Paris, Tuscany and London (1937–1939)

In 1937 Spencer-Churchill studied art in Paris.^[7] 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.^[6] 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.^[8]

In the summer of 1937, Spencer-Churchill accompanied Julian Asquith (grandson of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith) and his mother, Katharine, on tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany region of Italy.^[9] 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 (c. 1452), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting—"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".^[10]

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^[9] after the latter's appearance in the film Morocco (1930). 1938 was the future Lady Avon's "coming out" year, and she was regarded as "[o]ne of the more notable" débutantes^[11] in "a vintage year for beautiful girls",^[12] 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"^[13]—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 in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris".^{[12][lower-alpha 1]}

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".^{[16][lower-alpha 2]} 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.^[17]

In 1939 Spencer-Churchill spent another four months in Paris and, in August of that year, travelled to Romania as a guest of the novelist Elizabeth Bibesco and her husband Antoine (Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith, having been left distraught after her daughter visited her in London earlier in the year^{[18][lower-alpha 3]}). 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.^[9]

Second World War: Oxford and the Foreign Office

The Foreign Office in London, c. 2014

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.^[7] Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a fellow of Christ Church, described her as having been "the dons' delight".^[21] For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle,^[22] although his womanising was not extended to her.^{[23][lower-alpha 4]}

When Spencer-Churchill moved back to London, she decoded ciphers in the communications department of the Foreign Office, where her future husband was the secretary of state from 1940 to 1945. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting, who in 1956 resigned from Anthony Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez Operation. For a time, the future Lady Avon lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing^[9] (although the building was a modern, steel-framed structure with extensive underground accommodation that was considered relatively safe during air raids).^{[25][lower-alpha 5]}

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",^[27] 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 (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.^[28] During the latter excursion, Goddard expressed a wish to attend a pornographic show. Still, 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.^[29]

Spencer-Churchill also worked for the short-lived monthly magazine Contact, established by George (later Lord) Weidenfeld and edited by Philip Toynbee. Weidenfeld was keen to expand into book publishing, and Contact, which appeared with a hard cover, offered a means of circumventing post-war paper quotas.^[9][30] 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.^[31]

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",^[7] while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly".^[32] 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".^{[33][lower-alpha 6]}

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 [in 1986]".^[40] 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.^[41]

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 (1944–1947), who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother:^{[42][lower-alpha 7]} "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from".^{[44][lower-alpha 8]} 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".^{[48][lower-alpha 9]} When Cooper was raised to the peerage (eventually choosing the title Viscount Norwich), he sought Spencer-Churchill's views as to a title—"Think, child, think ... Have you any suggestions? (not funny ones)"^[50]—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.^[50]

Other friends

Among the future Lady Avon's many other friends, several of whom were some years older than she, were the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford (whose sister Deborah wrote of an encounter with Avon some 20 years after they had been débutantes together that she found her "rather alarming"^[51]), 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".^[52] 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.^[53] The journalist and author Sofka Zinovieff claimed that, after her grandmother, Jennifer Fry (of the Fry's chocolate family), separated in 1944 from her grandfather, Robert Heber-Percy, who was Lord Berners's closest friend, Spencer-Churchill and Beaton amused themselves by riffling through underclothes and love letters that Fry had left in a drawer at Berners's country home, Faringdon House, in Oxfordshire.^{[54][lower-alpha 10]} A few years later while working at Contact, Spencer-Churchill became friends with the writer and journalist Alan Ross, who subsequently married Fry.^[56]

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". Still, she 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.^[57] Like Avon herself, many of her acquaintances frequented the bookshop Heywood Hill, next to the hairdresser Trumper's in Mayfair's Curzon Street, which, during the war was managed by Nancy Mitford and became a regular meeting place:^[58] according to Mitford's sister, Diana, Lady Mosley, "[i]ts ground-floor room didn't just look like a private club, it very nearly was one".^{[59][lower-alpha 11]}

