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
from 1955-1957. 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. Her memoir, sub-titled From Churchill to Eden, was published in 2007 under the name of Clarissa Eden.
(1880–1947), the younger brother of Winston Churchill
, and Lady Gwendoline ("Goonie") Bertie (1885–1941), daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon
, who married in 1908. She is thus the niece of Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister during the Second World War (1940-5) and from 1951-5, and granddaughter of Lord Randolph Churchill
, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1886-7, and the American society beauty Jenny Jerome. Her paternal great-grandfather was the 7th Duke of Marlborough
; her maternal great-great-grandfather was the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry
, half-brother of the 2nd Marquess, who, as Viscount Castlereagh, was Foreign Secretary during the Congress of Vienna
(1815) that followed the Napoleonic Wars
.
. At the time this was considered an unsuitable career for a "gentleman" and, in 1907, his marriage to Lady Gwendoline had to be postponed because her mother thought him impecunious. Though self-effacing and inoffensive, a good deal of unfounded rumour attached to him as a young man (as it did to much of the Churchill clan, though in some cases for better reason): among other things, it was suggested that his natural father was the fifth Earl of Roden
and that he had murdered Lord Percy
, heir to the Duke of Northumberland
, who was whispered to have been the lover of Clementine Hozier
, whom Winston Churchill married in 1908. Jack Churchill served with distinction in the Boer War
and the First World War, being awarded both the Croix de Guerre
and the Légion d'Honneur
during the latter conflict.
Lady Avon's elder brothers were Johnnie
(1909–1992), an artist, and Henry Winston (known as Peregrine) (1913–2002).
, Kensington
, London. She was educated at Kensington High School and then at Downham
, a "fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Lady Avon felt also the need to get away from home - "I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much".
. 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 Lady Avon made in Paris were the monocle
d Fitzroy Maclean, a future politician and adventurer who was then third secretary at the embassy, and the writer Marthe Bibesco
. Together with two female contemporaries, she made a visit to the Folies Bergère, an unusual destination for sixteen year old girls, where the singer Joséphine Baker
, clad only in a circlet of bananas, became the first naked female body she had ever seen'
In the summer of 1937 Lady Avon accompanied Julian, Earl of Oxford & Asquith
(grandson of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) and his mother, Katherine, on a tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany
region of Italy
. Among other artistic treasures, she saw for the first time the fifteenth century frescos by Piero della Francesca
at Arezzo
, one of which, "The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood" (c.1452), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting: "in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".
When Lady Avon 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 that associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich
after the latter's appearance in the film, Morocco (1930). 1938 was Lady Avon's "coming out
" year and she was regarded as "one of the more notable débutante
s" in a "vintage year for beautiful girls", but, having mixed with older and more sophisticated people in Paris, she seems 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 her exhibiting "more than a whiff of [Greta] Garbo
in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris". Among those with whom Lady Avon 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
or the Asquiths
".
In 1939 Lady Avon spent another four months in Paris and in August of that year travelled to Romania
as 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). Lady Avon only just managed to return to England - on one of the last flights out of Bucharest
- before the start of the Second World War.
, 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
. Lady Antonia Fraser
, whose father, later Lord Longford
, was a Fellow of Christ Church
, has described her as "the don's 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 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. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting
, who, in 1956, resigned from Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez
operation. For a time 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).
for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened", 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
, 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 Lady Avon, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits.
Lady Avon 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
", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly".
Member of Parliament
Woodrow, Lord Wyatt
that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste (Lady Bragg
), was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2007. Phoenix published a paperback edition in 2008. Haste had previously collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair
, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon in 2004 as part of a wider study of Prime Ministerial spouses. Lady Avon noted that, after meeting Haste, she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it happen".
A photograph on the dust jacket of the memoir, depicting a young, pensive Lady Avon, 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".
, diplomat and painter, who was stepson of Lord Vansittart
, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.
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: "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 (as Viscount Norwich), he sought Lady Avon'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.
, Anthony Powell
and Nancy Mitford
(whose sister Deborah "found her [Lady Avon] 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. 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 Lady 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, "its ground floor room didn't just look like a private club, it very nearly was one".
Lady Avon was a long-standing friend of Anne Fleming, wife of novelist Ian Fleming
and lover of Hugh Gaitskell
, leader of the Labour Party 1955-63, who had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere
. Lady Avon and composer and playwright Noel Coward
became godparents in 1952 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 and adviser Lord Goodman.
, 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.
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
. Lady Avon has 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 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 of the United Kingdom
, King Leopold III of Belgium
and the aviator Charles Lindbergh
. (All three men, for various reasons, would not have appealed much to Churchill at that point in the war.)
and Michael Wilding
, prompting Harold Macmillan
, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' he [Eden] still has and how popular he is". The reception was held at 10, Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence.
, 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" However, Lady Avon's decision drew also the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Lady Avon himself and, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman
for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Waugh enquired of Lady Avon, "Did you never think that you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary
by your desertion [of the faith]?".
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". According to 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 Evelyn Waugh, gave her "two years to knock him [Eden] into 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 The Princess Margaret
, sister of The Queen, 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. Although recently available evidence suggests that the Eden government was prepared to be reasonably accommodating of such a marriage and that Margaret would have needed only to renounce her right of succession to the throne, Townsend reflected in the 1970s that
noted that, though "non-political", Lady Avon was interested in foreign affairs, having written a Berlin diary for the literary magazine Horizon. 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. Eden's private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh
, recalled Lady Avon's role in ensuring that the complaint that led to the operation had been diagnosed properly: "When Eden acquired a loving wife, Sir [Horace] Evans was called in ..." Before then Eden had travelled with a tin box containing medicaments that ranged from aspirin
s to morphia injections.
Lady 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 Avon'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 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.
The Edens' marriage, which lasted until his death on 14 January 1977, was, by all accounts, an extremely happy one, though Lady Avon 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
, was a Minister in Margaret Thatcher
's Government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS
in 1985.
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 Avon’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 (a noted society hostess, described by the biographer of her father, Lord Birkenhead, as "the politician manqué
e of the second generation") was said by some to have had a "blood row" (Macmillan's phrase) with Lady Avon. The latter's attempts to make up this puzzling rift were apparently shunned.
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 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.
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". 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. 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 Avon's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.
In April 1956 Lady Avon hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet
leaders Nikita Khrushchev
and Nikolai Bulganin
. Khrushchev noted that Lady Avon's (sober) behaviour contradicted briefing from the Soviet Embassy in London that she shared some of Winston 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 Avon'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 the incident".
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". (An alternative version is that Mrs Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".) 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.
In his memoirs Eden recalled that, on several occasions during the Suez 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 sanguine
s by André Derain
and a bronze of a girl in her bath by Degas that Alexander Korda had given the Edens as a wedding present.
and referred to "Clarissa's war". (It should be borne in mind, however, that her husband, Sir Gladwyn, a "figure of some grandeur, if not hauteur", was furious at his exclusion from an Anglo-French summit in Paris two weeks before the Suez invasion.) In December 1956 Walter Monckton, a member of Eden's Government who opposed the Suez invasion, apparently told a Labour Member of Parliament, Anthony Wedgwood Benn
, that Lady Avon was a powerful force in politics, with great influence on her husband, and that "now she knows he [Monckton] opposed Anthony she won't have anything to do with him". Monckton claimed, among other things, that, during a rail strike in 1955, Eden, by then Prime Minister, had, at his wife's urging, taken a tougher public stance in relation to the railwaymen than that advised by Monckton, as Minister of Labour, and senior civil servants (although there is evidence that Churchill had also privately advocated to Eden the need for a strong line).
