Anthony Eden

At 79 years old, Anthony Eden has this physical status:

1st Earl of Avon, born in 1897 and then briefed as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1957, Robert Anthony Eden (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British Conservative politician who served three stints as Foreign Secretary and then briefly as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1955 to 1957. He rose to prominence as a young member of Parliament before resigning in protest against Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy against Mussolini's Italy.

He held his position for the bulk of the Second World War and a third time in the early 1950s.

Having served as deputy to Winston Churchill for nearly 15 years, he succeeded him as the Prime Minister and Prime Minister in April 1955 and a month later won a general election. Eden's global reputation as a perpetrator of appeasement, a "man of peace," and a skilled diplomat was overshadowed in 1956 when the US refused to endorse the Anglo-French military response to the Suez Crisis, which analysts characterized as a historic setback for British foreign policy, signaling the demise of British predominance in the Middle East.

Most historians agree he made a series of mistakes, but not aware of the extent of American resistance to military action.

Two months after directing an end to the Suez project, Eden resigned as Prime Minister on account of ill health and because he was widely accused of misleading the House of Commons on the extent of collusion with France and Israel, though two widely supported biographies (in 1986 and 2003) have helped to shift the balance of opinion.

"The Suez Crisis" came to an end to his premiership, and one that came to assume a disproportionate place in any analysis of his career, according to biographer D. R. Thorpe.

Early life

Eden was educated at two separate schools. He attended Sandroyd School in Wiltshire from 1907 to 1910, where he excelled in languages. In January 1911, he began attending Eton College. He won a Divinity award and excelled at cricket, rugby, and rowing, winning House colours in the last.

Eden learned French and German on continental holidays, and it is reported that as a child, they spoke French better than English. Although Eden was able to speak with Hitler in German in February 1934 and with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai in Geneva in 1954, he preferred, out of a sense of professionalism, to have interpreters at formal meetings.

Though Eden later claimed that he had no interest in politics until the early 1920s, his biographer argues that his teenage letters and diaries "only now come to life" when discussing the topic. In November 1912, he was a statism-minded Conservative who thought his securityist father was "a fool" for attempting to discourage his free-trade supporters uncle from running for Parliament. He revelled in the demise of Charles Masterman at a by-election in May 1914 and once astonished his mother on a train ride by informing her that his majority was the same for each constituency through which they went. He was a member of the Eton Society by 1914 (Pop").

Lieutenant John Eden, Eden's older brother, was killed in combat on October 17th, aged 26, while serving with the 12th (Prince of Wales' Royal) Lancers). He is buried in Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) The Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery in Belgium is located. When he was not serving with the Royal Flying Corps, his uncle Robin was shot down and captured.

Eden, who was also serving in the British Army during his youth, was first recruited by the Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC), a Kitchener's Army unit, but the majority of the army's Royal Rifles Corps (KRRC), a Surrey army unit, were mainly recruited from County Durham country labourers, who were largely replaced by Londoners after the Somme in mid-1916. On November 2, 1915, he was promoted as a provisional second lieutenant (antidates to 29 September 1915). As part of the 41st Division, his battalion was moved to the Western Front on May 4, 1916. During the Battle of Jutland, Eden's younger brother, Midshipman William Eden, was killed in combat, aged 16 on board HMS Indefatigable. On the Plymouth Naval Memorial, he is commemorated. During the conflict, his brother-in-law, Lord Brooke, was wounded.

Eden was forced to lead a small attack into a small trench to kill or capture enemy troops in order to find the enemy units opposite one summer night in 1916. Under enemy fire, he and his guys were pinned down in no man's land, and his sergeant was seriously wounded in the leg. Eden sent one man and a stretcher to retrieve another man and a stretcher, and he and three others carried the wounded sergeant back with, a "chilly sensation down our spines" for those who had not seen them in the dark or were chivalrously declining to fire. He declined to reveal that he had been awarded the Military Cross (MC) for the incident, of which he made no mention in his political career. On the 18th of September 1916, he wrote to his mother, "I've seen things lately that I am not going to forget." He was promoted to adjutant on October 3rd, with the rank of provisional lieutenant for the duration of his service. He was the youngest adjutant on the Western Front at the age of 19.

In the 1917 Birthday Honours List, Eden's MC was ranked first. In June 1917, his battalion took part at Messines Ridge. Eden was appointed as a provisional lieutenant on July 1, 1917, only a few days later. In the first few days of the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July – August), his battalion fought in the first few days of the battle of Ypres (31 July – 4 August). On the Franco-Belgian frontier, his battalion spent a few days on coastal defense between 20 and 19 September 1917.

