Extract from Clarissa Eden: A Memoir
From Churchill To Eden
Editor [Cate Haste] Introduction
On 18 January 1957 Clarissa Eden and her husband, Sir Anthony, boarded a liner at Tilbury Dock bound for New Zealand. Both were under strain. At 60, Eden was still handsome, but exhaustion and illness were etched on his face. Only 9 days before (9 January) he had resigned as Britain’s Prime Minister due to ill health. He had served only 20 months in office.
Friends and political colleagues lined the quay to wave the couple off, and messages of support and goodwill flowed in from all over the country. There was deep sadness at the parting. Clarissa’s concern was the recovery of her husband’s health and spirits. For Eden, it was the end of a political career spanning three decades in which early promise had ripened to distinction as Foreign Secretary and then the prize of the premiership.
Even before they sailed away, the new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had taken over, politics had moved on, and the reckoning on Eden’s premiership begun.
The pressures at Downing Street during the previous six months had been intense as the Suez Crisis, one of the major turning points in the 20th century, had engulfed the couple and the nation. Eden’s decision, backed by a well-nigh unanimous Cabinet, to reclaim the Suez Canal to international control by force was – and remains – controversial, though Eden’s personal popularity rating just prior to his resignation was high at 56%.
For Clarissa, much younger at 37, their departure was another new beginning. Before her marriage and her late entry into politics, she had already crafted a life of her own. Politics had changed all that.
This memoir covers Clarissa’s early life and her life in politics. It properly falls into two parts. They are, both factually and atmospherically, different, though Clarissa entered wholeheartedly into each phase .
Her life has spanned several different worlds, and she met and made friends with some of the most colourful and influential figures of the 20th century. Always clear–sighted and individual, she observes them with a shrewd and perceptive eye.
Happily, Clarissa belongs to a generation who wrote regularly to each other and who preserved their letters, many in their original envelopes, so she could draw on these, along with appointment diaries, as aides memoires for the early part of her life covered in Part One. From 1952 she kept a regular diary recording her own experiences and what her husband, Anthony Eden, told her of the day’s events in Cabinet and the interactions of government when he was Foreign Secretary and then Prime Minister. We have quoted from these at length and they form the backbone to Part Two of the Memoir. The difference in tone and atmosphere reflects the change in Clarissa’s own life.
Though born into the aristocracy, Clarissa Churchill seemed never to have quite identified with that class. When she was old enough to decide on the direction of her life, it was not to a make a ‘good’ marriage, as was expected, or to become the graceful chatelaine of a country estate. She decided to pursue her own interests.
Her mother, Lady Gwendeline Bertie, known as ‘Goonie’, was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon. Renowned for a subtle twilight beauty and alluring charm, she was intelligent and widely- read, although untutored, and had a wide-ranging interest in culture and the arts. She seemed a romantic figure, with blue eyes the colour of cornflowers and dark auburn hair, elegant and civilised, with a delicate natural sympathy and perceptive appreciation for other people’s qualities. Admirers noted her clear-eyed shrewdness, amused scepticism and the mischievous irony which flickered over her conversation.
In 1908, she married John Strange Spencer-Churchill, a quiet man, courteous and good-looking, the younger brother of Winston Churchill. ‘Jack’ had become a partner in the City stockbrokers Vickers, da Costa with the help of his Harrow schoolmate, Leo Rothschild. He had fought in the Boer War, arriving on a hospital ship equipped by his mother, Jennie Churchill, and in the First World War – at Gallipoli and then on the Western front, where he served on the staff of General Birdwood, was mentioned in dispatches and awarded the DSO (Distinguished Service Order)..
Within a month of Jack marrying Goonie, Winston married Clementine Hozier, and the two families spent much of their early married lives together. The brothers were close, with Jack playing the supportive role to the more ambitious, flamboyant Winston. It was one of Winston’s dictums that blood was thicker then water, Clarissa recalls, and that was how he behaved towards the family, whatever idiocies the younger members got up to. Goonie, with her sympathetic nature, got on well with the more highly strung Clemmie, who found in her sister-in-law a safety valve and confidante.
Though Jack and Goonie were not well-off, they were well connected. Goonie already had an extensive network of friends including those from the Liberal world and the more interesting figures from the Conservative aristocracy, and her admirers included figures from the world of the arts who paid her regular visits. Clarissa found her mother’s friends from this varied social tapestry sympathetic and interesting.
