41 Facts About Clarissa Eden

Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon was an English memoirist and the second wife of Anthony Eden, who served as British prime minister from 1955 to 1957.

Clarissa Eden married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made Knight Companion of the Garter, before becoming Countess of Avon in 1961 when her husband was created Earl of Avon.

Clarissa Eden turned 100 in 2020, the second British prime minister's spouse to become a centenarian after Wilson.

Clarissa Eden's 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 cafe society parties.

Clarissa Eden knew Guy Burgess, who fled to Russia in 1951 when he and Maclean were about to be unmasked as traitors.

Clarissa Eden 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.

Clarissa Eden met the actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film The Third Man, and escorted actress Paulette Goddard, who played Mrs Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, on "a rather wild trip" to Brussels.

Clarissa Eden 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.

Clarissa Eden 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".

Clarissa Eden was already famous for his elegant attire and Homburg hat, and she was struck by Eden's unusual pinstriped tweed trousers.

Clarissa 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.

In 1950, Clarissa Eden was divorced from his first wife, Beatrice.

Until 2019, Clarissa Eden was one of only two British prime ministers to have been divorced.

Lady Clarissa Eden is said to have murmured, "he can't keep away", as Clarissa Eden, in Beaton's words, "gangled in like a colt" and proclaimed to Garbo that he had always wanted to meet her.

Lady Clarissa Eden miscarried in 1954, and there were no children.

Churchill had told Lady Clarissa Eden, following her honeymoon in 1952, that he wanted to give up the premiership.

However, it was not until 6 April 1955 that Clarissa Eden succeeded him as prime minister, shortly afterwards winning a general election in which the Conservative Party polled the largest percentage of the popular vote recorded by a party between 1945 and the present day.

Colville noted that, at a dinner attended by the Queen to mark Churchill's retirement, the Duchess of Westminster had put her foot through Lady Clarissa Eden's train, causing the monarch's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, to remark, "that's torn it, in more than one sense".

For much of this period, Clarissa Eden was the subject of hostility from elements of the Conservative press, notably The Daily Telegraph, the wife of whose chairman, Lady Pamela Berry, was said by some to have had a "blood row" with Lady Clarissa Eden.

Clarissa Eden 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".

Lady Clarissa 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 Clarissa Eden and replaced them with roses of a "normal [colour]".

In January 1956, Lady Clarissa Eden politely requested the occupant of a farm worker's cottage on the estate to hang her washing where visitors could not see it.

Khrushchev noted that Lady Clarissa Eden's behaviour contradicted a briefing from the Soviet embassy in London that she shared some of Churchill's "traits in the matter of drinking".

Clarissa Eden confided later in Bulganin, with whom he "had a good laugh over [the] incident".

On 1 November, Lady Clarissa 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.

One example of its durability was a journalist's observation some 54 years later, with reference to the Iraq War of 2003, that "if, as Clarissa Eden remarked, the Suez Canal ran through her drawing room, Iraq and the decisions that flowed from it still haunt [the] Labour [Party] and stir up antipathies and discomforts".

Indeed, as historian Ben Pimlott put it, "if Lady Clarissa Eden came to believe that the Suez Canal flowed through her drawing room, the Queen must have felt pretty damp as well".

David Dutton, another biographer of Eden, noted that "some observers believed that Clarissa was excessively protective and tended to exacerbate Eden's natural volatility" but remarked on her devoted companionship and that "during the dark days of the Suez Crisis, [she] was at his side, supportive throughout".

Clarissa 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.

Clarissa Eden says that this is the right way to run the F[oreign].

Clarissa Eden suggested that Torquay, a seaside resort in the southwest of England, and a sun lamp might have been preferable.

However, Lady Clarissa 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".

Indeed, it seems that Lady Clarissa Eden's mentioning that Blackwell had been helpful at Goldeneye led Ann Fleming to suspect that her husband and Blackwell were having an affair.

Lady Clarissa Eden noted that, on their return, "everyone [was] looking at us with thoughtful eyes".

When Eden was taken mortally ill with liver cancer, he and Lady Avon had just spent their final Christmas together at Hobe Sound, Florida, as guests of former New York governor W Averell Harriman, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party, and his English-born wife Pamela.

Clarissa Eden had previously been married to Lady Avon's cousin Randolph Churchill and in the 1990s was US president Bill Clinton's ambassador to Paris, where she died in 1997.

Clarissa Eden moved to an apartment in London in the 1980s.

Clarissa Eden was only 36 when her husband resigned and was widowed at 56.

Clarissa Eden outlived five later prime ministerial spouses and witnessed the administrations of 13 subsequent prime ministers.

Clarissa Eden was the second longest-lived prime ministerial spouse after Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, widow of Harold Wilson, who died in 2018 aged 102.