, Lady Thatcher would have taken her place inside as the dominant figure at the heart of some rowdy Commons debate, surrounded by baying enemies and noisy allies.
Now, in a solitary coffin beneath the silent, vaulted emptiness of an ornate crypt, she was alone. For the next 18 hours, ahead of today’s procession to St Paul’s, she was scheduled to remain in the marble and stone surroundings of the chapel of St Mary Undercroft, deep beneath St Stephen’s Hall.
The chapel spans more than 700 years of history, and yesterday, 87 of them belonged to Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
They call it Parliament’s ‘hidden gem’, a prized jewel in the palace’s crown. Like its occupant overnight, it was variously challenged by disaster, reform and betrayal.
Fittingly, perhaps, it once became a hiding place for suffragette Emily Davison when, 102 years ago, she secreted herself in a cupboard overnight to be able to record her place of residence for the following day’s census as the House of Commons.
She did not have the right to vote or to stand for Parliament.
Two years later, she would die after stepping in front of the king’s horse during the Epsom Derby as a protest.
Mrs Thatcher would later benefit from Miss Davison’s feminist cause by becoming an MP in 1959.
Now the former prime minister – or ‘stateswoman (retired)’ as her death certificate rather formally described her – lay just a few feet from the brass plaque commemorating the 1911 event.
She wasn’t alone for long though. After a private service attended by her close family – including son Mark and his children Michael, 24, and Amanda, 19, and daughter Carol with her boyfriend Marco Grass – friends and political associates, a stream of them filed by to pay their respects.
During the night the Speaker’s chaplain, the Rev Rose Hudson-Wilkin, kept a
vigil. Soon, friends and supporters from a nation Lady Thatcher helped to shape will be allowed to say goodbye for the last time.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310155/Near-journeys-end-Baroness-Thatchers-coffin-taken-scene-triumphs-rest-chapel-beneath-Parliament.html
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