BEN PIMLOTT

Harold Wilson

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins in 1992

This edition first published by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Ben Pimlott 1992

Foreword copyright © Peter Hennessy 2016

Ben Pimlott has the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Harold Wilson, c. 1974 (oil on canvas), Spear, Ruskin (1911–90)/National Portrait Gallery, London, UK/© Stefano Baldini/Bridgeman Images

Illustrations: p. 40, courtesy of the Wilson family. All cartoons courtesy of the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, University of Kent, Canterbury: p. 97, Junior minister, 1945; p. 195, ‘We’re washing our dirty linen in public’ (Vicky) (Daily Mirror); p. 230, Blackpool, 1959 (Vicky) (Solo Syndication); p. 358, ‘When he is worried he walks up and down and hums’ (Vicky) (Solo Syndication); p. 538, ‘It’s not easy’ (Garland) (© Telegraph plc); p. 599, Follow my Leadership (Garland) (© Telegraph plc).

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Source ISBN: 9780008182618

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008182625

Version: 2016-03-10

Dedication

FOR

DANIEL, NATHANIEL AND SETH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Peter Hennessy

Preface

Part One

1 Roots

2 Be Prepared

3 Jesus

4 Beveridge Boy

5 Mines

6 Vodka

7 Bonfire

8 Three Wise Men

9 Nye’s Little Dog

10 The Dog Bites

11 The Man Who Changed His Mind

12 Spherical Thing

13 Leader

14 Heat

Part Two

15 Kitchen

16 Fetish

17 Quick Kill

18 Super-Harold

19 Dog Days

20 Personal Diplomat

21 Aching Tooth

22 Style

23 Strife

24 Carnival

25 Indiarubber

26 Second Coming

27 Slag

28 Birthday Present

29 Vendetta

30 Tricks

31 Ghost

Notes

Sources and Select Bibliography

Index

By the Same Author

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword

by Peter Hennessy

‘In the cycle to which we belong we can see only a fraction of the curve.’

So wrote the statesman and novelist John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps fame.¹

Harold Wilson dominated the political curve during my late adolescence and early manhood and, later, my first years as a journalist. To borrow Winston Churchill’s line on Joseph Chamberlain, Wilson made the political weather² for the great bulk of his thirteen years as leader of the Labour Party between 1963 and 1976, during which he won four of the five general elections he contested and occupied 10 Downing Street from October 1964 to June 1970 and from March 1974 until April 1976.

The UK and its politics have travelled a huge arc on Buchan’s curve since Harold Wilson gave way to an older man, Jim Callaghan, as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in the spring of 1976. Ben Pimlott’s fine biography described that curve superbly up to 1992. It was an instant classic and has become an enduring one from one of Britain’s master biographers of the post-war years, and it is a great sadness to me that Ben is not here to update it to mark the centenary of Wilson’s birth.

How do the politics and policies of the years of the Wilsonian ascendancy strike one now? Excessive hindsight can be a historical blight; but fresh perspectives shaped by elapsed time are a stimulating part of the historian’s tradecraft. For example, there are in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century plentiful resonances from all phases of the Wilson years, between his succeeding Hugh Gaitskell as Labour Party leader in 1963 and his final handing in of his seals of office to the Queen in 1976.

Merely to list some of them tells a story:

• The internal condition of Labour; the tussles between its competing philosophies and factions; the party’s relationships with the trade unions and constituency activists.

• Europe and the referendum question; Britain’s place in the wider world; of punching heavier than its weight³ militarily and diplomatically, plus the deployment of soft power, with the often neuralgic sub-theme of The Bomb and remaining a nuclear weapons state always a lurking question.

• Employment, productivity, the imbalance between finance, services and manufacturing; the state’s role in shaping an industrial strategy and sustaining the country’s scientific and technological base; plus the UK’s thinking above its weight in terms of research and the universities.

This inventory is by no means complete, and how it would intrigue Wilson to revisit it as he absorbed the current scene through the clouds of his trademark pipe smoke were he still with us.

