The Suez Crisis
As the Suez Crisis reached its climax in 1956, the Labour Party opposed Anglo-French attacks on Egypt. On 1 November Lady Avon 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 Mrs Gaitskell replied, "the boys must have their fun". (An alternative version is that Mrs Gaitskell responded, "What I can't stand is the mounted police charging the crowds outside".) Three days later Lady Avon 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.
Read more about this topic: Clarissa Eden, Countess Of Avon
Famous quotes containing the word crisis:
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)