The Countess of Avon, intellectual and independent-minded widow of the prime minister Anthony Eden and niece of Winston Churchill – obituary
In youth she moved in the circle of Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Lord David Cecil, and was ‘beautiful and extremely intellectual’
She was not on the list.
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.
In recent years she was not widely known to the general public and certainly she did not enjoy any of the benefits accorded to the widows of other prime ministers. A fragile-looking haute bohemian beauty in youth, with fair hair and pallid skin, she was also an intellectual with highly developed tastes in literature, art, music and design.
Before her marriage she had received close attention from figures such as Evelyn Waugh, James Pope-Hennessy, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, Duff Cooper, Lord Berners, Lucian Freud, Greta Garbo and Isaiah Berlin. The list of those whose path she crossed in her early life ranged from Jean Cocteau and the composer Nicolas Nabokov to Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. And these were not mere meetings. She read their books, studied their art and had a clear understanding of what they were trying to achieve.
After her marriage, she entered an altogether different world, peopled by Cabinet ministers such as Harold Macmillan, “Rab” Butler and Selwyn Lloyd, and figures such as the Mountbattens, and found herself entertaining or being entertained by Bulganin, Khrushchev, Nehru, Eisenhower and General de Gaulle. She was in Downing Street during the Suez crisis of 1956, when she famously said that it felt as though the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room.
Those admitted to her circle, however, found her entertaining, stimulating and original. Many considered her more than a match for Anthony Eden in intelligence and political understanding. Reviewing her memoirs, her old friend, Raymond Carr, described her as “an extraordinary woman, fiercely independent since childhood”. He noted that “in her prime the stare of her intense blue eyes and the sting of her sharp tongue would drive time-serving politicians and pushy wives to take refuge in silence.”
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”.
At that time she inspired the character of Emmeline Pocock in Lord Berners’s wartime book, Far From the Madding War. Berners described her thus: “The first impression was one of gentleness and modesty. Then you began to realise that she was extremely pretty.
“Some even considered her beautiful. But her features were too retroussé to conform with the canons of classic beauty … She was of rather diminutive stature, but her body was so well-proportioned that she appeared taller than she really was. Her hair, as a poetical undergraduate had once said, was reminiscent of a cornfield at daybreak. Her complexion was of that fairness that invites freckles, but as she never exposed herself to the sun this was not a serious defect … She looked like a nymph in one of the less licentious pictures of Fragonard.”
She was also the inspiration for Perdita, the heroine of James Pope-Hennessy’s book London Fabric, which was dedicated to Clarissa. Together they wandered round war-torn London, frequently disagreeing over the architectural gems visited.
Pope-Hennessy described “Perdita” as looking “with her freshness and her swinging golden hair, like a Hans Andersen princess in a dungeon. It was hard to know what she was thinking. There is about her a withdrawn aloofness that just misses being haughty and widely misses being absurd. It is an unmodern quality, and I find it arresting.”
Pope-Hennessy was devoted to her, but her long friendship with him ended when she married, as his lifestyle proved too bohemian for Anthony Eden.
In middle age Clarissa Eden could claim without exaggeration that most of her friends, drawn from an earlier generation, were dead. Indeed she often complained that her letters were being published, and she found herself a pivotal figure in many a posthumous biography.
Through Cecil Beaton she became an unlikely friend of the reclusive film star, Greta Garbo, when she was staying with him in Wiltshire in 1951. Beaton wrote: “Who can resist the fascination of Greta when the allure is turned on? – and it was certainly turned on for Clarissa’s benefit.”
In her early life she travelled widely and loved opera. The idea of being a debutante held no appeal and she avoided being presented at court, while nevertheless attending a number of aristocratic pre-war balls, most of which she found boring. She followed Marlene Dietrich’s lead in wearing men’s suits cut in tweed.
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.
When she announced her engagement, her aunt Clementine Churchill expressed the view that Clarissa was too independent to make a suitable wife for a politician. Others were shocked by the fact that she was marrying one.
Evelyn Waugh suddenly confessed that he had been in love with her – “a rare treat which came my way now and again” – and opposed the match on the grounds that Eden was a divorcee and she was a Roman Catholic, albeit a lapsed one. He berated her: “Thousands have died and are dying today in torture for the Faith you have idly thrown aside.” Their friendship never recovered, but as she recalled: “Other Catholic friends were more civilised.”
Duff Cooper hit the nail on the head when he warned her: “You will find, I expect, that you have many more friends than you used to have. Even in London I heard echoes of things to come: ‘I used not to like her, but she has become much nicer later. I was saying to Mrs Slander and Lady Sneerwell and they both agreed…’ ”
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