Avon was a long-standing friend of Ann Fleming, wife of novelist Ian Fleming and lover of Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963, who had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere. In 1952, she and composer and playwright Noël Coward became godparents to the Flemings' son Caspar,^[61] who died of a drug overdose in 1975. In later years, as a widow, she was close to the influential solicitor Lord Goodman.^{[62][lower-alpha 12]} Another long-standing social acquaintance was Labour minister Roy (later Lord) Jenkins, also a friend of Ann Fleming. Jenkins's official biographer chose, as an example of the broadly-based groups Jenkins would entertain at his home at East Hendred, a small party assembled there in March 1994—Avon, together with the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, Jenkins's publisher Roland Philipps and their wives.^[64]

Winston Churchill and the wartime link

There was further contact during the war, under the circles in which she and Eden moved and through her uncle Winston, who became prime minister in May 1940. As an illustration of her occasional proximity to the centre of power, between meetings of the War Cabinet on 30 May 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was at its height, Spencer-Churchill was present when Churchill lunched with her parents and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.^[66] The future Lady Avon described this occasion as "a nightmare, with news of people's deaths coming in ...".^{[67][lower-alpha 13]} After her mother died in 1941, she stayed at Chequers, the prime minister's country home in Buckinghamshire.

R. A. Butler, then Minister of Education, recalled a dinner party in Eden's flat above the Foreign Office following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Attempting to defuse an argument between Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook about their respective motivation during the abdication crisis of 1936, Spencer-Churchill, just turned 21, proclaimed with patent improbability that she had three favourites, Edward VIII, Leopold III of Belgium and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.^[69]

Marriage to Eden

A more defined relationship with Eden, who was a married man 23 years older than Spencer-Churchill, developed gradually after they had sat next to each other at a dinner party in about 1947. Eden had been monopolised for much of the meal by a woman on his other side and afterwards, in an undertone, invited Spencer-Churchill out to dinner.^[70] In 1950, Eden was divorced from his first wife, Beatrice (née Beckett, 1905–1957). Although she was a Roman Catholic and her church was opposed to divorce, Spencer-Churchill married Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary again in 1951, in a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall, London, on 14 August 1952. This event drew large crowds, on a level with those earlier in the year for the wedding of film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding,^[36] prompting Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' [Eden] still has and how popular he is".^[71] The wedding reception was held at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister, who at the time was Lady Eden's uncle, Churchill.

Chatelaine at Downing Street and Chequers

Chequers in Buckinghamshire, 2018

As hostess at 10 Downing Street, Lady Eden oversaw the organisation of official receptions. She brought in new caterers, causing US secretary of state John Foster Dulles to lose a bet with a fellow dinner guest that he knew "exactly what every course is going to be".^[100] Because the Edens' tenure was so short, Lady Eden's plans to return the fabric and furniture of the house to the styles of the 1730s, when it was built, were never realised.^[101]

Lady Eden was not very fond of Chequers, though she did take a keen interest in the garden and grounds, introducing old-fashioned roses and increasing the range of fruit trees. However, her successor, Lady Dorothy Macmillan, so keen a horticulturalist that she sometimes gardened at night, removed yellow and white flowers planted by Lady Eden and replaced them with roses of a "normal [colour]".^{[102][lower-alpha 19]} One episode at Chequers attracted considerable publicity. In January 1956, Lady Eden politely requested the occupant of a farm worker's cottage on the estate to hang her washing where visitors could not see it.^[104] Although it seems that the washing may have been hung across a lime walk, beyond the boundary of the cottage garden itself,^[105] the story was taken up by the Daily Mirror as an alleged example of Lady Eden's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.

