Anthony Eden

For the eponymous hat, see Anthony Eden hat.

The Right Honourable Anthony Eden KG, MC, PC
File:AREden.jpg
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office 7 April 1955 – 10 January 1957
Monarch	Elizabeth II
Preceded by	Sir Winston Churchill
Succeeded by	Harold Macmillan
Lord Privy Seal
In office June 1934 – 7 June 1935
Monarch	George V
Prime Minister	Ramsay MacDonald
Preceded by	Stanley Baldwin
Succeeded by	The Marquess of Londonderry
Foreign Secretary
In office 22 December 1935 – 20 February 1938
Monarchs	George V Edward VIII George VI
Prime Minister	Stanley Baldwin Neville Chamberlain
Preceded by	Sir Samuel Hoare, 2nd Baronet
Succeeded by	The Viscount Halifax
In office 22 December 1940 – 26 July 1945
Monarch	George VI
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill
Preceded by	The Viscount Halifax
Succeeded by	Ernest Bevin
In office 28 October 1951 – 7 April 1955
Monarchs	George VI Elizabeth II
Prime Minister	Sir Winston Churchill
Preceded by	Herbert Stanley Morrison
Succeeded by	Harold Macmillan
Deputy Prime Minister
In office 26 October 1951 – 6 April 1955
Prime Minister	Sir Winston Churchill
Preceded by	Vacant last holder was Herbert Stanley Morrison earlier in 1951
Succeeded by	Vacant next holder was Rab Butler in 1962
Personal details
Born	(1897-06-12)12 June 1897 West Auckland, County Durham, United Kingdom
Died	14 January 1977(1977-01-14) (aged 79) Alvediston, Salisbury, Wiltshire, United Kingdom
Political party	Conservative
Spouse(s)	Beatrice Beckett (1902–1957) (1923 – divorced 1950) Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (born 1920) (1952–1977)
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford

Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, KG, MC, PC (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British politician who was Foreign Secretary for three periods between 1935 and 1955, including World War II and Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957.

In the post-war years, Eden was a protagonist of the change in British policy about war criminal trials, maybe best symbolised by his signature under the pardon conceded to the German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring on 24 October 1952.

He is mainly remembered for his role in the Suez Crisis of 1956, which was politically disastrous from a British perspective.

He is generally ranked among the least successful British Prime Ministers of the 20th century , although two broadly sympathetic biographies (in 1986 and 2003) have gone some way to redressing the balance of opinion .

Early career

Eden was born in West Auckland, County Durham, England, into a very conservative landed gentry family, and attended Eton. He was a younger son of Sir William Eden, baronet, from an old titled family. His mother, Sybil Frances Grey, was a member of the famous Grey family of Northumberland (see below). This was perhaps the meaning of Rab Butler's later gibe that Eden - in later life a handsome but ill-tempered man - was "half mad baronet, half beautiful woman". He had an elder brother called Timothy and a younger brother, Nicholas, who was to be killed when the battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable blew up and sank at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.

During the First World War, Eden serving with the King's Royal Rifle Corps reached the rank of captain, received a Military Cross, and at the age of twenty-one became the youngest brigade-major in the British Army; at a conference in the early 1930s he and Hitler observed that they had probably fought on opposite sides of the trenches in the Ypres sector. After the war he studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in Oriental Languages. (He was fluent in French, German and Persian and also spoke Russian and Arabic). After fighting a hopeless seat in the November 1922 General Election, Captain Eden, as he was still known, was elected Member of Parliament for Warwick and Leamington in the December 1923 General Election, as a Conservative. In that year also he married Beatrice Beckett. They had three sons, one of whom died shortly after birth, but the marriage was not a success and broke up under the strain of Eden's political career.

During the 1924-9 Conservative Government Eden was first Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson Hicks, and then in 1926 to the Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. In 1931 he held his first ministerial office as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. In 1934 he was appointed Lord Privy Seal and Minister for the League of Nations in Stanley Baldwin's Government. Like many of his generation who had served in the First World War, Eden was strongly anti-war and strove to work through the League of Nations to preserve European peace. He was however among the first to recognise that peace could not be maintained by appeasement of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. He privately opposed the policy of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, of trying to appease Italy during its invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935. When Hoare resigned after the failure of the Hoare-Laval Pact, Eden succeeded him as Foreign Secretary.

At this stage in his career Eden was considered as something of a leader of fashion. He regularly wore a Homburg hat (similar to a trilby but more rigid), which became known in Britain as an "Anthony Eden".