In private correspondence just after Suez, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper derided Lady Avon's remark about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room and declared not only that the "vain and foolish" Eden was "wholly managed" by her, but that she herself would listen only to Cecil Beaton, whom he described (with reference to the Svengali
of the last Russian Czarina Alexandra) as her "Rasputin".
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. Similarly, David Dutton, a biographer generally less sympathetic to Eden than Thorpe, while noting that "some observers believed that Clarissa was excessively protective and tended to exacerbate Eden's natural volatility", nevertheless remarked on her devoted companionship and that "during the dark days of the Suez Crisis, [she] was at his side, supportive throughout".
Eden himself paid tribute to his wife's adaptation of their domestic arrangements to meet the "unsteady requirements" of this period, noting that his digestion took less kindly to them. There is some evidence also that, when he was Foreign Secretary, Lady Avon had influenced (or, at any rate endorsed) his patterns of work. A later Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd
, has observed that, though he worked hard, Eden did not keep office hours and often spent mornings working in bed. For example, on 29 December 1952, Eden wrote: "Raining and cold. Clarissa says that this is the right way to run the F[oreign].O[ffice]. Lie in bed, direct office by telephone and read Delacroix
".
Some of Lady Avon's friends may have been less than open with her about Suez. For example, Isaiah Berlin assured "dearest Clarissa" that Eden had acted with "great moral splendour", describing his stance as "very brave", "very patriotic" and "absolutely just", while opining to another acquaintance that his policy had been "childish folly". 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". Even so, her knowledge of the inner workings of Government was such that she was able to record in her diary the precise stance, at a critical point of the Suez operation, of every member of the Cabinet:
", 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. 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. 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".
Once installed in Jamaica, the Edens were temporary neighbours of Nöel Coward
, who presented them - "poor dears" - with a basket of caviare, pâté de foie gras and champagne. Coward also sent Frank Cooper's marmalade and Huntley and Palmer's biscuits, which, according to Lady Avon, "was not what we had been looking forward to". 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 1952.
was appointed as his successor in preference to R. A. Butler, Lady Avon wrote to Butler (whom two years earlier she had described in her diary as "curiously unnatural") that she thought politics "a beastly profession ... and how greatly I admire your dignity and good humour". (In 1952 she had told Duff Cooper that she thought modern politics something of a "farce".)
Macmillan's biographer Alistair Horne
noted that, of the various animosities that arose before and during Macmilan's premiership, it was the "loyal wives", among whom he counted Lady Avon and Lady Butler, who "tended most to keep [them] alive". Although there is evidence of a long-standing and lasting rift between Eden and Macmillan, Eden himself maintained "a friendly (if not conspicuously warm) relationship" with his successor, often being used as a "sounding board" by Macmillan who occasionally lunched with the Edens at their home. Lady Avon, on the other hand, was said to have been consistently vitriolic about Macmillan and recalled to one of Eden's biographers that Churchill had found Macmillan too "viewy". As late as 2007 she criticised Macmillan's behaviour as Chancellor of the Exchequer
during the Suez crisis, suggesting that he had been "too hasty" in using an American threat to withhold a loan from the International Monetary Fund
as "an excuse to back down" from military action and had wept "crocodile tears" at Eden's resignation. At the same time she concurred with the proposition that the Americans had behaved shabbily over Suez, but felt that U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"later regretted his stance."
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", was the future Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott
. 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. When they arrived in New Zealand, which was among the few countries publicly to have supported the Suez operation, the Edens received a rapturous "red carpet
" reception.
, Wiltshire, where he died on 14 January 1977 and is buried. The last entry in Eden's diary, dated 11 September 1976, had read; "exquisite small vase of crimson glory buds & mignonette from beloved C[larissa]".
When Eden 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 former New York Governor
Averell Harriman, elder statesman of the Democratic Party
, and his English-born wife Pamela
. (Mrs Harriman was Lady Avon's exact contemporary, a débutante of 1938 who had also taken a room at the Dorchester during the Second World War. She had previously been married to Lady Avon's cousin Randolph Churchill and in the 1990s was President Bill Clinton
's Ambassador to Paris, where she died in 1997.) 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.
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 2003 a research study by a Harvard clinician of Eden's medical condition and surgery during the 1950s was published in the USA with an acknowledgement of Lady Avon's interest and cooperation.
Over the years Lady Avon attended various state occasions, as well as gatherings of former Prime Ministers and their families. For example, in 1972 (while her husband was still alive) she described to Cecil Beaton the Duchess of Windsor's "very strange" and nervous demeanour - "Is this my seat?" "Is this my prayer book?" "What do I do now?" - at the funeral of her husband, the former King Edward VIII, while thirty years later Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair Campbell
noted that, at a dinner at 10 Downing Street to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee in 2002:
In 1994, 17 years after her husband's death, Lady Avon unveiled a bust of Eden at the Foreign Office.
As part of The Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, Lady Avon attended a dinner at Buckingham Palace
alongside several other relatives of deceased former prime ministers, as well as the then prime minister Tony Blair
and the four surviving former prime ministers.
in 2005 about Prime Ministers’ wives 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. 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.
Lady Avon was 87 when her memoir appeared in 2007. A journalist who interviewed her and her editor, Cate Haste, observed that Lady Avon "seems slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil", but described her as "vigorous and knowing" in conversation. In April 2008 she and Haste appeared at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, the literature for this event observing that, although Lady Avon was perhaps best known for her lament about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room, "she was far more than a drawing-room consort".
, Lady Callaghan
and Sir Denis Thatcher) who succeeded her and she is four years younger than Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, who is still living and is now the longest lived Prime Ministerial spouse, having turned 95 in 2011. The husbands of Dame Norma Major
, Cherie Blair and Sarah Brown
became Prime Minister 35, 42 and 52 years respectively after Eden had done so; in 2010, Samantha Cameron
's husband David Cameron
succeeded Brown seven weeks before Lady Avon's ninetieth birthday, 55 years after Eden had assumed office and 53 years and 4 months after his resignation. Norma Major (whose husband became Prime Minister in 1990) was the first of Lady Avon's successors to have been born after her. Until William Hague
married 29-year old Ffion Jenkins in 1997, Lady Avon had been the youngest spouse of a leader of the modern Conservative Party. Like Lady Avon, Samantha Cameron was 34 when her husband became leader of the party in 2005.
, a sample of a hundred members of the public registered low recognition of Lady Avon as a Prime Ministerial spouse since 1945, though her profile was higher than that of Lady Dorothy Macmillan, Elizabeth Home and Audrey Callaghan, all of whom scored no points at all.
In the first episode of the BBC's drama series The Hour (2011), set in 1956, a television producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai
) was complimented by one of Eden's press officers for a feature about "Lady Eden at home".
Anthony Eden
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, KG, MC, PC was a British Conservative politician, who was Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957...
, 1st Earl of Avon (1897–1977), who was British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Prime Minister
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
from 1955-1957. 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. Her memoir, sub-titled From Churchill to Eden, was published in 2007 under the name of Clarissa Eden.
Antecedents
Lady Avon was the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-ChurchillJohn Strange Spencer-Churchill
Major John Strange "Jack" Spencer-Churchill, DSO, TD was the younger son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Randolph Churchill , and brother of World War II Prime Minster, Sir Winston Churchill....
