title: Heat map

text: Heat maps originated in 2D displays of the values in a data matrix. Larger values were represented by small dark gray or black squares (pixels) and smaller values by lighter squares. (1873) used a shading matrix to visualize social statistics across the districts of Paris. Sneath (1957) displayed the results of a cluster analysis by permuting the rows and the columns of a matrix to place similar values near each other according to the clustering. Jacques Bertin used a similar representation to display data that conformed to a Guttman scale. The idea for joining cluster trees to the rows and columns of the data matrix originated with Robert Ling in 1973. Ling used overstruck printer characters to represent different shades of gray, one character-width per pixel. Leland Wilkinson developed the first computer program in 1994 (SYSTAT) to produce cluster heat maps with high-resolution color graphics. The Eisen et al. display shown in the figure is a replication of the earlier SYSTAT design.


title: Heat map

text: Software designer Cormac Kinney trademarked the term 'heat map' in 1991 to describe a 2D display depicting financial market information. The company that acquired Kinney's invention in 2003 unintentionally allowed the trademark to lapse.


title: Heat map

text: A spatial heat map displays the magnitude of a spatial phenomena as color, usually cast over a map. In the image labeled “Spatial Heat Map Example,” temperature is displayed by color range across a map of the world. Color ranges from blue (cold) to red (hot).


title: Heat map

text: A grid heat map displays magnitude as color in a two-dimensional matrix, with each dimension representing a category of trait and the color representing the magnitude of some measurement on the combined traits from each of the two categories. For example, one dimension might represent year, and the other dimension might represent month, and the value measured might be temperature. This heat map would show how temperature changed over the years in each month. Grid heat maps are further categorized into two different types of matrices: clustered, and correlogram.


title: Heat map

text: Heat maps have a wide range of possibilities amongst applications due to their ability to simplify data and make for visually appealing to read data analysis. Many applications using different types of heat maps are listed below.


title: Heat map

text: Business Analysis: Heat maps are used in business analytics to give a visual representation about a company’s current functioning, performance, and the need for improvements. Heat maps are a way to analyze a company’s existing data and update it to reflect growth and other specific efforts. Heat maps visually appeal to team members and clients of the business or company.


title: Heat map

text: Websites: There are many different ways heat maps are used within websites to determine a visiting users actions. Typically, there are multiple heat maps used together to determine insight to a website on what are the best and worst performing elements on the page. Some specific heat maps used for website analysis are listed below.


title: Heat map

text: Exploratory Data Analysis: Working with small and large data sets, data scientists and data analysts look at and determine essential relationships and characteristics amongst different points in a data set as well as features of those data points. Data scientists and analysts work with a team of others in different professions. The use of heat maps make for a visually easy way to summarize findings and main components. There are other ways to represent data, however heat maps can visualize these data points and their relationships in a high dimensional space without becoming too compact and visually unappealing. Heat maps in data analysis, allow for specific variables of rows and/or columns on the axes and even on the diagonal.


title: Heat map

text: Financial Analysis: The values of different product and assets fluctuate both rapidly and/or gradually over time. The need to log changes to the daily markets is imperative. It allows for the ability to draw predictions from patterns while being able to revisit past numerical data. Heat maps are able to remove the tedious process and enable the user to visualize data points and compare amongst the different performers.


title: Heat map

text: Geographical Visualization: Heat maps are used to visualize and display a geographic distribution of data. Heat maps represent different densities of data points on a geographical map to help users see the intensities of certain phenomena and to show items of most or least importance. Usually, heat maps used in geographical visualization are mistaken for Choropleth maps, but the difference comes with how certain data is presented which differentiate the two.


title: Heat map

text: Sports: Heat maps can be used in many sports and can influence manager’s and/or coaches decisions based on high and low densities of data displayed. Users can identify patterns within the game, the strategies of opponents and one’s own team, make more informed decisions benefitting the player, team, and business, and can enhance performance in different areas by identifying enhancement is needed. Heat maps also visualize comparisons and relationships amongst different teams in the same sport or between different sports all together.


title: Heat map

text: Many different color schemes can be used to illustrate the heat map, with perceptual advantages and disadvantages for each. Choosing a good color scheme is integral to accurately and effectively displaying data, whereas a poor color scheme can lead viewers to inaccurate conclusions or exclude those with color deficiencies from proper analysis of said data.


title: Heat map

text: Rainbow color maps are a common choice, as humans can perceive more shades of color than they can of gray, and this would purportedly increase the amount of detail perceivable in the image. However, this is heavily discouraged in the scientific community for a number of reasons. Possibly the largest reason is that when there is a large number of colors involved, the visualization may give off the impression that there exist gradients in the data that are not really present. The more colors used in a visualization the more values begin to bleed together and color lacks the natural perceptual ordering found in grayscale or blackbody spectrum colormaps. Additionally, values represented by different shades of the same color can imply that the values are related when they are not.


title: Heat map

text: An important consideration when choosing a color scheme is whether or not the data will be viewed by anyone with any form of color deficiency. If the audience contains individuals with any form of color blindness, it may be wise to avoid color schemes with prominent reds and greens or uneven color gradients.


title: Heat map

text: In addition to audience considerations, it is also important to consider the form in which the data will be viewed. For example, if the data is to be printed in black and white or projected onto a large screen, it may be wise to adjust one's choice in color scheme. Common colormaps (like the "jet" colormap used as the default in many visualization software packages) have uncontrolled changes in luminance that prevent meaningful conversion to grayscale for display or printing. This also distracts from the actual data, arbitrarily making yellow and cyan regions appear more prominent than the regions of the data that are actually most important.


title: Heat map

text: Choropleth maps and heat maps are often used in place of one another incorrectly when referring to data visualized geographically. Both techniques show the proportion of a variable of interest, but the two differ in how the boundaries for the variable’s data aggregations are constructed. If the data were collected and aggregated using irregular boundaries, such as administrative units, then a heat map displaying that data will be the same as a choropleth map, encouraging confusion about the how the two differ.


title: Heat map

text: Choropleth maps show data grouped by geographic boundaries like countries, states, provinces or even floodplains. Each region has a singular value, visualized by color intensity, shading or pattern. The figure on the right displaying a choropleth map showing the United States' population density by state may be used as an example. The figure illustrates a singular value (population) denoted by blue color intensity proportionate to the state's value relative to all other states' values, bounded by each state's border.


title: Heat map

text: Similarly, heat maps may also visualize data over a geographic region. However, unlike choropleth maps, heat maps show the proportion of a variable over an arbitrary, but usually small grid size, independent of geographic boundaries. The figure on the right displaying a heat map of world population is an example. The figure illustrates a single value (population) bounded in an arbitrary grid (square kilometers) with each cell in the grid represented by a color intensity proportionate to the value of the cell relative to all other cells. Some heat maps that are created using approximated regional data may show familiar geographic borders in the visualization where none really exist. The illusion of geographic borders is due to the existence of patterns within the dataset rather than the visualization technique. The figure on the right displaying a heat map of world population also contains this occurrence. Areas in rural parts of the United States and South America may closely resemble familiar geographic borders in those regions.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas (Spanish for "little milpas") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in Silicon Valley. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 80,273. The city's origins lie in Rancho Milpitas, granted to Californio ranchero José María Alviso in 1835. Milpitas incorporated in 1954 and has since become home to numerous high tech companies, as part of Silicon Valley.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas was first inhabited by Tamien people, a subgroup of the Ohlone people who had resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years. The Ohlone Indians lived a traditional life based on everyday hunting and gathering. Some of the Ohlone lived in various villages within what is now Milpitas, including sites underneath what are now the Calvary Assembly of God Church and Higuera Adobe Park. Archaeological evidence gathered from Ohlone graves at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 1993 revealed a rich trade with other tribes from Sacramento to Monterey.


title: Milpitas, California

text: During the Spanish expeditions of the late 18th century, several missions were founded in the San Francisco Bay Area. During the mission period, Milpitas served as a crossroads between Mission San José de Guadalupe in present-day Fremont and Mission Santa Clara de Asis in present-day Santa Clara. The land of modern-day Milpitas was divided between the Rancho Rincon de Los Esteros (Spanish for "corner of the wetlands") granted to Ignacio Alviso; the Rancho Milpitas (Spanish for "little corn fields") granted to José María Alviso; and the Rancho Los Tularcitos (Spanish for "little tule marshes") granted to José Higuera. Jose Maria Alviso was the son of Francisco Xavier Alviso and Maria Bojorquez, both of whom arrived in San Francisco as children with the de Anza Expedition. José María Alviso is considered to be the founder of Milpitas. Due to Jose Maria Alviso's descendants' difficulty securing his claims to the Rancho Milpitas property, portions of his land were either swindled from the Alviso family or were sold to American settlers to pay for legal fees.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Both landowners had built prominent adobe homes on their properties. Today, both adobes still exist and are the oldest structures in Milpitas. The seriously eroded walls of the Jose Higuera Adobe, now in Higuera Adobe Park, are encapsulated in a brick shell built c. 1970 by Marian Weller, a descendant of pioneer Joseph Weller.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The Alviso Adobe can be seen mostly in its original form, with one kitchen addition made by the Cuciz family after they purchased the adobe from the Gleason family in 1922. Prior to the city acquiring the Alviso Adobe in 1995, it was the oldest continuously occupied adobe house in California dating from the Mexican period and today is still gradually being restored and undergoing seismic upgrades by the City of Milpitas. Alviso Adobe History Park is to be opened, after the exterior restoration of the adobe and outbuildings is completed, as an educational museum with historic items, trees, buildings, and documents.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In the 1850s, large numbers of Americans of English, German, and Irish descent arrived to farm the fertile lands of Milpitas. The Burnett, Rose, Dempsey, Jacklin, Trimble, Ayer, Parks, Wool, Weller, Minnis, and Evans families are among the early settlers of Milpitas. (Today many schools, streets, and parks have been named in honor of these families.) These early settlers farmed the land that was once the ranchos. Some set up businesses on what was then called Mission Road (now called Main Street) between Calaveras Road (now called Carlo Street) and the Alviso-Milpitas Road (now called Serra Way). By the late 20th century this area became known as the "Midtown" district. Yet another influx of immigration came in the 1870s and 1880s as Portuguese sharecroppers from the Azores came to farm the Milpitas hillsides. Many of the Azoreans had such locally well-known surnames as Coelho, Covo, Mattos, Nunes, Spangler, Serpa, and Silva.