Foreign Secretary and resignation (1935-38)

Eden became Foreign Secretary at a time when Britain was having to adjust its foreign policy to face the rise of the fascist powers. He supported the policy of non-interference in the Spanish Civil War, and supported Neville Chamberlain in his efforts to preserve peace through reasonable concessions to Germany. He did not protest when Britain and France failed to oppose Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. But in February 1938, he resigned because he could not accept Chamberlain's opening of negotiations with Italy. He became a Conservative dissenter leading a group conservative whip David Margesson called the "Glamour Boys," and a leading anti-appeaser like Winston Churchill who led a similar group called "The Old Guard." Although Churchill claimed to have lost sleep the night of Eden's resignation (later recounted in his wartime memoirs (The Gathering Storm, 1948), they were not allies, and did not see eye to eye until Churchill became Prime Minister. There was much speculation that Eden would become a rallying point for all the disparate opponents of Chamberlain, but instead he maintained a low profile, avoiding confrontation though he opposed the Munich Agreement and abstained in the vote on it in the House of Commons. As a result Eden's position declined heavily amongst politicians, though he remained popular in the country at large - in later years he was often wrongly supposed to have resigned in protest at the Munich Agreement.

Second World War (1939-45)

Eden in 1945

In September 1939, on the outbreak of war, Eden, who had briefly rejoined the army with the rank of major, returned to Chamberlain's government as Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, but was not in the War Cabinet. As a result he was not a candidate for the Premiership when Chamberlain resigned after Germany invaded France in May 1940 and Churchill became Prime Minister. Churchill appointed Eden Secretary of State for War.

At the end of 1940 Eden returned to the Foreign Office, and in this role became a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive in 1941. Although he was one of Churchill's closest confidants, his role in wartime was restricted because Churchill conducted the most important negotiations, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, himself, but Eden served loyally as Churchill's lieutenant. Nevertheless he was in charge of handling much of the relations between Britain and de Gaulle during the last years of the war.

In 1942 Eden was given the additional job of Leader of the House of Commons. He was considered for various other major jobs during and after the war, including Commander-in-Chief Middle East in 1942 (this would have been a very unusual appointment as Eden was a civilian, not a General; General Harold Alexander was in fact appointed), Viceroy of India in 1943 (General Archibald Wavell was appointed to this job) or Secretary-General of the newly-formed United Nations Organisation in 1945.

Eden's eldest son, Simon Eden, went missing in action, later declared deceased, while serving as a pilot with the RAF in Burma in the latter days of the Second World War. There was a close bond between Anthony and Simon Eden, and Simon's death was a great personal shock to his father. De Gaulle wrote him a personal letter of condolence in French.

Eden meeting Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Quebec Conference in 1943

Post-war

Opposition (1945-51)

After the Labour Party won the 1945 elections, Eden went into opposition as Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party. Many felt that Churchill should have retired and allowed Eden to become party leader, but Churchill refused to consider this and Eden was too loyal to press him. He was in any case depressed during this period by the break-up of his first marriage and the death of his eldest son.

Return to government (1951-55)

In 1951, the Conservatives returned to office and Eden became Foreign Secretary for a third time. Churchill was largely a figurehead in this government and Eden had effective control of British foreign policy for the first time, as the Cold War grew more intense. He dealt effectively with the various crises of the period, although Britain was no longer the world power it had been before the war. In 1950 he and Beatrice Eden were finally divorced and in 1952 he married Churchill's niece, Lady Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (b. 1920) — a nominal Roman Catholic who was fiercely criticised by Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorced man — a marriage much more successful than his first had been.

The release of Nazi war criminals

Upon regaining office, Winston Churchill and Eden moved for the release of the Nazi war criminals still in British custody, following a policy focused on Anti-Communism and the emerging Cold War. This policy had been discretely pursued at least since 1947, when Churchill and Harold Alexander had pressured Clement Attlee to commute the death sentence on the German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring for atrocities perpetrated in Italy during the Second World War handed down by a British Military Court in Venice on May 6 1947. Kesselring had been called to account for more than 1,400 innocent civilians massacred in a series of violent reprisals, including the Ardeatine massacre.

In December 1951 Eden introduced to the Cabinet a cleverly drafted policy according to which pre-trial custody should be counted against sentences inflicted upon war criminals, so effectively reducing them. The policy - apparently aimed only to promote an equitable principle - exploited a loophole which - in certain instances - was effectively used to double a prison reduction already in effect, as for example, in the case of the German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.