(1880–1947), the younger brother of Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, and Lady Gwendoline ("Goonie") Bertie (1885–1941), daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon
Montagu Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon
Montagu Arthur Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon was an English peer.-Background:He was the fifth child of Montagu Bertie, 6th Earl of Abingdon and Elizabeth Lavinia Vernon-Harcourt.-Family:...
, who married in 1908. She is thus the niece of Winston Churchill, who was Prime Minister during the Second World War (1940-5) and from 1951-5, and granddaughter of Lord Randolph Churchill
Lord Randolph Churchill
Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill MP was a British statesman. He was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and his wife Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane , daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry...
, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1886-7, and the American society beauty Jenny Jerome. Her paternal great-grandfather was the 7th Duke of Marlborough
John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough
John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough, KG, PC , styled Earl of Sunderland from 1822 to 1840 and Marquess of Blandford from 1840 to 1857, was a British statesman and nobleman...
; her maternal great-great-grandfather was the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry
Charles Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry
Charles William Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry KG, GCB, GCH, PC , styled The Honourable Charles Stewart from 1789 until 1813 and The Honourable Sir Charles Stewart from 1813 to 1814 and known as The Lord Stewart from 1814 to 1822, was a British soldier, politician and nobleman...
, half-brother of the 2nd Marquess, who, as Viscount Castlereagh, was Foreign Secretary during the Congress of Vienna
Congress of Vienna
The Congress of Vienna was a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and held in Vienna from September, 1814 to June, 1815. The objective of the Congress was to settle the many issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars,...
(1815) that followed the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
.
Father and brothers
Jack Churchill was a stockbroker, who had been found a suitable position by the financier Sir Ernest CasselErnest Cassel
Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, PC was a German-born British merchant banker and capitalist.-Biography:...
. At the time this was considered an unsuitable career for a "gentleman" and, in 1907, his marriage to Lady Gwendoline had to be postponed because her mother thought him impecunious. Though self-effacing and inoffensive, a good deal of unfounded rumour attached to him as a young man (as it did to much of the Churchill clan, though in some cases for better reason): among other things, it was suggested that his natural father was the fifth Earl of Roden
Earl of Roden
Earl of Roden is a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1771 for Robert Jocelyn, 2nd Viscount Jocelyn. This branch of the Jocelyn family descends from the 1st Viscount, prominent Irish lawyer and politician Robert Jocelyn, the son of Thomas Jocelyn, third son of Sir Robert Jocelyn,...
and that he had murdered Lord Percy
Henry Percy, Earl Percy
Henry Algernon George Percy, Earl Percy , styled Lord Warkworth until 1899, was a British Conservative politician...
, heir to the Duke of Northumberland
Henry Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland
Henry George Percy, 7th Duke of Northumberland KG, PC, FRS , styled Lord Lovaine between 1865 and 1867 and Earl Percy between 1867 and 1899, was a British Conservative politician...
, who was whispered to have been the lover of Clementine Hozier
Clementine Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill
Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill, Baroness Spencer-Churchill, GBE, CStJ was the wife of Sir Winston Churchill and a life peeress in her own right.-Early life:...
, whom Winston Churchill married in 1908. Jack Churchill served with distinction in the Boer War
Boer War
The Boer Wars were two wars fought between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics, the Oranje Vrijstaat and the Republiek van Transvaal ....
and the First World War, being awarded both the Croix de Guerre
Croix de guerre
The Croix de guerre is a military decoration of France. It was first created in 1915 and consists of a square-cross medal on two crossed swords, hanging from a ribbon with various degree pins. The decoration was awarded during World War I, again in World War II, and in other conflicts...
and the Légion d'Honneur
Légion d'honneur
The Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
during the latter conflict.
Lady Avon's elder brothers were Johnnie
John Spencer-Churchill (artist)
John George Spencer-Churchill , son of John Strange Spencer-Churchill and nephew of Sir Winston Churchill, was an artist. He was proud to acknowledge that he was "...a direct descendant of one of the sons of the American Revolution." His sister Clarissa married Anthony Eden, British Prime Minister...
(1909–1992), an artist, and Henry Winston (known as Peregrine) (1913–2002).
| Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, Lady Eden (Countess of Avon 1961) | Father: John Strange Spencer-Churchill John Strange Spencer-Churchill Major John Strange "Jack" Spencer-Churchill, DSO, TD was the younger son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Randolph Churchill , and brother of World War II Prime Minster, Sir Winston Churchill.... DSO TD |
Paternal Grandfather: Rt. Hon. Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill Lord Randolph Churchill Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill MP was a British statesman. He was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and his wife Lady Frances Anne Emily Vane , daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry... |
Paternal Great-grandfather: John Winston Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough |
| Paternal Great-grandmother: Lady Frances Vane-Tempest-Stewart |
|||
| Paternal Grandmother: Jeanette (Jenny) Jerome |
Paternal Great-grandfather: Leonard Jerome Leonard Jerome Leonard Walter Jerome was a Brooklyn, New York, financier and grandfather of Winston Churchill.- Early life :... |
||
| Paternal Great-grandmother: Clara Hall |
|||
| Mother: Lady Gwendoline Bertie ("Goonie") (married John Churchill 1908) |
Maternal Grandfather: Montagu Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon Montagu Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon Montagu Arthur Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon was an English peer.-Background:He was the fifth child of Montagu Bertie, 6th Earl of Abingdon and Elizabeth Lavinia Vernon-Harcourt.-Family:... |
Maternal Great-grandfather: Montagu Bertie, 6th Earl of Abingdon Montagu Bertie, 6th Earl of Abingdon Montagu Bertie, 6th Earl of Abingdon was a British peer and politician. He was styled Lord Norreys from birth until acceding in 1854.-Background:... |
|
| Maternal Great-grandmother: Elizabeth Harcourt |
|||
| Maternal Grandmother: Gwendoline Mary Dormer |
Maternal Great-grandfather: Lt.-Gen. the Hon. James Charlemagne Dormer |
||
| Maternal Great-grandmother: Ella Francis Catherine Alison |
Early life
Lady Avon was born at her family's home in the Cromwell RoadCromwell Road
Cromwell Road is a major road in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, and is designated part of the A4. It was created in the 19th century and is named after Oliver Cromwell....
, Kensington
Kensington
Kensington is a district of west and central London, England within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. An affluent and densely-populated area, its commercial heart is Kensington High Street, and it contains the well-known museum district of South Kensington.To the north, Kensington is...
, London. She was educated at Kensington High School and then at Downham
Downham
Downham is a district located in south-east London, occupying much of the boundary between the London Borough of Lewisham and the London Borough of Bromley; it is the name of an electoral ward covering much of the area on the Lewisham side...
, a "fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Lady Avon felt also 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
In 1937 Lady Avon studied art in ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Her mother had asked the British Ambassador, Sir George Clerk, to keep a watchful eye on her, an unintended consequence
Unintended consequence
In the social sciences, unintended consequences are outcomes that are not the outcomes intended by a purposeful action. The concept has long existed but was named and popularised in the 20th century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton...
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 Lady Avon made in Paris were the monocle
Monocle
A monocle is a type of corrective lens used to correct or enhance the vision in only one eye. It consists of a circular lens, generally with a wire ring around the circumference that can be attached to a string. The other end of the string is then connected to the wearer's clothing to avoid losing...
d Fitzroy Maclean, a future politician and adventurer who was then third secretary at the embassy, and the writer Marthe Bibesco
Marthe Bibesco
Marthe, Princess Bibesco was a Romanian-French writer of the Belle Époque...
. Together with two female contemporaries, she made a visit to the Folies Bergère, an unusual destination for sixteen year old girls, where the singer Joséphine Baker
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was an American dancer, singer, and actress who found fame in her adopted homeland of France. She was given such nicknames as the "Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess"....