title: Milpitas, California

text: There is a local legend that in 1857, when the U.S. Postal Service wanted to locate a Post Office in Frederick Creighton's store near the intersection of Mission Road and Alviso-Milpitas Road to serve the newly created Township, there was some support for naming it "Penitencia," after the small Roman Catholic confessional building that had served local Indians and ranchers and had once stood several miles south of the village near Penitencia Creek which ran just west of the Mission Road. A local farmer and first Assistant Postmaster, Joseph Weller, felt the Spanish word "Penitencia" might be confused with the English word "penitentiary." Instead of choosing "Penitencia," he suggested another popular name for the area, "Milpitas," after the name of Alviso's property, "Rancho Milpitas". Thus was born "Milpitas Township."


title: Milpitas, California

text: For over a century, Milpitas served as a popular rest stop for travelers on the old Oakland−San Jose Highway. At the north side of the intersection of that road with the Milpitas-Alviso Road, for many years stood "French's Hotel" that had been originally built by Alex Anderson prior to 1859, when Alfred French bought it from Austin M. Thompson. South of the site of French's Hotel, was a saloon dating from at least 1856 when Agustus Rathbone purchased the land and "improvements" from Richard Greenham. The first murder in Milpitas was committed in the early 1860s in "Rathbone's Saloon" (alas, the murderer escaped). Later the saloon was replaced by a hotel that is shown on the 1893 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map as "Goodwin's Hotel" (perhaps the same Henry K. Goodwin who, in 1890, loaned money to prominent local rancher Marshall Pomeroy). Presumably, this hotel burned down and "Smith's Corner," which still stands, was built in 1895, by John Smith, as a saloon that served beer and wine to thirsty travelers for a century before becoming a restaurant in 2001. Around this central core, grocery and dry goods stores, blacksmithies, service stations, and, in the 1920s, one of America's earliest "fast food" chain restaurants, "The Fat Boy", opened nearby. Another of Milpitas's most popular restaurants was the "Kozy Kitchen", established in 1940 by the Carlo family in the former "Central Market" building. Kozy Kitchen was demolished soon after Jimmy Carlo sold the restaurant in 1999. Even in the early 1950s, Milpitas served a farming community of 800 people who walked a mere one or two blocks to work.


title: Milpitas, California

text: On January 26, 1954, faced with getting swallowed up by a rapidly expanding San Jose, Milpitas residents incorporated as a city that included the recently built Ford Auto Assembly plant. When San Jose attempted to annex Milpitas barely seven years later, the "Milpitas Minutemen" were quickly organized to oppose annexation and keep Milpitas independent. An overwhelming majority of Milpitas registered voters voted "No" to annexation in the 1961 election as a result of a vigorous anti-annexation campaign. Following the election, the anti-annexation committee, who had compared themselves to the Revolutionary War Minutemen who fought the British on Lexington Green—a role filled in this case by the neighboring city of San Jose—adopted the image of Daniel Chester French's Minuteman statue, that stands near the site of the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA, as part of the official city seal. In the 1960s, the city approved the construction of the Calaveras overpass. Formerly at a junction with the Union Pacific railroad, Calaveras Boulevard had a bridge passing over six sets of railroad tracks after the construction was completed. Though the result was that local residents could now drive over the train tracks without waiting for a slow freight to pass, it resulted in the loss of the historical residential area. Here houses owned by city leaders had to be purchased by the city at full market value and either moved or demolished.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Starting in 1955, with the construction of the Ford Motor Assembly Plant, and accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s, extensive residential and retail development took place. Hayfields in Milpitas rapidly disappeared as industries and residential housing developments spread. Soon, the once rural town of Milpitas found itself a San Jose suburb. The population jumped from about 800 in 1950 to 62,698 in 2000. Several local farmers and businessmen who had chipped in from $2 to $50 to file for incorporation, had become millionaires within ten years. Most of them then moved away.


title: Milpitas, California

text: According to the book "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein (2017), when the Ford plant moved from Richmond to Milpitas in 1953, the town incorporated in order to pass laws that would exclude African American workers from residing there. “Union leaders met with Ford Executives and negotiated an agreement permitting all 1400 Richmond plant workers, including the approximately 250 African Americans, to transfer to the new facility. Once Ford’s plans became known, Milpitas residents incorporated the town and passed an emergency ordinance permitting the newly installed city council to ban apartment construction and allow only single family homes. ... The Federal Housing Administration approved subdivision plans that met their specifications in Milpitas and guaranteed mortgages to qualified buyers ... One of the specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas (as in the rest of the country at that time) was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans. Because Milpitas had no apartments, and houses in the area were off-limits to black workers-though their incomes and economic circumstances were like those of whites on the assembly line-African Americans had to choose between giving up the good industrial jobs, moving to apartments in a segregated neighborhood of San Jose, or enduring lengthy commutes between North Richmond and Milpitas.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In 1961, Ben F. Gross, a civil rights activist, became Milpitas's first black city councilman with the backing of the UAW. This election was recognized nationally and received attention from Look and Life magazines. In 1966, Ben F. Gross became California's first black mayor when he was elected by the city's residents and "the only black mayor of a predominantly white town in California". Mayor Gross was reelected in 1968 and continued fighting against Milpitas's annexation by San Jose.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The Ford San Jose Assembly Plant closed in 1984, later being converted into a shopping mall, known as The Great Mall of the Bay Area, which opened in 1994.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In the early 21st century, the Milpitas light rail transit system station was added, making it the northeastern most light rail destination in the region. On January 26, 2004, the city celebrated the 50th anniversary of its incorporation and issued the book "Milpitas: Five Dynamic Decades" to commemorate 50 years of Milpitas's history as a busy, exciting crossroads community.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The name "Milpitas" is the plural diminutive of "milpa," Mexican Spanish for "cornfield." The name means "Place of little cornfields." The word "milpa" is derived from the Nahuatl words "milli", meaning "agricultural field," and "pan", meaning "on."


title: Milpitas, California

text: The name "Milpitas", perhaps used by Jose Maria Alviso to name his land grant, "Rancho de las Milpitas", may have meant that there had been small Native American gardens nearby because of the rich alluvial soils of the area.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The first deed of property sale in Milpitas is found in the Santa Clara County Records General Index 1850–1856 (K-143) and is dated February 14, 1856. It is Juana Galindo Alviso, widow of Jose Maria Alviso, to Michael and Ellen Hughes for of land, today the Main Street area south of Carlo Street, although the deed gives the name of the Rancho as "Rancho San Miguel", rather than as "Milpitas".


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas lies in the northeastern corner of the Santa Clara Valley, which is south of San Francisco. Milpitas is generally considered to be a San Jose suburb in the South Bay, a term used to denote the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.


title: Milpitas, California

text: According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of . of it is land and of it (0.36%) is water.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The median elevation of Milpitas is 19 feet (6 m). At Piedmont Road, Evans Road, and North Park Victoria Drive, the elevation is generally about 100 feet (30 m), while the western area is almost at sea level. The highest point in Milpitas is a 1,289-foot (393 m) peak in the southeastern foothills.


title: Milpitas, California

text: To the east of Milpitas is a range of high foothills and mountains, part of the Diablo Range which runs along the east side of San Francisco Bay. Monument Peak is a prominent summit in the eastern Milpitas hills, and is the location of antenna broadcasting television stations KICU and KQEH to the San Francisco Bay Area.


title: Milpitas, California

text: There are also many creeks in Milpitas, most of which are part of the Berryessa Creek watershed. Calera Creek, Arroyo de los Coches, Penitencia Creek and Piedmont Creek are some of the creeks that flow from the Milpitas hills and empty into the San Francisco Bay. ("See" Berryessa Creek)


