Winston Churchill’s Namesake Charity Changes Name and Disassociates from the Wartime PM

A charity formerly known as “The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust” has changed its name to the “Churchill Fellowship” and removed all images of the former Prime Minister from its website. It later restored one of the images after both media and public backlash.

The leader of Great Britain throughout World War Two, who was voted the greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 BBC poll, has had his association nearly erased by his name-sake charity. The charity has stated that:

“Many of his views on race are widely seen as unacceptable today, a view that we share.”

The Churchill Fellowship is headed by Julia Weston who is paid between £90,000 to £100,000 a year. In the email announcing edits to the website and the name change, Ms Weston stated:

“For some time we have known that our previous name was confusing as it did not reflect what we are about.”

The charity had previously hosted a page which contained a 1,400 tribute to Churchill which described him as a “much-loved leader” who had a “bulldog spirit”, but this has been removed alongside a list of his achievements and biography. The website now contains a ‘racism disclaimer’ across its pages in response to some of Churchill’s views on race that the charity has found unacceptable. 

The charity takes particular exception to Churchill’s comments in 1937 regarding indigenous Australians and Americans when he said:

“I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

One of the charity’s volunteers commented on the decision to disassociate from the former PM, stating that it “beggars belief that the man who saved this nation in our darkest hour finds himself cancelled in this way.”

Former Conservative Party leader Ian Duncan Smith, who currently holds Churchill’s old Woodford seat in Parliament, said of the charity’s move:

“I think this is ridiculous. It was set up as the Winston Churchill trust. He is the most popular British person to have lived in poll after poll. What we are left with here is another group of individuals who fail to recognise the most important thing Churchill said to us, which is that those who sit in judgement of the past will lose the future. Without him they would not be sat where they are making these ridiculous decisions. They need to think about that for a second and recognise quite how ridiculous what they are doing will appear to the wider British public who are proud of what Winston Churchill achieved and find all this process of judging historical figures an absurdity.”

However, Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames supported the charity instead, stating:

“The Churchill family is wholly and unreservedly supportive of the wonderful work done by the Churchill Fellowship. Its record speaks for itself.”