Clarissa Churchill – as she was known until her marriage to Sir Anthony Eden – was brought up in a now vanished privileged world of intellectual, social and political London. In the introduction to his biography, Hugo Vickers provides a valuable roll-call of names. Those still living who knew Clarissa have proved invaluable sources of information, though a note of unconscious humour sometimes slips in – as when Antonia Fraser comments: ‘I was not quite glamorous enough for her’ (‘quite’ being the operative word).
Born in 1920, Clarissa began life with the ostensible advantage of being a Churchill, the niece of Winston. In fact this was not the case: her real father was Harold Baker, known as ‘Bluey’, a scholar, barrister, Liberal politician and friend of H.H. Asquith’s eldest son Raymond. Elected for Accrington in 1910, Baker was very much at home in Downing Street and would go on to serve as financial secretary at the War Office. But after Lloyd George split the Liberal party, he failed to win his seat back. He never married and remained a disappointed man in many ways. On his death in 1960 he left his daughter £3,000 and a cottage near Winchester, where he had become Warden of his old college.
Clarissa worked hard at school in London, and by the age of 17 had read, among others, Kafka, Descartes, Berkeley and Hume, with Kant a favourite. On the outbreak of war she did not hurry off, like most Churchills, to find employment of some kind (though she later worked in the cypher department at the Foreign Office), but moved to Oxford – not as an undergraduate but as a kind of privileged fellow traveller.
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