Arabella Bob Churchill

Arabella Spencer-Churchill (30 October 1949 – 20 December 2007) was an English charity founder, festival co-founder and fundraiser. Rarely giving interviews, she was a focus of press attention as the granddaughter of former wartime British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.

In 1971, Churchill played a major role in the development of the Glastonbury Festival. In 1979, she set up the children's area of the festival and also the theatre area. Until her death, she ran the theatre and circus fields. Her duties in the 2007 festival involved the booking and management of some 1500 separate acts. She also founded and was the director of the Children's World charity.

Early life Churchill was born in London to Randolph Churchill (son of Sir Winston Churchill) and his second wife June Osborne (daughter of Colonel Rex Hamilton Osborne), and was half-sister to Winston Churchill, who was born to Randolph Churchill and his first wife Pamela Beryl Digby, better known as Pamela Harriman. Her parents divorced in 1961.

She appeared, at the age of two, in the portrait of Winston Churchill and his family which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (said to have been his favourite granddaughter, she was to frequently visit her grandfather at Chartwell and during his final illness in January 1965 regularly called to his house in London) In March 1954, then four-year-old Churchill appeared on the cover of Life as part of a feature on possible future spouses of then five-year-old Prince Charles.

She went to Fritham School for Girls, where she was Head Girl, and then Ladymede school, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. In 1967 she was "Debutante of the Year", appeared in January UK Vogue feature "Youthquakers Face '67" photographed by Norman Parkinson.

Charity, Dissent and Glastonbury While working as public relations trainee for the international leprosy charity Lepra, in 1969 she helped organise a charity ball at Kensington town hall for the starving children in war and famine struck Biafra. In 1970, a year in which reports had her romantically linked with Crown Prince Carl, the future King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, she toured leper colonies in Tanzania and Zambia. To the organisers she wrote: "My grandfather used the phrase 'The Iron Curtain'. It seems to be that what is facing us all now is the final curtain. The defence systems of the great powers are mutually infectious".

Chased through London by "a surprised press", Michael Eavis, Kerr was planning to stage "a free summer festival with 'cosmic significance' in one of the fields". After re-directing £4,000 of family resources to, among other things, purchase materials for Bill Harkin’s "visionary Pyramid Stage", Churchill helped them stage the first full-scale incarnation of the Glastonbury Festival. Eavis recalls: "12,000 people turned up for five days of music, dance, poetry, theatre and entertainment during which Hawkwind, David Bowie, Joan Baez and Fairport Convention gave performances".

After the festival, in late 1971, she was said to have "dropped out of sight" in a commune outside London. In the mid-1970s, she was living with her son Jake (born 1973) in a squatted street in London's Maida Vale, Bristol Gardens, where she ran a small kitchen restaurant. In a radio interview in 1976, she explained that the house, owned by the Greater London Council, had been empty for 5 years, and that in advance of the street being redeveloped, she was paying rates. The community, she said, was "one place where I have been accepted and not thought of as a Churchill”. In 1987 she met her second husband, a professional juggler, Haggis McLeod, and in 1988 they had a daughter, Jessica Churchill-McLeod. Working alongside her father, Churchill-McLeod took over the running of her mother's Children’s Festival in 2012.

Death and commemoration

On Thursday, 20 December 2007, Churchill died at St Edmund's Cottages, Bove Town, Glastonbury, Somerset, aged 58. She had developed a short illness due to pancreatic cancer. Churchill, who had embraced Tibetan Buddhism through the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, refused chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Arrangements following her death reflected her Buddhism, and included a parade and simple farewell on the final evening of the Glastonbury Festival in June 2008.

Festival organiser Michael Eavis, paying tribute to Churchill after her death, said: "Her energy, vitality and great sense of morality and social responsibility have given her a place in our festival history second to none."

In 2010, Eavis received a donation from British Waterways of timber from the old gates at Caen Hill Locks in Wiltshire. This was used to construct a new bridge, dedicated to Churchill's memory, at the Glastonbury Festival site. That same year, Arthur Smith, Andrew Kerr, Haggis McLeod and Michael Eavis offered their tributes to Arabella Churchill, "the first lady of Glastonbury", for BBC radio.