The Countess of Avon (1920-2021)

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According to Wikipedia, the Countess of Avon (born Anne Clarissa Spencer-Churchill), died Nov. 15, 2021 at age 101.

She was the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill and niece of Winston Churchill.  

Her marriage to Anthony Eden, Prime Minister and later created the Earl of Avon, ended in 1977 with his death.  The couple had no children.

Brooke

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The Countess of Avon, intellectual and independent-minded widow of the prime minister Anthony Eden and niece of Winston Churchill – obituary

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/11/15/countess-avon-intellectual-independent-minded-widow-prime-minister/

In youth she moved in the circle of Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, and was ‘beautiful and extremely intellectual’

The Countess of Avon, who has died aged 101, was the widow of Anthony Eden, Conservative Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957 (later the 1st Earl of Avon), and the most unusual of all the political wives who have occupied 10 Downing Street.

Anne Clarissa Churchill, always called Clarissa, was born on June 28 1920, the only daughter of Major John Strange Churchill, Sir Winston’s younger brother, a stockbroker. Her father was proud to have been known as “Winston’s brother”, but his daughter was always a little distant from the Churchill clan.

According to her brother Johnnie, their mother, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, was a “lifelong friend” of the Rt Hon Harold (“Bluey”) Baker, Warden of Winchester College, with whom Clarissa was “on close terms” until he died in 1960.

She was christened Anne after her godmother, Lady Islington, but also Clarissa as her mother was reading Samuel Richardson’s novel at the time.

She had two older brothers, the elder of whom, Johnnie (1909-92), was an ebullient artist to whom she was not close (she was amused when he failed to recognise her at a private view in the early 1980s).

She was on better terms with the younger brother, Peregrine (1913-2002), described by his mother as enveloped in “an air of Chekhovian gloom”. She was also close to her niece, Sally, Lady Ashburton, who oversaw her care in the last years of her life.

Clarissa spent her early years in London, attended a boarding school, but left early without any formal qualifications because she was “bored”. She moved to Paris aged 16 to undertake courses in art and to relish the freedom that London denied her.

Later she enrolled at the Slade and then went to Oxford, where she studied philosophy, but not as an undergraduate because of her lack of formal qualifications. She studied with Professor A J (Freddie) Ayer, and edited the translations of Sir Bernard Pares. She moved in the circle of Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, and according to Lady Antonia Fraser she was “the dons’ delight because she was beautiful and extremely intellectual”.

During the war, she spent much of her time at Chequers with her uncle Winston. She worked first for the Ministry of Information on Britansky Soyuznik, an English-language propaganda newspaper published in Russia, and later in a basement of the Foreign Office decoding messages, under the supervision, ironically, of a later adversary of the Edens, Sir Anthony Nutting.

After the war, Clarissa worked on the Spotlight column of Vogue, and then in the publicity department of the film director, Alexander Korda, while he was engaged in making such films as An Ideal Husband, Anna Karenina, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol (she only admired the last two). For a while she edited the ill-fated magazine, Contact, owned by the young Viennese publisher, George Weidenfeld.

Many wondered why such a beautiful and intelligent woman had not married. She had numerous admirers but had mixed in such an unusual set that a conventional life in the country with horses and dogs held little allure.

Her friends were surprised when she announced her engagement to Anthony Eden, then serving his third term as Foreign Secretary (and acknowledged as prime minister in waiting in Churchill’s last administration).

She had first seen Eden when he stayed with his friend Lord Cranborne (later 5th Marquess of Salisbury) when she was 16. He possessed the looks of a film star and was dashingly dressed in bottle-green tweeds.

She happened to sit next to him at a dinner in 1946 and was intrigued when, after very little conversation, he asked her out to dinner. He was on his own since Beatrice Beckett, his first wife and the mother of his two sons, had left him the previous year after beginning an ultimately unsuccessful affair with General C D Jackson, Eisenhower’s political warfare representative in England, and had moved to America. They were divorced in 1950. He had also endured the intense sorrow of losing his elder son, Simon, killed in action while serving with the RAF at the end of the war.

Initially Clarissa turned him down when he proposed but six months later she accepted him and they were married on August 14 1952. The civil ceremony at Caxton Hall drew crowds that compared well with the recent wedding there of Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding. Harold Macmillan remarked somewhat grudgingly: “It’s extraordinary how much ‘glamour’ he [Eden] still has and how popular he is.” The reception was held at 10 Downing Street.