In his absence, let us linger on a few key Wilsonian themes. First, Labour Party management. Wilson was a supple and serpentine party manager. He was a quantum physicist among politicians in his understanding of what it took to keep its volatile subatomic particles together. For these gifts he was often derided – dismissed as a tactician who would all too readily sacrifice long-term strategy to the imperative of the immediate and the pressing. But now, at a time when the Corbyn-led Labour Party is demonstrating fortissimo its most powerful centrifugal tendencies, to the detriment of its indispensable constitutional function of providing sustained and effective opposition to the government, Harold-the-party-manager seems positively lustrous – a reminder that at least a semblance of party coherence is more often than not a first-order matter for Labour. The party’s relations with the unions and the wider Labour movement are integral to this.

Wilson knew how to juggle with and arbitrate between the political philosophies that perpetually compete for the soul of the Labour Party: social democracy; democratic socialism; and a variety of hard-left factions. This skill was matched by his sense of party structure: the constituency membership base and its affiliated trade unionists; the relationship with the Trades Union Congress; the Parliamentary Labour Party; the Shadow Cabinet and the Party’s National Executive Committee and its annual conference. His word power, his sharp wit and his plethora of personal relationships enabled him to pursue his ambition, with considerable success, of turning Labour into the natural party of government, rather than operating in ‘a Conservative country that sometimes votes Labour’, as Reggie Maudling, a former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, liked to put it.⁴

For all his striking achievement in the course of a single summer in 2015 in capturing the base and the leadership apex of the Labour Party (with considerable support from the leaders of the fewer yet larger conglomerate trade unions), Jeremy Corbyn is simply not in the Wilson class. Crucially for Corbyn, his wit, his style, his policies simply do not run in the crucial middle, including the bulk of the PLP. In terms of jumping and clearing the Labour Party’s internal fences, Wilson was a Grand National winner; Corbyn has yet to win a local point-to-point. The gap between them as parliamentary performers in the House of Commons similarly yawns chasm-like. Wilson was born to excel at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Their pre-leadership formation and experience also make for the starkest of contrasts. Wilson, like the classic scholarship boy he was, had prepared meticulously for the Labour leadership and ultimately for the premiership. He knew the Civil Service intimately as a temporary official in the War Cabinet Office,* and rose rapidly through the junior ranks of the Attlee government to become President of the Board of Trade in 1947, at thirty-one the youngest member of a Cabinet since Pitt. A seemingly principled resignation in April 1951, alongside Nye Bevan and John Freeman, in response to health service cuts and the cost of rearmament when the outbreak of conflict in Korea chilled the Cold War still further, opened his credentials to the left of the party in a way his previous technocratic prowess had not.

In opposition Wilson shadowed nearly all the big portfolios, including the Treasury and Foreign Affairs, chaired the premier select committee in the Commons (Public Accounts) and taught himself to be a sharp and often bitingly funny speaker at the despatch box and on the platform alike (he had been rather pedestrian at the Board of Trade). He retained his technocratic edge and, as a trained economist and statistician, was numerate as well as literate. By the time of Gaitskell’s sudden and unexpected death, Wilson had all the gifts and fitted to perfection the mould of the gritty grammar school meritocrat – part of the rising generation that would sweep away the last vestiges of amateurism in Whitehall committee rooms and industrial boardrooms alike.

Wilson, however, never acquired the full trust or affection of many of the right of the Labour Party (several of whom thought he took careerism and opportunism to new heights), but he was admired, respected and feared, especially by his opponents. He was a stunningly effective Leader of the Opposition between February 1963 and October 1964. First Harold Macmillan, in his last, no longer ‘Supermac’ phase, and then the aristocratic Alec Douglas-Home were almost out of central casting as foils for Wilson.

