Little London

Little London is a group of half a dozen houses to the west of Broadchalke.

It’s outside of the typical geographical limits of the website – Little London might be closer to Shaftesbury than it is to Salisbury, but I’m including it because I like the name and because there is a family connection.

Why ‘Little London’?

There are many ‘Little Londons’ both in the UK and beyond. For example there is a Little London in Hampshire¹ and another in Jamaica².

In the Wikipedia entry for the Hampshire Little London, there are two or three suggestions as to how it got its name:

‘Little London’ is a common village name in England, assumed by some to have its origins in the quantity of seasonal Londoners who would camp for the harvest season. However in common with many ‘Little Londons’ approximately 50 miles or so from London, it has also been claimed that the name was given by settlers escaping the Great Plague of London of 1665. Alternatively, it could have been corrupted from ‘Little Loddon’, the name of a stream that marks the Southern extent of the village. Nobody really knows!³

All of these derivations seem unlikely for the Broadchalke ‘Little London’ – it’s too far from the capital, and there’s no River Lodden nearby.

Another suggestion is that the name is ironic. The settlement is so small and so remote that giving it the name of London is a kind of a joke.

In any case, it’s a charming name.

The family connection is that my grandparents lived there until moving into Broadchalke.

Little London and the Suez Crisis

I don’t think that my grandparents would mind me saying that they lived in fairly modest conditions at Little London.

A couple of the neighbours were, however, rather grand.

Clarissa Churchill at ‘Rose Bower’

Clarissa Spencer-Churchill moved into ‘Rose Bower’ in Little London in 1942. Reading a bit about her life I would agree with the Daily Telegraph that she seems ‘more like a character from a novel than a real person.’ ⁴.

She was the niece of Winston Churchill, the wartime Prime Minister. She recalls in the 1930s at Chartwell sitting ‘around the luncheon table endlessly listening to Winston telling us there was going to be a war and we would all get gassed’⁵

During the 1930s she went to Oxford to be privately tutored. While there she befriended Isiah Berlin. Antonia Fraser says that she was “the dons’ delight, because she was beautiful and extremely intellectual”⁶

Image from Amazon

She spent part of the war working at the Foreign Office, trying to decode enemy communications⁷.

In 1942, at Cecil Beaton’s suggestion, she bought the cottage in Little London, reportedly for £3000⁸. She wrote at the time that ‘‘I am so excited I cannot sleep. I have never owned a bit of earth before’.

She worked in both publishing and the film industry. She became Orson Welles ‘dinner companion’ while working on ‘The Third Man’⁹

She also knew Anne and Ian Fleming, Lucien Freud (who painted her portrait), the Mitfords, Evelyn Waugh¹⁰ and Noel Coward.

Anthony Eden at Little London

Clarissa Churchill first met Anthony Eden before the war.

They seem to have begun a relationship in the post-war period. Eden divorced his first wife in 1950, and married Clarissa in 1952.

At the time of the marriage Eden was Foreign Secretary, under Sir Winston as Prime Minister. The wedding breakfast was held at 10 Downing Street.

Eden succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1955.

Anthony Eden’s premiership was dominated by the ‘Suez Crisis’. The ‘crisis’ arose when Eden decided to bomb Egyptian forces when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. This has been widely seen as a mistake. Although it is usually referred to as ‘the Suez Crisis’, I notice that at the time of writing the passage on the official Number 10 website is headed ‘the Suez disaster‘¹¹.

The Edens kept the cottage at Little London throughout this time – there is a reference in one of the accounts of the crisis to the couple being away ‘in Wiltshire’ at some critical point.

Clarissa Eden famously commented that

For the past three months I have felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room.¹²

Update: I just listened to a short podcast which discusses Suez, among other things, from an American perspective. At the time of writing it’s available here:

• Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books – Eisenhower 1956

The podcast is an interview with David Nichols, author of a book called “Eisenhower 1956″.

Footnotes

1. Little London, Tadley, Hampshire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
2. Little London, Jamaica – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
3. Little London, Tadley, Hampshire – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
4. Clarissa Eden’s road to Suez – Telegraph [↩]
5. Random House : Book extract from The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister [↩]
6. Clarissa Eden: A witness to history – Telegraph [↩]
7. Clarissa Eden: A witness to history – Telegraph [↩]
8. Full text of “Portrait Of A Statesman” [↩]
9. Random House : Book extract from The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister [↩]
10. Waugh had declared himself to have fallen in love with her, but ‘fell out’ when Clarissa married – see Random House : Book extract from The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister [↩]
11. Sir Anthony Eden | Number10.gov.uk – on 23rd June 2010 [↩]
12. The guardian of Eden – Times Online [↩]