In April 1956, Lady Eden hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev noted that Lady Eden's (sober) behaviour contradicted a briefing from the Soviet embassy in London that she shared some of Churchill's "traits in the matter of drinking". Over dinner (when, according to his hostess, he ate nothing^[9] despite his reputation for eating and drinking greedily^{[106][lower-alpha 20]}), 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".^{[lower-alpha 21]} The following morning, Khrushchev mistook Lady Eden's room for Bulganin's but, having provoked a cry after almost walking in on her, beat a hasty retreat and did not identify himself. He confided later in Bulganin, with whom he "had a good laugh over [the] incident".^[108]

Suez Crisis

As the Suez Crisis climaxed in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November, Lady Eden found herself sitting next to Dora Gaitskell, wife of the Labour leader, in the gallery of the House of Commons, whose sitting was suspended, due to uproar, for the first time since 1924. "Can you stand it?" she asked, to which, according to one version, the seasoned Gaitskell replied, "the boys must have their fun".^[109] (An alternative version is that Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".^[110]) Three days later, Lady Eden attended, out of curiosity, an anti-government "Law not War" demonstration in Trafalgar Square but thought it sensible to withdraw when she was recognised with friendly cheers.^[111]

Political influence

During this period, some thought they detected undue influence by Lady Eden over her husband. For example, Lady Jebb, wife of the British ambassador in Paris, alluded in her diary to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and referred to "Clarissa's war".^[118] (It should be borne in mind, however, that her husband, Sir Gladwyn, a "figure of some grandeur, if not hauteur",^[119] was furious at his exclusion from an Anglo-French summit in Paris two weeks before the Suez invasion.^[120]) In December 1956, Walter Monckton, a member of Eden's government who opposed the Suez invasion, apparently told a Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, that Lady Eden was a powerful force in politics, with great influence on her husband, and that "now she knows [Monckton] opposed Anthony she won't have anything to do with him".^[121] 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 concerning the railwaymen than that advised by Monckton, as Minister of Labour, and senior civil servants^[122] (although there is evidence that Churchill had also privately advocated to Eden the need for a strong line).^[123]

In private correspondence just after Suez, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper derided Lady Eden'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 would listen only to Cecil Beaton, whom he described (with reference to the Svengali of the last Russian czarina Alexandra) as her "Rasputin".^[124]

Protective influence

Less dramatically, there were suggestions that Anthony Eden's touchiness and over-sensitivity to criticism, characteristics frequently remarked upon by colleagues,^[125] were exacerbated by Lady Eden (described by historian Barry Turner, without explanation, as "equally touchy"^[126]). One of Eden's private secretaries claimed that she had a habit of "stirring up Anthony when he didn't need it".^[127] However, Eden's biographer D. R. Thorpe concluded that such imputations arose from a misreading of the Edens' relationship, also noting that, during Suez, the only two people in whom Eden could confide without inhibition were his wife and the Queen.^[128] Indeed, as historian Ben Pimlott put it, "if Lady Eden came to believe that the Suez Canal flowed through her drawing room, the Queen must have felt pretty damp as well".^[129] David Dutton, another (not notably sympathetic) biographer of Eden, noted that "some observers believed that Clarissa was excessively protective and tended to exacerbate Eden's natural volatility" but also remarked on her devoted companionship and that "during the dark days of the Suez Crisis, [she] was at his side, supportive throughout".^{[130][lower-alpha 22]}

Eden 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.^[117] There is some evidence also that, when he was Foreign Secretary, Lady Eden had influenced (or, at any rate, endorsed) his patterns of work. A later Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, 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".^{[133][lower-alpha 23]}

Some of Lady Eden's friends may have concealed their true views 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",^[134] while opining to another acquaintance that his policy had been "childish folly".^{[135][lower-alpha 24]} The future 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".^[137] 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], Antony Head, Peter [Thorneycroft], [Sir David] Eccles, Duncan [Sandys], James Stuart, Gwilym [Lloyd George], and [Lord] Hailsham were for going on. [Lord] Kilmuir, [Derick] Heathcoat Amory, [Iain] Macleod, Bobbety [Lord Salisbury], Patrick Buchan-Hepburn were for doing whatever Anthony wanted and Lord Selkirk was unintelligible.^[138]

