Clarissa Avon

Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (; 28 June 1920 – 15 November 2021) was an English memoirist and the second wife of Anthony Eden, who served as British prime minister from 1955 to 1957. She married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made a Knight of the Garter, before becoming Countess of Avon in 1961 when her husband was created Earl of Avon. She was also the niece of Winston Churchill. In 2007, at age 87, she released her memoir subtitled '' From Churchill to Eden''.

On the death of Lady Wilson of Rievaulx in 2018, Lady Avon became the oldest living spouse of a British prime minister. She turned 100 in 2020, the second British prime minister's spouse to become a centenarian after Wilson. She also outlived four other prime ministers' spouses who came after her: Lady Dorothy Macmillan (died 1966), Elizabeth Douglas-Home (died 1990), Audrey Callaghan (died 2005) and Sir Denis Thatcher (died 2003).

Early life

Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was born in 1920, the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill (1880–1947) and (1885–1941), a daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, who had married in 1908. Her elder brothers were John ("Johnnie") (1909–1992), an artist, and Henry Winston (1913–2002), known as Peregrine.

Spencer-Churchill was born at her parents' house in the Cromwell Road, Kensington, London. She was educated at Kensington Preparatory School and then at Downham School, Hatfield Heath, "a fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Seventy years later she said she had also felt the need to get away from home—"I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much".

Paris, Tuscany and London (1937–1939)

In 1937 Spencer-Churchill studied art in Paris. Her mother had asked the British ambassador, Sir George Clerk, 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. Among the friends she made in Paris were writers Fitzroy Maclean and Marthe Bibesco. Together with two female contemporaries, she visited the Folies Bergère, an unusual destination for 16-year-old girls, where the singer Josephine Baker, clad only in a circlet of bananas, became the first naked female body she had ever seen.

In the summer of 1937, Spencer-Churchill accompanied Julian Asquith (grandson of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith) and his mother, Katharine, on a tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany region of Italy. Among other artistic treasures, she saw the fifteenth-century frescoes by Piero della Francesca at Arezzo, one of which, ''The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood'' (), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".'' Country Life'', 8 September 2010.

When Spencer-Churchill returned to London she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. Around this time she displayed her individualism by acquiring a specially tailored trouser suit along the lines of those associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich after the latter's appearance in the film ''Morocco'' (1930). 1938 was the future Lady Avon's "coming out" year and she was regarded as " e of the more notable" débutantes in "a vintage year for beautiful girls", but, having mixed with older and more sophisticated people in Paris, she seemed to have disdained the circuit—since described by Anne de Courcy as "more or less naive seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds suddenly flung into a round of gaities"—and was never presented at court. Another débutante of 1938, Deborah Mitford, later Duchess of Devonshire, recalled Spencer-Churchill as exhibiting "more than a whiff of retaGarbo in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris".

Among those with whom Spencer-Churchill danced at that year's Liberal ball was the future double agent Donald Maclean, who complained that she was too smart to be "a proper Liberal girl like the Bonham-Carters and the Asquiths". She also knew Guy Burgess, who fled to Russia in 1951 when he and Maclean were about to be unmasked as traitors. A 2015 biography of Burgess, a homosexual, contained claims that, encouraged by his Soviet " handlers", he had contemplated marriage to Spencer-Churchill. However, the latter, then aged 95, denied that they had been close. She described Burgess as "courteous, amusing, nice and good company", but said that he had been "standoffish" towards her and did not wish any friendship to develop.

In 1939 Spencer-Churchill spent another four months in Paris and in August of that year travelled to Romania as a guest of the novelist Elizabeth Bibesco and her husband Antoine (Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith, having been left distraught at the conclusion of her daughter's visit to her in London earlier in the year). Spencer-Churchill only just managed to return to England—on one of the last flights out of Bucharest—before the start of the Second World War.

Second World War: Oxford and the Foreign Office

In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy Harrod, Spencer-Churchill went to Oxford to study philosophy, although 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. Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a fellow of Christ Church, described her as having been "the dons' delight". For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle, although his womanising was not apparently extended to her.

When Spencer-Churchill 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 to 1945. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting, who in 1956 resigned from Anthony Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez Operation. For a time the future Lady Avon lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing (although the building was a modern, steel-framed structure with extensive underground accommodation that was considered relatively safe during air raids).