, clad only in a circlet of bananas, became the first naked female body she had ever seen'
In the summer of 1937 Lady Avon accompanied Julian, Earl of Oxford & Asquith
Julian Asquith, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith
Julian Edward George Asquith, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Asquith KCMG , was a British colonial administrator.-Background and education:...
(grandson of Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) and his mother, Katherine, on a tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany
Tuscany
Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
region of Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. Among other artistic treasures, she saw for the first time the fifteenth century frescos by Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...
at Arezzo
Arezzo
Arezzo is a city and comune in Central Italy, capital of the province of the same name, located in Tuscany. Arezzo is about 80 km southeast of Florence, at an elevation of 296 m above sea level. In 2011 the population was about 100,000....
, one of which, "The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood" (c.1452), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting: "in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".
When Lady Avon returned to London she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art
Slade School of Fine Art
The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...
. Around this time she displayed her individualism by acquiring a specially tailored trouser suit along the lines of that associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...
after the latter's appearance in the film, Morocco (1930). 1938 was Lady Avon's "coming out
Debutante
A débutante is a young lady from an aristocratic or upper class family who has reached the age of maturity, and as a new adult, is introduced to society at a formal "début" presentation. It should not be confused with a Debs...
" year and she was regarded as "one of the more notable débutante
Debutante
A débutante is a young lady from an aristocratic or upper class family who has reached the age of maturity, and as a new adult, is introduced to society at a formal "début" presentation. It should not be confused with a Debs...
s" in a "vintage year for beautiful girls", but, having mixed with older and more sophisticated people in Paris, she seems 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 her exhibiting "more than a whiff of [Greta] Garbo
Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...
in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris". Among those with whom Lady Avon danced at that year's Liberal
Liberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
Ball was the future double agent
Double agent
A double agent, commonly abbreviated referral of double secret agent, is a counterintelligence term used to designate an employee of a secret service or organization, whose primary aim is to spy on the target organization, but who in fact is a member of that same target organization oneself. They...
Donald Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean
Donald Duart Maclean was a British diplomat and member of the Cambridge Five who were members of MI5, MI6 or the diplomatic service who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War and beyond. He was recruited as a "straight penetration agent" while an undergraduate at Cambridge by...
who complained that she was too smart to be "a proper Liberal girl like the Bonham-Carters
Maurice Bonham Carter
Sir Maurice Bonham Carter, KCB, KCVO was an English Liberal politician and cricketer.Bonham Carter was the second son of Sibella Charlotte and Henry Bonham Carter. He was born in London and educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford...
or the Asquiths
Asquith family
The Asquiths were originally a middle class family from West Yorkshire, members of the Congregational church. The first prominent member of the family was H. H. Asquith, the British Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916. In 1925, Asquith was raised to the peerage as Earl of Oxford and Asquith. His...
".
In 1939 Lady Avon spent another four months in Paris and in August of that year travelled to Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
as guest of the novelist Elizabeth Bibesco
Elizabeth Bibesco
Elizabeth, Princess Bibesco was an English writer active between 1921 and 1940. A final posthumous collection of her stories, poems and aphorisms was published under the title Haven in 1951, with a preface by Elizabeth Bowen.-Childhood and youth:Elizabeth Charlotte Lucy was the first child of...
and her husband Antoine
Antoine Bibesco
Antoine, Prince Bibesco was a Romanian aristocrat, lawyer, diplomat and writer.- Biography :His father was Prince Alexandre Bibesco, the last surviving son of the Hospodar of Wallachia. His mother was Helene Epourano, daughter of a former Prime Minister of Romania...
(Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith
Margot Asquith
Margot Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith , born Emma Alice Margaret Tennant, was an Anglo-Scottish socialite, author and wit...
, having been left distraught at the conclusion of her daughter's visit to her in London earlier in the year). Lady Avon only just managed to return to England - on one of the last flights out of Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
- before the start of the Second World War.
Second World War: Oxford and the Foreign Office
In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy HarrodRoy Harrod
Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod was an English economist. He is best known for his biography of John Maynard Keynes and the development of the Harrod–Domar model, which he and Evsey Domar developed independently...
, Lady Avon went to Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
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
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
and Maurice Bowra
Maurice Bowra
Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra was an English classical scholar and academic, known for his wit. He was Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, from 1938 to 1970, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1951 to 1954.-Birth and boyhood:...
. Lady Antonia Fraser
Antonia Fraser
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE , née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Antonia Fraser...
, whose father, later Lord Longford
Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford
Francis Aungier Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford KG, PC , known as the Lord Pakenham from 1945 to 1961, was a British politician, author, and social reformer...
, was a Fellow of Christ Church
Christ Church, Oxford
Christ Church or house of Christ, and thus sometimes known as The House), is one of the largest constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England...
, has described her as "the don's delight". For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor
Wykeham Professor
The University of Oxford has three statutory professorships named after William of Wykeham.-Logic:The Wykeham Professorship in Logic was established in 1859, although it was not known as the Wykeham chair until later...
of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle, although his womanising was not apparently extended to her.
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. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting
Anthony Nutting
Sir Harold Anthony Nutting, 3rd Baronet was a British diplomat and Conservative Party politician.-Early and private life:...
, who, in 1956, resigned from Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez
Suez Crisis
The Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression, Suez War was an offensive war fought by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel against Egypt beginning on 29 October 1956. Less than a day after Israel invaded Egypt, Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Egypt and Israel,...
operation. For a time Lady Avon lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel
Dorchester Hotel
The Dorchester is a luxury hotel in London, opened on 18 April 1931. It is situated on Park Lane in Mayfair, overlooking Hyde Park.The Dorchester was created by the famous builder Sir Robert McAlpine and the managing director of Gordon Hotels Ltd, Sir Frances Towle, who shared a vision of creating...
, 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 Lady Avon worked at London FilmsLondon Films
London Films is a British film production company founded in 1932 by Alexander Korda originally based at London Film Studios in Denham, Buckinghamshire, England. The company's productions included The Private Life of Henry VIII , Things to Come , Rembrandt , The Four Feathers , The Thief of Bagdad ...
for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened", and as a reviewer for the fashion magazine Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...
. She met actor Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film, The Third Man
The Third Man
The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard. Many critics rank it as a masterpiece, particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and unique musical score...
(1949), and escorted actress Paulette Goddard
Paulette Goddard
Paulette Goddard was an American film and theatre actress. A former child fashion model and in several Broadway productions as Ziegfeld Girl, she was a major star of the Paramount Studio in the 1940s. She was married to several notable men, including Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich...
, who played Mrs Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's An Ideal Husband
An Ideal Husband (1947 film)
An Ideal Husband, also known as Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, is a 1947 film adaptation of the play by Oscar Wilde. It was made by London Film Productions and distributed by British Lion Films and Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation . It was produced and directed by Alexander Korda from a...
(1947), on a "rather wild trip" to Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
. 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 Lady Avon, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits.
Lady Avon also edited the magazine Contact, which was part of George Weidenfeld
George Weidenfeld
Arthur George Weidenfeld, Baron Weidenfeld, GBE is a British publisher, philanthropist, and newspaper columnist. He was born in Vienna, Austria.Weidenfeld attended the University of Vienna and the city's Diplomatic College...