Eden was posted as a GMSO3 General Staff Officer Grade 3 (GSO3) on 19 November, with the temporary rank of captain. He served at Second Army HQ from mid-November 1917 to 8 March 1918, while Italy's 41st Division was transferred there after the Italian Second Army was defeated at the Battle of Caporetto). Eden was welcomed back to the Western Front as a major German offensive was expected, but only for his former battalion to be disbanded to help alleviate the British Army's acute manpower shortage. Despite the fact that David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, was one of the few politicians of whom Eden told frontline soldiers in disgrace over his "wait and see twaddle" in refusing to extend conscription to Ireland, he wrote to his sister (23 December 1917).

He was stationed on the Oise in March 1918, opposite Adolf Hitler, who was attending a conference in 1935. "You now have your first glimpse of the next war," his brigade HQ was bombed by a German plane at one point. He was appointed brigade major of the 198th Infantry Brigade, which was part of the 66th Division, on May 26, 1918. Eden was the youngest brigade major in the British Army at the age of 20.

He considered running for Parliament at the end of the war, but the general election was scheduled too early for that to be possible. With his brigade, he spent the winter of 1918-1919 in the Ardennes; on March 28, 1919, he was promoted to brigade major of the 99th Infantry Brigade. Eden considered a commission in the Regular Army, but it was impossible to come by due to the army's seasonality. He dismissed his mother's suggestion of studying at Oxford right away. He also denied the possibility of becoming a barrister. At this moment, he preferred career paths, whether that be standing for Parliament for Bishop Auckland, the Civil Service in East Africa, or the Foreign Office. He was demobilized on June 13, 1919. He retained his rank as captain.

Eden and a family friend were involved in the study of Turkish. After the war, he studied Oriental Languages (Persian and Arabic) at Christ Church, Oxford, beginning in October 1919. Persian was his principal and Arabic was his secondary language. He worked under Richard Paset Dewhurst and David Samuel Margoliouth.

Eden was unconcerned with student politics, and his primary leisure passion at the time was art. Eden was a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and President of the Asiatic Society. He founded the Uffizi Society, alongside Lord David Cecil and R. E. Gathorne-Hardy, which later became President. Possibly under the influence of his father, he wrote a book on Paul Cézanne, whose work was not well known. Eden was already collecting paintings.

Eden, who was still an undergraduate, was called to military service in the Durham Light Infantry's 6th Battalion in July 1920. When significant industrial resistance appeared in 1921, he commanded local defence forces at Spennymoor, once more as a provisional captain. On July 8, he resigned from his post. He graduated from Oxford in June 1922 with a Double First. He continued to serve as an officer in the Territorial Army until May 1923.

Personal life

Beatrice Beckett, who was then eighteen, married Beatrice Beckett on November 5th, 1923, just before his aspirations to Parliament. They had three sons: Simon Gascoigne (1924–1945), Robert Gascoigne (1924–1945), Robert, who died fifteen minutes after being born in October 1928, and Nicholas (1930–1985).

The marriage was not a success, with both sides reportedly handling affairs. Beatrice's diaries barely mention him by the mid-1930s. The marriage finally broke down as a result of their son Simon's death, who was killed in combat with the RAF in Burma in 1945. Eden's plane was found "missing in action" on June 23rd and July 16th; Eden did not want the news to be revealed until the election was declared on July 26th to avoid accusations of "making political capital" from it.

Eden, Countess Beatty, the wife of David Beatty, died between 1946 and 1950, although he was not separated from his wife.

Eden, the great-grandnephew of author Emily Eden, and in 1947, she wrote an introduction to her book The Semi-Attached Couple (1860).

Eden and Beatrice were finally divorced in 1950, and Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (1920–2021), a nominal Roman Catholic who was chastised by Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh for marrying a divorced man, married Childl's niece in 1952.

As early as the 1920s, Eden had a stomach ulcer caused by overwork. During an operation to remove gallstones in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 12, 1953, his bile duct was blocked, making Eden susceptible to recurrent infections, biliary obstruction, and liver failure. Sir Horace Evans, the Royal Physician, was consulted at the time. Eden selected three surgeons, one of whom had performed his appendectomy, John Basil Hume, a surgeon from St Bartholomew's Hospital, was among those chosen. Eden died as a result of cholangitis, an abdominal disease that had become so agonizing that he was admitted to the hospital in 1956 with a temperature of 106 °F (41 °C). To solve the disorder, he needed major surgery on three or four occasions.

Benzedrine, the wonder drug of the 1950s, was also prescribed to him. It was once thought of as a harmless stimulant, and it was used in a relaxed manner at the time. Sleep deficiency, hunger, and mood swings are among the side effects of Benzedrine; in fact, Eden was worried about being kept awake at night by the sounds of motor scooters, being unable to sleep more than 5 hours per night, and some people wake up at 3 a.m. Eden's drug use has now been shown to have been a factor in his poor decision as Prime Minister David Cameron's poor judgment. Eden denied Eden's use of Benzedrine, although Eden's medical records at Birmingham University indicated that the allegations were "untrue," and that no [at the time] is available for study.