Jeremy Corbyn’s CV on assuming the leadership of the Labour Party was entirely lacking in job experience. His apprenticeship placement had been on Labour’s outer-left rim, as narrow and rigid (if principled) as Wilson’s had been wide, fluid and adaptive. He neither planned for nor expected the party leadership. He was without ministerial or Opposition front-bench experience. In the summer of 2015 it merely seemed Corbyn’s turn to be the traditional tethered goat that the Labour hard left offers up for mainstream leadership candidates to savage. Far from being the sacrificial quadruped, he turned out – to his and everyone else’s surprise – to be the lion of the contest. There could not be a greater contrast of formations than between those of Wilson and Corbyn, this intriguing and unproven figure with carnivorous views and herbivorous ways. Jeremy Corbyn may turn out to be a more effective Labour leader than many expect, but his long-term mission, one suspects, will not include a Wilsonian appetite for capturing the centre of the British electorate and turning Labour into the natural party of government. For that to happen, the fulcrum of British politics would have to shift several degrees to the left.

Wilson, however, did set out in the early months of 1963 to offer himself and his party as a transforming instrument to his country. Like Corbyn’s – though in a very different way – his was a transformative pitch, a blueprint (to use a noun fashionable at the time) for a New Britain. If office fell into his and his party’s hands it would not be a status quo or a ‘better yesterday’ (to adapt a phrase of Ralf Dahrendorf’s⁵) premiership or administration. His stall, which he laid out with great verve throughout the election year of 1964, was both brilliantly simple and fiendishly difficult – to project the British economy onto a new and sustained trajectory of science, technology and export-led growth substantially higher than achieved so far in the years since 1945. Wilson set himself a very high bar against which he and his ministry would be judged, and the brilliance of his language, the grittiness of his style and the seemingly comprehensive approach to ‘purposive’ (a favourite adjective) government and planning plainly persuaded a sizeable slice of the electorate as to its achievability. At the October 1964 general election a Conservative majority of nearly a hundred in the House of Commons was converted to a Labour one of six.

It was a dazzling performance and, for all the frustrations and underachievement that followed, it still has a tingle to it today that echoes in the latest approaches to growth, science and technology and the planning of long-term investment that are the currency of industrial and infrastructural politics in 2016. If Wilson were taking a centenarian’s look at British politics today he might allow himself a dash of I-told-you-soing.

In what I still regard as the signature speech of Harold Wilson’s long political life, he found a theme at the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough on 1 October 1963 that served not only to unite all shades of Labour opinion but also caught the wider appetite for a modernity that would replace privilege with meritocracy. We learned from Ben Pimlott’s biography when it was first published that Wilson did not finally decide on this theme until the night before he delivered his conference peroration, and that he did so at the prompting of his Political Secretary, Marcia Williams, now Lady Falkender.⁶

Wilson’s speech built upon his analysis of the deeper causes of Britain’s relative economic slippage by providing an outline of the attitudes and the ‘new industries which would make us once again one of the foremost industrial nations of the world’. As Ben wrote, ‘The climax was a declaration that enraptured his audience, made a profound impact on the press, and was frequently to be quoted – at first in his favour and then against him, in later years’:⁷

In all our plans for the future, we are re-defining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution. But that revolution cannot become a reality unless we are prepared to make far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our whole system of society.

The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated methods on either side of industry … In the Cabinet room and the board room alike those charged with the control of our affairs must be ready to think and to speak the language of our scientific age.⁸

From that autumn day on the Yorkshire coast, any political word-association game would twin ‘white heat’ with ‘Harold Wilson’.

As a country we are still searching for that Holy Grail of full employment, high productivity, export-led prowess sustained by the technical ingenuity and the applied little grey cells of a well-trained, flexible, agile and highly motivated world-class workforce. Today, in, for example, Michael Heseltine’s highly influential report on growth for the Cameron coalition government, No Stone Unturned,⁹ the ingredients of such a strategy would be different, stressing a far greater charge of private sector input within a public/private mix and no trace of the revived or new state enterprises that animated Wilson’s view from the Scarborough Conference Hall. But the clarion call to embrace new technology and the rekindling of once great industrial powerhouses has more than a dash of Scarborough about it.

