The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his biological father, Anthony Montague Browne. Composite: RexThe archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and his biological father, Anthony Montague Browne. Composite: Rex

Justin Welby This article is more than 7 years oldAnalysis

Sir Anthony Montague Browne: who is Justin Welby's biological father?

This article is more than 7 years oldKevin Rawlinson

Oxford graduate and RAF serviceman who spent much of his career working for Winston Churchill

Sir Anthony Montague Browne first worked for Winston Churchill during his second term as prime minister and, via a brief tenure at the Foreign Office, went on to serve as private secretary to the wartime leader until the latter’s death in 1965.

It was Montague Browne, the Telegraph’s obituary reports, who signed Churchill’s death certificate after arranging for him to be flown back from France, so he could “die in England”.

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Besides his Whitehall service, Montague Browne is now also notable as the father of Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, who discovered that his biological father is not Gavin Welby by means of a Daily Telegraph investigation and a paternity test.

Welby’s mother, Jane Williams, and Montague Browne had a brief affair immediately before her marriage to Gavin. They did not see each other again during the course of her relationship with Gavin, she said.

“After Gavin and I broke up in 1958, Anthony and I met occasionally but, although he may have asked how Justin was, there was nothing that gave me any hint that he might have thought he was Justin’s father,” she added.

The Daily Telegraph’s obituary reports that Montague Browne was born in May 1923, the son of a British army colonel. He was educated in Switzerland and at the Stowe boarding school, in Buckinghamshire.

He attended Magdalen college, Oxford, and later joined the RAF, serving in the Middle East and close to the Myanmar-Bengal border during the second world war. After his maiden flight in a Tiger Moth, his instructor told him: “You didn’t land, you arrived. But these are hard times, so go off and do a little flying on your own.”

He joined the Foreign Office after the war and started working for Churchill about a decade later. Montague Browne died in 2013, aged 89.

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