Eden's resignation paper, which was published by Eden in 1957, admitted to his reliance on stimulants while denying that they had influenced his decision during the Suez crisis in the autumn of 1956. "... I was forced to increase the medications [taken after the "poor abdominal procedures]] and also raise the stimulants needed to combat the drugs. "It's now have an adverse effect on my precarious inside," he wrote. However, historian Hugh Thomas, who was quoted by David Owen in his book The Suez Affair (1966), said Eden had told a coworker that he was "actually living on Benzedrine" at the time. He took a variety of sedatives, opioid painkillers, and related stimulants to counteract their depressant effects; among them, Promazine (a sedative antipsychotic used to induce sleep and combat the stimulants he took), Dextroamphetamine (a barbiturate sedative), Vitamin B12 and Pethidine were among the medications used to treat the bile ducts, which is now known to be inaccurate).

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Early political career, 1922–1931

Captain Eden, as he was then known, had been chosen to contest Spennymoor as a Conservative. He had hoped to win with some Liberal help at first, but by the time of the November 1922 general election, it was clear that the Labour vote had made that unlikely. The Marquess of Londonderry, a local coal owner, was his primary sponsor. Liberals gave way to Labour in this post.

Eden's father died on February 20th, 1915. He had inherited capital of £7,675 as a younger son, but after tax (approximately £375,000 and £35,000 at 2014 rates).

Eden read Lord Curzon's books and hoped to imitate him by entering politics with a view to specializing in international affairs. Eden married Beatrice Beckett in 1923 and after a two-day honeymoon in Essex, he was chosen to fight Warwick and Leamington for a by-election in November 1923. Daisy Greville, his Labour rival, was attracted to his sister Elfrida's mother-in-law and then mother to his wife's step-mother, Marjorie Blanche Beckett, née Greville. Parliament was dissolved for the December 1923 general election on November 16, 1923, during the by-election campaign. At the age of twenty-six, he was elected to Parliament.

In January 1924, the first Labour Government, under Ramsay MacDonald, took power. Eden's maiden speech (19 February 1924) was a bitter threat to Labour's defence policy that was largely dismissed, and he was only allowed to speak after extensive planning. He reprinted the address in the collection Foreign Affairs (1939) to give the appearance that he had been a consistent promoter of air power. Eden adored H. Asquith, who was also in his last year in the Commons, for his lucidity and brevity. He preached Anglo-Turkish friendship and the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, which had been signed in July 1923.

At the 1924 General Election, the Conservatives were re-elected. Eden, a disappointment not to have been offered a job in January 1925, went on a Middle East tour and visited Emir Feisal of Iraq. Feisal reminded him of the "Czar of Russia" and (I) suspect that his destiny will be similar" (ascension also befell the Iraqi Royal Family in 1958). During a visit to Pahlavi Iran, he inspected the Abadan Refinery, which he likened to "a Swansea on a small scale."

He was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Godfrey Locker-Lampson, Under-Secretary at the Home Office (17 February 1925), while under Home Secretary William Joynson Hicks.

He travelled to Canada, Australia, and India in July 1925. He wrote articles for The Yorkshire Post, which is run by his father-in-law Sir Gervase Beckett, who went by the name "Backbencher" in honor of his pseudonym "Backbencher." He appeared for the Yorkshire Post at the Imperial Conference in Melbourne in September 1925.

When Eden was appointed Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in December 1925, he continued to be PPS to Locker-Lampson. He distinguished himself with a speech on the Middle East (21 December 1925), which called for the re-measurement of Iraqi borders in favour of Turkey but also for a renewed British mandate rather than a "scuttle." Eden ended his address by requesting that Anglo-Turkish relations be praised. On March 23, 1926, he spoke to convince the League of Nations to admit Germany, which would take place next year. He became PPS to Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain in July 1926.

He published a book about his travels, Places in the Sun, 1926, which was largely critical of the detrimental effects of socialism in Australia and for which Stanley Baldwin wrote a foreword.

Eden had to speak for the government in an interview in November 1928, after Austen Chamberlain was away on a trip to recover his health, in response to Ramsay MacDonald, then Leader of the Opposition. According to Austen Chamberlain, he would have been promoted to his first ministerial post, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, if the Conservatives had won the 1929 election.

Eden received less than half of the vote at Warwick in 1929, the only time that Eden received less than half of the vote. After the Conservative loss, he joined a young democratic party, including Oliver Stanley, William Ormsby-Gore, and the incoming Speaker W.S. Morrison, "Shakes." Noel Skelton, who had coined the term "property-owning democracy" before his death, which Eden would later use as a candidate for the Conservative Party. Eden encouraged co-partnership in industry between managers and employees, in which he wanted to be recognized.

Eden worked as a City broker for Harry Lucas from 1929 to 1931, a company that was later absorbed into S. G. Warburg & Co.

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