The failure to make manifest the promise of Scarborough has blighted Wilson’s reputation from the late 1960s until today, I think now (though once I did not) to probably an excessive degree. It’s not just that Britain or ‘England’, as Disraeli called it, is ‘a very difficult country to move … and one in which there is more disappointment to be looked for than success!’.¹⁰ The very nature of the state did not lend itself to becoming the production engineer of such a transformation. We simply did not possess what the economist Chalmers Johnson later called the kind of ‘developmental state’ required.¹¹

In my judgement, Wilson knew this when he rose to bathe his Scarborough audience in the warmth of the ‘white heat’ of the longed-for technological revolution. He said as much in an agenda-setting speech he called ‘The New Britain’ in Birmingham Town Hall on 19 January 1964: ‘We must reconstruct our institutions … This means a new sense of drive in the higher direction of our national affairs; it means changes in our departmental structure to reflect the scientific and technological realities of the new age.’¹²

For a fundamental change in the structure of Whitehall’s economic and industrial ministries was also central to the plan. In October 1964 he split the Treasury, leaving it a ministry of finance and public spending and placing responsibility for growth and planning in a new Department of Economic Affairs under his mercurial deputy, George Brown, whom he had defeated in the race to succeed Gaitskell. A second new department, the Ministry of Technology, was created as the ‘white heat’ department and placed in the charge of the left-wing leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, Frank Cousins. The hope was that these institutional innovations would fuel a take-off for the British economy as laid out in the French-style National Plan unveiled by Brown in September 1965.

A foreword is not the place for an autopsy on the failure of Wilson’s grand design. Ben’s pages carefully and vividly anatomise how it played out, not least how the anticipated ‘creative tension’ between Jim Callaghan’s Treasury and George Brown’s DEA produced more tension than creativity, especially when the showdown came between keeping the pound at $2.80 on the exchanges rather than devaluing and dashing for growth during the economic crisis of July 1966, when the balance of payments (the great economic totem of the age) worsened on the back of a protracted seamen’s strike and the government resorted to deflationary measures and an incomes policy.

Wilson still sought new ways of stimulating the British economy to rise to a higher and more productive trajectory after the setback of July 1966 and the inevitable – but still humiliating – devaluation of the pound in November 1967 from $2.80 to $2.40. With his favourite minister, the dazzling Barbara Castle, at the Department of Employment and Productivity (the old Ministry of Labour by another name), Wilson sought to curb the power of the unions and the rash of ‘wildcat’ strikes that were such a familiar Sixties phenomenon with a set of proposals in a white paper they called In Place of Strife. This went down in flames in June 1969, battered by hostile ordnance hurled by the National Executive Committee, the wider Labour movement and, finally, a Cabinet prepared to settle for a feeble ‘solemn and binding’ undertaking from the TUC to spare no effort in curbing industrial action. The ‘white heat’ speech of 1963 and the promise of 1964 were tarnished for ever.

They were also unfulfilled. As Sir Alec Cairncross, Head of the Government Economic Service from 1964 to 1969, put it in his audit of the British economy since 1945, ‘the target assumed’ by the 1965 National Plan was ‘an average 3.8% rate of growth compared with an average rate of only 2.9% from 1950 to 1964 and a rate actually achieved between 1964 and 1970 of only 2.6%’.¹³ There was no leap to growth; no new trajectory for the British economy.

Wilson did not reach the benchmark he had drawn for himself and his governments. In pursuit of his grail of growth, Wilson also cut against his own Commonwealth instincts and turned to what at that stage was the unarguable economic success story of the Common Market of the six original members of the European Economic Community led by West Germany and France. He and Brown (moved to the Foreign Office from the DEA after the 1966 crisis) determined to persuade sceptical Cabinet colleagues of the EEC route to economic salvation. They set off for a round of conversations across the European capitals, declaring that they would not take ‘No’ for an answer as Harold Macmillan had been forced to by President Charles de Gaulle of France in January 1963, following the first UK application. De Gaulle rather liked Brown calling him ‘Charlie’ when the Harold and George show passed through Paris – but he said ‘No’ again anyway.

