Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon

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Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (née Spencer-Churchill, 28 June 1920) is the widow of Sir Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon (1897-1977), who was British Prime Minister 1955-7. She married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made a Knight of the Garter and Countess of Avon in 1961 on his elevation to the peerage.

Contents 1 Antecedents 2 Early life 2.1 Second World War: Oxford and London 2.2 Post-war 3 Friends and acquaintances 3.1 Early admirers 3.2 Other friends 4 Relationship with Anthony Eden 4.1 Winston Churchill and the wartime link 4.2 Marriage to Eden 4.3 Attitudes to the marriage 4.4 Married life 5 Eden's premiership 5.1 Chateleine at Downing Street and Chequers 5.2 The Suez Crisis 5.3 "The Suez Canal flowing through my drawing room" 6 The aftermath of Suez 6.1 Goldeneye 6.2 Eden's resignation 7 Eden's retirement and death 8 Widowhood 8.1 Lady Avon's longevity 9 Notes

[edit] Antecedents

Lady Avon (by which title she is referred to throughout this article) is the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill (1880-1947), the younger brother of Winston Churchill, and Lady Gwendoline ("Goonie") Bertie (1885-1941), daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon. She is thus the niece of Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister 1940-5 and 1951-5 and granddaughter of Lord Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1886-7. Her paternal great-grandfather was the 7th Duke of Marlborough and her maternal great-great-grandfather, the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry,^[1] half-brother of the 2nd Marquess, who, as Viscount Castlereagh, was Foreign Secretary during the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Lady Avon had two older brothers, Johnny (1909-1992) and Peregrine^[2] (1913-2002).

[edit] Early life

Lady Avon was educated at Kensington High School and then at a boarding school, which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications.^[3] She felt too the need to get away from home - "I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much"^[4] - and in 1937 studied art in Paris.^[5] Her mother had asked the British Ambassador to keep a watchful eye on her, an unintended consequence of this being that she was taken under the wing of an Embassy press secretary who, with his wife, introduced her to a round of café society parties.^[6]

When Lady Avon returned to London she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. 1938 would have been her "coming out" year, but she declined to be part of the débutante circuit - since described by Anne de Courcy as "more or less naive seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds suddenly flung into a round of gaities"^[7] - and was never presented at Court. In August 1939 she was in Romania, only just managing to return to England before the start of the Second World War.

[edit] Second World War: Oxford and London

In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy Harrod, Lady Avon went to Oxford to study philosophy, though not as an undergraduate because of her lack of qualifications. While there she became associated with, among other leading academics, Isaiah Berlin and Maurice Bowra.^[8] Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a Fellow of Christ Church, has described her as "the don's delight".^[9]

When Lady Avon moved back to London she decoded ciphers in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office, where her future husband was the Secretary of State from 1940-5. For a time she lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing.

[edit] Post-war

After the war Lady Avon worked at London Films for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened",^[10] and as a reviewer for the fashion magazine Vogue. She met actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film, The Third Man (1949), and escorted actress Paulette Goddard on a "rather wild trip" to Brussels.^[11] She also edited the magazine Contact, which was part of George Weidenfeld's publishing empire.

As a result of this eclectic early career, Lady Avon widened her circle of friends and contacts beyond those in society and politics with whom she already had close connections. As one of Anthony Eden's biographers put it, she was "equally at home in the worlds of Hatfield and Fitzrovia".^[12]

[edit] Friends and acquaintances

Glimpses of Lady Avon's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. She herself has not published a memoir, having indicated to former Labour Member of Parliament Woodrow, Lord Wyatt that such a volume would appear only after her death.^[13] However, it was reported in 2006 that the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicholson had acquired Lady Avon's memoirs, to be edited by Cate Haste (Lady Bragg),^[14] who, with Cherie Blair, wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, published a short biographical sketch of Lady Avon in 2004 as part of a wider study of Prime Ministerial spouses.^[15]

[edit] Early admirers

Having lost both parents by her mid twenties, Lady Avon was comparatively independent for a young woman of her time. In later years she apparently remarked to Wyatt on "how much more restricted girls were when she was young", while conceding that she herself had had her first affair at seventeen with a "man who was quite well-known and … still alive [in 1986]".^[16] She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay,^[17] diplomat and painter, who was stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.^[18] Lady Avon was quoted by Wyatt as having told him that she resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime Information Minister and British Ambassador in Paris 1944-7, who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother:^[19] "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from".^[20] She informed Cooper in 1947, following a weekend in the country with Anthony Eden, at which the only other guest was the French Ambassador to Britain, that Eden "never stops trying to make love to her".^[21]