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas is divided into three sections by Interstates 680 and 880. To the west of I-880 is a largely industrial and commercial area. Between I-880 and its eastern counterpart freeway, I-680, is an industrial zone in the south and residential neighborhoods in the north. Other residential neighborhoods and undeveloped mountains lie east of I-680.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In reality, Milpitas has no concentrated downtown "center," but instead has several small retail centers generally located near residential developments and anchored by a supermarket. The so-called "Midtown" area, the oldest part of Milpitas, has few remaining historic residences and was the only commercial district that existed before 1945. Midtown is situated in the region where Main and Abel Streets run parallel to each other bordered by Montague Expressway in the south and Weller Street at the north end. A USPS post office, Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church, Elementary & Junior High Catholic School, the Milpitas Public Library (which incorporates the old Milpitas Grammar School building), the Smith/DeVries mansion, the Senior Center, and Elmwood Correctional Facility are all in the Midtown section of Milpitas. The Milpitas Civic Center, which includes City Hall, is not located in Midtown, but stands at the intersection of Milpitas and Calaveras Boulevards. The Civic Center is separated from Midtown by the Calaveras overpass. The boundaries that divide major Milpitas neighborhoods and districts include Calaveras Boulevard running from east to west and the Union Pacific railroad, which runs from north to south. The newest retail centers are west of Interstate 880.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas occasionally experiences odorous air traveling downwind from bay salt marshes, from the Newby Island landfill, from the anaerobic digestion facility at Zero Waste Energy Development Company, and from the San Jose sewage treatment plant's percolation ponds. Most malodorous during the autumn, it is especially pungent west of Interstate 880 because of its close location to the San Francisco Bay and the direction of the prevailing winds out of the north-northwest. The City of Milpitas would like to remedy this air quality problem to the extent it can and encourages its residents to file odor complaints.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Local creeks and the nearby San Francisco Bay suffer somewhat from water pollution originating from street water runoff and industrial wastes. The creeks in Milpitas, especially Calera, Scott, and Berryessa Creeks, used to be prime fishing spots for native steelhead until pollutants from urban development and industry killed the fish starting in the 1950s. While small populations of steelhead and even salmon still may be seen in area streams these cannot legally be fished and consumption of legal catches is limited by mercury contamination.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The I-880 corridor has experienced relatively elevated levels of air pollution from freeway traffic. For example, eight-hour standards for carbon monoxide have been near to maximum levels for the last two decades.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Set within a warm Mediterranean climate zone in Santa Clara County, Milpitas enjoys warm, sunny weather with few extreme temperatures. Rainfall is confined mostly to the winter months. During winter, temperatures are relatively cold, at an average of . Showers and cloudy days come and go during this season, dropping most of the city's annual of precipitation, and as spring approaches, the gentle rains gradually dwindle. In summer, the grasslands on the hillsides dehydrate rapidly and form bright, golden sheets on the mountains set off by stands of oak. Summer is dry and warm but not hot like in other parts the Bay Area. Temperatures infrequently reach over , with most days in the low 80s to the mid 80s. From June to September, Milpitas experiences little rain, and as autumn approaches, the weather gradually cools down. Many temperate-climate trees drop their leaves during fall in the South Bay but the winter temperature is warm enough for evergreens like palm trees to thrive.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The 2010 United States Census reported that Milpitas had a population of 66,790. The population density was . The racial makeup of Milpitas was 13,725 (20.5%) White, 1,969 (2.9%) African American, 309 (0.5%) Native American, 41,536 (62.2%) Asian, 346 (0.5%) Pacific Islander, 5,811 (8.7%) from other races, and 3,094 (4.6%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 11,240 persons (16.8%).


title: Milpitas, California

text: The Census reported that 64,092 people (96.0% of the population) lived in households, 104 (0.2%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 2,594 (3.9%) were institutionalized.


title: Milpitas, California

text: There were 19,184 households, out of which 8,616 (44.9%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 12,231 (63.8%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 2,279 (11.9%) had a female householder with no husband present, 1,105 (5.8%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 760 (4.0%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 100 (0.5%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 2,470 households (12.9%) were made up of individuals, and 742 (3.9%) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.34. There were 15,615 families (81.4% of all households); the average family size was 3.61.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The population was spread out, with 15,303 people (22.9%) under the age of 18, 5,887 people (8.8%) aged 18 to 24, 21,827 people (32.7%) aged 25 to 44, 17,434 people (26.1%) aged 45 to 64, and 6,339 people (9.5%) who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36.1 years. For every 100 females, there were 104.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 104.6 males.


title: Milpitas, California

text: There were 19,806 dwelling units at an average density of , of which 12,825 (66.9%) were owner-occupied, and 6,359 (33.1%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 1.2%; the rental vacancy rate was 3.1%. 42,501 people (63.6% of the population) lived in owner-occupied dwelling units and 21,591 people (32.3%) lived in rental housing units.


title: Milpitas, California

text: As of the census of 2000, there were 62,698 people, 17,132 households, and 13,996 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,785.2/km (4,622.9/mi). There were 17,364 housing units at an average density of 494.4/km (1,280.3/mi). The racial makeup of the city was 51.81% Asian, 30.87% White, 3.66% African American, 0.62% Native American, 0.63% Pacific Islander, 7.48% from other races, and 4.94% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 16.61% of the population.


title: Milpitas, California

text: There were 17,132 households, out of which 43.0% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 65.1% were married couples living together, 10.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 18.3% are nonfamilies. 11.5% of all households were made up of individuals, and 2.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 3.47, and the average family size was 3.72.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In the city, the population was spread out, with 24.6% under the age of 18, 9.5% from 18 to 24, 38.0% from 25 to 44, 20.9% from 45 to 64, and 7.0% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 33 years. For every 100 females, there are 110.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 111.4 males.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The median income for a household in the city was $84,429, and the median income for a family was $84,827 (these figures had risen to $85,186 and $91,232 respectively as of a 2007 estimate). Males had a median income of $51,316 versus $36,681 for females. The per capita income for the city was $27,823. About 3.3% of families and 5.0% of the population were below the poverty line, including 5.5% of those under age 18 and 6.4% of those age 65 or over.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Compared to rural parts of California, living in Milpitas is more expensive, as it is throughout Silicon Valley. Compared to other South Bay bedroom communities Milpitas is considered affordable. For example, a regular one-story, detached single-family home with a 1,300-square-foot (140 m) size sells for between $600,000 to $700,000 in the city. These prices are slightly more affordable than the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area, as a similar sized house may cost well over a million dollars in more affluent cities such as Palo Alto, Cupertino or Saratoga. Reasons for the expensive housing in the South Bay Area include the regional high tech industries, mild climate, strong foreign investment in the West Coast's housing, strict zoning codes, and a huge demand for limited homes. With the decline in the housing market, however, median sales prices in Milpitas have declined from nearly $700,000 to less than $500,000, and single-family new house construction building permits have plummeted from a 2004 average price of $949,900 to $269,400 in 2007.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas ranks first in the United States with the largest percent of residents employed in the computer and electronic products industry. 34.1% of men and 26.9% of women are employed in this industry.


title: Milpitas, California

text: While over 75% of people who live in Milpitas work out of the city; the daytime population of Milpitas actually increases by nearly 20% as there are more people living in other cities who work in Milpitas than people living in Milpitas who work in other cities. This results in heavy traffic commutes along key arterial roads twice each day.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas is home to the headquarters of Adaptec, Aerohive Networks, FireEye, Intersil, SonicWall, IXYS Corporation, Viavi Solutions and Lumentum Holdings (formerly JDSU), KLA-Tencor, Linear Technology, LTX-Credence, SCA, Sigma Designs, and Flex. Many other companies have corporate offices in Milpitas including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Western Digital, Cisco Systems, Renesas, Infineon Technologies, Varian Medical Systems, Teledyne, Quantum, LifeScan and International Microsystems Inc.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas is also home to one of Santa Clara County's two correctional facilities, the Elmwood Correctional Facility, which houses over 3,000 inmates.


title: Milpitas, California

text: According to the city's 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city are:


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas residents enjoy various visual and performing arts. The Milpitas Alliance for the Arts, founded in 1997, is an organization which promotes and funds murals, plays, sculptures, and many other forms of art. The "Art in Your Park" project has put many sculptures in local Milpitas parks, including a ceramic tower in Hillcrest Park, a sundial in Augustine Park, and a historical memorial in Murphy Park. The Celebrate Milpitas Festival is held annually every August, featuring vendors of crafts-type merchandise and providing local talent with a performance venue while selling visitors samplings of exotics like garlic fries or lumpia and even offerings from one or two Californian wineries. The suburb offers a rich variety of food options, including sit-down restaurants and fast food.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas is home to the largest Bay Area enclosed shopping mall (in terms of land area), the Great Mall of the Bay Area. The Great Mall is a part of the Simon mall branch and is the biggest mall/outlet shopping center in northern California. There are approximately 200 stores within the mall, with a total of of retail area.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas is also home to the first and largest power center in Santa Clara County, McCarthy Ranch Marketplace which was built in 1994 by Devcon Construction and was originally anchored by Borders Books, Computer City, Service Merchandise , SportMart , OfficeMax, Walmart and many more different tenants. In 1996, The center was expanded to include more retail space where the cancelled Sam's Club was going to be. Some of the new tenants were Home Express, Lil' Things, Michael's, Relax The Back, The Good Guys, HomeTown Buffet, Color Tile, and more. A large outdoor shopping center called Milpitas Square is anchored by the 99 Ranch Market west of Interstate 880. Another shopping center in Milpitas is The Seasons Marketplace anchored by Seafood City. Other Milpitas shopping centers and plazas include Ulferts Center, Milpitas Town Center, Jacklin Square, Parktown Plaza, Beresford Square, and the City Square.