'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
Hatfield House
Hatfield House is a country house set in a large park, the Great Park, on the eastern side of the town of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England. The present Jacobean house was built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury and Chief Minister to King James I and has been the home of the Cecil...
and Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia
Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End lying partly in the London Borough of Camden and partly in the City of Westminster ; and situated between Marylebone and Bloomsbury and north of Soho. It is characterised by its mixed-use of residential, business, retail,...
", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly".
Memoir (2007)
Glimpses of Lady Avon's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. Although she had indicated to former LabourLabour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...
Member of Parliament
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
Woodrow, Lord Wyatt
Woodrow Wyatt
Woodrow Lyle Wyatt, Baron Wyatt of Weeford , was a British politician, published author, journalist and broadcaster, close to the Queen Mother, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch...
that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste (Lady Bragg
Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg FRSL FRTS FBA, FRS FRSA is an English broadcaster and author best known for his work with the BBC and for presenting the The South Bank Show...
), was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2007. Phoenix published a paperback edition in 2008. Haste had previously collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon in 2004 as part of a wider study of Prime Ministerial spouses. Lady Avon noted that, after meeting Haste, she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it happen".
A photograph on the dust jacket of the memoir, depicting a young, pensive Lady Avon, cigarette in hand, conveyed an alluring and slightly Bohemian
Bohemian style
In modern usage, the term "Bohemian" is applied to people who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. The adherents of the "Bloomsbury Group", which formed around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century, are among the best-known examples...
image. The book was generally well received by critics and even generated an engaging "spoof" in the satirical magazine Private Eye
Private Eye
Private Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop.Since its first publication in 1961, Private Eye has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deemed guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency,...
("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".
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]". She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville BarclayColville Barclay
Sir Colville Herbert Sanford Barclay, 14th Baronet was a British naval officer, painter and botanist whose career spanned amphibious landings and commando operations off the coast of France during the Second World War, having his paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy, publishing reference works...
, diplomat and painter, who was stepson of Lord Vansittart
Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart GCB, GCMG, PC, MVO was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War...
, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.
Lady Avon was quoted by Wyatt as having told him that she resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper
Duff Cooper
Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich GCMG, DSO, PC , known as Duff Cooper, was a British Conservative Party politician, diplomat and author. He wrote six books, including an autobiography, Old Men Forget, and a biography of Talleyrand...
, wartime Information Minister and British Ambassador in Paris 1944-7, 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 (as Viscount Norwich), he sought Lady Avon'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
White's
White's is a London gentlemen's club, established at 4 Chesterfield Street in 1693 by Italian immigrant Francesco Bianco . Originally it was established to sell hot chocolate, a rare and expensive commodity at the time...
club) shortly before his death at sea on New Year's Day, 1954.
Other friends
Among Lady Avon's many other friends, a number of whom were some years older than she, were novelists Evelyn WaughEvelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
, Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
and Nancy Mitford
Nancy Mitford
Nancy Freeman-Mitford, CBE , styled The Hon. Nancy Mitford before her marriage and The Hon. Mrs Peter Rodd thereafter, was an English novelist and biographer, one of the Bright Young People on the London social scene in the inter-war years...
(whose sister Deborah "found her [Lady Avon] rather alarming"), painter Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
and choreographer Frederick Ashton
Frederick Ashton
Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton OM, CH, CBE was a leading international dancer and choreographer. He is most noted as the founder choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London, but also worked as a director and choreographer of opera, film and theatre revues.-Early life:Ashton was born at...
. When she was still in her teens James Pope-Hennessy
James Pope-Hennessy
James Pope Hennessy CVO was a British biographer and travel writer.-Life:Richard James Arthur Pope-Hennessy was born in London on 20 November 1916, the younger son of Ladislaus Herbert Richard Pope-Hennessy, a soldier from County Cork in Ireland, and his wife, Una Constance Pope-Hennessy who was...
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
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre...
, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo. Lady Avon thought the writer and horticulturalist Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...
(whose husband, the politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson
Harold Nicolson
Sir Harold George Nicolson KCVO CMG was an English diplomat, author, diarist and politician. He was the husband of writer Vita Sackville-West, their unusual relationship being described in their son's book, Portrait of a Marriage.-Early life:Nicolson was born in Tehran, Persia, the younger son of...
was a friend of her mother) "an interesting romantic figure", but felt "dunched" by her "remote and rather superior" manner. Visiting her at Sissinghurst
Sissinghurst Castle Garden
The garden at Sissinghurst Castle in the Weald of Kent, near Cranbrook, Goudhurst and Tenterden, is owned and maintained by the National Trust. It is among the most famous gardens in England.-History:...
some years later, she "thought the less of her" for troubling to provide, evidently in a hurry, table napkins that were still damp.
Like Lady Avon herself, many of her acquaintances frequented the bookshop Heywood Hill, next to the hairdresser Trumper's in Mayfair's Curzon Street
Curzon Street
Curzon Street is located within the exclusive Mayfair district of London. The street is located entirely within the W1J postcode district and is 400 yards to the north west of Green Park tube station...
, which, during the war was managed by Nancy Mitford and became a regular meeting place: according to Mitford's sister, Diana, Lady Mosley, "its ground floor room didn't just look like a private club, it very nearly was one".
Lady Avon was a long-standing friend of Anne Fleming, wife of novelist Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
and lover of Hugh Gaitskell
Hugh Gaitskell
Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell CBE was a British Labour politician, who held Cabinet office in Clement Attlee's governments, and was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955, until his death in 1963.-Early life:He was born in Kensington, London, the third and youngest...
, leader of the Labour Party 1955-63, who had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere
Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere
Esmond Cecil Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere was a British Conservative politician and press magnate.Harmsworth's father, Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, had been the financial wizard behind the creation of the Daily Mail in partnership with his brother Alfred Harmsworth,...
. Lady Avon and composer and playwright Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
became godparents in 1952 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 and adviser Lord Goodman.
Relationship with Anthony Eden
Lady Avon first met her future husband at CranborneCranborne
Cranborne is a village in East Dorset, England. In 2001 the village had a population of 779 people. The town is situated on chalk downland called Cranborne Chase, part of a large expanse of chalk in southern England which includes the nearby Salisbury Plain and Dorset Downs.-History:The village...
, Dorset (home of the future 5th Marquess of Salisbury
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury
Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury, KG, PC , known as Viscount Cranborne from 1903 to 1947, was a British Conservative politician.-Background:...
) in 1936 when she was sixteen. Already famous at the time for his elegant attire and Homburg
Anthony Eden hat
An "Anthony Eden" hat, or simply an "Anthony Eden", was a silk-brimmed, black felt Homburg of the kind favoured in the 1930s by Anthony Eden, later 1st Earl of Avon . Eden was a Cabinet Minister in the British National Government, holding the offices of Lord Privy Seal from 1934–35 and Foreign...
hat, she was struck by Eden's tweed pinstriped 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 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 CabinetWar Cabinet
A War Cabinet is a committee formed by a government in a time of war. It is usually a subset of the full executive cabinet of ministers. It is also quite common for a War Cabinet to have senior military officers and opposition politicians as members....
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
John Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough
John Albert William Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough , styled Marquess of Blandford until 1934, was a British peer....
. Lady Avon has 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
Chequers
Chequers, or Chequers Court, is a country house near Ellesborough, to the south of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England, at the foot of the Chiltern Hills...
, the Prime Minister's country home in Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
.
R .A. Butler
Rab Butler
Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, KG CH DL PC , who invariably signed his name R. A. Butler and was familiarly known as Rab, was a British Conservative politician...
, 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 of the United Kingdom
Edward VIII of the United Kingdom
Edward VIII was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, and Emperor of India, from 20 January to 11 December 1936.Before his accession to the throne, Edward was Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay...