[edit] Other friends

Among Lady Avon's many other friends, a number of whom were some years older than she, were novelists Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, painter Lucien Freud and choreographer Frederick Ashton. Gerald, Lord Berners used her as the basis of a character in his novel Far From the Madding War (1941), while photographer Cecil Beaton, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo.^[22] Lady Avon was a long-standing friend of Anne Fleming, wife firstly of Viscount Rothermere and then of novelist Ian Fleming, who was also lover of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party 1955-63. She and composer and playwright Noel Coward became godparents in 1952 to the Flemings’ son Caspar,^[23] who died of a drug overdose in 1975. In later years, as a widow, she was evidently close to the influential solicitor and adviser Lord Goodman.^[24]

[edit] Relationship with Anthony Eden

Lady Avon first met her future husband at Cranborne, Dorset (home of the future 5th Marquess of Salisbury) in 1936 when she was sixteen. Already famous at the time for his elegant attire and Homburg hat, she was struck by Eden's tweed pinstriped trousers.^[25]

[edit] Winston Churchill and the wartime link

There was some further contact during the war by virtue of the circles in which she and Eden both moved and through her family ties with Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister in 1940. An illustration of her occasional proximity to the centre of power was that, between meetings of the War Cabinet on 30 May 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was at its height, she was present when Churchill lunched with her parents and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.^[26] After her mother's death in 1941, she stayed at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country home in Berkshire.

R .A. Butler, then a junior Minister, recalled a dinner party in Eden’s flat above the Foreign Office, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Attempting to defuse an argument between Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook about their respective motivation during the Abdication crisis of 1936, Lady Avon, just turned twenty-one, proclaimed with patent improbability that she had three favourites, King Edward VIII, King Leopold III of the Belgians and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.^[27] (All three men, for various reasons, would not have appealed much to Churchill at that point in the war.)

[edit] Marriage to Eden

A more defined relationship with Eden, who was 23 years older than Lady Avon, developed gradually after they had sat next to each other at a dinner party in about 1947. Eden had been monopolised for much of the meal by a lady on his other side and afterwards, in an undertone, invited Lady Avon out to dinner.^[28] In 1950 Eden was divorced from his first wife, Beatrice, née Beckett (1905-57). Although she was a Roman Catholic and her church was opposed to divorce, Lady Avon married Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary again in 1951, in a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall, London on 14 August 1952. This event drew large crowds, on a level with those earlier in the year for the wedding of film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding,^[29] prompting Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' he [Eden] still has and how popular he is".^[30]

[edit] Attitudes to the marriage

Eden remains the only British Prime Minister to have been divorced. There was criticism of the marriage in the Church Times and from some others in the Anglican church, including the Bishop of Sydney, Australia, who drew parallels with Edward VIII's having given up the throne to marry an American divorcée. Macmillan, among others, thought such comparisons unfair: "Miss Churchill cannot be compared with Mrs Simpson, who had had two husbands"^[31] However, Lady Avon's decision drew also the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh,^[32] a strident convert to Catholicism, who, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs.^[33]

On the eve on the wedding, John Colville, a long-time private secretary of Winston Churchill, who, in his younger days, had been part of the same social “set” as Churchill's niece, recorded in his diary that Lady Avon, who was staying at Churchill's home at Chartwell, Kent, was "very beautiful, but ... still strange and bewildering". He added that Churchill "feels avuncular to his orphaned niece, gave her a cheque for £500 and told me that he thought she had a most unusual personality".^[34] The marriage is said to have exacerbated the antagonism towards Eden of Churchill's often wayward son Randolph, who, having defended his cousin to Evelyn Waugh, gave her "two years to knock him [Eden] into shape".^[35] His subsequent attacks on Eden in the press culminated in a scathing biography, The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden (1959).

The issues relating to the Edens' marriage resurfaced in 1955 when Eden was Prime Minister. In that year Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, announced that "mindful of the Church [of England]'s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble", she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcé.^[36] Townsend subsequently reflected that

Eden could not fail to sympathise with the Princess, all the more so that while his own second marriage had incurred no penalty, either for him or his wife, he had to warn the Princess that my second marriage - to her - would [mean] she would have to renounce her royal rights, functions and income.^[37]

[edit] Married life

Historian Hugh Thomas noted that, though "non-political", Lady Avon was interested in foreign affairs, having written a Berlin diary for the literary magazine Horizon.^[38] The first five years of her marriage were dominated by Eden's political career and by the effects of a botched operation on his gall bladder in 1953 which caused lasting problems. However, Lady Avon maintained many of her wider acquaintances. For example, Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo visited 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence, at her invitation in October 1956. They drank vodka and ice and Beaton recorded Lady Avon's observation that her husband was kept awake by the sound of motor scooters,^[39] which were growing in popularity among young people in the 1950s. Lady Avon is said to have murmured, "he can't keep away", as Eden, in Beaton's words, "gangled in like a colt" and proclaimed to Garbo, who had a cigarette holder between her teeth, that he had always wanted to meet her.^[40]

The Edens' marriage, which lasted until his death in 1977, was, by all accounts, a happy one, though Lady Avon miscarried in 1954^[41] and there were no children. Her stepson, Nicholas, Eden's surviving son from his first marriage, who succeeded him as 2nd Earl of Avon, was a Minister in Margaret Thatcher's Government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS in 1985.

