As the New Year of 1965 began, Cecil was to be found living at Pelham Place in London and Broadchalke with his friend, Kin, met in San Francisco during Cecil's work on the Warner Brothers film of My Fair Lady. Cecil had persuaded Kin to give up his life in San Francisco and to come to London to study at the Courtauld Institute. Kin had arrived in the summer of 1964, so they had been ensconced together for some six months, by and large happily, though Cecil had to make certain changes to his life and should perhaps have made more. Hardly had the New Year opened than the news broke that Sir Winston Churchill, who had reached his 90th birthday on 30 November 1964, had suffered a cerebral thrombosis and was suffering circulatory weakness following a cold. His elderly doctor, Lord Moran, became a familiar sight on television news broadcasts and in the newspapers, emerging in his dark overcoat and Homburg hat from Churchill's home in Hyde Park Gate to deliver the latest bulletin. The country waited nervously for the great man to die. As his daughter, Mary Soames, put it, "We marched about the parks in the grey chill days, killing time, while time killed him." Cecil was now back, working in England, and regularly took the train from Waterloo to Salisbury, escaping from the busy round of London life to the tranquillity of his garden at Broadchalke.

Sitting in the train, he would look out for a small house near the railway line, with a sign in the window advertising "Brides." He would look at it wistfully and say, "There but for the grace of God go I!" It was the height of chic for a bride to be photographed by Cecil and relatively rare. He took the official photographs at the wedding of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones in May 1960, and from time to time, for old friends, he would make an exception and become a bride photographer. Cecil loved Lord and Lady Lambton for their originality and eccentricity, and for their complete disdain for normal conventions. But he was also a little nervous, for he remembered that it was Tony Lambton's Aunt Violet, the Countess of Ellesmere, who had thrown his sister, Nancy, who had been brought there in innocence by Stephen Tennant, out of her ball in 1928, causing an enormous society row, known as the "Ellesmere Ball" scandal, which occupied columns of print in the society papers in the summer of 1928. Thus any connection with the Lambtons caused Cecil to remember his earlier social insecurity. This was wholly one-sided. The Lambtons found such attitudes hard to understand though they identified it in Cecil.

Lucinda Lambton, then aged 21, Lord Lambton's eldest daughter, was marrying Henry Harrod, elder son of Sir Roy Harrod, the economist and author of biographies of John Maynard Keynes, and The Prof, about F. A. Lindemann, and his wife, Wilhelmine ("Billa") Cresswell, who in old age became a friend of the Prince of Wales. The young Harrods had two children, Henry Barnaby, born in July that year, and Nathaniel, born in March 1967. The marriage was to last eight years, ending in divorce in 1973. FENTON, NORTHUMBERLAND 20 JANUARY 1965 Came up on the night sleeper for Lucy's wedding. Awful effort and every journey is a nail in coffin but am devoted to the family and felt I should make the effort. Also I knew, with so many eccentric personalities involved, it would be amusing.

And it was. A pre-nuptial gaiety in cold dark King's Cross Station with Lucian Freud and Ann [Fleming], Paddy Leigh Fermor and Joan, Ali F. [Forbes] etc. Arrival in north before daylight, cold, bleak moor scenery, Cheviot Hills, and our goal a turreted black and white Gothic house with light blazing in every window, and they had been blazing since five o'clock this morning when the chefs had started cooking for the wedding breakfast. Fires were also blazing in the hearth of every room and the corridors.