Sir Winston Churchill's niece and the widow of former Prime Minister Anthony Eden has died at the age of 101.
Clarissa Eden, the Countess of Avon, passed away on Monday, more than four decades after the death of her husband.
Born Anne Clarissa Churchill on June 28, 1920, she always known as Clarissa, and was the only daughter of Major John Strange Churchill, the younger brother of Winston, and Lady Gwendoline Bertie, daughter of the Earl of Abingdon.
As well as being the niece of Britain's most famous prime minister and later marrying another, her grandfather Lord Randolph Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer in the 1880s.
She celebrated her 100th birthday in lockdown alongside just four friends, denied a large celebration by the pandemic, and in later years dismissed distinguished politicians as 'frightful bores'.
She was the oldest former spouse of a Prime Minister following Mary Wilson's death, having outlived five of her successors.
In 1952, she married Anthony Eden, Churchill's former foreign secretary, who later served as Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957.
Clarissa Eden, Sir Winston Churchill's niece and the widow of former Prime Minister Anthony Eden has died at the age of 101
Anthony Eden and Clarissa Churchill, Countess of Avon, on their wedding day at the Caxton Hall registry office Westminster. Pictured from left to right: Mrs Churchill, Anthony Eden, Clarissa Eden, Winston Churchill
The former Prime Minister lost popularity during his time as leader of Britain - and was ultimately undone by his handling of the Suez Crisis.
Lady Avon famously remarked 'I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room' during the 1956 Suez crisis while at her husband's side in Downing Street.
Mr Eden left office in 1957 and died in January 1977, 44 years before his wife. He was 79.
In her memoir, From Churchill to Eden, published in 2007, Lady Avon said she was 'pleased to leave politics'.
Clarissa spent her youth in London where she attended boarding school but left without any qualifications because she was 'bored'.
She had two elder brothers: Johnnie, an artist with whom she was not close; and Peregrine, who she was much closer with. Johnnie died in 1992 and Peregrine in 2002.
After school, she enrolled at the Slade and went to Oxford, where she studied philosophy.
She spent much of the war at Chequers with her uncle, before going on to work for an English-language propaganda newspaper published in Russia.
Later, she took up a job in the basement of the Foreign Office decoding messages.
After the war, she worked for Vogue, and then alongside film director, Alexander Korda, before taking up a role editing the magazine Contact.
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, who was Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957 with his wife Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon
Clarissa met Anthony Eden, a Conservative politician, when she was just 16, in 1936, when he stayed with his friend Lord Cranborne.
It was during a dinner in 1946, while sat next to Clarissa, that Mr Eden asked her out to dinner having been left by his first wife Beatrice Beckett the previous year. They divorced in 1950.
Mr Eden proposed to Clarissa while he was serving his third term as Foreign Secretary. She initially turned him down until, six months later, she accepted.
News of the engagement was met with surprise, not least by Clarissa's aunt Clementine Churchill who felt she was too independent to make a suitable wife for a politician.
The pair married on August 14, 1952, with the ceremony held at the Caxton Hall registry office, in Westminster, and the reception at 10 Downing Street.
The start of married life was dominated by politics, and official visits to Paris and Washington, among others.
Mr Eden with wife Clarissa, Lady Eden, at their Wiltshire home after he accepted the peerage as Earl of Avon in 1961
