ARABELLA CHURCHILLArabella Churchill, who died on 20 December, 2007, was best known as the granddaughter of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She was also a tireless charity worker.She played a major role in the foundation of the Glastonbury music festival which she continued to be associated with throughout her life and set up her own international children’s charity.She was born into the aristocratic Churchill family on 30 October, 1949. Her father was Randolph Churchill and her mother his second wife, June Osborne. Even at an early age she was a keen organiser, arranging charity garden fêtes.During the 1960s she was educated at private schools, attended debutante balls, met American presidents and had been romantically linked with the future king of Sweden. However, she soon eschewed her privileged upbringing for a London squat.Her first job was as a secretary with London Weekend Television and she then joined leprosy charity Lepra as a public relations trainee where she helped organise glitzy charity balls.After a two-week tour of leper colonies in Tanzania in 1971, she and Andrew Kerr, her father’s personal assistant, gained permission from farm owner Michael Eavis to stage Glastonbury Fayre on his Somerset land and booked David Bowie, Traffic, Hawkwind and Fairport Convention to headline the fund-raising event.Ten years later, Mr Eavis decided to revive his festival as a regular event. Ms Churchill established many of the festival’s fringe attractions, including the children’s area and the Theatre and Circus tents. By the 2007 festival she was responsible for the booking of more than 1,500 performers and had seen attendances rise from 12,000 in 1971 to more than 150,000.The festival also led to the foundation of the Children’s World charity which encourages participation in the dramatic arts and creative education, specialising in helping children with special needs. The charity went international in 1999, sending educational equipment to Kosovo, Albania and post-tsunami Sri Lanka.As Churchills went, Arabella’s leftist, hippy leanings set her apart. She caused media controversy in 1971 when she refused to attend a Nato festival in America as a protest against the defence policies of the world’s most powerful nations – her mother begged her to fake a nervous breakdown rather than make her stand.She was reportedly Winston’s favourite granddaughter and visited him frequently during her teens until his death in January 1965. “I’m immensely proud of my grandfather,” she said in a recent interview, “and I hope he would be proud of me, but I was no good at being a Churchill. People never saw me for me. It doesn’t do a lot for your confidence.”She was married twice and had two children. She was suffering from pancreatic cancer at the time of her death and had recently converted to Buddhism. She died near the town of Glastonbury at the age of 58.
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