Post-war

After the war Spencer-Churchill worked at London Films for the producer Sir Alexander Korda''. She met the actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film ''The Third Man'' (1949), and escorted actress Paulette Goddard, who played Mrs. Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde's ''An Ideal Husband'' (1947), on "a rather wild trip" to Brussels. During the latter excursion Goddard expressed a wish to attend a pornographic show, but, although Korda's representatives made arrangements for this, she shied away when she and Spencer-Churchill, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits.

Spencer-Churchill also worked for the short-lived monthly magazine ''Contact'', established by George (later Lord) Weidenfeld and edited by Philip Toynbee. Weidenfeld was keen to expand into book publishing and ''Contact'', which appeared with a hard cover, offered a means of circumventing post-war paper quotas. Among those Spencer-Churchill persuaded to contribute to the magazine was the cookery writer Elizabeth David, whose recipes became very influential in the 1950s. Through Weidenfeld she also became a close friend of Marcus Sieff, later chairman of the retailer Marks and Spencer.

As a result of this eclectic early career, she 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", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly". Even so, the future Lady Avon did not impress everyone: after the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher met her at a Conservative Party ball in 1954, she wrote dismissively to her sister, "Mrs Anthony Eden received us. Really she is a most colourless personality".

2007 memoir

Glimpses of Spencer-Churchill's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. Although she had indicated to the former Labour member of Parliament (MP) Woodrow Wyatt that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste, was nevertheless published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007, and Phoenix brought out a paperback edition in 2008. In 2004 Haste had collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then prime minister Tony Blair, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon as part of a wider study of prime ministerial spouses. Avon noted that after meeting Haste she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it possible".

A photograph on the dust jacket of her memoir, depicting a young, pensive Spencer-Churchill, cigarette in hand, conveyed an alluring and slightly Bohemian image. The book was generally well-received by critics and even generated an engaging "spoof" in the satirical magazine ''Private Eye'' ("In the early 1950s I married Anthony Eden, a politician of above average height, with a prominent moustache ..."). Historian Andrew Roberts described it as "the last great British autobiography of the pre-war and wartime era", while art critic John McEwen remarked on its "witty and elegant restraint".

Friends and acquaintances

Early admirers

Having lost both parents by her mid-twenties, Spencer-Churchill was comparatively independent for a young woman of her time. In later years she remarked to Woodrow Wyatt on "how much more restricted" girls were when she was young while conceding that she had had her first affair at 17 with a "man who was quite well-known and ... still alive n 1986. She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay, briefly a diplomat and later a painter, who was the stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.

Lady Avon was quoted by Wyatt as having told him that she had resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime information minister and British ambassador in Paris (1944–1947), who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother: "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from". 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". When Cooper was raised to the peerage (eventually choosing the title Viscount Norwich), he sought Spencer-Churchill's views as to a title—"Think, child, think ... Have you any suggestions? (not funny ones)"—and she was the recipient of the last letter that he wrote (from White's club) shortly before his death at sea on New Year's Day, 1954.

Other friends

Among the future Lady Avon's many other friends, several of whom were some years older than she, were the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford (whose sister Deborah wrote of an encounter with Avon some 20 years after they had been débutantes together that she found her "rather alarming"), painter Lucian Freud, and choreographer Frederick Ashton. When she was still in her teens James Pope-Hennessy modelled on her the character of Perdita in ''London Fabric'' (1939) and dedicated the book "To Clarissa". 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. The journalist and author Sofka Zinovieff claimed that, after her grandmother, Jennifer Fry (of the Fry's chocolate family), separated in 1944 from her grandfather, Robert Heber-Percy, who was Lord Berners's closest friend, Spencer-Churchill and Beaton amused themselves by riffling through underclothes and love letters that Fry had left in a drawer at Berners's country home, Faringdon House, in Oxfordshire. A few years later while working at ''Contact'', Spencer-Churchill became friends with the writer and journalist Alan Ross, who subsequently married Fry.