Aftermath of Suez

Goldeneye

Goldeneye in Jamaica, 2011

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 "Goldeneye", Ian Fleming's "plain, low-roofed" bungalow^[139] on the north coast of Jamaica. Lady Eden's concern for her husband's health appears to have been decisive in the choice of destination. Still, it was regarded by many, including Macmillan and the government's Chief Whip, Edward Heath, as politically unwise.^[140] In addition, although Goldeneye had a private beach and a large living room with glassless louvre windows that enabled "the moist tropical air [to] blow through",^[141] Fleming's close friend, the journalist Denis Hamilton, who visited Goldeneye around that time, recalled a "shack-like house" which Fleming "went around pretending [was] ... a great palace ... a miniature Ritz".^{[142][lower-alpha 25]} Its bedrooms have been described as "insignificant and small".^[143] Ann Fleming warned Lady Eden about some of its primitive aspects. She suggested that Torquay, a seaside resort in the southwest of England, and a sun lamp might have been preferable.^[144] However, Lady Eden insisted that "Berkshire [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".^{[145][lower-alpha 26]}

Installed in Jamaica after a good deal of secrecy and close liaison between Downing Street and Ian Fleming's secretary, Una Trueblood,^{[148][lower-alpha 27]} the Edens were temporary neighbours of Noël Coward who thought Goldeneye "perfectly ghastly"^{[150][lower-alpha 28]} and presented them—"poor dears"—with a basket of caviare, pâté de foie gras and champagne.^[153] Coward also sent Frank Cooper's marmalade and Huntley and Palmer's biscuits, which, according to the future Lady Avon, "was not what we had been looking forward to".^[154] As was sometimes the case when Fleming let Goldeneye, he asked his neighbour (and lover) Blanche Blackwell, a member of the influential Lindo family, to ensure that the Edens were properly looked after.^{[155][156][lower-alpha 29]} Indeed, it seems that Lady Eden's mentioning that Blackwell had been helpful at Goldeneye led Ann Fleming to suspect that her husband and Blackwell were having an affair.^[157] The publicity that the Edens' 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.^{[lower-alpha 30]} The future Lady Avon later recalled her "astonishment" (and Ann Fleming's "rueful embarrassment") at the success of the Bond books,^[161] which continued after From Russia, with Love entered the best-seller lists in 1957.^{[162][lower-alpha 31]}

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 was widowed at 56. She outlived five later prime ministerial spouses and witnessed the administrations of 13 subsequent prime ministers. By contrast, Lady Dorothy Macmillan was 57 when her husband succeeded Eden and 63 when he resigned, dying just three years later; her husband outlived her by 20 years.^[5] As such, Avon enjoyed unusual longevity for a prime ministerial spouse, contributing, for example, to a television documentary by Cherie Blair in 2005 about prime ministers' wives^[189] and to a three-part series the following year marking the 50th 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.^[190] The critic A. A. Gill was among those who praised Avon's erudite performance in the Blair documentary ("bright as a button") while sensing that she appeared not entirely to approve of Cherie Blair.^[191]

Avon was 87 when her memoir appeared in 2007. A journalist who interviewed her and her editor, Cate Haste, observed that Avon "seems slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil" but described her as "vigorous and knowing" in conversation.^[116] In April 2008 she and Haste appeared at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival,^[192] the literature for this event observing that, although 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".

Avon died on 15 November 2021 at her home in London,^[193] at the age of 101.^[194][195] She was the second longest-lived prime ministerial spouse after Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, widow of Harold Wilson, who died in 2018 aged 102. Her funeral took place on 24 November in Alvediston,^[196] where she was laid to rest at her husband's side in the churchyard.^[197]

Notes

Citations

Bibliography