Sir Anthony Eden seriously ill with progressive liver failure
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from January 1977.
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His doctors said the 79-year-old retired diplomat "has deteriorated rapidly. recent days due to progressing liver failure. Eden, who holds the title Lord Avon, rode on a stretcher in an ambulance that drove through a torrential rainstorm from Lyneham Royal Air Force base across the bleak Salisbury Plain to his home, Manor House at Alvediston, about 90 miles southwest of London. Dr. Richard Bayliss and Dr. Christopher Brown, his regular physicians, were waiting to examine him. "Lord Avon is conscious," they said in a statement after the examination. "He is very happy to be back home."
Eden was taken critically ill while he and his wife, Clarissa, were vacationing with friends at the winter home of former U.S. diplomat W. Averall Harriman on Jupiter Island in Martin County. Harriman said Eden had been at his home for about a month when "he had a relapse and doctors advised he should go home. He hadn't been in good health for a number of years."
"He stayed with us all last year," Harriman added. "He was going to spend the winter with us...."
Eden returned home 20 years to the day after he was forced from the prime ministership by ill health and the Suez affair. He was "seriously ill and had taken a turn for the worse in Florida," a spokesman for Prime Minister James Callaghan said.
Callaghan arranged the special eight-hour RAF flight after a baggage handlers' strike at London's Heathrow Airport prevented Eden's flying back to Britain on a regularly scheduled flight from Miami.
Callaghan's office said the former Conservative prime minister was accompanied on the transatlantic flight by his wife. The RAF said the plane was equipped with medical facilities and carried two doctors and a team of nurses.
The suave, aristocratic Eden, who made the black homburg standard diplomatic dress, was a brave soldier in World War I, a brilliant diplomat before, during and after World War II, and a bitter and disillusioned loser in the Suez war that destroyed him as a political leader.
Eden served as prime minister for 21 months in 1956 and 1957, succeeding Winston Churchill.
He had served 10 years as foreign secretary.
