After the final hymn the fabric of the Abbey rang as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, played ‘Nimrod’ from Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’. It fell to Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, fellow war correspondent and lifelong friend, to give the closing commentary to the last Richard Dimbleby broadcast:
The service in the Abbey has been the public commemoration of Richard Dimbleby. May we who worked so long with him, the cameras and microphones now backstage, now say our farewell to the man we knew as the finest professional of us all. Ours is a transient art; our words and pictures make a powerful immediate impact, and then fade as if they had never been. But Richard brought a sense of permanence to our impermanent profession. We knew him as a simple man, a good man, and in the end a very brave man. He gave warmth to the spoken word, friendliness to the formal occasion, and tradition and dignity to the whole new world of broadcasting. We shall not easily forget him.