title: Milpitas, California

text: In the past, Milpitas had a very different culture from that of its modern suburban state. As late as the 1950s, Milpitas was an unincorporated rural town with the Midtown district on Main Street as its main center of business and social activities. Many old businesses include Main Street Gas (operated by the Azorean Spangler brothers), Smith's Corner Saloon, and Kozy Kitchen. The Cracolice Building was one of the oldest commercial buildings in Milpitas and was the site of many political conventions and meetings. "As Milpitas Goes, So Goes the State" used to be a popular slogan around the town. Most of the land now within modern-day Milpitas's boundaries was used for strawberry, asparagus, apricot, and potato cultivation until the postwar boom during the 1950s and 1960s.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The city has many athletic and educational recreational programs which are located in several city buildings, including the city's sports center, teen center, library, community center, and senior center.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Ed R. Levin County Park is the largest county regional park near Milpitas. The County of Santa Clara Parks and Recreation Department runs the park. Monument Peak can be accessed through trails that lead north through the county park. The park also provides facilities for hang gliding and paragliding and includes a newly built dog park that was a joint effort by the county and the city of Milpitas. Two golf courses, Spring Valley Golf Course and Summitpointe Golf Course, are located in the Milpitas foothills. Both have expensive gated residential developments located adjacent to them.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas itself has 17 traditional neighborhood parks which are generally 3 to 10 acres (12,000 to 40,000 m). There also is a sports complex with two swimming pools and sports parks with baseball and tennis play areas fenced off. There are also smaller parks of less than scattered in newer developments. Milpitas has begun to develop the San Francisco Water District's Hetch Hetchy right-of-way as park land in lieu of using land from new high density residential developments adjacent to it. Together, these parks total of land area or less than 2% of the city's acreage. The Milpitas City Council voted February 16, 2016, to designate "Jacaranda mimosifolia" as Milpitas's official city tree.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The city is headed by five-member city council consisting of a mayor, a vice mayor, and three councilmembers. As of 2020, the mayor is Rich Tran, the vice mayor is Carmen Montano, and the councilmembers are Evelyn Chua, Karina Dominguez and Anthony Phan. The city manager is Steven McHarris. The city attorney is Christopher Diaz. The police chief is Armando Corpuz. The fire chief is Brian Sherard.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The Milpitas Town Seal was the idea of former Councilman and Vice Mayor John McDermott, who came up with the idea for a seal of the Minuteman from one of his son's history textbooks. He designed the seal and took it to Arnie's Signs and had 4,000 decals made. The city's seal shows Daniel Chester French's Minuteman statue, musket in hand, standing in the Santa Clara Valley, with the golden hills of Milpitas rising to the east. He faces defiantly south toward San Jose because early residents of Milpitas considered themselves minutemen when they defeated efforts by San Jose to annex the newly incorporated Milpitas.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas has struggled establishing this case and was putting up with the smell of the dump that was placed under a high way which leads to San Jose and Fremont. Since Milpitas is the closest the smell of the dump effects the land and causes a putrid smell. Knowing this San Jose decided to dump their trash in the dump. Garbage law passed to reduce the trash which San Jose adopted but it was not enough. The city of Milpitas tried to convince San Jose but there was no luck it ended and they were refused. After some time the people had enough they decided they would sue the city of San Jose for their wrong doings. This created much needed tension. Milpitas formed a case on noise pollution and space but the court would not accept these arguments. The main argument which caused the distress on the smell. After seeing the disturbance in the lives of Milpitas citizens the sue was successful.


title: Milpitas, California

text: From 1912 to 1956, students attended Milpitas Grammar School—now a city library. Additional schools were built, administered by the Milpitas Elementary School District. In 1968, the community voted to combine the city schools as part of the Milpitas Unified School District. District schools include:


title: Milpitas, California

text: From north to south, the major east–west roads in Milpitas are Dixon Landing Road, Jacklin Road, Calaveras Boulevard, and Landess Avenue/Montague Expressway. From east to west, the major north–south roads are Piedmont Road, Evans Road, Park Victoria Drive, Milpitas Boulevard, Main Street, Abel Street, and McCarthy Boulevard. Milpitas roads that reach into the hills are, from north to south, Country Club Drive, Old Calaveras Road, Calaveras Road, and a private ranch drive, the historic Urridias Ranch Road.


title: Milpitas, California

text: As with many other Californian suburbs, Milpitas has divided roads that are maintained well by the local city government. Street signs are in green. Like the San Jose public works system, all pedestrians must manually press a button in order to turn the pedestrian signal lights on (unlike the South Bay cities, San Francisco has automatic pedestrian lights at intersections and does not have "press to cross" buttons for pedestrians).


title: Milpitas, California

text: Not all streets in Milpitas have bicycle lanes or sidewalks. It has a walk score of 48. Piedmont Road, Evans Road, and Jacklin Road have excellent bike lanes and sidewalks with ample spacing, but Montague Expressway and South Milpitas Boulevard have limited sidewalks and narrow bike lanes, which causes some problems for workers commuting by bike or on foot.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Interstate 680 and Interstate 880 lead north to Fremont and south to downtown San Jose. State Route 237 begins at Milpitas and goes west to Sunnyvale and Mountain View.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The city is served by the Milpitas BART station, which opened for service as part of Phase I of the Silicon Valley BART extension on June 13, 2020. The station is located near the city limits of San José, and is bounded on two sides by the Montague Expressway and Capitol Ave. A pedestrian bridge runs over Capitol Ave and connects the BART station with VTA's Milpitas light rail station (formerly known as Montague station).


title: Milpitas, California

text: The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) runs light rail and local buses for public transportation. Three light rail stations lie within city limits: Milpitas, Great Mall, and Alder, all on the Orange Line. VTA bus routes in Milpitas are 46, 47, 66, 70, 71, 77.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas does not currently have any commuter rail service. However, VTA runs timed connecting shuttles to the Altamont Corridor Express train's Santa Clara – Great America Station, meeting the four daily trains in the morning for workers commuting to Milpitas.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The nearest major airport to the city is the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport (SJC), less than ten minutes away in San José. The city is also served by the general aviation Reid–Hillview Airport in East San Jose.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Milpitas borders salt ponds on the San Francisco Bay in the extreme northwest, but has no boat access. Alviso, a neighborhood in San José and formerly a neighboring city, has a marina and boat launch that allows motorized and non-motorized boats access to the bay.


title: Milpitas, California

text: China Airlines formerly operated a bus service to San Francisco International Airport for flights to Taipei, Taiwan.


title: Milpitas, California

text: Like most other Bay Area cities, USPS, UPS, FedEx, and DHL are readily available to Milpitas. The USPS post office on Abel Street is Milpitas's main office for postal mail and is the only USPS post office in the city. ZIP code 95035 is exclusively for Milpitas and is the only standard ZIP code for the city. 95036 is a new ZIP that is used sometimes for post office boxes in Milpitas. Until the merger with SBC, Milpitas had relied on Pacific Bell for its telecommunications services. American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) acquired Southern Bell (SBC) in 2006 and became the landline telephone provider in the city. As part of the agreement for the merger of AT&T with SBC, Milpitas residents were offered high-speed DSL internet access from AT&T for only $10 per month until December 2009, although few residents were aware of the offer.


title: Milpitas, California

text: On Earth Day, April 22, 2009, the public-private partnership Silicon Valley Unwired announced the rollout of a free municipal WiFi wireless network for the entire city. After the Google WiFi network in Mountain View, it is the second municipal wireless network, providing free Internet access.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The "Milpitas Monster" was filmed in the town in 1976. Originally started as a high school project, it developed into a feature-length film. In the quiet town of Milpitas, California, a gigantic creature is spawned in a polluted, overflowing waste disposal site. The townspeople rally to destroy the creature, which has an uncontrollable desire to consume large quantities of garbage cans.


title: Milpitas, California

text: The following books on Milpitas have been used as significant references for this article. Many of the books are not available at a regular store or are out of print, but all are available at the Milpitas branch of the Santa Clara County Library. These books are also recommended as resources for further reading.


title: Rad (unit)

text: The rad is a unit of absorbed radiation dose, defined as 1 rad = 0.01 Gy = 0.01 J/kg. It was originally defined in CGS units in 1953 as the dose causing 100 ergs of energy to be absorbed by one gram of matter. The material absorbing the radiation can be human tissue or silicon microchips or any other medium (for example, air, water, lead shielding, etc.).


title: Rad (unit)

text: It has been replaced by the gray (Gy) in SI derived units, but is still used in the United States, although this is "strongly discouraged" in Chapter 5.2 of the "Guide to the SI", which was written and published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, the numerically equivalent SI unit, the centigray, is widely used to report absorbed doses within radiotherapy. The roentgen, used to quantify the radiation exposure, may be related to the corresponding absorbed dose by use of the F-factor.


title: Rad (unit)

text: A dose of under 100 rad will typically produce no immediate symptoms other than blood changes. A dose of 100 to 200 rad delivered to the entire body in less than a day may cause acute radiation syndrome (ARS), but is usually not fatal. Doses of 200 to 1,000 rad delivered in a few hours will cause serious illness, with poor prognosis at the upper end of the range. Whole body doses of more than 1,000 rad are almost invariably fatal. Therapeutic doses of radiation therapy are often given and tolerated well even at higher doses to treat discrete, well-defined anatomical structures. The same dose given over a longer period of time is less likely to cause ARS. Dose thresholds are about 50% higher for dose rates of 20 rad/h, and even higher for lower dose rates.


title: Rad (unit)

text: The International Commission on Radiological Protection maintains a model of health risks as a function of absorbed dose and other factors. That model calculates an effective radiation dose, measured in units of rem, which is more representative of the stochastic risk than the absorbed dose in rad. In most power plant scenarios, where the radiation environment is dominated by X- or gamma rays applied uniformly to the whole body, 1 rad of absorbed dose gives 1 rem of effective dose. In other situations, the effective dose in rem might be thirty times higher or thousands of times lower than the absorbed dose in rad.


title: Rad (unit)

text: In the 1930s the roentgen was the most commonly used unit of radiation exposure. This unit is obsolete and no longer clearly defined. One roentgen deposits 0.877 rad in dry air, 0.96 rad in soft tissue, or anywhere from 1 to more than 4 rad in bone depending on the beam energy. These conversions to absorbed energy all depend on the ionizing energy of a standard medium, which is ambiguous in the latest NIST definition. Even where the standard medium is fully defined, the ionizing energy is often not precisely known.


title: Rad (unit)

text: In 1940, British physicist Louis Harold Gray, who had been studying the effect of neutron damage on human tissue, together with William Valentine Mayneord and John Read published a paper in which a unit of measure, dubbed the ""gram roentgen"" (symbol: gr) defined as "that amount of neutron radiation which produces an increment in energy in unit volume of tissue equal to the increment of energy produced in unit volume of water by one roentgen of radiation" was proposed. This unit was found to be equivalent to 88 ergs in air. It marked a shift towards measurements based on energy rather than charge.


title: Rad (unit)

text: The Röntgen equivalent physical (rep), introduced by Herbert Parker in 1945, was the absorbed energetic dose to tissue before factoring in relative biological effectiveness. The rep has variously been defined as 83 or 93 ergs per gram of tissue (8.3/9.3 mGy) or per cc of tissue.


title: Rad (unit)

text: In 1953 the ICRU recommended the rad, equal to 100 erg/g as a new unit of absorbed radiation, but then promoted a switch to the gray in the 1970s.


