Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, 1920-2021

When Anthony Eden entered 10 Downing Street in 1955, the British public were intrigued by his young and unconventional second wife, Winston Churchill’s niece, Clarissa. But few grasped the extent of her originality, her intellectual endeavours, or her impatience with convention.

“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,” wrote historian Raymond Carr.

Eden, who has died aged 101, grew up in London, where her nursery window overlooked the Natural History Museum. Though born into the Churchill dynasty, as an upper class girl she received an incomplete education. At 16 she quit boarding school and headed to Paris, which, she wrote in her memoir, “was like opening a window on life”. She enrolled in art classes, but to her mother’s consternation, spent most of her time partying in Paris café society.

London, comparatively, was a bitter disappointment. On her return home, she refused to have a traditional debutante’s ball or to be presented at court, calling the whole thing “nonsense”. She took refuge in music halls and pubs with the “Liberal set”, started reading the New Statesman, and returned to Paris as soon as she could. 

Her intellectual life was voracious. In 1940, apparently unfazed by her lack of qualifications, she moved to Oxford and took philosophy lectures, mixing in academic circles with A J Ayer and Isaiah Berlin, who praised her “noble and unbending pride and disdain for the minutest kind of cheating and compromise”. As her friends were called up to join the war effort, she got her first job decoding telegrams for the Foreign Office. At night she retired to her temporary home, a top-floor room of the Dorchester Hotel, which she negotiated for a discounted rate on the basis that it was a bomb risk.

Anne Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was born on June 28, 1920, the youngest child of Lady Gwendoline Bertie, daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon, and John Strange Spencer-Churchill, a stockbroker, military veteran and younger brother of Winston. She had two brothers, Johnnie and Peregrine. 

During the war years she started to write. Her first byline, in 1944, was a dispatch for Horizon magazine on what remained of cultural life in bomb-scarred London. She wrote arts reviews for Vogue before moving on to a better-paid PR job at the film director Alexander Korda’s production company, spending time with Hollywood stars who, she wrote in her acerbic style, were “not very interesting”.

At 32, she had an editing job at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and owned her own cottage and car — quite a feat for a woman at that time. It was a surprise to her bohemian friends, then, when she told them about her engagement to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, a Conservative divorcé 23 years her senior. 

When the couple first chatted at a party in 1946, Clarissa did not consider Anthony a romantic prospect, “because he was a politician, for a start”. Her people were intellectuals and artists. He had become the UK’s youngest foreign secretary for decades at the age of 38, and had established a reputation as a skilled diplomat. But Clarissa was uninterested in his political skill. Anthony was tall, dark and handsome, and the couple bonded over art and literature. 

As a politician’s wife, however, Clarissa was forced to swap her literary and artistic milieu for significantly less exciting political circles. At first she was out of her depth, and wrote that Anthony was “no help at all”. 

Sonia Purnell, Clementine Churchill’s biographer, visited Clarissa when she was 90 years old. She found her clever, sharp and surrounded by political magazines and newspapers. She was sharp in more than one sense of the word: “I was quite struck by how judgmental she was about other people.” 

Throughout Eden’s political career, Clarissa wrote searing assessments of world leaders and politicians, and was an intelligent observer of various political intrigues — notably the tensions that simmered between her uncle Winston and his political heir, Eden, as the former clung to power.

She was relieved to leave politics after Anthony resigned following his handling of the Suez crisis and the severe deterioration in his health. When he died in 1977, Clarissa was just 57. She resumed her life of peripatetic travel. 

Despite her ambivalence about the political world, and the “frightful bores” who populated it, Clarissa was bent on preserving her husband’s political legacy. She commissioned two biographies of his life, eager to ensure he would not be remembered for Suez alone.

Madeleine Speed