Life
She was born in London to Randolph Churchill (son of Sir Winston Churchill) and his second wife June Osborne, and was half sister to Winston Churchill. She appeared, at the age of two, in the portrait of Winston Churchill and his family which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
She went to Fritham School for Girls, where she was Head Girl, and then Ladymede school, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. She worked at Lepra, the charity for leprosy sufferers, and then briefly at London Weekend Television.
In 1954 she had appeared on the cover of Life as part of a feature on possible future spouses of Prince Charles. In 1967 she was 'Debutante of the Year,' met the Kennedys and Martin Luther King in America, and was romantically linked with Crown Prince (now King) Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 1970. In 1971 she was invited to represent Britain at the Norfolk International Azalea Festival in Virginia, established in 1953 after NATO's Allied command was established there. Each year a NATO country is honoured, and invited to send a beautiful “Azalea Queen" as its ambassador.
Churchill refused to go, indicating in a letter she believed in the goals of the peace movement, and was horrified by the Vietnam War. Chased through London by a surprised press, she left instead for rural Somerset, where she helped lead the first full-scale incarnation of the Glastonbury Festival with Andrew Kerr, Thomas Crimble, Michael Eavis and many others.
During the 1970s she embraced the alternative culture of the time, which included living for a time in a squat but later worked and lived on a farm. She granted a rare interview to Rolling Stone magazine. In 1979 Churchill and Kerr were again in charge of the festival, and from then on her administration continued alongside Eavis and Kerr, along with the founding and leading of the charity Children's World and work as a fundraiser.
In 1972 she married Jim Barton, and in 1973 had a son, Nicholas Jake. In 1987 she met her second husband, a juggler, Haggis McLeod, and in 1988 they had a daughter, Jessica.
She embraced Tibetan Buddhism through the teachings of Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
Read more about this topic: Arabella Churchill (charity Founder)
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