title: Rad (unit)

text: The International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) has not accepted the use of the rad. From 1977 to 1998, the US NIST's translations of the SI brochure stated that the CIPM had temporarily accepted the use of the rad (and other radiology units) with SI units since 1969. However, the only related CIPM decisions shown in the appendix are with regards to the curie in 1964 and the radian (symbol: rad) in 1960. The NIST brochures redefined the rad as 0.01 Gy. The CIPM's current SI brochure excludes the rad from the tables of non-SI units accepted for use with the SI. The US NIST clarified in 1998 that it was providing its own interpretations of the SI system, whereby it accepted the rad for use in the US with the SI, while recognizing that the CIPM did not. NIST recommends defining the rad in relation to SI units in every document where this unit is used. Nevertheless, use of the rad remains widespread in the US, where it is still an industry standard. Although the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission still permits the use of the units curie, rad, and rem alongside SI units, the European Union required that its use for "public health ... purposes" be phased out by 31 December 1985.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Anne Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon (; 28 June 1920 – 15 November 2021) was an English memoirist and the second wife of Anthony Eden, who served as British prime minister from 1955 to 1957. She married Eden in 1952, becoming Lady Eden in 1954 when he was made a Knight of the Garter, before becoming Countess of Avon in 1961 when her husband was created Earl of Avon. She was also the niece of Winston Churchill. In 2007, at age 87, she released her memoir subtitled "From Churchill to Eden".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: On the death of Lady Wilson of Rievaulx in 2018, Lady Avon became the oldest living spouse of a British prime minister. She turned 100 in 2020, the second British prime minister's spouse to become a centenarian after Wilson. She also outlived four other prime ministers' spouses who came after her: Lady Dorothy Macmillan (died 1966), Elizabeth Douglas-Home (died 1990), Audrey Callaghan (died 2005) and Sir Denis Thatcher (died 2003).


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Clarissa Spencer-Churchill was born in 1920, the daughter of Major Jack Spencer-Churchill (1880–1947) and (1885–1941), a daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon, who had married in 1908. Her elder brothers were John ("Johnnie") (1909–1992), an artist, and Henry Winston (1913–2002), known as Peregrine.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Spencer-Churchill was born at her parents' house in the Cromwell Road, Kensington, London. She was educated at Kensington Preparatory School and then at Downham School, Hatfield Heath, "a fashionable boarding school ... orientated to horses", which she disliked and left early without any formal qualifications. Seventy years later she said she had also felt the need to get away from home—"I just wanted to get out from under the whole thing of being loved too much".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In 1937 Spencer-Churchill studied art in Paris. Her mother had asked the British ambassador, Sir George Clerk, to keep a watchful eye on her, an unintended consequence of this being that she was taken under the wing of an embassy press secretary who, with his wife, introduced her to a round of "café" society parties. Among the friends she made in Paris were writers Fitzroy Maclean and Marthe Bibesco. Together with two female contemporaries, she visited the Folies Bergère, an unusual destination for 16-year-old girls, where the singer Josephine Baker, clad only in a circlet of bananas, became the first naked female body she had ever seen.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In the summer of 1937, Spencer-Churchill accompanied Julian Asquith (grandson of the Liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith) and his mother, Katharine, on a tour, mainly by third class rail, across the Apennines in the Tuscany region of Italy. Among other artistic treasures, she saw the fifteenth-century frescoes by Piero della Francesca at Arezzo, one of which, "The Queen of Sheba Adoring the Holy Wood" (), she nominated in 2010 as her favourite painting"in an age of violence he went on painting clearly and calmly".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: When Spencer-Churchill returned to London she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art. Around this time she displayed her individualism by acquiring a specially tailored trouser suit along the lines of those associated with the actress Marlene Dietrich after the latter's appearance in the film "Morocco" (1930). 1938 was the future Lady Avon's "coming out" year and she was regarded as "[o]ne of the more notable" débutantes in "a vintage year for beautiful girls", but, having mixed with older and more sophisticated people in Paris, she seemed to have disdained the circuit—since described by Anne de Courcy as "more or less naive seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds suddenly flung into a round of gaities"—and was never presented at court. Another débutante of 1938, Deborah Mitford, later Duchess of Devonshire, recalled Spencer-Churchill as exhibiting "more than a whiff of [Greta] Garbo in a dress by Maggy Rouff of Paris".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Among those with whom Spencer-Churchill danced at that year's Liberal ball was the future double agent Donald Maclean, who complained that she was too smart to be "a proper Liberal girl like the Bonham-Carters and the Asquiths". She also knew Guy Burgess, who fled to Russia in 1951 when he and Maclean were about to be unmasked as traitors. A 2015 biography of Burgess, a homosexual, contained claims that, encouraged by his Soviet "handlers", he had contemplated marriage to Spencer-Churchill. However, the latter, then aged 95, denied that they had been close. She described Burgess as "courteous, amusing, nice and good company", but said that he had been "standoffish" towards her and did not wish any friendship to develop.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In 1939 Spencer-Churchill spent another four months in Paris and in August of that year travelled to Romania as a guest of the novelist Elizabeth Bibesco and her husband Antoine (Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith, having been left distraught at the conclusion of her daughter's visit to her in London earlier in the year). Spencer-Churchill only just managed to return to England—on one of the last flights out of Bucharest—before the start of the Second World War.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In 1940, encouraged by economist Roy Harrod, Spencer-Churchill went to Oxford to study philosophy, although not as an undergraduate because of her lack of qualifications. While there she became associated with, among other leading academics, Isaiah Berlin and Maurice Bowra. Lady Antonia Fraser, whose father, later Lord Longford, was a fellow of Christ Church, described her as having been "the dons' delight". For a short while she was tutored by A. J. Ayer, a future Wykeham Professor of Logic known for his libidinous lifestyle, although his womanising was not apparently extended to her.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: When Spencer-Churchill moved back to London, she decoded ciphers in the communications department of the Foreign Office, where her future husband was the secretary of state from 1940 to 1945. One of her colleagues was Anthony Nutting, who in 1956 resigned from Anthony Eden's government because of his opposition to the Suez Operation. For a time the future Lady Avon lived in a roof-top room at the Dorchester Hotel, which she obtained at a cut-price rate because of its vulnerability to bombing (although the building was a modern, steel-framed structure with extensive underground accommodation that was considered relatively safe during air raids).


