Lost letter: Family of Churchill feared he might convert to Islam

“Please don’t become converted to Islam,” says Lady Gwendoline who would go on to marry Churchill’s brother

The indelible image of Winston Churchill is that of a cigar-chomping curmudgeon glowering behind spectacles, features gnarled by years of war, worry and wine. But even Churchill was not always thus. There was a time when he was young soldier with a face round and full who had journeyed to the outer reaches of the British Empire. There, in northwest India and Sudan at the turn of the 20th century, he came into contact with a religion his family feared would consume him, The Washington Post said.

In 1907, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, who would go on to marry Churchill’s brother, Jack, wrote the future prime minister an impassioned note. She was concerned with Churchill’s dalliance with what she called the Orient, The Washington Post.

“Please don’t become converted to Islam,” she wrote him in a note recently uncovered by a Cambridge historian and reported by the British press on Sunday. “I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalize … If you come into contact with Islam, your conversion be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed, call of the blood, don’t you know what I mean, do fight against it.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2014.