National Portrait Gallery Shows Artist’s Film on Churchill and the 1943 Bengal Famine

The National Portrait Gallery is showing a 40-minute film by artist Helen Cammock that states Winston Churchill wilfully inflicted mass starvation on Bengalis during the 1943 famine. More than three million people died from starvation, malaria and other diseases during that famine. Lord Soames and 50 other peers signed a letter calling the taxpayer-funded display a barefaced lie.

The letter was sent after the gallery placed the work on temporary display in September 2025. Lord Roberts, who published the biography Churchill: Walking with Destiny in 2018, wrote separately to gallery director Professor Shearer West. He described the accusation that Churchill deliberately caused the famine as foul and vile.

Lord Roberts quoted Churchill’s wartime instruction that every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to alleviate local shortages. The film also criticises Oliver Cromwell for his campaigns in Ireland. Cammock was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2019.

She has called for Israel to be banned from the Venice Biennale and has stated that Israel is conducting genocide in Gaza and carrying out a 78-year occupation of Palestine. The gallery’s exhibition also echoes claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used starvation as a weapon of war.

Netanyahu said last year there is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.

The installation is scheduled to remain open until August. The National Portrait Gallery stated that it gives artists opportunities to create works in response to its collection and that Cammock’s piece, commissioned in 2023, includes her personal reflections on historical and current events. Churchill’s Parliament Square statue was defaced during the Black Lives Matter campaign.