The first five years of the Edens’ marriage were dominated by politics. Until they entered Downing Street, they lived in the Foreign Secretary’s official London residence in Carlton Gardens. She accompanied Eden to Paris and Washington and attended the State Opening of Parliament and party conferences.

Not long into the marriage, in 1953, Eden’s health was permanently damaged by a botched gall bladder operation which caused him lasting problems. Then in 1954 Clarissa suffered a miscarriage, as a result of which there were no children of the marriage. She spent several months with Eden at the Geneva Conference (on the crisis in Indo-China), after which Eden was appointed a Knight of the Garter, and early in 1955 she accompanied him to Bangkok for the SEATO conference.

The whole period was overshadowed by the agonising wait for Winston Churchill to surrender the reins of office and stand down as Prime Minister. Churchill found endless excuses to stay on. By the time he did so in April 1955, it was the 10th time he had promised to go. Right to the end he played a cat-and-mouse game about the date of his departure.

Arguably, Eden had waited in the wings as crown prince for too long. But soon after taking over he went to the country and secured the personal triumph of increasing the government’s majority from 17 to 60, the first incumbent administration to increase its majority for a century.

Highlights of Eden’s premiership included the visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev in April 1956. With her customary wry take on life Clarissa observed these and other heads of state.

By November 1956 the Prime Minister’s nervous system was burnt out, at which point Clarissa arranged that they should take a break at Goldeneye in Jamaica (Ian Fleming, its owner, hoping this would greatly increase its value).

On their return, Eden took soundings from his Cabinet and close friends. Sir Horace Evans, his doctor, predicted a complete collapse in his health and so the Edens went to Sandringham to tell the Queen of his decision to step down. At his final audience he turned down the offer of an earldom.

...On their return, the Edens settled in Wiltshire, ultimately living in a beautiful Queen Anne house in Alvediston. Eventually accepting a peerage as Earl of Avon in 1961, Eden came to London from time to time to speak in the House of Lords.

He wrote three volumes of memoirs, starting with the Suez volume in case he did not survive to write the other two, and the Edens remained in touch with political friends past and present.

Some judged her overprotective, yet she undoubtedly brought him the happiness and contentment which had been absent from his first marriage. The last entry in Lord Avon’s diary, dated September 11 1976, read: “Exquisite small vase of crimson glory buds & mignonette from beloved C.”

Lord Avon was taken ill in the United States while staying with Averill Harriman, but the then prime minister James Callaghan had him flown back to Britain in an RAF plane to die at home in Wiltshire, on January 14 1977.

Lady Avon stayed on at Alvediston for a few years before moving permanently to a London flat, first in Montagu Square and then Bryanston Square.

In 1986 she commissioned a biography of Eden by Robert Rhodes James but, dissatisfied with the result, she commissioned D R Thorpe to write a further volume in 2003. Both books went some way to reappraise Eden’s political career and restore his reputation.

Lady Avon had never intended to write her memoirs despite ceaseless appeals from George Weidenfeld. But having met Cate Haste (wife of Melvyn Bragg and co-author with Cherie Blair of The Goldfish Bowl, a book about the experiences of the wives of prime ministers at Number 10), she agreed to collaborate with her.

The result, From Churchill to Eden, was published in 2007 and respectably reviewed. The Times found that “her character bounds off every page – wry, steely, inscrutable – and emerges all the stronger for being revealed rather than described.” 

Her last decade was less easy for her, as she was acutely aware that she was losing her memory, but she remained enjoyably sharp in conversation, dismissing numerous distinguished figures as “frightful bores”, and she retained her legendary beauty to the day she marked her 100th birthday – with but four guests, the pandemic denying her the celebration she deserved.

The Countess of Avon, born June 28 1920, died November 15 2021     

[colinp]

Interview with Hugo Vickers from the Oldie -  The late Clarissa Avon, 101, Anthony Eden's widow, talked to Hugo Vickers in her last interview - The Oldie

[Richard R]

From the Telegraph of 17 Nov 2021: AVON  On 15th November 2021, peacefully at home, Clarissa, widow of the Earl of Avon, KG, aged 101. Funeral private. No memorial service at her request.

Obit in the Times of 17 Nov 2021:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/clarissa-eden-countess-of-avon-dies-aged-101-g0fhbnltw

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Info about her funeral - 

Remembering: The Countess of Avon — Diocese of Salisbury (anglican.org)

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