, King Leopold III of Belgium
Leopold III of Belgium
Leopold III reigned as King of the Belgians from 1934 until 1951, when he abdicated in favour of the Heir Apparent,...
and the aviator Charles Lindbergh
Charles Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.Lindbergh, a 25-year-old U.S...
. (All three men, for various reasons, would not have appealed much to Churchill at that point in the war.)
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. 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 TaylorElizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
and Michael Wilding
Michael Wilding (actor)
-Early life:Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, Wilding was a successful commercial artist when he joined the art department of a London film studio in 1933. He soon embarked on an acting career.-Career:...
, prompting Harold Macmillan
Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963....
, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' he [Eden] still has and how popular he is". The reception was held at 10, Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence.
Attitudes to the marriage
Eden remains the only British Prime Minister to have been divorced (although he was one of nine 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 SydneySydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, 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" However, Lady Avon's decision drew also the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Lady Avon himself and, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman
John Betjeman
Sir John Betjeman, CBE was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture...
for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Waugh enquired of Lady Avon, "Did you never think that you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary
Calvary
Calvary or Golgotha was the site, outside of ancient Jerusalem’s early first century walls, at which the crucifixion of Jesus is said to have occurred. Calvary and Golgotha are the English names for the site used in Western Christianity...
by your desertion [of the faith]?".
On the eve on the wedding, John Colville
John Colville (civil servant)
Sir John Rupert "Jock" Colville, CB, CVO , was a British civil servant. He is best known for his diaries, which provide an intimate view of number 10 Downing Street during the wartime Prime Ministership of Winston Churchill....
, 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
Chartwell
Chartwell was the principal adult home of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill and his wife Clementine bought the property, located two miles south of Westerham, Kent, England, in 1922...
, 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 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
Randolph Churchill
Major Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer-Churchill, MBE was the son of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine. He was a Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston from 1940 to 1945....
, who, having initially defended his cousin to Evelyn Waugh, gave her "two years to knock him [Eden] into 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 The Princess Margaret
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon was the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II and the younger daughter of King George VI....
, sister of The Queen, announced that "mindful of the Church [of England]'s
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble", she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend
Peter Townsend (Group Captain)
Group Captain Peter Wooldridge Townsend, CVO, DSO, DFC and Bar, RAF was Equerry to King George VI 1944–1952 and held the same position for Queen Elizabeth II 1952–1953.-RAF career:...
, a divorcé. Although recently available evidence suggests that the Eden government was prepared to be reasonably accommodating of such a marriage and that Margaret would have needed only to renounce her right of succession to the throne, Townsend reflected in the 1970s 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.
Married life
Historian Hugh ThomasHugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton
Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton , is a British historian of Welsh origin and writer.Hugh Thomas was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset before taking a BA in 1953 at Queens' College, Cambridge, he was a major scholar and he is now a Honorary Fellow...
noted that, though "non-political", Lady Avon was interested in foreign affairs, having written a Berlin diary for the literary magazine Horizon. 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. Eden's private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh
Evelyn Shuckburgh
Sir Charles Arthur Evelyn Shuckburgh , better known as Evelyn Shuckburgh, was a British diplomat. In the 1950s he was at the heart of affairs in London, as Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and from 1954 to 1956 as Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in...
, recalled Lady Avon's role in ensuring that the complaint that led to the operation had been diagnosed properly: "When Eden acquired a loving wife, Sir [Horace] Evans was called in ..." Before then Eden had travelled with a tin box containing medicaments that ranged from aspirin
Aspirin
Aspirin , also known as acetylsalicylic acid , is a salicylate drug, often used as an analgesic to relieve minor aches and pains, as an antipyretic to reduce fever, and as an anti-inflammatory medication. It was discovered by Arthur Eichengrun, a chemist with the German company Bayer...
s to morphia injections.
Lady 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 Avon'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 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.
The Edens' marriage, which lasted until his death on 14 January 1977, was, by all accounts, an extremely happy one, though Lady Avon 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
Nicholas Eden, 2nd Earl of Avon
Nicholas Eden, 2nd Earl of Avon , styled Viscount Eden between 1961 and 1977, was a British Conservative politician and younger son of Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his first wife, Beatrice...
, was a Minister in Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
's Government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
in 1985.
Eden's premiership
Churchill had told Lady Avon, 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 afterward winning a general election in which his Conservative PartyConservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
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 Avon’s train, causing the monarch's consort, The Duke of Edinburgh
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is the husband of Elizabeth II. He is the United Kingdom's longest-serving consort and the oldest serving spouse of a reigning British monarch....
, 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 (a noted society hostess, described by the biographer of her father, Lord Birkenhead, as "the politician manqué
Manqué
Manqué is a term used in reference to a person who has failed to live up to a specific expectation or ambition. It is usually used in combination with a profession: for example, a career civil servant with political prowess who nonetheless never attained political office might be described as a...
e of the second generation") was said by some to have had a "blood row" (Macmillan's phrase) with Lady Avon. The latter's attempts to make up this puzzling rift were apparently shunned.
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 DullesJohn Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world...
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 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.
Lady Avon was not very fond of Chequers
Chequers
Chequers, or Chequers Court, is a country house near Ellesborough, to the south of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England, at the foot of the Chiltern Hills...
, 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
Lady Dorothy Macmillan
Lady Dorothy Evelyn Macmillan GBE was a daughter of the 9th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and the wife of the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.-Family life:...
, 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". 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. 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 Avon's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.
In April 1956 Lady Avon hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
leaders Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
and Nikolai Bulganin
Nikolai Bulganin
Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin was a prominent Soviet politician, who served as Minister of Defense and Premier of the Soviet Union . The Bulganin beard is named after him.-Early career:...
. Khrushchev noted that Lady Avon's (sober) behaviour contradicted briefing from the Soviet Embassy in London that she shared some of Winston 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 Avon'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 the incident".
The Suez Crisis
As the Suez CrisisSuez Crisis
The Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression, Suez War was an offensive war fought by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel against Egypt beginning on 29 October 1956. Less than a day after Israel invaded Egypt, Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Egypt and Israel,...
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
Anna Gaitskell, Baroness Gaitskell
Dora Gaitskell, Baroness Gaitskell , was a British Labour Party politician....
, wife of the Labour leader, in the gallery of the House of Commons
British House of Commons
The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which also comprises the Sovereign and the House of Lords . Both Commons and Lords meet in the Palace of Westminster. The Commons is a democratically elected body, consisting of 650 members , who are known as Members...
, 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". (An alternative version is that Mrs Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".) Three days later Lady Avon attended, out of curiosity, an anti-Government "Law not War" demonstration in Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
, 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 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. Lady Avon has since described this observation as "silly, really idiotic", though it remains probably the most quoted utterance of the whole crisis. An 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 [the] Labour [Party] and stir up antipathies and discomforts". In Lady 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 Eden recalled that, on several occasions during the Suez 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 sanguine
Sanguine
Sanguine is chalk of a reddish color, often called the true colour of blood. tending to brown, used in drawing, The word also describes any drawing done in sanguine.-Technique:...
s by André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
and a bronze of a girl in her bath by Degas that Alexander Korda had given the Edens as a wedding present.
Power behind the throne?