At heart Wilson was a Commonwealth and an Atlanticist man, not a European man. A strong believer in the NATO alliance (very much a creation of Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the Attlee administration in which Wilson was so proud to have served). Wilson is remembered fondly by today’s Labour left for setting his face against sending British troops to fight in the Vietnam War despite intense pressure from President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, who repeatedly said that even a platoon of Black Watch bagpipers would do. Wilson’s argument was partly that the UK was doing its duty in Asia fighting (and winning) the ‘Confrontation’ with Indonesia.

His handling of the perennial question of Labour and The Bomb was also masterly. Even though it was initially Labour’s bomb (Attlee took the decision to procure a UK atomic weapon in a Cabinet committee in January 1947; though the first test took place under a restored Churchill premiership in October 1952), the H-bomb era brought the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament into existence in 1958, which, briefly, captured the Labour Party Conference in 1960–61. For a time as Leader of the Opposition, Wilson gave the left the impression that though he was a multilateral disarmer, he did not believe Britain should accept the high level of dependence on the United States implicit in the purchase of submarine-launched Polaris missiles in the deal Macmillan struck with Kennedy at Nassau in December 1962. Labour’s manifesto for the 1964 general election, Let’s Go with Labour for the New Britain, said of the new system: ‘it will not be independent, it will not be British and it will not deter’ and pledged ‘the renegotiation of the Nassau Agreement’.¹⁴

Yet, in office, he persuaded successive Cabinet committees and finally the full Cabinet that Polaris should be purchased for the Royal Navy, whose submarine service would operate four boats to ensure that at least one was at sea at all times – so-called ‘continuous at-sea deterrence’, which has been maintained from 14 June 1969 to today, ever since the Navy took over the strategic deterrent role from the ‘V’ bombers of the Royal Air Force.¹⁵ Once more there are resonances for the present era of Labour leadership. Jeremy Corbyn, currently Vice-President of CND, has been a unilateral disarmer all his political life. His shadow Foreign Secretary, Hilary Benn, and his shadow Defence Secretary, Maria Eagle (at the time of writing), are adherents of the still current Labour policy of replacing the Trident missile-carrying Vanguard-class submarines with sufficient so-called ‘Successor’ boats to sustain continuous at-sea deterrence into the 2050s. Yet the nuclear policy with which Labour will fight the 2020 general election is far from clear given its leader’s connections (he has already made plain he would never authorise its use¹⁶) and the party’s current defence review jointly led by Maria Eagle and the anti-nuclear Ken Livingstone. The names may have changed but the nature and line-ups of this debate would be deeply familiar to Wilson.

So would another nerve-stretching element in the 2016 political season – Europe and the referendum. Vernon Bogdanor has made the very shrewd observation that Harold Wilson is one of the very few British prime ministers who has not, in one way or another, been eaten up by the European Question (despite the failure of that second EEC application) because of the way he handled the 1975 referendum on whether the UK should leave the EEC or remain, just two and a half years after acceding to it in January 1973. Bogdanor believes that this was ‘perhaps Wilson’s greatest triumph’,¹⁷ a bold claim that has much in it, especially as he also described Wilson’s position on the EEC in the early 1970s as ‘unheroic’. Professor Bogdanor recalled that when Roy Jenkins, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in 1972, after Labour promised a referendum on Common Market membership if returned to power, with others following,

Wilson told the Shadow Cabinet that while they had been indulging their consciences, it had been left to him to wade through s**t [to keep the Labour Party together]. Yet Bernard Donoughue, head of Wilson’s Policy Unit after 1974, was surely right to say that while Heath had taken British Establishment into Europe,¹⁸ it was Wilson who brought in the British people.¹⁹

A justifiable claim given the two-thirds-to-one-third vote in 1975 to stay in. But, as Professor Bogdanor noted, in the run-up to the coming remain/leave referendum in 2016 or 2017, ‘the British establishment remains firmly attached to Europe, even though the people remain full of doubts’.²⁰

The European question has been a near-perpetual of the UK’s national political conversation since Jean Monnet turned up almost out of the blue in London from Paris in May 1950 bearing his and Robert Schuman’s plan for a Coal and Steel Community.²¹ It has been a particularly vexing element in our political biorhythms ever since, not least because it cannot be cast in the traditional left–right mould that normally shapes our party political competition.

