IN ONE respect John Robert Parker Ravenscroft (“known to most people as John Peel”) got his own send-off exactly right. As he often predicted, his coffin was carried out to the jaunty sound of Teenage Kicks by the Undertones, his favourite record, and before that, mourners heard You’ll Never Walk Alone — not in its Carousel version but recorded in all its maudlin optimism at the Kop.

But his lugubrious tones would have poured scorn on the notion that his funeral would fill the 900 seats in St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and bring a thousand more to stand outside and applaud on a grey chilly November day in Bury St Edmunds, sharing their mourning with Peel’s sobbing wife Sheila and four children, William, Thomas, Alexandra and Flossy.

To those who flocked to the 12th-century cathedral, John Peel was as revolutionary as that other national figure whose funeral was being held in Cairo on the same day.

They said, just as the tributes after his sudden death from a heart attack in Peru last month all said, that Peel had changed their lives, that he was irreplaceable, that he felt like family, and that the best thing about him was that he was so normal. Celebrity ordinariness is a hard trick to achieve. Peel was a cross-generation hero, the first to play Sergeant Pepper in 1967: ageing hippies grew old along with him, while their children revered his unrelenting willingness to play new bands and sounds nobody had heard of, and often never heard of again.

For connoisseurs of popular culture the event was an interesting blend of the polarised BBC audiences, of Radios 1 to 4. The BBC’s big cheeses — Mark Byford, deputy Director-General, who said he thought it the most powerful service he had been to, Jenny Abramsky and Helen Boaden were there, and other solidly Radio 4 people such as Laurie Taylor.

From Radio 2 came Johnnie Walker and Mark Radcliffe, from Radio 3 and his world music slot came Andy Kershaw, discovered and mentored by Peel, and from Radio 1 Jo Whiley — who had her big break after writing Peel a letter from university — Annie Nightingale and Bob Harris. His fellow Liverpudlians Roger McGough and Mike McCartney, Paul’s brother, were there, and performers Phill Jupitus, Joan Armatrading, Jarvis Cocker, Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, Billy Bragg, the White Stripes, and Fergal Sharkey of the Undertones, as well as his neighbour Delia Smith.

The most amusing tribute came from a family friend, Charlie Bell, who read out the reminiscences from Peel’s four children: it was an apotheosis of the way Peel celebrated the strength and oddity of family life in Home Truths on Radio 4 on Saturday mornings. Many found that programme cloying, and Peel himself never felt it was his own creation as his Radio 1 shows were, but it did find a new dimension for Radio 4. And he had been flattered to do it, as he metamorphosed from diehard hippie into a grumpy old dad. He would rail at his children for lights left on and drinks left undrunk, Charlie Bell said, and thought every garden bonfire in the locality had been lit expressly to annoy him. His lovingly guarded collection of £2 coins would go to pay for his headstone.

At first, the tenor of the funeral service, conducted by Canon Deirdre Parmenter, Rural Dean of Stowmarket, appeared to be entirely traditional. There was Mozart’s Ave Verum and Franck’s Panis Angelicus, sung by Stowmarket Choral Society, one of the choirs in which Peel’s wife Sheila (known to listeners as Pig) sings. Much loved hymns such as Jan Struther’s Lord of all Hopefulness Lord of all Joy, and Lyte’s Abide With me.

Familiar readings such as I Corinthians 13. A Shelley poem, Love’s Philosophy. By contrast, the twanging guitar of Howlin Wolf’s Going down slow, and Roy Orbison’s plaintive Running Scared, sounded thin in the vast cathedral space. But the contrast reflected Peel’s catholic tastes. In a way it was a testimony to contemporary culture that one who had confessed to a wildly unedifying past, a teenage bride who died of drug addiction, a dose of the clap, etc, should in the end be hymned in a cathedral, and fill it with Christian sentiments.

Peel’s younger brother Alan Ravenscroft, who looks exactly like Peel, and followed him to public school at Shrewsbury, but had not emulated his brother in adopting a Liverpool drone, said John had given him some useful advice about sex: “Always remember that girls like it too.” They had shared, he said, a love of Anthony Powell’s novel, A Dance to the Music of Time. John was always the same person, he said, on and off the microphone. And he had ended up with all he wanted in life: a house in the country (“Peel Acres” at nearby Great Finborough), dogs and cats and children and a stunning wife.

Paul Gambaccini pointed out that Peel always wanted the late John Walters, his long-term producer, to give his eulogy. “You are probably now with him, talking about Liverpool FC,” he said. He also revealed that Peel, while DJ-ing in Dallas in 1963, had been invited to jump on John Kennedy’s motor and take photographs, and the pictures had only recently been found.

Peel, said Gambaccini, was the most loved broadcaster of his time.

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