The National Portrait Gallery has been criticised for displaying a video installation that accuses Sir Winston Churchill of starving the Indian population.
A 40-minute video installation by artist Helen Cammock, titled Persistence, claims that Sir Winston used “wilful” mass starvation as part of the Bengal famine in 1943.
A historian and former trustee of the gallery wrote to “protest in the strongest possible terms” the video installation and claimed that the accusation was “foul and vile”.
Lord Andrew Roberts of Belgravia accused the institution of telling a “barefaced lie” in a letter countersigned by more than 50 members of the House of Lords, including Sir Winston’s grandson, Lord Nicholas Soames, and Lord Michael Hintze, who was trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2017 to 2021.
The author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny claimed that the Bengal famine was caused by a typhoon on 16 October 1942 that not only destroyed rice crops but also the road and rail links used to bring food into the region. An estimated 3 million people died due to the Bengal famine.
He added that Sir Winston had told the war cabinet that “the hard pressures of world war have for the first time for many years brought conditions of scarcity, verging in some localities into actual famine, upon India. Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages”, and even asked President Roosevelt and the prime ministers of Canada and Australia to send hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain.
“He would not have done this if he were the genocidal maniac described by Ms Cammock [sic] in her taxpayer-funded rant against one of our greatest national heroes,” he wrote in the letter to Professor Shearer West, the interim chair of the board of trustees.
The Churchill Project, launched by the private Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan to preserve and promote Sir Winston’s legacy, also said that the Bengal famine had been seized upon by revisionists in recent years to attack the wartime leader, according to The Times.
While remaining one of Britain’s most revered prime ministers, Sir Winston has been criticised for his policy in the Bengal famine as well as his comments on race and empire.
Researchers in India and the US concluded in 2019 that the Bengal famine was due to a “complete policy failure during the British era”.
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, they used weather data to simulate the amount of moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 1873 and 1943 and found that the Bengal famine was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, but instead due to policy.
Lord Roberts called Ms Cammock’s art “an ideologically motivated rant” that was “far removed from the kind of artistic endeavour that the National Portrait Gallery is pledged to advance” under its founding charter and the agreed framework with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
A spokesperson from the National Portrait Gallery said it supported the freedom of artistic expression without endorsing all the opinions expressed by artists on display.
“At the National Portrait Gallery, in addition to our own permanent collection displays, we also give opportunities to artists to create works of art in response to our collection,” they said.
“This work by Helen Cammock, which was commissioned in 2023 and has been on temporary display at the National Portrait Gallery since September 2025, is created and narrated by the artist and includes her personal reflections on historical and current events. We support freedom of artistic expression while not necessarily endorsing the opinions expressed by any of the artists shown at the gallery.”
Ms Cammock has been contacted for comment.
