Lady Williams of Elvel
BREMENMURRAY
Richard R
Lady Williams of Elvel obituary
Intuitive personal secretary to Winston Churchill and mother of Justin Welby, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury
…She … witnessed Churchill’s tears in February 1952 on the journey to Heathrow to greet the new Queen Elizabeth returning from Kenya after the death of her father. “She was so young. And [Churchill was] this old man,” she recalled. “And on the way back, he never dictated a word. He just sat there, tears pouring down his face. He wept so beautifully. It was not embarrassing . . . I remember in the car him just weeping because he felt the history of it.”…
…Portal eventually left Downing Street to get married in spring 1955, a week before Churchill resigned: he was 80, she was 25. First, however, she enjoyed a brief fling with Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary, “fuelled”, she wrote, “by a large amount of alcohol on both sides”.
Jane Gillian Portal was a child of the Raj, born near Delhi in 1929. She was the eldest of two daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Gervas Portal, who during the First World War served with the Indian Army, and his wife Iris (née Butler) a journalist and historian. One of her uncles was Viscount Portal of Hungerford, wartime air marshal of the RAF, and another was RA Butler, Churchill’s chancellor of the exchequer…
…By 1955 Portal had been “bullied” by Gavin Welby, her wealthy suitor, to elope to the US, where his divorce was being finalised. “At the age of 25, as I was, the pressure became too great and I found myself unable to resist,” she wrote. They were married in Baltimore, Maryland. With no friends or family present, two strangers were brought off the street to act as witnesses.
It later transpired that Welby’s real name was Bernard Weiler, a chancer who had masqueraded as an upper-class Englishman in America, had an affair with the young Vanessa Redgrave and dated a sister of John F Kennedy. When news of the nuptials reached Kennedy, he wrote to Gunilla von Post, his 21-year-old Swedish mistress: “Did you see in the paper that our friend — the cold, frozen Mr Gavin Welby — got married to Mr Churchill’s secretary. Something must have happened.”… Nine months after they married, her only child, Justin, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, was born, although a DNA test in 2016 showed that he was the result of her fling with Montague Browne. “It appears that the precautions taken at the time didn’t work, and my wonderful son was conceived as a result of this liaison,” she said. The marriage collapsed within three years and Justin was placed in Welby’s custody, though he has described being shuttled between relatives as his parents battled with their respective drink problems…
…In 1975 she married Charles Williams, a banker, biographer and Labour Party grandee who in 1985 was raised to the peerage as Lord Williams of Elvel. They lived in a Kensington apartment that was described by Andrew Billen in The Times as “looking like a set from The Crown season one, impeccably furnished in books and antiques”…
Lady Williams of Elvel, secretary to Winston Churchill, was born on December 11, 1929. She died on July 15, 2023, aged 93
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lady-williams-of-elvel-obituary-xcm38krbb