Gazing wider than Europe, how does Harold Wilson fit the standard model of British politics since he entered the House of Commons in 1945? First of all, what is the ‘standard model’? In my judgement, it’s this: post-war UK electoral competitions have seen a jostling for pole position between liberal capitalism (in my view, the best instrument for innovation and economic growth so far discovered) and social democracy (the best mechanism so far created for redistribution and a measure of social justice). The voting public tends to wish for a judicious mix of each, and the job of Parliament and Whitehall is to attempt to achieve this by reconciling and blending these two philosophies. Occasionally, the electorate votes for a sharp dose of one rather than the other.

Early Wilson benefited from a ‘sharp dose’ phase if you take the general elections of 1964 and March 1966 (when Labour’s majority shot up to ninety-seven) together. It was, along with 1945 and, perhaps, 1997, one of the shining opportunities for radical centre-leftist policies in the UK. In June 1970 when, to near universal surprise, Wilson lost to Ted Heath, who was propelled into Downing Street by a Conservative majority of forty-four, it appeared the electorate had plumped for a shot of liberal capitalism (if the Tory manifesto A Better Tomorrow22 was to be believed). But the Heath U-turns, in the face of unemployment nudging a million people (a shocking statistic for the first fifteen or twenty years after the war), rather belied the free-market impulses of the 1970 prospectus.

The general election of February 1974, which Heath called on the back of the second miners’ strike inside two years, did not produce a shining hour for either of the competing political philosophies. Heath went to the country in a mood of ‘Who governs?’, and the electorate replied ‘Not sure’ twice, with Wilson taking office at the head of a minority government in March 1974 and with the slimmest of overall majorities in October 1974. Though his last administration tried to reach a new deal with the trade unions (the ‘social contract’) and offered a mildly interventionist industrial strategy, it was a time for coping, for getting by rather than for white – or any other – heat. With inflation around 25 per cent and the balance of payments reeling from a quadrupling of world oil prices following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Wilson’s extraordinary array of political gifts was almost entirely devoted to holding the line through yet another incomes policy (which is why it is easy to forget just how skilfully he played his party and the country in the run-up to the 1975 referendum on Europe).

I have concentrated in this foreword on the special selling points Wilson displayed before the electorate in the promising glow of his first leadership of the Opposition and his early days as Prime Minister, as well as the extraordinary feat of party and wider political management he exhibited in 1975 (‘and people say I have no sense of strategy’, he said to his Principal Private Secretary, Ken Stowe, once the result was in²³). But rereading Ben’s biography brings back just how relentlessly demanding the job of prime minister is. The crises are endless and Pimlott’s pages crackle with Wilson-the-crisis-manager. There was the perpetual problem of holding the thin red line of the sterling exchange rate in the 1964–70 government, when the seemingly constant balance of payments problems placed, as soon as they seriously deteriorated, instant pressure on the pound as the world’s second reserve currency after the US dollar in that age of Fixed exchange rates From November 1965 there was the running sore of Rhodesia after the Smith government unilaterally declared independence, presenting Wilson in both his Downing Street spells with one of the most stretching problems created by the withdrawal from Empire. And from 1968–69 a recrudescence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland was another great absorber of time and political nervous energy. And all the while, throughout his premiership, the ever-present perils of the Cold War lurked.

It is not surprising, therefore, that when he finally announced he was standing down, just days after his sixtieth birthday, he was worn out – if still chirpy in his pawkier moments – having sat almost continually on Labour’s front bench since the late summer of 1945. His longevity at or near the top of his party, his temperament, his gifts, his cockiness combined with social edginess – the sheer variety of Harolds he could put on display according to need or taste – made him the richest of characters for the biographer’s art. And in Pimlott on Wilson, subject and biographer were supremely well met.

Rereading his Harold Wilson serves only to remind us what a huge loss Ben Pimlott was to the historians’ trade and to political commentary. Tracing the Buchanite curves of contemporary British history as we travel them is so much harder without Ben. ‘What would Ben have made of this?’ is a thought that still crosses my mind when an event breaks or a political shift becomes apparent, as, for example, the weekend in September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership race. But, above all, what would Ben Pimlott have made of the Wilson legacy in the centenary year of Harold’s birth? It is a matter of great regret – personal and professional – that this question must go unanswered.

