A video installation accusing Sir Winston Churchill of using ‘wilful’ mass starvation during the 1943 Bengal famine has been withdrawn from the National Portrait Gallery after a furious row. The 40-minute film, titled *Persistence*, was created by Turner-Prize winning artist Helen Cammock and had been on temporary display for 10 months, due to end in August. It claimed Churchill deliberately used starvation as part of the famine that killed an estimated three million people in eastern India.
The controversy erupted after a historian and former trustee of the gallery wrote to ‘protest in the strongest possible terms’, calling the accusation ‘foul and vile’. An open letter from Lord Roberts of Belgravia, a Churchill biographer, accused the institution of telling a ‘barefaced lie’ and described the installation as an ‘ideologically motivated rant’. The letter, which received more than 50 signatures including that of Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, argued that the famine was caused by a typhoon and that Churchill told his war cabinet every effort must be made to help.
“National Portrait Gallery removes Helen Cammock's video blaming Churchill for 'wilful' starvation in 1943 Bengal famine after row.”
‘He would not have done this if he were the genocidal maniac described by Ms Cammock in her taxpayer-funded rant against one of our greatest national heroes,’ Lord Roberts wrote to Professor Shearer West, the interim chair of the board of trustees. In the video, Cammock narrated comparisons between Oliver Cromwell’s 17th-century military campaigns in Ireland, where she said he ‘starved people, en masse’, and Churchill’s actions during the famine.
The nature of Churchill’s role has long been subject to academic dispute. In 2019, researchers in India and the US concluded that the Bengal famine was due to a ‘complete policy failure during the British era’. Others have argued Churchill’s policies contributed.
Cammock, who had worked on the installation since 2023, said in a statement on Monday: ‘There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst. I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society and art is intrinsic to this.’
The gallery said: ‘Today, Helen Cammock decided to remove her film, *Persistence*, from display at the National Portrait Gallery. We respect her decision, just as we acknowledge the opinions of those who were offended by what was said in the film.’