The downfall of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby prompts memories of his mother
As Winston Churchill's secretary, she had a unique view of his ties with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth
The downfall last week of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, stunned not only the Church of England, but also the worldwide Anglican Communion, which has upwards of 80 million members in 163 countries beyond Britain. In my own church in Washington, we always included in our prayers, “We pray for Justin, Archbishop of Canterbury.”
I had a personal connection with Welby as well. In May 2018, I spent several hours with his mother, Lady Williams—as she was known after her second husband was created a Life Peer in 1985—in her elegant flat on Thurloe Square in London’s South Kensington neighborhood. At age eighty-eight, she was gracious and exceedingly cultivated. She had a sharp memory, with an enviable gift for detail. When I visited Thurloe Square, Jane Williams served me tea in porcelain cups and chocolate biscuits from a silver tray. Her drawing room was furnished with antiques, tasteful artwork, and numerous framed photographs of her son, of whom she was justifiably proud. (I couldn’t resist taking a snapshot of my favorite one, shown below). I was working on my book about King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and I was eager to hear about their relationship with Winston Churchill from Lady Williams, who had been one of his secretaries for six years.
Justin Welby was then midway through a stretch of a dozen years in which he participated in the Royal Family’s most significant events. He presided over the funerals of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh in April 2021 and Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, and he crowned King Charles III in May 2023. Prior to that, he officiated at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018 and at the christenings of all three children of Prince William and Catherine, the Princess of Wales: Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis. Seldom in the history of the Church of England has its leader played such a pivotal role.
“A distinct lack of curiosity”
The forced resignation of Welby—the first ever for an Archbishop of Canterbury on the grounds of negligence—was another improbable turn in a life, as he once described it, of “great privilege and great muddle.” His reputation was undone by a report into “horrific” abuses committed by a British barrister named John Smyth against scores of boys under his supervision at Christian camps during the 1970s and 1980s. Victims of Smyth’s sadistic assaults began coming forward in 2013 shortly after Welby became archbishop. Instead of pushing a thorough investigation, he merely reassured himself that “actions were being taken.” The recently published review concluded that the archbishop had shown a “distinct lack of curiosity” about the scandal. Under pressure from high-ranking Anglican clerics as well as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Welby finally stepped down, acknowledging “personal and institutional” responsibility.
The tragic irony was that Welby had himself grown up in an abusive household. He later wrote about “the pernicious influence of alcohol dependency in both parents” and an atmosphere of “divorce, hatred, litigation, abuse and cruelty.” He recalled one Christmas when his father was so neglectful that Justin had to forage for “scraps of food in the back of the fridge.” His putative father, Gavin Welby, died in 1977 “as a result of his addictions, alcohol and tobacco,” wrote Justin, who was twenty-one at the time.
Justin had the good fortune to be sent away to school at Eton and then earned a degree in history and law at Cambridge. Before finding his calling as an Anglican priest, he pursued a lucrative career as a finance executive in the oil business. He married a Cambridge classmate, Caroline Eaton, with whom he had six children.
His mother, Jane Gillian Portal, was born in Delhi, India, in 1929, a daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Gervais Portal, who served during the First World War in the Indian Army, and Iris Butler, an author and historian. From the age of seven, Jane was educated in England and lived with her mother’s brother, Richard Austen “Rab” Butler and his wife, Sydney. Rab Butler would achieve prominence in Britain’s Conservative party and academia: Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary as well as Master of Trinity College Cambridge, where he would be the principal adviser to the future King Charles III.
In 1949 Rab Butler introduced his twenty-year-old niece to Winston Churchill, then Leader of the Opposition to the Labour government before his return to power as Prime Minister two years later. She worked in Churchill’s secretarial pool until April 1955, when she eloped with Gavin Welby, an unpredictable bully and adventurer who made a small fortune selling bootleg whisky. Nine months later, Justin was born, and in 1959 his parents divorced. Jane came to grips with her “serious alcoholism” in 1968 when she entered a rehab clinic. Seven years afterward, she married Charles Williams, a prosperous merchant banker.
“Fueled by a large amount of alcohol”
In 2016 the archbishop learned at age sixty through a DNA test that his biological father was actually Anthony Montague Browne, a private secretary to Winston Churchill from 1952 to 1965. Jane Williams described her “almost unbelievable shock” on hearing the news. She revealed that just before her “very sudden marriage,” she and Montague Browne had a sexual liaison “fueled by a large amount of alcohol on both sides.”
“I didn’t go to university, so it was Rab who said to me, ‘Go and learn typing and shorthand,’” Jane Williams recalled. “‘You won’t like it, but it’s essential.’ And so, I did.” One day in 1949, Butler said, “I was with Winston today. He is writing his war memoirs. There are already four secretaries typing away.” “Churchill had to speak every word he thought,” Williams told me. “He was in love with the English language, so it was all dictation.”
“Utterly terrified”
Butler said that Churchill needed another secretary to work at night, because he often dictated until two in the morning: “Go along and try.” Jane Portal, just shy of her twenty-first birthday, was “utterly terrified.” She went to Winston and Clementine Churchill’s London home near Kensington Gardens at 28 Hyde Park Gate, which had an office annex. Walking down the passageway between the house and office, she saw Churchill coming toward her. He was dressed in his frock coat, and he was heading to the House of Commons.
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