Remembering Eden – Lady Avon
the oldie who has seen it all before and worse At 98, Anthony Eden’s widow recalls Macmillan, Khruschev and Suez
The Countess of Avon, the final Oldie prizewinner, who turns 100 next year, must be the last intimate survivor from the world of Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Berners, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles.
When she was young, Clarissa Spencer-churchill had the exceptional advantages of being beautiful, extremely intelligent and well read. Being a Churchill, by name if not by temperament, and niece to Winston, she grew up surrounded by the most interesting men and women of the day. She studied philosophy in Oxford, was tutored by Isaiah Berlin, A J Ayer and Lord David Cecil. She worked for Alexander Korda, and George Weidenfeld in the worlds of film and publishing.
Clarissa was, and still is, remote, preferring her own company to society, which never greatly interested her. As a young girl she remained silent for hours at a time. She says, ‘I only spoke when I had something to say.’
In war-bombed London, the writer James Pope-hennessy described her as looking, ‘with her freshness and her swinging golden hair, like a Hans Christian 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 There is about her a withdrawn aloofness that just misses being haughty and widely misses being absurd.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… she demands, I think, a French background, the pillared elegance of the Second Empire or the lofty saloons of Versailles to frame her to perfection.’
And at Faringdon, Lord Berners could not help drawing on her as his heroine in Far From the Madding War (1941): ‘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.’
In 1952, Clarissa surrendered a life in high bohemia to become the wife of Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister and later the Earl of Avon. She lived the middle part of her life at the very epicentre of politics. She met Khrushchev – ‘He was frightening, pale
and bullet-headed, like a Russian peasant.’ She was disappointed by President Eisenhower: ‘Charmless! I had imagined someone live and dapper, with strength and repose, but he was heavy, hearty and bland.’ But she liked his wife, Mamie – ‘Perfectly natural; she had no side whatever.’ When Harold Macmillan visited Lord Avon in retirement in Wiltshire, she would meet him at Salisbury station and drive him to
The Oldie
their home at Alvediston ‘in as much silence as possible’.
I have always been surprised and quietly flattered that she chose me as a friend. Clarissa’s father, Jack Churchill, had been a partner in my grandfather’s stockbroking firm, Vickers Da Costa. When I embarked on a biography of the Duchess of Marlborough in 1975, my aunt, Joan Vickers, took me to see her at Alvediston. Lord Avon was in the house, but had retired to bed, so I never met him.
I had seen her many times as the most youthful of the wives of the Knights of the Garter, when they attended the annual service at Windsor. Gyles Brandreth described me correctly as ‘a Garter groupie’ (I have been present at every Garter ceremony since 1965), and Clarissa had many stories about Garter luncheons of old. Sitting next to Gerry, 7th Duke of Wellington, grandfather of the present Duke, she recalled him saying, ‘The trouble with the Order of the Garter these days is that it is full of field marshals and people who do their own washing-up.’
She remembered that when Lord Iveagh was installed, he found himself seated next to Winston, each trying to avoid one another, due to a childhood spat in Ireland in the 1880s. And when Harold Wilson was invested, he sat next to the Queen at lunch. The Queen Mother mused to Lord Avon, ‘Isn’t it wonderful – how she’s tamed him!’
She had serious reservations about Lord Mountbatten and how he tried to
manipulate the facts. He had tried on one occasion to persuade Lord Avon to ‘go into one of the loose boxes at Broadlands and be recorded for his film saying that they had met at London Airport and he had congratulated him on his handling of India. Anthony asked his private secretary, Philip Noble, if they could possibly have met, and Philip confirmed that they were never there at the same time. Anthony declined.’
In 1980, Clarissa took me to Tuscany to stay with that wild self-exile Lord Lambton at the Villa Cetinale. I was delighted when she told me that he had described me as ‘a most sinister person’. ‘You really rattled him,’ she said.
You can sometimes detect what she is thinking without her saying it. There was a sequence on television when she was taken round 10 Downing Street to see it as decorated by the Blairs. Her quizzical inspection and her bemused silence as she observed the ‘latest improvements’ spoke volumes.
Greta Garbo took a considerable liking to her while staying with Cecil Beaton in Wiltshire in 1951. In turn, Clarissa was fascinated by Garbo: ‘Her looks – certainly not her intelligence; obviously not,’ she says. After Clarissa married the Foreign Secretary, she happened to be in New York and asked the elusive star to lunch. She was surprised to find her waiting outside the restaurant, in awe of Clarissa’s new status. ‘I thought she was better than that,’ says Clarissa.
Clarissa turned Eden down the first time, and Beaton wondered if she thought she had made a mistake. When Eden asked her again, she accepted and was propelled into the world of high politics. The long wait for Winston Churchill to retire and the serious illness of Anthony Eden during his premiership made those years difficult.
During those years, she surrendered all her personal interests to being Eden’s wife. She loved the opera and the theatre, but never went. She is remembered for her comment in a rare political speech at Gateshead on 20th November 1956: ‘In the past few weeks, I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room.’ The use of ‘drawing room’, she tells me, was perhaps unfortunate.
During his long years of retirement, Clarissa devoted herself to the care of her husband. ‘I was pleased to leave politics,’ she says, ‘and that we could have a marriage without all the tensions, plottings and shenanigans of political life.’ When Lord Avon fell ill in America in January 1977, he was flown home in an RAF plane sent by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan to die at Alvediston.
Clarissa remade her life, moving to London. A widow at 56, she spent many hours at the opera and theatre, travelled widely, took up deep-sea diving for some years, read voraciously and entertained discriminatingly. She had an impish sense of humour and enjoyed the TV series Dallas, the wickedness of J R, and how those oil barons always talked about ‘their daddies’.
Ten years ago, she first mentioned with a sense of quiet resignation that she worried about her memory. She has a fine brain: analytical and what, in a prepolitically correct world, would have been described as a man’s brain.
Today she reads the papers voraciously, and at times professes to remember nothing of the past. She retains her elegance and style, is always beautifully dressed and gives sharp answers to questions. She makes expeditions to parks and galleries and sees close friends – most often her niece, Sally Ashburton.
It is never dull to visit her, and she most certainly possesses ‘the snap in her celery’ that has prompted the voting panel of the Oldie to bestow upon her this prestigious and enjoyable honour.
‘I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room’