title: Clarissa Eden

text: After the war Spencer-Churchill worked at London Films for the producer Sir Alexander Korda, who she thought made "terrible mistakes without really knowing what has happened", and as a reviewer for the fashion magazine "Vogue". She met the actor Orson Welles, who became a dining companion, on the set of the film "The Third Man" (1949), and escorted actress Paulette Goddard, who played Mrs. Cheverley in Korda's production of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" (1947), on "a rather wild trip" to Brussels. During the latter excursion Goddard expressed a wish to attend a pornographic show, but, although Korda's representatives made arrangements for this, she shied away when she and Spencer-Churchill, having climbed "a flight of shabby stairs", were greeted by two men in black suits.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Spencer-Churchill also worked for the short-lived monthly magazine "Contact", established by George (later Lord) Weidenfeld and edited by Philip Toynbee. Weidenfeld was keen to expand into book publishing and "Contact", which appeared with a hard cover, offered a means of circumventing post-war paper quotas. Among those Spencer-Churchill persuaded to contribute to the magazine was the cookery writer Elizabeth David, whose recipes became very influential in the 1950s. Through Weidenfeld she also became a close friend of Marcus Sieff, later chairman of the retailer Marks and Spencer.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: As a result of this eclectic early career, she widened her circle of friends and contacts beyond those in society and politics with whom she already had close connections. As one of Anthony Eden's biographers put it, she was "equally at home in the worlds of Hatfield and Fitzrovia", while a reviewer of her memoir wrote that "few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly". Even so, the future Lady Avon did not impress everyone: after the future prime minister Margaret Thatcher met her at a Conservative Party ball in 1954, she wrote dismissively to her sister, "Mrs Anthony Eden received us. Really she is a most colourless personality".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Glimpses of Spencer-Churchill's life as a single woman, for example, in diaries and other reminiscences, are quite extensive. Although she had indicated to the former Labour member of Parliament (MP) Woodrow Wyatt that no memoir of her own would appear until after her death, a volume, edited by Cate Haste, was nevertheless published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2007, and Phoenix brought out a paperback edition in 2008. In 2004 Haste had collaborated with Cherie Booth, wife of the then prime minister Tony Blair, to produce a biographical chapter about Lady Avon as part of a wider study of prime ministerial spouses. Avon noted that after meeting Haste she realised that the latter's "enthusiasm and professionalism could make it possible".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: A photograph on the dust jacket of her memoir, depicting a young, pensive Spencer-Churchill, cigarette in hand, conveyed an alluring and slightly Bohemian image. The book was generally well-received by critics and even generated an engaging "spoof" in the satirical magazine "Private Eye" ("In the early 1950s I married Anthony Eden, a politician of above average height, with a prominent moustache ..."). Historian Andrew Roberts described it as "the last great British autobiography of the pre-war and wartime era", while art critic John McEwen remarked on its "witty and elegant restraint".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Having lost both parents by her mid-twenties, Spencer-Churchill was comparatively independent for a young woman of her time. In later years she remarked to Woodrow Wyatt on "how much more restricted" girls were when she was young while conceding that she had had her first affair at 17 with a "man who was quite well-known and ... still alive [in 1986]". She had many devoted admirers, an early "ardent suitor" being Sir Colville Barclay, briefly a diplomat and later a painter, who was the stepson of Lord Vansittart, former permanent head of the Foreign Office.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Avon was quoted by Wyatt as having told him that she had resisted the amorous advances of Duff Cooper, wartime information minister and British ambassador in Paris (1944–1947), who, thirty years her senior, had also been a friend of her mother: "I was the only woman who he never got more than a peck on the cheek from". She informed Cooper in 1947, following a weekend in the country with Anthony Eden, at which the only other guest was the French ambassador to Britain, that Eden "never stops trying to make love to her". When Cooper was raised to the peerage (eventually choosing the title Viscount Norwich), he sought Spencer-Churchill's views as to a title—"Think, child, think ... Have you any suggestions? (not funny ones)"—and she was the recipient of the last letter that he wrote (from White's club) shortly before his death at sea on New Year's Day, 1954.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Among the future Lady Avon's many other friends, several of whom were some years older than she, were the novelists Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Nancy Mitford (whose sister Deborah wrote of an encounter with Avon some 20 years after they had been débutantes together that she found her "rather alarming"), painter Lucian Freud, and choreographer Frederick Ashton. When she was still in her teens James Pope-Hennessy modelled on her the character of Perdita in "London Fabric" (1939) and dedicated the book "To Clarissa". Gerald, Lord Berners, used her as the basis of a character in his novel "Far From the Madding War" (1941), while photographer Cecil Beaton, 16 years her senior, treated her as a special confidante and introduced her to the reclusive Swedish actress Greta Garbo. The journalist and author Sofka Zinovieff claimed that, after her grandmother, Jennifer Fry (of the Fry's chocolate family), separated in 1944 from her grandfather, Robert Heber-Percy, who was Lord Berners's closest friend, Spencer-Churchill and Beaton amused themselves by riffling through underclothes and love letters that Fry had left in a drawer at Berners's country home, Faringdon House, in Oxfordshire. A few years later while working at "Contact", Spencer-Churchill became friends with the writer and journalist Alan Ross, who subsequently married Fry.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Avon thought the writer and horticulturalist Vita Sackville-West (whose husband, the politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson was a friend of her mother) "an interesting romantic figure", but felt "dunched" by her "remote and rather superior" manner. Visiting her at Sissinghurst some years later, she "thought the less of her" for troubling to provide, evidently in a hurry, table napkins that were still damp. Like Avon herself, many of her acquaintances frequented the bookshop Heywood Hill, next to the hairdresser Trumper's in Mayfair's Curzon Street, which, during the war was managed by Nancy Mitford and became a regular meeting place: according to Mitford's sister, Diana, Lady Mosley, "[i]ts ground-floor room didn't just like a private club, it very nearly was one".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Avon was a long-standing friend of Ann Fleming, wife of novelist Ian Fleming and lover of Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963, who had previously been married to Viscount Rothermere. In 1952, she and composer and playwright Noël Coward became godparents to the Flemings' son Caspar, who died of a drug overdose in 1975. In later years, as a widow, she was evidently close to the influential solicitor Lord Goodman. Another long-standing social acquaintance was Labour minister Roy (later Lord) Jenkins, also a friend of Ann Fleming. Jenkins's official biographer chose, as an example of the broadly-based groups Jenkins would entertain at his home at East Hendred, a small party assembled there in March 1994—Avon, together with the architectural historian James Lees-Milne, Jenkins's publisher Roland Philipps and their wives.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Spencer-Churchill first met her future husband at Cranborne, Dorset (home of the future 5th Marquess of Salisbury), in 1936, when she was 16. He was already famous for his elegant attire and Homburg hat, and she was struck by Eden's unusual pinstriped tweed trousers.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: There was some further contact during the war, by virtue of the circles in which she and Eden both moved and through her uncle Winston, who became prime minister in May 1940. As an illustration of her occasional proximity to the centre of power, between meetings of the War Cabinet on 30 May 1940, when the Dunkirk evacuation was at its height, Spencer-Churchill was present when Churchill lunched with her parents and the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. The future Lady Avon described this occasion as "a nightmare, with news of people's deaths coming in ...". After her mother's death in 1941, she stayed at Chequers, the prime minister's country home in Buckinghamshire.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: R. A. Butler, then Minister of Education, recalled a dinner party in Eden's flat above the Foreign Office, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Attempting to defuse an argument between Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook about their respective motivation during the abdication crisis of 1936, Spencer-Churchill, just turned 21, proclaimed with patent improbability that she had three favourites, Edward VIII, Leopold III of Belgium and the aviator Charles Lindbergh.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: A more defined relationship with Eden, who was a married man 23 years older than Spencer-Churchill, developed gradually after they had sat next to each other at a dinner party in about 1947. Eden had been monopolised for much of the meal by a woman on his other side and afterwards, in an undertone, invited Spencer-Churchill out to dinner. In 1950, Eden was divorced from his first wife, Beatrice ("née" Beckett, 1905–1957). Although she was a Roman Catholic and her church was opposed to divorce, Spencer-Churchill married Eden, who had become Foreign Secretary again in 1951, in a civil ceremony at Caxton Hall, London, on 14 August 1952. This event drew large crowds, on a level with those earlier in the year for the wedding of film stars Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding, prompting Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing, to note that "it's extraordinary how much 'glamour' [Eden] still has and how popular he is". The wedding reception was held at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the prime minister, who at the time was Lady Eden's uncle, Churchill.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Until 2019, Eden was one of only two British prime ministers to have been divorced (although he was one of ten to have been married twice). There was criticism of the marriage in the "Church Times"—"Mr. Eden's action this week shows how far the climate of public opinion in this matter has changed for the worse"—and from some others in the Anglican church, including the Archbishop of Sydney, who drew parallels with Edward VIII's having given up the throne to marry an American divorcée. Harold Macmillan, among others, thought such comparisons unfair: "Miss Churchill cannot be compared with Mrs Simpson, who had had two husbands". However, the marriage also drew the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Spencer-Churchill himself and who, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Waugh enquired of Lady Eden, "Did you never think that you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary by your desertion [of the faith]?"


title: Clarissa Eden

text: On the eve of the wedding, John Colville, a long-time private secretary of Churchill, who in his younger days had been part of the same social "set" as Churchill's niece, recorded in his diary that Spencer-Churchill, who was staying at Churchill's home at Chartwell, Kent, was "very beautiful, but ... still strange and bewildering". He added that Churchill "feels avuncular to his orphaned niece, gave her a cheque for £500 and told me that he thought she had a most unusual personality". According to the future Lady Avon herself, Churchill's wife Clementine thought her "too independent and totally unsuitable", while the marriage is said to have exacerbated the antagonism towards Eden of the Churchills' often wayward son Randolph, who, having initially defended his cousin to Waugh, gave her "two years to knock [Eden] into shape". His subsequent attacks on Eden in the press culminated in a scathing biography, "The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden" (1959).


title: Clarissa Eden

text: The issues relating to the Edens' marriage resurfaced in 1955 when Eden was prime minister. In that year Princess Margaret, sister of the Queen, announced that she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcé. Although recently available evidence suggests that the Eden government was prepared to be reasonably accommodating towards such a marriage and that Margaret would have needed only to renounce her right of succession to the throne, Townsend reflected in the 1970s that:


title: Clarissa Eden

text: The Edens' marriage, which lasted until his death on 14 January 1977, was, by all accounts, an extremely happy one.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: The first five years of her marriage were dominated by Eden's political career and by the effects of a botched operation on his gall bladder in 1953, which caused lasting problems. Eden's private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh, recalled Lady Eden's role in ensuring that the complaint that led to the operation had been diagnosed properly: "When Eden acquired a loving wife, Sir [Horace] Evans was called in ...". Before then Eden had travelled with a tin box containing medicaments that ranged from aspirins to morphia injections.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Historian Hugh Thomas noted that, though "non-political", Lady Avon was interested in foreign affairs, having written a Berlin diary for the literary magazine "Horizon". Avon maintained many of her wider acquaintances. For example, Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo visited 10 Downing Street at her invitation in October 1956. They drank vodka and ice and Beaton recorded Lady Eden's observation that her husband was kept awake by the sound of motor scooters, which were growing in popularity among young people in the 1950s. Lady Eden is said to have murmured, "he can't keep away", as Eden, in Beaton's words, "gangled in like a colt" and proclaimed to Garbo that he had always wanted to meet her.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Eden miscarried in 1954 and there were no children. Her stepson, Nicholas, Eden's surviving son from his first marriage, who succeeded him as 2nd Earl of Avon, served as Under-Secretary of State for Energy in Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s, but died of AIDS in 1985. At this point the earldom became extinct.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Churchill had told Lady Eden, following her honeymoon in 1952, that he wanted to give up the premiership. However, it was not until 6 April 1955 that Eden succeeded him as prime minister, shortly afterwards winning a general election in which the Conservative Party polled the largest percentage of the popular vote recorded by a party between 1945 and the present day. Colville noted that, at a dinner attended by the Queen to mark Churchill's retirement, the Duchess of Westminster had put her foot through Lady Eden's train, causing the monarch's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, to remark, "that's torn it, in more than one sense".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Eden's premiership lasted less than two years. For much of this period Eden was the subject of hostility from elements of the Conservative press, notably "The Daily Telegraph", the wife of whose chairman, Lady Pamela Berry (an ambitious and sometimes spiteful society hostess, described by the biographer of her father, Lord Birkenhead, as "the politician "manqué" of the second generation"), was said by some to have had a "blood row" (Macmillan's phrase) with Lady Eden. The latter's attempts to make up this puzzling rift were shunned.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: As hostess at 10 Downing Street, Lady Eden oversaw the organisation of official receptions. She brought in new caterers, causing US secretary of state John Foster Dulles to lose a bet with a fellow dinner guest that he knew "exactly what every course is going to be". Because the Edens' tenure was so short, Lady Eden's plans to return the fabric and furniture of the house to the styles of the 1730s, when it was built, were never realised.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Eden was not very fond of Chequers, though she did take a keen interest in the garden and grounds, introducing old fashioned roses and increasing the range of fruit trees. However, her successor, Lady Dorothy Macmillan, so keen a horticulturalist that she sometimes gardened at night, removed yellow and white flowers planted by Lady Eden and replaced them with roses of a "normal [colour]". One episode at Chequers attracted considerable publicity. In January 1956 Lady Eden politely requested the occupant of a farm worker's cottage on the estate to hang her washing where it could not be seen by visitors. Although it seems that the washing may have been hung across a lime walk, beyond the boundary of the cottage garden itself, the story was taken up by the "Daily Mirror" as an alleged example of Lady Eden's high-handedness. Coming shortly after attacks in the press on Eden's leadership, the timing was unfortunate.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In April 1956 Lady Eden hosted a dinner at Chequers for the visiting Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev noted that Lady Eden's (sober) behaviour contradicted a briefing from the Soviet embassy in London that she shared some of Churchill's "traits in the matter of drinking". Over dinner (when, according to his hostess, he ate nothing despite his reputation for eating and drinking greedily), he responded rather bluntly to her question about the range of Soviet missiles that "they could easily reach your island and quite a bit farther". The following morning Khrushchev mistook Lady Eden's room for Bulganin's but, having provoked a cry after almost walking in on her, beat a hasty retreat and did not identify himself. He confided later in Bulganin with whom he "had a good laugh over [the] incident".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: As the Suez Crisis reached its climax in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November Lady Eden found herself sitting next to Dora Gaitskell, wife of the Labour leader, in the gallery of the House of Commons, whose sitting was suspended, due to uproar, for the first time since 1924. "Can you stand it?" she asked, to which, according to one version, the seasoned Gaitskell replied, "the boys must have their fun". (An alternative version is that Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".) Three days later Lady Eden attended, out of curiosity, an anti-government "Law not War" demonstration in Trafalgar Square, but thought it politic to withdraw when she was recognised with friendly cheers.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In the humiliating aftermath of the crisis in 1956, Lady Eden's most famous public remark to a group of Conservative women that, "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing room", was widely reported. The future Lady Avon later described this observation as "silly, really idiotic", though it remains probably the most quoted utterance of the whole crisis. One example of its durability was a journalist's observation some 54 years later, with reference to the Iraq War of 2003, that "if, as Clarissa Eden remarked, the Suez Canal ran through her drawing room, Iraq and the decisions that flowed from it still haunt [the] Labour [Party] and stir up antipathies and discomforts". Another instance was in 2013 when options for airport expansion around London were being debated: "The Times" newspaper cited Avon's words in 2011 in connection with a call by the outgoing Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus (later Lord) O'Donnell for prime ministerial spouses to receive greater support from public funds: "In a constitutional monarchy, the consort of the prime minister is not an official role ... Yet, as the Countess of Avon so vividly pointed out, it can be impossible to keep public scrutiny at bay altogether". In Avon's view, both she and her husband "were quite naive about how the press works. Neither of us should have been, but we were."


