OIL MAN
Justin Portal Welby was born in London in 1956, appropriately for a future man of the cloth on January 6 — the festival of Epiphany that Christians celebrate to mark the appearance of Jesus to the Magi.
His mother, Jane, was a former personal secretary to Winston Churchill who married his father, Gavin, nine months earlier. The timing, he was later to discover, was significant.
In 2016, a paternity test revealed that he was not a “honeymoon baby” but his biological father was in fact Anthony Montague Browne, who also served Churchill as a private secretary and had a brief relationship with his mother.
His parents — both alcoholics — divorced in 1958 and he was brought up by Gavin Welby, a businessman of German-Jewish stock who traded whisky in the United States during the prohibition era, knew the Kennedys and had an affair with the actress Vanessa Redgrave.
He later became a professional backgammon player.
Welby was sent first to Eton College, the prestigious English private school that has produced 20 British prime ministers, then Cambridge University, where he discovered his faith and future direction.
First, though, he worked for 11 years in the oil industry, including five at the French company Elf Aquitaine — now part of TotalEnergies — in Paris, then for the exploration group Enterprise Oil plc in London where he focused on West Africa and North Sea projects.
He quit in 1989, studied theology and was ordained as a priest in 1993. His ascent was rapid and less than 10 years later he became Bishop of Durham, the Church of England’s fourth-most senior cleric.
Just a year into the role in 2012, the plain-speaking Welby, from the evangelical wing of the Church, emerged as a candidate to succeed Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury, who had struggled to keep conservatives and liberals together over issues such as same-sex marriage and female clergy.