Jack was cousin to the Duke of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the second son of 6th Duke of Marlborough, Conservative MP and one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer, had married Jennie Jerome, the beautiful daughter of a New York stockbroker. The family took a dim view of Leonard Jerome and opposed the marriage, but, taking into account the parlous finances of Blenheim Palace and the beauty of his future daughter-in-law, the Duke’s view softened with Jerome’s offer of a £50,000 dowry. Clarissa never knew her grandmother, who died of a haemorrhage 18 months after she was born.
Goonie and Jack were regular visitors at Blenheim Palace. His cousin ‘Sunny’, Duke of Marlborough had married another exotic American beauty, Consuelo Vanderbilt, daughter of an American railroad millionaire, who had been forced into the marriage by her socially ambitious mother, and is said to have wept behind her veil throughout the ceremony. After performing her duties as chatelaine of Blenheim Palace and producing two sons, an heir and a spare, Consuelo left. On her divorce in 1921, she married, for love, Jacques Balsan, a French textile heir and rather dashing pioneer balloonist and aviator. Goonie kept up her friendship with Consuelo after the split and Clarissa and her mother were lent their Moulin in Normandy and stayed at the main Chateau where, Clarissa remembers, the sheets were so fine that they rouched up and became positively uncomfortable.
Clarissa, a longed for daughter, was born on June 28, 1920. With her brothers, Johnnie and Peregrine, respectively eleven and seven years older than her, she was brought up as virtually an only child. Johnnie became an artist who conducted an erratic married life, Peregrine was an engineer who, according to Goonie, carried around with him an air of Chehkovian gloom.
Clarissa’s schooling was patchy. At six, she was judged an intelligent, enthusiastic and capable little girl, always delightful to deal with, and at fourteen, her headmistress reported she was clever, with a good brain – capable of doing one of the very best matriculation certificates, but her ground work was poor. Certainly she was spirited, and somewhat rebellious. She found her mother’s concern and love overbearing: “Why so hectic about me? I am quite well and happy, don’t spend so much on the telephone,” she wrote perkily, aged ten, from her cousins at Wroxham in Norfolk, where she was climbing trees and swatting stray bats in the night.
Within a year of leaving her formal schooling, Clarissa was restless. She discovered a hunger for knowledge and intellectual life and a delight in art and culture, which her inadequate schooling had failed to satisfy. Having found what interested her, she set about educating herself . She failed to fully enter the spirit of her ‘coming out’ into Society (as a debutante) – a year involving a busy social schedule – and spent much time attending daily art and philosophy lectures. Even so, her Aunt Clemmie reported to Goonie: “On all sides I hear of Clarissa’s charm and success and beauty. I am so glad, because I love Clarissa.. I hope she will make a happy and brilliant marriage. She is made to shine.” Uncle Winston thought she had “a most unusual personality.” (JC p653)
Clarissa was making her mark. At 18 she was a beautiful, stylish and enigmatic figure – with clear blue eyes and golden hair likened to “the colour of cornfields at sunrise.” An admirer – the writer James Pope-Hennessy, thought that she had éclat, combining ‘the aristocratic traditions of the England that was worth living in’ with a film star-like glamour. Hugh Fraser nicknamed her ‘Garbo’.
She had a capacity for friendship and appreciation which evoked deep affection among her friends as she blossomed onto society. Then, and later, men fell in love with her. Striking and unusual, she sometimes lacked confidence, though her natural poise and style belied this. She could give an impression of being aloof, when in fact she simply remained silent when felt she had nothing worthwhile to say.
She was, and is, impatient with convention and not afraid to be abrupt. Nor was she concerned about what others thought – and some found her directness and intellectual honesty daunting. Many were, and still are, intrigued by her individuality. Of those who became friends in the discerning atmosphere of Oxford’s academia, philosopher Isaiah Berlin thought her ‘upright and downright’, which amused her, and praised her ‘noble and unbending pride and disdain for the minutest kind of cheating & compromise ...hence your reproaches when I seemed to you to betray some clear standard of integrity or even manners.’ Lord David Cecil delighted in her conversation. Clever, intelligent and singular in her judgements, she has wit and an often mischievous sense of humour, with a keen sense of the absurd and strong antennae for pretentiousness and humbug,
Though she soon moved almost entirely in literary and cultural circles, she was also at ease in the social milieu of the British and European aristocracy, and then, in her later life, in political circles.
Chapter 3 [Clarissa Eden]
Paris had been for me a liberation and revelation from which I learned to cherish my freedom, painting, and everything French. This made the English upper-class process for a girl to ‘come out’ – dances, and meet eligible young men – an anti-climax which I failed to surmount. My escape was to go with Jeremy Hutchinson, one of the Liberal set, to the music hall in Stratford East and dinner at the Prospect of Whitby by the Isle of Dogs. I also discovered the left-wing weekly New Statesman and Nation, which I liked for its book reviews.
