Arabella Churchill

Jan 3 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

A GENEROUS helping of her grandfather’s bulldog spirit could be seen in the set of her jaw, the defiance of her jowls and the determination of her brow, though she was a champion of the generation which favoured making love, rather than fighting, on the beaches and fields.

Even so, rebel blood ran in the veins of Arabella Churchill, just as it had in the great war leader, who never had time for the timid, time-servers or dullards.

Arabella had more in common with Winston than was ever understood by the popular press, which branded her, in the disapproving tones of a maiden aunt, as the “hippy Churchill”.

But she, too, was a leader, whose energy ensured the continuation of the Glastonbury Festival.

Arabella was the daughter of June Osborne, second wife of Randolph Churchill, the heavy-drinking, cantankerous and occasionally brilliant son of Winston, who once had an operation to remove a benign tumour, stirring his “friend” Evelyn Waugh to note that it was the only bit of him that wasn’t malignant.

As a girl she doted on her grandfather, visiting him regularly before his death in 1965.

It seemed then that Arabella was destined for a conventional upper-class life. She had been headgirl at Fritham House, a private school in the New Forest.

In 1967, she was Deb of the Year. She worked for the leprosy charity Lepra and served on the committee of the glittering Biafra Ball, in Kensington Town Hall.

Speculation mounted that she would become Queen of Sweden after she dated Crown Prince Carl Gustav, in 1970.

Arabella was beautiful and possessed the Churchillian presence, but in 1971 she declined an invitation to represent Britain as Azalea Queen at a Nato festival in the US.

“I felt I wanted to be a hippy. I felt I was left-wing. I didn’t feel like the rest of my family,” she would say, before living in a squat for down-and-outs.

Also in 1971, she helped organise the first Glastonbury Festival. Some 12,000 people watched performances by Joan Baez, David Bowie and others. In later years, she was in charge of the circus and travelling acts, now integral to the festival. Her second husband was the juggler Haggis McLeod, with whom she had the second of her two children.

Arabella Churchill, festival organiser; born August 31, 1949,died December 20, 2007.