At 58, Arabella Spencer-Churchill; was family rebel

Sir Winston Churchill, with his granddaughter Arabella, then 8, in Monte Carlo. (ap file/1958)

LONDON - Arabella Spencer-Churchill, a granddaughter of Britain's wartime prime minister whose unconventional enthusiasms included a role as cofounder of the Glastonbury rock festival, died Friday at her home there, in England's rolling West Country. She was 58.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her family said.

Although born to privilege as the daughter of Sir Winston Churchill's son Randolph, Ms. Spencer-Churchill rebelled early.

"I was no good at being a Churchill," she told the newspaper The Independent last summer. She had been a model in the late 1960s, a hippie traveling in Africa and Asia, and a squatter in London running a restaurant for fellow squatters before finding a more settled life in Glastonbury.

Arriving in 1971 in Glastonbury, then a sleepy town in the Thomas Hardy countryside of Somerset, she worked with a friend to organize a festival marking the summer solstice. The festival was a failure. Eight years later, she returned to organize another festival. It ran up heavy losses.

But a local farmer, Michael Eavis, paid off the debt, took over as organizer, and turned the festival into the huge success it became by the mid-1990s, when it regularly drew half a million people and became known as Britain's Woodstock.

With her husband - Ian McLeod, known as Haggis, a former professional juggler - Ms. Spencer-Churchill oversaw the small army of circus and theater performers - among them sword-swallowers, contortionists, and fire-breathers - who became major draws at Glastonbury. She also founded a charity, Children's World, that uses theater and circus entertainment as therapy for disabled children.

Her last year was overshadowed by the involvement of her only son - Nicholas Barton, known as Jake - in a drug scandal in Australia, where he had immigrated as a teenager.

In addition to her husband and son, Ms. Spencer-Churchill is survived by a daughter, Jessica.

Born Oct. 31, 1949, Ms. Spencer-Churchill was exposed early in life to the irregular habits, included heavy drinking and marital breakdowns, that opened a rift between Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, who added the Spencer to his name.

A teenage beauty, Ms. Spencer-Churchill first came to public notice as London's debutante of the year in 1967. But she later recalled how her quirky independence - flirting with left-wing causes, running away from home to join her hippie friends - irked her father and mother, June Osborne, the daughter of a highly decorated army officer.