I was inclined to independent gestures. Marlene Dietrich had been appearing in all the newspapers dressed in a man’s suit. I was very taken by this and went off to Simpsons in Piccadilly – then a men’s tailor. They were rather taken aback, and probably checked with my mother. However, they duly made me a lounge suit in lovat cloth.
Arriving that summer at the Angleseys in North Wales my suit naturally astonished, and I like to think was admired by, all the Pagets. One of the young men staying there was particularly taken by it, to the extent that Marjorie Anglesey warned my mother against him.
In 1937, before I was going to any dances, there was a ball at Hatfield House.*
(* Hatfield House- A vast Jacobean edifice built by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, in 1611, and occupied by the Cecils for 400 years. The Old Palace, where Elizabeth 1 was confined for much of her childhood, is nearby.)
My mother took me, togged up in a white dress girdled by a wreath of green leaves. I had always known the Cecil boys at their other house at Cranborne in Dorset – Michael, who had died, was my exact contemporary and friend – but this party was for his elder brother Robert’s coming of age. Straight in at the deep end for me: the huge house all lit up, music blaring into the night, and Robert, the birthday boy, seizing me round the waist to dance, and dance, and dance. After this particular event the social world unfolded rapidly, and Robert and I later gave a dance of our own for our friends, in his grandparents’ house in Arlington Street.
The so-called ‘season’ is a blur.. One dance was very like another. Each year there was the Liberal Ball. One partner – stiff in his white tie and tails – was Donald MacLean.* He complained that I was not a proper Liberal girl like the Bonham-Carters and the Asquiths – I was too smart. It turned out that he wasn’t a proper Liberal boy either.
(* – Donald Maclean,(1913-1983) – a diplomat in the Foreign Office and son of Liberal Party leader, Sir Donald Maclean, was recruited by Soviet intelligence at Cambridge in the 1930s to spy for the Russians during and after World War Two. With fellow agents Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, a high-ranking member of British Intelligence, he defected to Russia after their exposure, provoking a major spy scandal in 1951)
My new friends in Paris had been older and more sophisticated and I had also met ‘Café Society’, so the boys I was now confronted by – as dinner guests or dancing partners, let alone possible romance, seemed immature. I made a few friends – Richard Cavendish (of the Devonshire clan) was one. Just as Charles Mendl’s wine excited me, so at Richard Cavendish’s family house in Lancashire (Holker Hall) I tasted the best food in England. Robert Cecil remained a close friend for life , and Charlie Lansdowne* seemed so sympathetic – a gentle, sensitive boy who, being un-judgemental and observant could fit in with anyone – was a particular friend. Charlie was killed in the war. He had come to stay at the Moulin de Montreuil that summer – the mill belonging to Consuelo Balsan, a continuing friend of my mothers, where lunches at the Château nearby were always elegant and simple and cool and beautiful, and her husband, Jacques, wrinkled and clean and full of ‘le sport’. He always had a small pad by his side to write notes to his chef – ‘trop de sel’ etc..
(* Charles Lansdowne - 7th Marquess of Lansdowne, succeeded to the title aged 19 in 1936, killed in action in Italy, 1944)
Back from Paris, I had immediately enrolled at the Slade School of Art and at a strange institution called the Monkey Club where an inspiring young woman fired me with the discovery of English poetry. During ‘the season’ I also started going to lectures at the Institute of Philosophy in Gordon Square and lectures on art at the Courtauld Institute. I was discovering the lacunae in my education hitherto, and eager to make up for lost time.
That summer I was asked by Trim to go on a walking tour across the Appenines , with his mother Katharine and his sister Helen. The tour started at Siena. I don’t remember much walking – it was mainly wooden train journeys, 3rd Class. The mosaics at Ravenna were dazzling; the Piero della Francesco’s frescoes at Arezzo were in their exquisite original colours – before being later ruined by restoration, and Piero’s Resurrection in San Sepulchro was still hung in dramatic gloom.
