Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (; 28 June 1920 – 15 November 2021) was an English memoirist and the second wife of Anthony Eden, who served as British prime minister from 1955 to 1957. She married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made a Knight of the Garter, before becoming Countess of Avon in 1961 when her husband was created Earl of Avon. She was also Winston Churchill's niece. In 2007, at 87, she released her memoir subtitled From Churchill to Eden.
On the death of Lady Wilson of Rievaulx in 2018, Lady Avon became the oldest living spouse of a British prime minister. She turned 100 in 2020, the second British prime minister's spouse to become a centenarian after Wilson. She also outlived four other prime ministers' spouses who came after her: Lady Dorothy Macmillan (died 1966), Elizabeth Douglas-Home (died 1990), Audrey Callaghan (died 2005) and Sir Denis Thatcher (died 2003).
Early life
Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was born in 1920, the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill (1880–1947) and (1885–1941), a daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, who had married in 1908. Her elder brothers were John ("Johnnie") (1909–1992), an artist, and Henry Winston (1913–2002), known as Peregrine.
Spencer-Churchill was born at her parents' house in the Cromwell Road, Kensington, London. She was educated at Kensington Preparatory School and then at Downham School, Hatfield Heath, "a fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Seventy years later she said she had also felt the need to get away from home—"I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much".
Paris, Tuscany and London (1937–1939) In 1937 Spencer-Churchill studied art in Paris. 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. 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.
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. 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 (), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".
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 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 in "a vintage year for beautiful girls", 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"—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".
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". 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.