[edit] Eden's premiership

Eden succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister on 6 April 1955 and, shortly afterwards, won a general election in which his Conservative Party polled the largest percentage of the popular vote recorded between 1945 and the present day. Colville noted that, at a dinner, attended by the Queen, to mark Churchill’s retirement, the Duchess of Westminster had put her foot through Lady Avon’s train, causing the monarch's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, to remark, "that's torn it, in more than one sense".^[42]

Eden’s premiership lasted less than two years. For much of this period Eden was the subject of hostilty from elements of the Conservative press, notably the Daily Telegraph,^[43] the wife of whose Chairman, Lady Pamela Berry, daughter of Lord Birkenhead and a noted society hostess, was said by some to have had a "blood row" (Macmillan's phrase) with Lady Avon. The latter's attempts to make this up this puzzling rift were apparently shunned.^[44]

[edit] Chateleine at Downing Street and Chequers

As hostess at 10 Downing Street, Lady Avon oversaw the organisation of official receptions. She brought in new caterers, causing US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to lose a bet with a fellow dinner guest that he knew "exactly what every course is going to be".^[45] Because the Edens' tenure was so short, Lady Avon's plans to return the fabric and furniture of the house to the styles of the 1730s, when it was built, were never realised.^[46]

Lady Avon was not very fond of Chequers, though she did take a keen interest in the garden and grounds, introducing old fashioned roses and increasing the range of fruit trees. However, her successor, Lady Dorothy Macmillan, so keen a horticulturalist that she sometimes gardened at night, removed yellow and white flowers planted by Lady Avon and replaced them with roses of "normal colour".^[47]

One episode at Chequers attracted considerable publicity. In January 1956 Lady Avon politely requested the occupant of a farm worker's cottage on the estate to hang her washing where it could not be seen by visitors.^[48] Although it seems that the washing may have been hung across a lime walk, beyond the boundary of the cottage garden itself,^[49] the story was taken up by the Daily Mirror as an alleged example of Lady Avon's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.

[edit] The Suez Crisis

As the Suez Crisis reached its climax in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November Lady Avon found herself sitting next to Dora Gaitskell, wife of the Labour leader, in the gallery of the House of Commons, whose sitting was suspended, due to uproar, for the first time since 1924. "Can you stand it?" she asked, to which, according to one version, the seasoned Mrs Gaitskell replied, "the boys must have their fun".^[50] (An alternative version is that Mrs Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".^[51]) Three days later Lady Avon attended, out of curiosity, an anti-Government "Law not War" demonstration in Trafalgar Square, but thought it politic to withdraw when she was recognised with friendly cheers.^[52]

[edit] "The Suez Canal flowing through my drawing room"

In the humiliating aftermath of Suez in 1956, Lady Avon's most famous public remark to a group of Conservative woman that, "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room", was widely reported.^[53] Lady Avon has since described this observation as "silly, really idiotic",^[54] though it remains probably the most quoted utterance of the whole crisis.

During this period there were some who thought they detected undue influence by Lady Avon over her husband. For example, Lady Jebb, wife of the British Ambassador in Paris, alluded in her diary to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and referred to "Clarissa's war".^[55] Less dramatically, there were suggestions that Eden’s touchiness and over-sensitivity to criticism, characteristics frequently remarked upon by colleagues,^[56] were exacerbated by Lady Avon (described by historian Barry Turner, without explanation, as "equally touchy"^[57]). One of Eden's private secretaries claimed that "she had a habit of stirring up Anthony when he didn't need it".^[58] However, Eden's biographer D. R. Thorpe concluded that such imputations arose from a misreading of the Edens' relationship, noting also that, during Suez, the only two people in whom Eden could confide without inhibition were his wife and the Queen.^[59] Lady Avon herself recalled that, though she sought to "bolster up" her husband and scanned the newspapers for anything that she thought he ought to know, she did not feel she "knew enough about what was going on to try and interfere in any way".^[60]