Ben Nicolson ( Trim’s friend from Oxford and son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West) had advised Trim on no account should we miss Piero’s pregnant Virgin of Montierchi. He told us it was known only to a few of the cognoscenti, and to see it was something of a coup. Trim and I set off on the considerable detour alone. On arrival one had to search out the caretaker who unlocked the Chapel with a flourish. As we contemplated the painting – dramatic, as it was only a few feet away in this tiny space – the caretaker piped up “English lady here last week”. “Oh really?” we said. “Yes. A Lady Col…Colefax.” Collapse on our part. (Lady Colefax was renowned only as a London society hostess with an interest in celebrity). The next time I saw the painting, it had been whisked away to a building with white walls, spotlights, music playing – a nightmare.
Our tour ended in Venice. We had been living very simply for two weeks but thought nothing of taking up (my mother’s friend) Juliet Duff’s suggestion that we should call on Count Volpi * in his Palazzo in Venice. His daughter was the chatelaine of a Villa at Maser decorated by Veronese in collaboration with Palladio which I visited years later in smart company. Then, Italian women in a town like Venice wore silk dresses and pearls and high-heeled shoes. We arrived for tea in old clothes and dusty shoes, worn for two weeks, and unwashed hair. They were polite but presumably appalled.
(* Count Guiseppe Volpi, a diplomat and leading industrialist, was Chairman of the Biennale and was renowned for annual balls in his palazzos graced by the cultural aristocracy of Europe.)
Some years later, when Iris Origo* came to see the Isaiah and Aline Berlin in Paraggi when I was staying there, she appeared dressed up like that after a steep climb in the blazing heart up a rough path to their house.
(*: Iris Origo (1902-1988) – Anglo-American heiress, married to the Marchesa of Val d’Orcia, was a distinguished biographer and writer on life in the Italian countryside based on the estate, La Foce, which she developed with her husband.)
Another side trip from Venice was made to see Freya Stark at Asolo – a friend of Trim’s – who lived in a simple house with a big view. She gave an impression of pure integrity. I saw her once more, driving up from Venice to her home, and was again struck by her intelligence and honesty. Trim encountered her in Syria in 1941 “wearing crushed strawberry coloured shorts and garters, having just returned from picnicking on a donkey in the desert.” (T to CE: 15 March 1942)
(* – Dame Freya Stark (1892-1993) – Explorer and travel writer and fluent in several languages, she was one of the first women to journey alone across the Arabian deserts, which she explored and mapped and wrote about. Later she worked for British Intelligence in the Middle East.)
At another time in another part of Italy, I saw a bit of Muriel Spark. I loved her. She would arrive in an open-top sports car – full of enthusiasm and friendliness and determination to enjoy people. She was fun.
Haste edit Link:
Back in London in Sept 38, Clarissa continued her philosophy studies.
It was a period of uncertainty and crisis as Europe gradually descended into war. Hitler had absorbed Austria in the ‘Anschluss’ of March 1938. In September, he threatened Czechoslovakia. At the Munich Conference, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with French and Italian leaders, Daladier and Mussolini, conceded Hitler’s occupation of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain returned to Britain announcing he had averted war and achieved ‘Peace with Honour’. Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned at this appeasement of Hitler. Warning bells sounded, not least from Winston Churchill, then out of office and languishing on the sidelines. Britain was suddenly preparing for war.
Clarissa was at Holworth during the critical days at the end of September, and was warned by friends not to return to this ‘nerve-racking Armageddon atmosphere’ in London. Friends were digging steel-propped trenches in their back gardens, trees were cut down on Primrose Hill to make way for anti-aircraft guns, the V&A Museum was packing up paintings and families were removing their children and servants to the country.
James Pope- Hennessy* wrote of his “terror of crouching underground and the knowledge that St Paul’s Cathedral and the Wallace Collection will be a heap of smoking ruins.” (28 Septemner 1938) He was working on a book, ‘London Fabric’, which describes his journey with a young companion – Clarissa, thinly disguised as ‘Perdita’ – round historic landmarks of London which were threatened with destruction. Perdita had swift intelligence, directness and an original aesthetic sensibility. Pope-Hennessy warned Clarissa: “Do not think of Perdita as a portrait of you, for that would be fatal; she is not” (25 June 1939) but, it reflects his fascination with her: “It is just that combination of youth and swift steely intelligence and dignity and looks that makes you what you are, unique,” (15 April 1939) he wrote. Dedicated ‘To Clarissa’, the book was published in autumn (27 September) 1939 and won the Hawthorden Prize in 1940 .
(* James Pope-Hennessy (1916-1974) corresponded regularly with Clarissa at this time, though his restless and sometimes erratic behaviour soured their friendship later. He was just embarking on his career as travel writer and biographer of, among others, Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), Queen Mary, Robert Louis Stevenson and Anthony Trollope. He later kept dangerous company and died violently in 1974.)