Lady Avon thought the writer and horticulturalist Vita Sackville-West (whose husband, the politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson was a friend of her mother) "an interesting romantic figure", but felt "dunched" by her "remote and rather superior" manner. Visiting her at Sissinghurst some years later, she "thought the less of her" for troubling to provide, evidently in a hurry, table napkins that were still damp. Like Avon herself, many of her acquaintances frequented the bookshop Heywood Hill, next to the hairdresser Trumper's in Mayfair's Curzon Street, which, during the war was managed by Nancy Mitford and became a regular meeting place: according to Mitford's sister, Diana, Lady Mosley, " s ground-floor room didn't just like a private club, it very nearly was one".

Avon was a long-standing friend of Ann Fleming, wife of novelist Ian Fleming and lover of Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963, who had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere. In 1952, she and composer and playwright Noël Coward became godparents to the Flemings' son Caspar, who died of a drug overdose in 1975. In later years, as a widow, she was evidently close to the influential solicitor Lord Goodman. Another long-standing social acquaintance was Labour minister Roy (later Lord) Jenkins, also a friend of Ann Fleming. Jenkins's official biographer chose, as an example of the broadly-based groups Jenkins would entertain at his home at East Hendred, a small party assembled there in March 1994—Avon, together with the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, Jenkins's publisher Roland Philipps and their wives.

Relationship with Anthony Eden

Spencer-Churchill first met her future husband at Cranborne, Dorset (home of the future 5th Marquess of Salisbury), in 1936, when she was 16. He was already famous for his elegant attire and Homburg hat, and she was struck by Eden's unusual pinstriped tweed trousers.

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 uncle Winston, who became prime minister in May 1940. As an illustration of her occasional proximity to the centre of power, between meetings of the War Cabinet on 30 May 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was at its height, Spencer-Churchill was present when Churchill lunched with her parents and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. The future Lady Avon described this occasion as "a nightmare, with news of people's deaths coming in ...". After her mother's death in 1941, she stayed at Chequers, the prime minister's country home in Buckinghamshire.

R. A. Butler, then Minister of Education, 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, Spencer-Churchill, just turned 21, proclaimed with patent improbability that she had three favourites, Edward VIII, Leopold III of Belgium and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Marriage to Eden

A more defined relationship with Eden, who was a married man 23 years older than Spencer-Churchill, 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 woman on his other side and afterwards, in an undertone, invited Spencer-Churchill out to dinner. In 1950, Eden was divorced from his first wife, Beatrice (''née'' Beckett, 1905–1957). Although she was a Roman Catholic and her church was opposed to divorce, Spencer-Churchill 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, prompting Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' denstill has and how popular he is". The wedding reception was held at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister, who at the time was Lady Eden's uncle, Churchill.

Attitudes to the marriage

Until 2019, Eden was one of only two British prime ministers to have been divorced (although he was one of ten to have been married twice). There was criticism of the marriage in the ''Church Times''—"Mr. Eden's action this week shows how far the climate of public opinion in this matter has changed for the worse"—and from some others in the Anglican church, including the Archbishop of Sydney, who drew parallels with Edward VIII's having given up the throne to marry an American divorcée. Harold Macmillan, among others, thought such comparisons unfair: "Miss Churchill cannot be compared with Mrs Simpson, who had had two husbands". However, the marriage also drew the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Spencer-Churchill himself and who, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Waugh enquired of Lady Eden, "Did you never think that you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary by your desertion f the faith"

On the eve of the wedding, John Colville, a long-time private secretary of Churchill, who in his younger days had been part of the same social "set" as Churchill's niece, recorded in his diary that Spencer-Churchill, 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". According to the future Lady Avon herself, Churchill's wife Clementine thought her "too independent and totally unsuitable", while the marriage is said to have exacerbated the antagonism towards Eden of the Churchills' often wayward son Randolph, who, having initially defended his cousin to Waugh, gave her "two years to knock deninto shape". 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 the Queen, announced that she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcé. Although recently available evidence suggests that the Eden government was prepared to be reasonably accommodating towards such a marriage and that Margaret would have needed only to renounce her right of succession in 1953, which caused lasting problems. Eden's private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh, recalled Lady Eden's role in ensuring that the complaint that led to the operation had been diagnosed properly: "When Eden acquired a loving wife, Sir oraceEvans was called in ...". Before then Eden had travelled with a tin box containing medicaments that ranged from aspirins to morphia injections.

