Churchill's great-grandson faces jail over alleged Ecstasy haul

Jake Nicholas 'Gompo' Barton, 33, whose mother Arabella Churchill is the granddaughter of Sir Winston and daughter of his son Randolph, will appear in court next month after his bail application was refused.

Newly-married, he is in Sydney's Parklea Jail after being arrested over the alleged discovery of more than 100lbs of ecstasy tablets, said to have been found in his beachside home and other premises in Sydney.

It was only last March that his mother - known as Sir Winston's 'hippy' grand-daughter in the 1960s - visited her son in the New South Wales resort of Byron Bay to attend his wedding.

She wrote in an internet diary that she and her second husband Haggis McLeod 'love Jake and his wife Kim dearly' and despite the distance 'we had to be at their wedding.'

Barton was born during Arabella's brief marriage to Scottish schoolteacher Jim Barton in the early 1970s.

Following the collapse of that marriage, she married Mr McLeod, a juggler.

Without revealing his background to anyone but his closest friends, Barton, who trained as a pearl farmer in Indonesia when he was 29, took out Australian citizenship in the late 1990s.

At the time he was attending university in Tasmania, graduating as a Bachelor of Applied Science. His mother spoke proudly in a recent interview of how he was in Tasmania learning how to farm fish.

But it was on the Australian mainland, in the Sydney beachside suburb of Coogee - where Hollywood stars Mel Gibson and Greta Scacchi have homes - that his new life Down Under came to an abrupt end when he was raided by Special Crime Unit police after a three-month investigation.

Barton was charged, along with his alleged associate, New Zealand-born Rees Gerard Woodgate, 42, with supplying a large commercial quantity of ecstasy.

He is due in court next month and if convicted Barton and his alleged associate face maximum life sentences.

The seized drugs are said to have an estimated street value five million pounds.

Also allegedly seized were 40lbs of ecstasy powder and two pill presses, used to manufacture ecstasy tablets, as well as some 40,000 pounds in cash.

Police said the tablets were stamped with motoring logos such as Maserati, Volkswagen and Mercedes.

Barton's given name of Gompo is thought to be derived from a legendary Tibetan resistance leader who was strongly supported by Sir Winston Churchill during the fight against China's invasion of Tibet in 1949.

Arabella Churchill, 56, played a major role in the development of the Glastonbury Festival and founded the Children's World charity.