Mainstein was mainly accused of orders equating Partisans to Jews, thus aiming at their indiscriminate extermination. Churchill donated money to von Manstein's defence and openly branded the trial against the German Field Marshal as yet another effort by the then ruling Attlee government to appease the Soviets.

Anticipating an extensive interpretation of the pre-trial custody reduction, the Tribunal that condemned von Manstein on December 19 1949 explicitly stated in its ruling that "The period during which the accused has been in custody has been taken into account". Nevertheless, Eden pushed ahead with the idea that it was legitimate to subtract the pre-trial custody time from the period decreed by judicial decision even in cases such as von Manstein's.

The pressure on Eden and the government to resolve the war criminals issue as quickly as possible increased during the summer of 1952, coinciding with the looming question of the ratification of the European Defence Community Treaty by West Germany. A lobby that included Harold Alexander - then Minister of Defence - and Basil Liddell Hart strove to this end, echoing the calls in the same direction coming from the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer and the press campaign orchestrated in West Germany for the pardoning of most war criminals. Alexander in particular had gone to considerable lengths to justify their release in a way or another, tactically and falsely emphasising health issues and, almost incredibly, the "melancholy" experienced by jailed war criminals.

Under Eden, who as Foreign Minister had taken over responsibility after the withdrawal of the British High Commission from the International Military Tribunal, with the clear approval of Churchill, and based on the tactics suggested by Alexander - which included adequately priming prison doctors on which medical aspects concentrate on - both Kesselring (July) and Manstein (August) were released from prison under medical pretexts during the summer of 1952, allegedly because they needed urgent hospitalization for treating, respectively, an "exploratory operation" on a throat cancer, and cataracts. Following their operations, both were conveniently left in liberty for an indefinite convalescence period, and were not to set again foot in jail or, as the German press proclaimed, in a "dungeon"..

Jeane Kirkpatrick, promoter of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine advocating Anti-Communism worldwide, swiftly suggested that Adenauer propose the application of the same principal to the US High Commission, which helped West Germany not to misunderstand the real significance of the "medical" release of the Field Marshals, and the policy pursued by both the British and the US governments.

To make the path taken by the British government towards the war criminals clear to German public opinion however, a more explicit gesture was deemed to be necessary. Therefore, on 24 October 1952 Eden signed an act of clemency in favour of the German war criminal Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Kesselring - officially pardoned in consideration of his allegedly cancerous throat - addressed a rally of veterans immediately after his release (including the fanatic Green Devils who had fought under his command at Monte Cassino and a number of Nazi former leaders), calling for the wholesale liberation of all war criminals.

Afterwards he lived an active public life for another eight years - he died in July 1960 - mostly rallying ex-Nazis as leader of the neo-Nazi organisation Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, at the head of which had been elected while still in prison.

Thus Eden - albeit with some reluctance and attention for legal stricture - had put his signature upon a policy commenced by Churchill which, by means of a broad campaign of rehabilitation of Nazi military personalities, was aimed at re-establishing a strong Army in what was then West Germany, as a central part of the NATO front line at the height of Cold War.

When Churchill took over the Foreign Office due to Eden's serious health problems in 1953, the plan for liberating the war criminals was brought to it logical conclusion, without any further scruples. Selwyn Lloyd, the Minister of State in the Foreign Office with responsibility for German Affairs, was given a carte-blanche to resolve the issue of war criminals, now seen as no more than embarrassing. On May 6 1953 Manstein was pardoned and in 1956 he returned to service upon Adenauer's call, assuming an important official role in the resurrection of the German Army.

Health issues

Starting from April 1953 Eden underwent a series of operations at Boston's Lahey Clinic to correct complications of gallbladder surgery he had undergone previously in London. During the removal of his gallbladder he suffered a bile duct injury, a very serious complication of a relatively minor procedure. Eden's health never fully recovered; this was to undermine his subsequent career. In 1954 he was made a Knight of the Garter.

Prime Minister (1955-57)

In April 1955 Churchill finally retired, and Sir Anthony succeeded him as Prime Minister. Eden was a very popular figure, as a result of his long wartime service and his famous good looks and charm. On taking office he immediately called a general election, at which the Conservatives were returned with an increased majority. But Sir Anthony had never held a domestic portfolio and had little experience in economic matters. He left these areas to his lieutenants such as Rab Butler, and concentrated largely on foreign policy, forming a close alliance with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. His famous words "Peace comes first, always" added to his already substantial popularity.