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In his memoirs, Anthony Eden recalled that on several occasions during the crisis, he found time to sit in his wife's drawing-room, whose décor he described as green. There he was able to enjoy two sanguines by André Derain and a bronze of a girl in her bath by Degas that Alexander Korda had given the Edens as a wedding present.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: During this period some thought they detected undue influence by Lady Eden over her husband. For example, Lady Jebb, wife of the British ambassador in Paris, alluded in her diary to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth and referred to "Clarissa's war". (It should be borne in mind, however, that her husband, Sir Gladwyn, a "figure of some grandeur, if not hauteur", was furious at his exclusion from an Anglo-French summit in Paris two weeks before the Suez invasion.) In December 1956, Walter Monckton, a member of Eden's government who opposed the Suez invasion, apparently told a Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, that Lady Eden was a powerful force in politics, with great influence on her husband, and that "now she knows [Monckton] opposed Anthony she won't have anything to do with him". Monckton claimed, among other things, that, during a rail strike in 1955, Eden, by then prime minister, had, at his wife's urging, taken a tougher public stance concerning the railwaymen than that advised by Monckton, as Minister of Labour, and senior civil servants (although there is evidence that Churchill had also privately advocated to Eden the need for a strong line).


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In private correspondence just after Suez, the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper derided Lady Eden's remark about "the Suez Canal flowing through [her] drawing room" and declared not only that the "vain and foolish" Eden was "wholly managed" by her, but that she would listen only to Cecil Beaton, whom he described (with reference to the Svengali of the last Russian czarina Alexandra) as her "Rasputin".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Less dramatically, there were suggestions that Anthony Eden's touchiness and over-sensitivity to criticism, characteristics frequently remarked upon by colleagues, were exacerbated by Lady Eden (described by historian Barry Turner, without explanation, as "equally touchy"). One of Eden's private secretaries claimed that she had a habit of "stirring up Anthony when he didn't need it". However, Eden's biographer D. R. Thorpe concluded that such imputations arose from a misreading of the Edens' relationship, noting also that, during Suez, the only two people in whom Eden could confide without inhibition were his wife and the Queen. Indeed, as historian Ben Pimlott put it, "if Lady Eden came to believe that the Suez Canal flowed through her drawing room, the Queen must have felt pretty damp as well". David Dutton, another (not notably sympathetic) biographer of Eden, noted that "some observers believed that Clarissa was excessively protective and tended to exacerbate Eden's natural volatility" but also remarked on her devoted companionship and that "during the dark days of the Suez Crisis, [she] was at his side, supportive throughout".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Eden himself paid tribute to his wife's adaptation of their domestic arrangements to meet the "unsteady requirements" of this period, noting that his digestion took less kindly to them. There is some evidence also that, when he was Foreign Secretary, Lady Eden had influenced (or, at any rate, endorsed) his patterns of work. A later Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, observed that, though he worked hard, Eden did not keep office hours and often spent mornings working in bed. For example, on 29 December 1952, Eden wrote: "Raining and cold. Clarissa says that this is the right way to run the F[oreign].O[ffice]. Lie in bed, direct office by telephone and read Delacroix".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Some of Lady Eden's friends may have concealed their true views about Suez. For example, Isaiah Berlin assured "dearest Clarissa" that Eden had acted with "great moral splendour", describing his stance as "very brave", "very patriotic" and "absolutely just", while opining to another acquaintance that his policy had been "childish folly". The future Lady Avon herself recalled that, though she sought to "bolster up" her husband and scanned the newspapers for anything that she thought he ought to know, she did not feel she "knew enough about what was going on to try and interfere in any way". Even so, her knowledge of the inner workings of government was such that she was able to record in her diary the precise stance, at a critical point of the Suez operation, of every member of the Cabinet:


title: Clarissa Eden

text: The damage caused by the Suez Crisis to the Prime Minister's already frail health persuaded the Edens to seek a month's rest cure at "Goldeneye", Ian Fleming's "plain, low-roofed" bungalow on the north coast of Jamaica. Lady Eden's concern for her husband's health appears to have been decisive in the choice of destination, but it was regarded by many, including Macmillan and the government's Chief Whip, Edward Heath, as politically unwise. In addition, although Goldeneye had a private beach and a large living room with glassless louvre windows that enabled "the moist tropical air [to] blow through", Fleming's close friend, the journalist Denis Hamilton, who visited Goldeneye around that time, recalled a "shack-like house" which Fleming "went around pretending [was] ... a great palace ... a miniature Ritz". Its bedrooms have been described as "insignificant and small". Ann Fleming warned Lady Eden about some of its primitive aspects and suggested that Torquay, a seaside resort in the south-west of England, and a sun-lamp might have been preferable. However, Lady Eden insisted that "Berkshire [Chequers] or somewhere instead" would not have been suitable: "I thought if we didn't go to Jamaica, he was going to drop down dead, literally".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Installed in Jamaica after a good deal of secrecy and close liaison between Downing Street and Ian Fleming's secretary, Una Trueblood, the Edens were temporary neighbours of Noël Coward who thought Goldeneye "perfectly ghastly" and presented them"poor dears"with a basket of caviare, pâté de foie gras and champagne. Coward also sent Frank Cooper's marmalade and Huntley and Palmer's biscuits, which, according to the future Lady Avon, "was not what we had been looking forward to". As was sometimes the case when Fleming let Goldeneye, he asked his neighbour (and lover) Blanche Blackwell, a member of the influential Lindo family, to ensure that the Edens were properly looked after. Indeed, it seems that Lady Eden's mentioning that Blackwell had been helpful at Goldeneye led Ann Fleming to suspect that her husband and Blackwell were having an affair. The publicity that the Edens' sojourn attracted is credited by some with boosting Fleming's literary career, including sales of his early novels about James Bond, the first of which, "Casino Royale", he had written at Goldeneye in 1952. The future Lady Avon later recalled her "astonishment" (and Ann Fleming's "rueful embarrassment") at the success of the Bond books, which continued after "From Russia, with Love" entered the best-seller lists in 1957.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: The Edens flew back to England just before Christmas 1956. A young witness of their departure from Kingston airport recalled Lady Eden looking "glacial" and her husband, pale. Lady Eden noted that, on their return, "everyone [was] looking at us with thoughtful eyes". Early in January 1957, the Edens stayed with the Queen at Sandringham, where Eden informed her of his intention to resign as prime minister. Eden tendered his resignation formally at Buckingham Palace on 9 January. When Harold Macmillan was appointed his successor in preference to R. A. Butler, Lady Eden wrote to Butler (whom two years earlier she had described in her diary as "curiously unnatural") that she thought politics "a beastly profession ... and how greatly I admire your dignity and good humour". (In 1952 she had told Duff Cooper that she thought modern politics something of a "farce".)