[edit] The aftermath of Suez

[edit] Goldeneye

The damage caused by the Suez Crisis to the Prime Minister's already frail health persuaded the Edens to seek a month’s rest cure at "Goldeneye", Ian Fleming’s home in Jamaica. Lady Avon's concern for her husband's health appears to have been decisive in the choice of destination, although it was regarded by many, including Macmillan and the Government's Chief Whip, Edward Heath, as politically unwise.^[61] Even Anne Fleming, who also warned Lady Avon about some of the primitive aspects of Goldeneye, suggested that Torquay (a seaside resort in the south west of England) and a sun-lamp might have been preferable.^[62] However, Lady Avon has insisted that "Berkshire [i.e. Chequers] or somewhere instead" would not have been suitable: "I thought if we didn't go to Jamaica, he was going to drop down dead, literally".^[63]

Once installed in Jamaica, the Edens were temporary neighbours of Noel Coward, who presented them - "poor dears" - with a basket of caviare, pâté de fois gras and champagne.^[64] The publicity that this sojourn attracted is credited by some with boosting Fleming's literary career, including sales of his early novels about James Bond, the first of which, Casino Royale, he had written at Goldeneye in 1953.

[edit] Eden's resignation

The Edens returned to England just before Christmas 1956 and Sir Anthony resigned as Prime Minister on 9 January 1957. When Harold Macmillan, with whom Eden had had a difficult relationship,^[65] was appointed as his successor in preference to R. A. Butler, Lady Avon wrote to Butler that she thought politics "a beastly profession ... and how greatly I admire your dignity and good humour".^[66] Macmillan's biographer Alistair Horne noted of the various animosities that arose before and during Macmilan's premiership that it was the "loyal wives", among whom he counted Lady Avon and Lady Butler, who "tended most to keep [them] alive". Whereas Eden himself maintained "a friendly (if not conspicuously warm) relationship" with Macmillan, Lady Avon was said to have been consistently vitriolic about him.^[67]

Shortly after Eden's resignation, he and Lady Avon sailed to New Zealand for a further break. Their cabin steward, on what she described as "the hellship Rangitata",^[68] was the future Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.^[69] Half a century later Prescott recalled that, while kneeling down to clean the ship's brass, he had occasion to admire a pair of legs that turned out to be Lady Eden's - "You naturally look, don't you" - whereupon Sir Anthony tapped him on the head.^[70]

[edit] Eden's retirement and death

Eden had been told by doctors that his life might be in danger if he remained in office. In the event he was to live for another twenty years. The Edens' home was at Alvediston, Wiltshire, where he died on 14 January 1977 and is buried.

The last entry in Eden's dairy, dated 11 September 1976, had read; "exquisite small vase of crimson glory buds & mignorette from beloved C[larissa]".^[71] When he was taken mortally ill with liver cancer, he and Lady Avon had just spent their final Christmas together at Hobe Sound, Florida as guests of Averell Harriman, elder statesman of the Democratic Party, and his English-born wife Pamela, Lady Avon's exact contemporary, whose first marriage to Randolph Churchill had led to her becoming a wartime confidante of Winston Churchill.^[72] The Edens were flown back to Britain in a Royal Air Force VC-10 that was diverted to Miami after Prime Minister James Callaghan had been alerted to the situation by Pamela Harriman's son, Winston.^[73]

[edit] Widowhood

After her husband's death, Lady Avon received many tributes to her devoted care in the later stages of his life. She moved to an apartment in London in the 1980s. She invited firstly Robert Rhodes James and later D. R. Thorpe to write official biographies of her husband. Published in 1986 and 2003 respectively, both offered a broadly sympathic view of Eden’s career and were generally well received by critics. Between them they did much to help restore Eden’s reputation, which had taken such a battering during the final months of his premiership.

In 1994 Lady Avon unveiled a bust of Eden at the Foreign Office.

[edit] Lady Avon's longevity

Lady Avon was the youngest wife of an incumbent Prime Minister in the twentieth century. She was only 36 when her husband resigned and a widow by her mid fifties. As such she has enjoyed unusual longevity for a Prime Ministerial spouse, contributing, for example, to a television documentary by Cherie Blair in 2005 about Prime Ministers’ wives^[74] and to a three-part series the following year marking the fiftieth anniversary of Suez. In the latter, she recalled, among other things, Eden's disillusion with the lack of American support for British policy in 1956.^[75] The critic A A Gill was among those who praised Lady Avon's erudite performance in the Blair documentary ("bright as a button"), while sensing that she appeared not entirely to approve of Mrs Blair.^[76]

Lady Avon has outlived four of the seven spouses (Lady Dorothy Macmillan, Lady Home, Lady Callaghan and Sir Denis Thatcher) who succeeded her and is two years younger than Lady Wilson of Rievaulx. The husbands of Dame Norma Major and Cherie Blair became Prime Minister 35 and 42 years respectively after Eden had done so. Norma Major (whose husband became Prime Minister in 1990) was the first of Lady Avon's successors to have been born after her.

[edit] Notes