Suez (1956)

Further information: Suez Crisis

This alliance proved illusory, however, when in 1956 Sir Anthony, in conjunction with France, tried to prevent Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt, from nationalising the Suez Canal, which had been owned since the 19th century by British and French shareholders in the Suez Canal Company. Eden, drawing on his experience in the 1930s, saw Nasser as another Mussolini, considering the two men aggressive nationalist "socialists" determined to invade other countries. Sir Anthony even responded by plotting to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser by enlisting Miles Copeland's "assistance" since he was-apparently-a close friend of Nasser's. Others believed that Nasser was acting from legitimate patriotic concerns.

In October 1956, after months of negotiation and attempts at mediation had failed to dissuade Nasser, Britain and France, in conjunction with Israel, invaded Egypt and occupied the Suez Canal Zone. But Eisenhower was an advocate of decolonisation, and he immediately and strongly opposed the invasion. Eden had ignored Britain's financial dependence on the U.S. in the wake of World War II, and was forced to bow to American pressure to withdraw. The Suez Crisis is widely taken as marking the end of Britain's status as a superpower.

The Suez fiasco ruined, in many eyes, Eden's reputation for statesmanship and led to a breakdown in his health. His Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, despite having been one of the architects of Suez, manoeuvred Eden into resignation and succeeded him as Prime Minister in January 1957. Eden retained his personal popularity and was made Earl of Avon in 1961.

Suez in retrospect

His official biographer Robert Rhodes James re-evaluated sympathetically Eden's stance over Suez in 1986 and, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, asked, "who can now claim that Eden was wrong?" . Such arguments turned mostly on whether, as a matter of policy, the Suez operation was fundamentally flawed or whether, as such "revisionists" thought, the lack of American support conveyed the impression that the West was divided and weak. Anthony Nutting, who resigned as a Foreign Office Minister over Suez, expressed the former view in 1967, the year of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, when he wrote that "we had sown the wind of bitterness and we were to reap the whirlwind of revenge and rebellion" . Conversely, D. R. Thorpe, another of Eden's biographers, suggested that had the Suez venture succeeded, "there would almost certainly have been no Middle East war in 1967, and probably no Yom Kippur War in 1973 also" .

Health Speculation in later years

A medical mishap would change the course of Eden’s life forever. During an operation in 1953 to remove Eden’s gallstones, the surgeon damaged his bile duct. This blunder made Eden vulnerable to recurrent infections and attacks of violent pain and fevers. To overcome this weakness Eden was prescribed the wonder drug of the 1950s - Benzedrine. Regarded by doctors in the 1950s as a harmless stimulant, it belongs to the family of drugs called amphetamines – the illegal drug we now call speed. During this time amphetamines were prescribed and used in a very casual way. It has been widely suggested that Eden's medication affected his mood and decision-making in both the build-up to and during the Suez Crisis.

Rejected plan for union between Britain and France

British Government cabinet papers from September 1956, during Eden's term as Prime Minister, have shown that French Prime Minister Guy Mollet approached the British Government suggesting the idea of an economic and political union between France and Great Britain. This was a similar offer, in reverse, to that made by Churchill (drawing on a plan devised by Leo Amery ) in June 1940 . The offer by Guy Mollet was referred to by Sir John Colville, Churchill's former private secretary, in his collected diaries, The Fringes of Power (1985), his having gleaned the information in 1957 from Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson during an air flight (and, according to Colville, after several whiskies and soda) . Mollet's request for Union with Britain was rejected by Eden, but the additional possibility of France joining the British Commonwealth was considered, although similarly rejected. Colville noted, in respect of Suez, that Eden and his Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd "felt still more beholden to the French on account of this offer" .

Retirement (1957-77)

Eden soon retired and lived quietly with his second wife Clarissa, formerly Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, niece of Sir Winston, in 'Rose Bower' by the banks of the River Ebble in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire and published a highly acclaimed personal memoir, Another World (1976), as well as several volumes of political memoirs. He sat for extensive interviews for the famed multi-part Thames Television production, The World at War, which was broadcast in 1974. He also featured frequently in Marcel Ophüls' 1969 documentary Le chagrin et la pitié, discussing the occupation of France in a wider geopolitical context. He spoke impeccable, if accented, French. From 1945–1973, Eden was Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, England.