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Macmillan's biographer Alistair Horne noted that, of the various animosities that arose before and during Macmillan's premiership, it was the "loyal wives", among whom he counted Lady Eden and Lady Butler, who "tended most to keep [them] alive". Although there is evidence of a long-standing and lasting rift between Eden and Macmillan, Eden himself maintained "a friendly (if not conspicuously warm) relationship" with his successor, often being used as a "sounding board" by Macmillan who occasionally lunched with the Edens at their home. Lady Eden, on the other hand, was said to have been consistently vitriolic about Macmillan and recalled to one of Eden's biographers that Churchill had found him "too 'viewy. There is some evidence that, following Suez, Macmillan had briefed sections of the press that he intended to retire, whereas his true intention had been to displace Eden as prime minister, and, as late as 2007, the future Lady Avon criticised his behaviour as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the crisis, claiming that he had been "too hasty" in using an American threat to withhold a loan from the International Monetary Fund as "an excuse to back down" from military action and had wept "crocodile tears" at Eden's resignation.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Shortly after Eden's resignation, he and Lady Eden sailed to New Zealand for a further break. Their cabin steward, on what she described as "the hellship ", was the future deputy prime minister John Prescott. Half a century later Prescott recalled that, while kneeling to clean the ship's brass, he had occasion to admire a pair of legs that turned out to be Lady Eden's—"You naturally look, don't you"—whereupon Anthony Eden tapped him on the head. When they arrived in New Zealand, which was among the few countries publicly to have supported the Suez operation, the Edens received a rapturous "red carpet" reception.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Eden had been told by doctors that his life might be in danger if he remained in office. However, he was to live for another twenty years. The Avons' home was at Alvediston Manor, Wiltshire, where he died on 14 January 1977 and is buried. The last entry in Eden's diary, dated 11 September 1976, had read; "[e]xquisite small vase of crimson glory buds & mignonette from beloved C[larissa]."


title: Clarissa Eden

text: When Eden was taken mortally ill with liver cancer, he and Lady Avon had just spent their final Christmas together at Hobe Sound, Florida, as guests of former New York governor W. Averell Harriman, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party, and his English-born wife Pamela. (Mrs Harriman was Lady Avon's exact contemporary, a débutante of 1938 who had also taken a room at the Dorchester during the Second World War. She had previously been married to Lady Avon's cousin Randolph Churchill and in the 1990s was US president Bill Clinton's ambassador to Paris, where she died in 1997.) The Avons were flown back to Britain in a Royal Air Force VC-10 that was diverted to Miami after Prime Minister James Callaghan had been alerted to his health situation by Pamela Harriman's son, Winston.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: After her husband's death, Lady Avon received many tributes for her devoted care in the later stages of his life. She moved to an apartment in London in the 1980s. She invited firstly Robert Rhodes James and later D. R. Thorpe to write official biographies of her husband (Churchill's biographer, Martin Gilbert, having previously declined an invitation). Published in 1986 and 2003 respectively, both offered a broadly sympathetic view of Eden's career and were generally well-received by critics. Between them, they did much to help restore Eden's reputation, which had taken such a battering during the final months of his premiership. In 2003 a research study by a Harvard clinician of Eden's medical condition and surgery during the 1950s was published in the US with an acknowledgement of Lady Avon's interest and co-operation.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Avon remained in touch with many influential friends. For example, in the lead-up to the Falklands War of 1982, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, confided during a cabinet meeting that the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger had spoken to Lady Avon of the risk of a "[s]ocialist" regime being established in Argentina. Lady Avon also attended various state occasions, as well as gatherings of former prime ministers and their families. In 1972 (while her husband was still alive) she described to Cecil Beaton the Duchess of Windsor's "very strange" and nervous demeanour—"Is this my seat?" "Is this my prayer book?" "What do I do now?"—at the funeral of her husband, the former king Edward VIII, while thirty years later Tony Blair's press secretary Alastair Campbell noted that at a dinner at 10 Downing Street in 2002 to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee, attended by five prime ministers and several relatives of deceased prime ministers:


title: Clarissa Eden

text: In 1994, 17 years after her husband's death, Lady Avon unveiled a bust of Eden at the Foreign Office. In 2013 she attended a memorial service for Sir Guy Millard (1917–2013), one of Eden's long-serving private secretaries and probably his last surviving close associate, having been with him and Churchill at wartime meetings with Roosevelt and Stalin and in Downing Street during the Suez Crisis.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Avon was the youngest wife of an incumbent prime minister in the twentieth century. She was only 36 when her husband resigned, and was widowed at 56. She outlived five later prime ministerial spouses and witnessed the administrations of 13 subsequent prime ministers. By contrast, Lady Dorothy Macmillan was 57 when her husband succeeded Eden and 63 when he resigned, dying just three years later; her husband outlived her by 20 years. As such Avon enjoyed unusual longevity for a prime ministerial spouse, contributing, for example, to a television documentary by Cherie Blair in 2005 about prime ministers' wives and to a three-part series the following year marking the 50th anniversary of Suez. In the latter, she recalled, among other things, Eden's disillusion with the lack of American support for British policy in 1956. The critic A. A. Gill was among those who praised Avon's erudite performance in the Blair documentary (""), while sensing that she appeared not entirely to approve of Cherie Blair.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Avon was 87 when her memoir appeared in 2007. A journalist who interviewed her and her editor, Cate Haste, observed that Avon "seems slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil", but described her as "vigorous and knowing" in conversation. In April 2008 she and Haste appeared at the "Sunday Times" Oxford Literary Festival, the literature for this event observing that, although Avon was perhaps best known for her lament about "the Suez Canal flowing through [her] drawing room", "she was far more than a drawing-room consort".


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Avon died on 15 November 2021 at her home in London, at the age of 101. She was the second longest-lived prime ministerial spouse after Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, widow of Harold Wilson, who died in 2018 aged 102. Her funeral took place on 24 November in Alvediston, where she was laid to rest at her husband's side in the churchyard.


title: Clarissa Eden

text: Lady Avon was played by Jennifer Daniel in Ian Curteis's 1979 drama for BBC television, "Suez 1956". In 2012 she was portrayed by Abigail Cruttenden in Hugh Whitemore's play about the Suez Crisis, "A Marvellous Year for Plums", that opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre. In the first episode of the BBC's "The Hour", also set in 1956, a television producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) was complimented by one of Eden's press officers for a feature about "Lady Eden at home". In the Netflix drama series "The Crown", she was portrayed by Anna Madeley.


title: Fritos

text: Fritos is an American brand of corn chips and dipping sauces that was created in 1932 by Charles Elmer Doolin and produced since 1961 by the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo. Fritos are made by deep-frying extruded whole cornmeal, unlike the similar tortilla chips, which are made from cornmeal and use the nixtamalization process (known as masa). It is one of two brands representing Frito-Lay along with Lay's.


title: Fritos

text: The Frito Company was born in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression. The family of Charles Elmer (C. E.) Doolin (1903–1959) owned the Highland Park Confectionary in San Antonio, and Doolin, twenty-eight at the time, wanted to add a salty snack to their repertoire. He responded to an ad in the "San Antonio Express". The ad, placed by Gustavo Olguin, listed for sale an original recipe for fried corn chips along with an adapted potato ricer and nineteen retail accounts. Doolin bought the small business venture for $100, and began to manufacture the chips in his mother’s kitchen with the help of his father, Charles Bernard Doolin; mother, Daisy Dean Stephenson Doolin; and brother, Earl Doolin. These four founders made up the first board of directors, with Charles Bernard Doolin serving as the first chairman.


title: Fritos

text: The Doolin family began selling Fritos in 1932 under the name of the Frito Corporation, located first in their garage; they soon bought the house next door to expand their operation. In 1933–34, they opened plants in Dallas and Tulsa. In 1936, Fritos were displayed at the Texas Centennial Exposition and the exhibit was moved to the 'Castle of Foods' during the 1938 State Fair of Texas. By 1947, the company had plants in Los Angeles and Denver, and licensed franchises nationwide, including H. W. Lay and Company, which had an exclusive franchise to produce and sell Fritos in the Southeastern United States. As its business expanded, the Frito Company also produced other items, including Cheetos (1948), chili, bean dip, tortilla chips, and other Mexican-inspired treats, along with potato chips, roasted peanuts, fried pork skins, and other snack-food products.


title: Fritos

text: By 1955, the company owned more than fifty production plants, including ones in Hawaii and Venezuela, as well as a number of "Frito farms" across Texas, where Doolin grew corn and other crops for use in his products. The Frito Company was one of the first to invest in Disneyland, and from the park's opening in 1955 had a Casa de Fritos Restaurant there. In 1961, the Frito Company merged with H. W. Lay and Company to become Frito-Lay. In 1965, Frito-Lay merged with the Pepsi-Cola Company to become PepsiCo, one of the world's largest producers of soft drinks and snack foods.


title: Fritos

text: According to "Smithsonian" magazine, C. E. Doolin did not eat meat or salt and was a follower of fellow Texan Herbert M. Shelton, a naturopath who advocated raw foods and fasting as a cure for diseases.


title: Fritos

text: From 1952 to 1967, Frito Kid was the company's official mascot, designed by Keitz & Herndon. The Frito Bandito was its mascot from 1967 until about 1971, and was discontinued due to complaints about the racist Bandito image. He was initially replaced by the Muncha Bunch, a group of cowboys, which then were replaced by W.C. Fritos, modeled after comedian W.C. Fields.


title: HMS Barham (04)

text: HMS "Barham" was one of five s built for the Royal Navy during the early 1910s. Completed in 1915, she was often used as a flagship and participated in the Battle of Jutland during the First World War as part of the Grand Fleet. For the rest of the war, except for the inconclusive action of 19 August 1916, her service generally consisted of routine patrols and training in the North Sea.


title: HMS Barham (04)

text: During the 1920s and 1930s, the ship was assigned to the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Home Fleets. "Barham" played a minor role in quelling the 1929 Palestine riots and the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. The ship was in the Mediterranean when the Second World War began in September 1939, on her voyage home three months later, she accidentally collided with and sank one of her escorting destroyers, .