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 MacbethLady Macbeth (Shakespeare)
Lady Macbeth is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Macbeth . She is the wife to the play's protagonist, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman. After goading him into committing regicide, she becomes Queen of Scotland, but later suffers pangs of guilt for her part in the crime...
and referred to "Clarissa's war". (It should be borne in mind, however, that her husband, Sir Gladwyn, a "figure of some grandeur, if not hauteur", was furious at his exclusion from an Anglo-French summit in Paris two weeks before the Suez invasion.) In December 1956 Walter Monckton, a member of Eden's Government who opposed the Suez invasion, apparently told a Labour Member of Parliament, Anthony Wedgwood Benn
Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood "Tony" Benn, PC is a British Labour Party politician and a former MP and Cabinet Minister.His successful campaign to renounce his hereditary peerage was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963...
, that Lady Avon was a powerful force in politics, with great influence on her husband, and that "now she knows he [Monckton] opposed Anthony she won't have anything to do with him". Monckton claimed, among other things, that, during a rail strike in 1955, Eden, by then Prime Minister, had, at his wife's urging, taken a tougher public stance in relation to the railwaymen than that advised by Monckton, as Minister of Labour, and senior civil servants (although there is evidence that Churchill had also privately advocated to Eden the need for a strong line).
In private correspondence just after Suez, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper derided Lady Avon's remark about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room and declared not only that the "vain and foolish" Eden was "wholly managed" by her, but that she herself would listen only to Cecil Beaton, whom he described (with reference to the Svengali
Svengali
Svengali is a fictional character of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby. Svengali "would either fawn or bully and could be grossly impertinent. He had a kind of cynical humour that was more offensive than amusing and always laughed at the wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong place...
of the last Russian Czarina Alexandra) as her "Rasputin".
Protective influence
Less dramatically, there were suggestions that Eden’s touchiness and over-sensitivity to criticism, characteristics frequently remarked upon by colleagues, were exacerbated by Lady Avon (described by historian Barry Turner, without explanation, as "equally touchy"). One of Eden's private secretaries claimed that "she had a habit of stirring up Anthony when he didn't need it". However, Eden's biographer D. R. ThorpeD. R. Thorpe
D. R. Thorpe is an historian and biographer who has written biographies of three British Prime Ministers of the mid 20th century, Sir Anthony Eden, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan.-Education and academic career:...
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. Similarly, David Dutton, a biographer generally less sympathetic to Eden than Thorpe, while noting that "some observers believed that Clarissa was excessively protective and tended to exacerbate Eden's natural volatility", nevertheless remarked on her devoted companionship and that "during the dark days of the Suez Crisis, [she] was at his side, supportive throughout".
Eden himself paid tribute to his wife's adaptation of their domestic arrangements to meet the "unsteady requirements" of this period, noting that his digestion took less kindly to them. There is some evidence also that, when he was Foreign Secretary, Lady Avon had influenced (or, at any rate endorsed) his patterns of work. A later Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd
Douglas Hurd
Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell, CH, CBE, PC , is a British Conservative politician and novelist, who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and his retirement in 1995....
, has observed that, though he worked hard, Eden did not keep office hours and often spent mornings working in bed. For example, on 29 December 1952, Eden wrote: "Raining and cold. Clarissa says that this is the right way to run the F[oreign].O[ffice]. Lie in bed, direct office by telephone and read Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
".
Some of Lady Avon's friends may have been less than open with her about Suez. For example, Isaiah Berlin assured "dearest Clarissa" that Eden had acted with "great moral splendour", describing his stance as "very brave", "very patriotic" and "absolutely just", while opining to another acquaintance that his policy had been "childish folly". 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". Even so, her knowledge of the inner workings of Government was such that she was able to record in her diary the precise stance, at a critical point of the Suez operation, of every member of the Cabinet:
[E]ach was asked in turn what they felt about going on. Selwyn [Lloyd], Alec Home, Harold [Macmillan], Alan [Lennox-Boyd], Anthony Head, Peter [Thorneycroft], [Sir David] Eccles, Duncan [Sandys], James Stuart, Gwilym [Lloyd George], and [Lord] Hailsham were for going on. [Lord] Kilmuir, [Derrick] Heathcoat Amory, [Iain] Macloed, Bobbety [Lord Salisbury], Patrick Buchan-Hepburn were for doing whatever Anthony wanted and Lord Selkirk was unintelligible.
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 "GoldeneyeGoldeneye (estate)
Goldeneye was the name given by Ian Fleming to his estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica. He purchased the land next door to Golden Clouds estate and built his house on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a private beach. The original house was a modest structure consisting of three bedrooms and a swimming...
", Ian Fleming's home in Jamaica
Jamaica
Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
. 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
Edward Heath
Sir Edward Richard George "Ted" Heath, KG, MBE, PC was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and as Leader of the Conservative Party ....
, as politically unwise. Even Anne Fleming, who also warned Lady Avon about some of the primitive aspects of Goldeneye, suggested that Torquay
Torquay
Torquay is a town in the unitary authority area of Torbay and ceremonial county of Devon, England. It lies south of Exeter along the A380 on the north of Torbay, north-east of Plymouth and adjoins the neighbouring town of Paignton on the west of the bay. Torquay’s population of 63,998 during the...
(a seaside resort in the south west of England) and a sun-lamp might have been preferable. 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".
Once installed in Jamaica, the Edens were temporary neighbours of Nöel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
, who presented them - "poor dears" - with a basket of caviare, pâté de foie gras and champagne. Coward also sent Frank Cooper's marmalade and Huntley and Palmer's biscuits, which, according to Lady Avon, "was not what we had been looking forward to". 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
James Bond
James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
, the first of which, Casino Royale, he had written at Goldeneye in 1952.
Eden's resignation
The Edens returned to England just before Christmas 1956 - "Everyone looking at us with thoughtful eyes", noted Lady Avon - and Sir Anthony resigned as Prime Minister on 9 January 1957. When Harold MacmillanHarold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963....
was appointed as his successor in preference to R. A. Butler, Lady Avon wrote to Butler (whom two years earlier she had described in her diary as "curiously unnatural") that she thought politics "a beastly profession ... and how greatly I admire your dignity and good humour". (In 1952 she had told Duff Cooper that she thought modern politics something of a "farce".)
Macmillan's biographer Alistair Horne
Alistair Horne
Sir Alistair Allan Horne is a British historian of modern France. He is the son of Sir James Horne and Lady Auriol Horne ....
noted that, of the various animosities that arose before and during Macmilan's premiership, it was the "loyal wives", among whom he counted Lady Avon and Lady Butler, who "tended most to keep [them] alive". Although there is evidence of a long-standing and lasting rift between Eden and Macmillan, Eden himself maintained "a friendly (if not conspicuously warm) relationship" with his successor, often being used as a "sounding board" by Macmillan who occasionally lunched with the Edens at their home. Lady Avon, on the other hand, was said to have been consistently vitriolic about Macmillan and recalled to one of Eden's biographers that Churchill had found Macmillan too "viewy". As late as 2007 she criticised Macmillan's behaviour as Chancellor of the Exchequer
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is the title held by the British Cabinet minister who is responsible for all economic and financial matters. Often simply called the Chancellor, the office-holder controls HM Treasury and plays a role akin to the posts of Minister of Finance or Secretary of the...
during the Suez crisis, suggesting that he had been "too hasty" in using an American threat to withhold a loan from the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
as "an excuse to back down" from military action and had wept "crocodile tears" at Eden's resignation. At the same time she concurred with the proposition that the Americans had behaved shabbily over Suez, but felt that U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...
"later regretted his stance."
Shortly after Eden's resignation, he and Lady Avon sailed to New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
for a further break. Their cabin steward, on what she described as "the hellship Rangitata", was the future Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott
John Prescott
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott is a British politician who was Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, he represented Hull East as the Labour Member of Parliament from 1970 to 2010...
. 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. When they arrived in New Zealand, which was among the few countries publicly to have supported the Suez operation, the Edens received a rapturous "red carpet
Red carpet
A red carpet is traditionally used to mark the route taken by heads of state on ceremonial and formal occasions, and has in recent decades been extended to use by VIPs and celebrities at formal events.- History :...
" reception.
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 AlvedistonAlvediston
Alvediston is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England, with a population of 91 . It is about eight miles east of Shaftesbury, at , and is the source of the River Ebble....
, Wiltshire, where he died on 14 January 1977 and is buried. The last entry in Eden's diary, dated 11 September 1976, had read; "exquisite small vase of crimson glory buds & mignonette from beloved C[larissa]".
When Eden 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 former New York Governor
Governor of New York
The Governor of the State of New York is the chief executive of the State of New York. The governor is the head of the executive branch of New York's state government and the commander-in-chief of the state's military and naval forces. The officeholder is afforded the courtesy title of His/Her...
Averell Harriman, elder statesman of the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
, and his English-born wife Pamela
Pamela Harriman
Pamela Beryl Harriman , also known as Pamela Churchill Harriman, was an English-born socialite who was married and linked to important and powerful men. In later life, she became a political activist for the United States Democratic Party and a diplomat...
. (Mrs Harriman was Lady Avon's exact contemporary, a débutante of 1938 who had also taken a room at the Dorchester during the Second World War. She had previously been married to Lady Avon's cousin Randolph Churchill and in the 1990s was President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
's Ambassador to Paris, where she died in 1997.) The Edens were flown back to Britain in a Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
VC-10 that was diverted to Miami after Prime Minister James Callaghan
James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC , was a British Labour politician, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980...
had been alerted to the situation by Pamela Harriman's son, Winston.
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 JamesRobert Rhodes James
Sir Robert Vidal Rhodes James was a British historian and Conservative Member of Parliament. He was born in India and began his education in private schools there, returning to England to attend Sedbergh School and then Worcester College, Oxford.He wrote his first book, a much-acclaimed biography...
and later D. R. Thorpe
D. R. Thorpe
D. R. Thorpe is an historian and biographer who has written biographies of three British Prime Ministers of the mid 20th century, Sir Anthony Eden, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan.-Education and academic career:...
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 2003 a research study by a Harvard clinician of Eden's medical condition and surgery during the 1950s was published in the USA with an acknowledgement of Lady Avon's interest and cooperation.
Over the years Lady Avon attended various state occasions, as well as gatherings of former Prime Ministers and their families. For example, in 1972 (while her husband was still alive) she described to Cecil Beaton the Duchess of Windsor's "very strange" and nervous demeanour - "Is this my seat?" "Is this my prayer book?" "What do I do now?" - at the funeral of her husband, the former King Edward VIII, while thirty years later Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair Campbell
Alastair Campbell
Alastair John Campbell is a British journalist, broadcaster, political aide and author, best known for his work as Director of Communications and Strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003, having first started working for Blair in 1994...
noted that, at a dinner at 10 Downing Street to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee in 2002:
Prince PhilipPrince Philip, Duke of EdinburghPrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is the husband of Elizabeth II. He is the United Kingdom's longest-serving consort and the oldest serving spouse of a reigning British monarch....
was deep in conversation with T[ony] B[lair], the Countess of Avon, Macmillan's and Douglas-Home's families, and there was lots of reminiscing about life in Number 10.
In 1994, 17 years after her husband's death, Lady Avon unveiled a bust of Eden at the Foreign Office.
As part of The Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, Lady Avon attended a dinner at Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace, in London, is the principal residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality...
alongside several other relatives of deceased former prime ministers, as well as the then prime minister Tony Blair
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
and the four surviving former prime ministers.
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 widowed at 56. By contrast, Lady Dorothy Macmillan was 57 when her husband succeeded Eden and 63 when he resigned. As such Lady Avon has enjoyed unusual longevity for a Prime Ministerial spouse, contributing, for example, to a television documentary by Cherie BlairCherie Blair
Cherie Blair , known professionally as Cherie Booth QC, is a British barrister working in the legal system of England and Wales. She is married to the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair; the couple have three sons and one daughter...
in 2005 about Prime Ministers’ wives 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. 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.
Lady Avon was 87 when her memoir appeared in 2007. A journalist who interviewed her and her editor, Cate Haste, observed that Lady Avon "seems slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil", but described her as "vigorous and knowing" in conversation. In April 2008 she and Haste appeared at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, the literature for this event observing that, although Lady Avon was perhaps best known for her lament about the Suez Canal flowing through her drawing room, "she was far more than a drawing-room consort".
Longevity relative to other Prime Ministerial spouses
Lady Avon has outlived four of the nine Prime Ministerial spouses (Lady Dorothy Macmillan, Lady HomeElizabeth Douglas-Home, Baroness Home of the Hirsel
Elizabeth Hester Douglas-Home, Baroness Home of the Hirsel was the wife of the British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home....
, Lady Callaghan
Audrey Callaghan
Audrey Elizabeth Callaghan, Lady Callaghan of Cardiff was the wife of British Prime Minister James Callaghan and was herself a politician and campaigner and fundraiser for children's health and welfare....
and Sir Denis Thatcher) who succeeded her and she is four years younger than Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, who is still living and is now the longest lived Prime Ministerial spouse, having turned 95 in 2011. The husbands of Dame Norma Major
Norma Major
Dame Norma Christina Elizabeth Major, DBE , is the wife of Sir John Major, the former British Prime Minister.-Biography:...
, Cherie Blair and Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown (spouse)
Sarah Brown is the wife of Gordon Brown, a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She is also the founding partner of Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications, a public relations company.-Early life:...
became Prime Minister 35, 42 and 52 years respectively after Eden had done so; in 2010, Samantha Cameron
Samantha Cameron
Samantha Gwendoline Cameron , often known simply as "Sam Cam", is a British business executive and wife of David Cameron, the current Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom....
's husband David Cameron
David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. Cameron represents Witney as its Member of Parliament ....
succeeded Brown seven weeks before Lady Avon's ninetieth birthday, 55 years after Eden had assumed office and 53 years and 4 months after his resignation. Norma Major (whose husband became Prime Minister in 1990) was the first of Lady Avon's successors to have been born after her. Until William Hague
William Hague
William Jefferson Hague is the British Foreign Secretary and First Secretary of State. He served as Leader of the Conservative Party from June 1997 to September 2001...
married 29-year old Ffion Jenkins in 1997, Lady Avon had been the youngest spouse of a leader of the modern Conservative Party. Like Lady Avon, Samantha Cameron was 34 when her husband became leader of the party in 2005.
Popular culture
In 2010, in connection with BBC television’s game show, PointlessPointless (TV series)
Pointless is a quiz show shown on BBC One, hosted by Alexander Armstrong, with Richard Osman as assistant. It has been broadcast since 24 August 2009....
, a sample of a hundred members of the public registered low recognition of Lady Avon as a Prime Ministerial spouse since 1945, though her profile was higher than that of Lady Dorothy Macmillan, Elizabeth Home and Audrey Callaghan, all of whom scored no points at all.
In the first episode of the BBC's drama series The Hour (2011), set in 1956, a television producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai
Romola Garai
Romola Sadie Garai is an English actress. She is known for appearing in the movies Amazing Grace, Atonement, and Glorious 39, and for appearing in the BBC adaptation of Emma.-Early life:...
) was complimented by one of Eden's press officers for a feature about "Lady Eden at home".