On the south wall of St Nicholas Church, a painted stone monument commemorates Sir Henry Winston, Lord of the Manor of Standish, who died in February 1609 at the age of forty-seven. His wife Lady Dionise, daughter of Sir George Bond of London, died just weeks later in March, aged forty-four. The couple were buried here, but their story took a peculiar turn.
Sir Henry's daughter Eleanor was refused permission to erect effigies to her parents inside the church. In an act of defiance, she removed not only her parents' carved likenesses but also the effigy of her grandfather Thomas Winston, transporting all three to Long Burton church in Dorset. The architectural frame — pediment, entablature, and columns — was left behind at Standish, empty.
It was another of Sir Henry's daughters who made the family's lasting mark on history. In 1618, Sarah Winston married John Churchill, carrying the Winston name into the Churchill line. Their son, also named Winston Churchill, fathered the first Duke of Marlborough, and from him descended the wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Spencer-Churchill.
“It was another of Sir Henry's daughters who made the family's lasting mark on history.”
In 1965, the monument was restored to honour this connection, incorporating the Winston and Churchill coats of arms. It was unveiled on 11 January 1966 — almost exactly a year after the great Churchill's death — by his grandson, Winston Churchill MP. The ceremony brought a circle of nearly four centuries to a quiet close, in a fourteenth-century church that the Winstons had once called their own.
