Who are Glastonbury Festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis?
GET THE LATEST UPDATES ON WHAT'S HAPPENING AT GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL Invalid Email Something went wrong, please try again later. SIGN UP Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice  June is Glastonbury month, and even though there's no proper festival this year, we're still getting in the mood to enjoy some of music's greats down here in Somerset. From Live at Worthy Farm to the BBC's Glastonbury Experience, there are still plenty of ways to get a taste of Glastonbury - with the hope that we might even get to go to Pilton in person for a two-day festival in the autumn. Until then, we're getting in the mood with a range of Glastonbury Festival content. But there are two people without whom there would be no Glastonbury: Michael and Emily Eavis. Read more: 23 facts about Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis  Michael Eavis has organised and overseen Glastonbury since its inception as a festival in 1970, initially with his wife, Jean, and then more recently with the couple's daughter, Emily. Here we take a look at the pair and how they got to where they are now. Michael Eavis was born in Pilton in 1935, the son of a Methodist local preacher and a school teacher. He attended Wells Cathedral school, after which he joined the Navy for four years and also spent time working as a miner. His plans to spend his life at sea were scuppered, however, when his father died when Michael was aged just 19. Reluctantly, Eavis took over the running of Worthy Farm and its 150 acres of land (and 60 cows). Around the same time, Eavis married his first wife, Ruth. The couple had three children before getting divorced in 1964. It was with his second wife, Jean, that he created what was then called the Pilton Pop, Blues and Folk Festival; they had been inspired after watching Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Shepton Mallet Blues Festival. The couple also had two children together: Emily and Patrick, who went on to become a GP in Bath. Jean sadly died of cancer in 1999. Glastonbury Festival grew rapidly in the 1980s and 90s, and by 1998 the official attendance surpassed 100,000. (Image: Yui Mok/PA Wire)  In 1997, Eavis stood as the Labour candidate for Wells, coming third after the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. He and the festival have long had an affinity with politics, mostly the leftwing variety, from his time as a member of the National Union of Mineworkers to the decade the event spent raising money for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Eavis invited then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to join him on the Pyramid stage in 2017. Eavis has also put his weight behind a number of charitable causes, though he was forced to resign as vice president of the Somerset Wildlife Trust following criticism of his support for the badger cull. Eavis has honorary arts degrees from the Universities of Bath and Bristol and was awarded a CBE for services to music in 2007. He was even named as one of the top 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2009. Eavis married for a third time to Liz, who he met at a medieval fancy dress party in 2000 while dressed as a cardinal. Emily Eavis is the daughter of Michael and Jean. She was born in 1979 and, like her father before her, grew up on Worthy Farm in Somerset and attended Wells Cathedral school. She actually appeared on stage - the Pyramid stage, no less - in 1985, when, at the age of five, she sang Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star as the Style Council were about to perform. In 1997 Emily enrolled in a teaching degree at Goldsmiths University, but she was forced to drop out to look after mother after she fell ill. After Jean died in 1999, Emily began helping her father organise Glastonbury Festival, and in recent years she has continued to take on a more prominent role in doing so. Her husband, Nick Dewey also now works on the festival as head of music programming. (Image: Western Daily Press)  Emily has been credited with diversifying the genres seen at Glastonbury from the festival's traditional rock and pop acts. She helped book the festival's first hip hop headliner, Jay Z, in 2008, for example, and has showcased a number of Middle Eastern and African artists on the Pyramid stage. She was crowned Godlike Genius at the NME Awards in 2020. Emily has taken on much of her father's politics. She has organised concerts to raise awareness of Fair Trade and to oppose the Iraq War, and is a prominent campaigner for female representation in the music industry. She has also been credited with the festival's decision to ban the sale of single-use plastic bottles from 2019. With husband Nick, Emily has two sons and a daughter, born in 2011, 2013 and 2016 respectively.