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''. Avon maintained many of her wider acquaintances. For example, Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo visited 10 Downing Street at her invitation in October 1956. They drank vodka and ice and Beaton recorded Lady Eden's observation that her husband was kept awake by the sound of motor scooters, which were growing in popularity among young people in the 1950s. Lady Eden 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 that he had always wanted to meet her.

Lady Eden miscarried in 1954 and there were no children. Her stepson, Nicholas, Eden's surviving son from his first marriage, who succeeded him as 2nd Earl of Avon, served as Under-Secretary of State for Energy in Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS in 1985. At this point the earldom became extinct.

Eden's premiership

Churchill had told Lady Eden, following her honeymoon in 1952, that he wanted to give up the premiership. However, it was not until 6 April 1955 that Eden succeeded him as prime minister, shortly afterwards winning a general election in which the Conservative Party polled the largest percentage of the popular vote recorded by a party 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 Eden's train, causing the monarch's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, to remark, "that's torn it, in more than one sense".

Eden's premiership lasted less than two years. For much of this period Eden was the subject of hostility from elements of the Conservative press, notably ''The Daily Telegraph'', the wife of whose chairman, Lady Pamela Berry (an ambitious and sometimes spiteful society hostess, described by the biographer of her father, Lord Birkenhead, as "the politician '' manqué'' of the second generation"), was said by some to have had a "blood row" (Macmillan's phrase) with Lady Eden. The latter's attempts to make up this puzzling rift were shunned.

Chatelaine at Downing Street and Chequers

As hostess at 10 Downing Street, Lady Eden 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". Because the Edens' tenure was so short, Lady Eden's plans to return the fabric and furniture of the house to the styles of the 1730s, when it was built, were never realised.

Lady Eden 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 Eden and replaced them with roses of a "normal olour. One episode at Chequers attracted considerable publicity. In January 1956 Lady Eden 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. Although it seems that the washing may have been hung across a lime walk, beyond the boundary of the cottage garden itself, the story was taken up by the ''Daily Mirror'' as an alleged example of Lady Eden's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.

In April 1956 Lady Eden hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev noted that Lady Eden's (sober) behaviour contradicted a briefing from the Soviet embassy in London that she shared some of Churchill's "traits in the matter of drinking". Over dinner (when, according to his hostess, he ate nothing despite his reputation for eating and drinking greedily), he responded rather bluntly to her question about the range of Soviet missiles that "they could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther". The following morning Khrushchev mistook Lady Eden's room for Bulganin's but, having provoked a cry after almost walking in on her, beat a hasty retreat and did not identify himself. He confided later in Bulganin with whom he "had a good laugh over heincident".

Suez Crisis

As the Suez Crisis reached its climax in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November Lady Eden 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 Gaitskell replied, "the boys must have their fun". (An alternative version is that Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".) Three days later Lady Eden 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.

"The Suez Canal flowing through my drawing room"

In the humiliating aftermath of the crisis in 1956, Lady Eden's most famous public remark to a group of Conservative women that, "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room", was widely reported. The future Lady Avon later described this observation as "silly, really idiotic", though it remains probably the most quoted utterance of the whole crisis. One example of its durability was a journalist's observation some 54 years later, with reference to the Iraq War of 2003, that "if, as Clarissa Eden remarked, the Suez Canal ran through her drawing room, Iraq and the decisions that flowed from it still haunt heLabour artyand stir up antipathies and discomforts". Another instance was in 2013 when options for airport expansion around London were being debated: ''The Times'' newspaper cited Avon's words in 2011 in connection with a call by the outgoing Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus (later Lord) O'Donnell for prime ministerial spouses to receive greater support from public funds: "In a constitutional monarchy, the consort of the prime minister is not an official role ... Yet, as the Countess of Avon so vividly pointed out, it can be impossible to keep public scrutiny at bay altogether". In Avon's view, both she and her husband "were quite naive about how the press works. Neither of us should have been, but we were."

In his memoirs, Anthony Eden recalled that on several occasions during the crisis, he found time to sit in his wife's drawing-room, whose décor he described as green. There he was able to enjoy two sanguines by André Derain and a bronze of a girl in her bath by Degas that Alexander Korda

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases