Clarissa Eden
Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon was an English memoirist and the second wife of Anthony Eden, who served as British prime minister from 1955 to 1957. She married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made Knight Companion of the Garter, before becoming Countess of Avon in 1961 when her husband was created Earl of Avon. In 2007, at 87, she released her memoir subtitled From Churchill to Eden.
On the death of Lady Wilson of Rievaulx in 2018, Lady Avon became the oldest living spouse of a British prime minister. She turned 100 in 2020, the second British prime minister's spouse to become a centenarian after Wilson.
Early life
Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was born on 28 June 1920, legally the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill and , a daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, who had married in 1908. Her elder brothers were John , an artist, and Henry Winston, known as Peregrine. However, it was later discovered that her biological father was the Liberal politician Harold Baker, who had had an affair with Lady Gwendoline in 1919.Spencer-Churchill was born at her parents' house in the Cromwell Road, Kensington, London. She was educated at Kensington Preparatory School and then at Downham School, Hatfield Heath, "a fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Seventy years later she said she had also felt the need to get away from home—"I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much".
Paris, Tuscany and London (1937–1939)
In 1937 Spencer-Churchill studied art in Paris. Her mother had asked the British ambassador, Sir George Clerk, to keep a watchful eye on her, an unintended consequence of this being that she was taken under the wing of an embassy press secretary who, with his wife, introduced her to a round of café society parties. Among the friends she made in Paris were writers Fitzroy Maclean and Marthe Bibesco. Together with two female contemporaries, she visited the Folies Bergère, an unusual destination for 16-year-old girls, where the singer Josephine Baker, clad only in a circlet of bananas, became the first naked female body she had ever seen.In the summer of 1937, Spencer-Churchill accompanied Julian Asquith and his mother, Katharine, on tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany region of Italy. Among other artistic treasures, she saw the fifteenth-century frescoes by Piero della Francesca at Arezzo, one of which, The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood, she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".
When Spencer-Churchill returned to London, she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. Around this time, she displayed her individualism by acquiring a specially tailored trouser suit along the lines of those associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich after the latter's appearance in the film Morocco. 1938 was the future Lady Avon's "coming out" year, and she was regarded as "ne of the more notable" débutantes in "a vintage year for beautiful girls", but, having mixed with older and more sophisticated people in Paris, she seemed to have disdained the circuit—since described by Anne de Courcy as "more or less naive seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds suddenly flung into a round of gaities"—and was never presented at court. Another débutante of 1938, Deborah Mitford, later Duchess of Devonshire, recalled Spencer-Churchill as exhibiting "more than a whiff of Greta Garbo| Garbo in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris".
Among those with whom Spencer-Churchill danced at that year's Liberal ball was the future double agent Donald Maclean, who complained that she was too smart to be "a proper Liberal girl like the Bonham-Carters and the Asquiths". She also knew Guy Burgess, who fled to Russia in 1951 when he and Maclean were about to be unmasked as traitors. A 2015 biography of Burgess, a homosexual, contained claims that, encouraged by his Soviet "handlers", he had contemplated marriage to Spencer-Churchill. However, the latter, then aged 95, denied that they had been close. She described Burgess as "courteous, amusing, nice and good company" but said that he had been "standoffish" towards her and did not wish any friendship to develop.
In 1939 Spencer-Churchill spent another four months in Paris and, in August of that year, travelled to Romania as a guest of the novelist Elizabeth Bibesco and her husband Antoine. Spencer-Churchill only just managed to return to England—on one of the last flights out of Bucharest—before the start of the Second World War.
Second World War: Oxford and the Foreign Office
In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy Harrod, Spencer-Churchill went to Oxford to study philosophy, although not as an undergraduate because of her lack of qualifications. While there, she became associated with, among other leading academics, Isaiah Berlin and Maurice Bowra. Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a fellow of Christ Church, described her as having been "the dons' delight". For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle, although his womanising was not extended to her.When Spencer-Churchill moved back to London, she decoded ciphers in the communications department of the Foreign Office, where her future husband was the secretary of state from 1940 to 1945. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting, who in 1956 resigned from Anthony Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez Operation. For a time, the future Lady Avon lived in a rooftop room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing.
Post-war
After the war Spencer-Churchill worked at London Films 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 the actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film The Third Man, and escorted actress Paulette Goddard, who played Mrs. Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, on "a rather wild trip" to Brussels. During the latter excursion, Goddard expressed a wish to attend a pornographic show. Although Korda's representatives made arrangements for this, she shied away when she and Spencer-Churchill, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits.Spencer-Churchill also worked for the short-lived monthly magazine Contact, established by George Weidenfeld and edited by Philip Toynbee. Weidenfeld was keen to expand into book publishing, and Contact, which appeared with a hard cover, offered a means of circumventing post-war paper quotas. Among those Spencer-Churchill persuaded to contribute to the magazine was the cookery writer Elizabeth David, whose recipes became very influential in the 1950s. Through Weidenfeld she also became a close friend of Marcus Sieff, later chairman of the retailer Marks and Spencer.
As a result of this eclectic early career, she widened her circle of friends and contacts beyond those in society and politics with whom she already had close connections. As one of Anthony Eden's biographers put it, she was "equally at home in the worlds of Hatfield and Fitzrovia", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly". Even so, the future Lady Avon did not impress everyone: after the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher met her at a Conservative Party ball in 1954, she wrote dismissively to her sister, "Mrs Anthony Eden received us. Really she is a most colourless personality".
2007 memoir
Glimpses of Spencer-Churchill's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. Although she had indicated to the former Labour member of Parliament Woodrow Wyatt that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste, was nevertheless published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007, and Phoenix brought out a paperback edition in 2008. In 2004 Haste had collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then prime minister Tony Blair, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon as part of a broader study of prime ministerial spouses. Avon noted that after meeting Haste, she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it possible".A photograph on the dust jacket of her memoir, depicting a young, pensive Spencer-Churchill, cigarette in hand, conveyed an alluring and slightly Bohemian image. The book was generally well-received by critics and even generated an engaging "spoof" in the satirical magazine Private Eye. Historian Andrew Roberts described it as "the last great British autobiography of the pre-war and wartime era", while art critic John McEwen remarked on its "witty and elegant restraint".
Friends and acquaintances
Early admirers
Having lost both parents by her mid-twenties, Spencer-Churchill was comparatively independent for a young woman. In later years, she remarked to Woodrow Wyatt on "how much more restricted" girls were when she was young while conceding that she had had her first affair at 17 with a "man who was quite well-known and ... still alive ". She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay, briefly a diplomat and later a painter, who was the stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.Wyatt quoted Lady Avon as having told him that she had resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime information minister and the British ambassador in Paris, 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, he sought Spencer-Churchill's views as to a title—"Think, child, think ... Have you any suggestions? "—and she was the recipient of the last letter that he wrote shortly before his death at sea on New Year's Day, 1954.