On a trip to the United States in 1976-77 to spend Christmas and New Year with Averell and Pamela Harriman, his health rapidly deteriorated. At his family's request, James Callaghan arranged for an RAF plane that was already in America to divert to Miami to fly him home. The Earl of Avon died from liver cancer in Salisbury in 1977 at the age of 79; born in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, he thus died in the year of Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee. Eden's papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections [1]

Eden's surviving son, Nicholas Eden (1930–1985), known as Viscount Eden until 1977, was also a politician and was a minister in the Thatcher government until his premature death from AIDS at the age of 54.

Anthony Eden is buried in the country churchyard at Alvediston, just 3 miles upstream from 'Rose Bower' at the source of the River Ebble.

Eden in Popular Culture

As Secretary of State for War in 1940, Eden authorised the setting-up of the Local Defence Volunteers (soon renamed the Home Guard). In the film of the TV sitcom "Dad's Army", the (fictional) Walmington-on-Sea platoon is formed after listening to Eden's radio broadcast. The debonair Sergeant Wilson is often said to resemble Eden, something he takes enormous pride in.

Eden appears as a character in James P. Hogan's science-fiction novel The Proteus Operation.

Anthony Eden appears as a charcter in the 2008 play Never So Good as a hysterical pill-addicted wreck. Eden is shown being overwhelmed by the chaos of the Suez Crisis and is eventually forced out of office by his Conservative Party Colleagues, at the urging of the American goverment.

The Eden Government

• Anthony Eden: Prime Minister
• Lord Chancellor: Lord Kilmuir
• Lord President of the Council: Lord Salisbury
• Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons: Harry Crookshank
• Chancellor of the Exchequer: R.A. Butler
• Foreign Secretary: Harold Macmillan
• Home Secretary: Gwilym Lloyd George
• Secretary of State for the Colonies: Alan Lennox-Boyd
• Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations: Lord Home
• President of the Board of Trade: Peter Thorneycroft
• Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster: Lord Woolton:
• Minister of Education: Sir David Eccles:
• Secretary of State for Scotland: James Stuart
• Minister of Agriculture: Derick Heathcoat Amory
• Minister of Labour and National Service: Sir Walter Turner Monckton
• Minister of Defence: Selwyn Lloyd
• Minister of Housing and Local Government: Duncan Sandys
• Minister of Pensions and National Insurance: Osbert Peake

Changes

• December 1955 - Rab Butler succeeds Harry Crookshank as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons. Harold Macmillan succeeds Butler as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Selwyn Lloyd succeeds Macmillan as Foreign Secretary. Sir Walter Monckton succeeds Lloyd as Minister of Defence. Iain Macleod succeeds Monckton as Minister of Labour and National Service. Lord Selkirk succeeds Lord Woolton as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The Minister of Public Works, Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, enters the Cabinet. The Minister of Pensions and National Insurance leaves the Cabinet upon Peake's retirement.
• October 1956: Sir Walter Monckton becomes Paymaster-General. Antony Henry Head succeeds Monckton as Minister of Defence.

Eden's initial cabinet is remarkable for the fact that 10 out of the original 18 members were Old Etonians: Eden, Salisbury, Crookshank, Macmillan, Home, Stuart, Thorneycroft, Heathcoat Amory, Sandys and Peake were all educated at Eton.

The Grey-Eden connection

                   Charles Grey, 1st Earl Grey = Elizabeth Grey
                                               |
                  ------------------------------------------
                  |                                        |
         Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey             William Grey
           Prime Minister                                  = Maria Shireff
                                                           |
                                  Georgina Plowden = Sir William Grey
                                                   |
                             Sir William Eden = Sybil Grey
                                              |
                                      Anthony Eden
                                     Prime Minister

References

Books

• Eden, Anthony. The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Sir Anthony Eden KG, PC, MC: Full Circle. (3 volumes) London: Cassell, 1960, 1962, 1965.

Biographies

• Film: Marcel Ophüls. Le chagrin et la pitié, 1971.
• Thorpe, D.R. Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003 (hardcover, ISBN 0-7011-6744-0); London: Pimlico, 2004 (paperback, ISBN 0-7126-6505-6).
  • Reviewed by Peter Jay in The Guardian, March 22, 2003.

External links

• More about Anthony Eden on the Downing Street website.
• University of Birmingham Special Collections The Avon Papers including papers on the Suez Crisis
• http://www.discoverychannel.com.au/altered_statesmen/anthony_eden/index.shtml
• http://discoverychannelasia.com/altered_statesmen/eden/index.shtml
• "Prime Ministers in the Post-War world: Anthony Eden", lecture by Dr David Carlton, given at Gresham College, 10 May 2007 (available for download as video or audio files)

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