Peter Hennessy, FBA,

Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History,

Queen Mary, University of London.

South Ronaldsay, Walthamstow and Westminster.

December–January 2015–16

Preface

In the old days, writing the life of a public figure was frequently part of a process of canonization. Only after the subject was respectably dead would it be attempted, and then by arrangement between the executors and a suitable admirer, with the implicit purpose of enhancing the reputation of the deceased. A customary part of the ritual was for the author to declare at the beginning of the book that the co-operation of the family had been provided unconditionally, and that no pressure had been exerted whatsoever. Such a work was known as the ‘official’ or ‘authorized’ biography.

This book is neither official nor authorized, but it would be untrue to say that I have not been under any pressure while writing it. Pressure – from Lord Wilson’s former supporters and opponents in politics, from Whitehall and Fleet Street confidants and critics, and from his personal friends and enemies – has been unremitting. At the same time, it has always been courteous, usually charming and often – unless I was very careful – beguiling. Indeed, as a way of getting to know and understand my subject, it has been invaluable, as much for the appreciation of the feelings which he and the politics of his time aroused, as for the details of the arguments that were put to me.

I have a great many debts. The first is to the Wilsons who have been unfailingly kind and helpful. In particular, I have greatly benefited from conversations with Lord and Lady Wilson, and Robin Wilson. I am also most grateful to them for family papers, photographs and other documents.

Several people have helped with the research. I would especially like to thank Anne Baker, who investigated a number of collections of private papers on my behalf with the greatest sensitivity and professional skill. I am also grateful to Andrew Thomas, who conducted interviews in Huddersfield and Huyton, and Gerard Daly, who examined Labour Party papers at the Labour Museum in Manchester. Among the many archivists and librarians who responded to my queries and were generous with their time, I should like to thank, in particular, Stephen Bird, formerly at the Labour Party Library in Walworth Road and now at the National Museum of Labour History; Dr Angela Raspin, at the British Library of Political and Economic Science; Helen Langley, at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Christine Woodland, at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University; Dr Correlli Barnett at Churchill College, Cambridge; Caroline Dalton at New College, D.A. Rees at Jesus College and Christine Ritchie at University College, Oxford; and Ruth Winstone, editor of the Tony Benn Diaries. I am grateful to the large number of people who helped me by correspondence or on the telephone. For sending me documentary material, I should like to thank Michael Crick, Francis Wheen, Sir Alec Cairncross, Lord Young of Dartington, Lord Jay, David Edgerton, Mervyn Jones and Ron Hayward. I am most grateful to Lord Jenkins for allowing me to see a manuscript copy of his autobiography, before it was published, and to Tony Benn, for letting me rummage around in his basement archive.

I am grateful to the following for permission to quote copyright material: Jonathan Cape (B. Pimlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton; P.M. Williams (ed.), The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell), Hamish Hamilton Ltd (J. Morgan (ed.), The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, 3 Vols.; Richard Crossman, The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman), David Higham Associates (Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 2 Vols.), Hutchinson (Mary Wilson, New Poems; Tony Benn, Diaries), Michael Joseph (H. Wilson, Purpose in Politics, and Memoirs: the Making of a Prime Minister), Macmillan Publishers Ltd (Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre), and Manchester University Press (M. Dupree (ed.), Lancashire and Whitehall: The Diary of Raymond Streat). For the use of unpublished papers and documents I am grateful to Harold Ainley (Ainley papers), Tony Benn (Tony Benn papers), Bodleian Library (Attlee papers, Lord George-Brown papers, Goodhart papers, and Anthony Greenwood papers), British Library of Political and Economic Science (Beveridge papers, Dalton papers, and Shinwell papers), Lord Cledwyn (Cledwyn papers), John Cousins (Frank Cousins papers), Susan Crosland (Crosland papers), Anne Crossman (Crossman papers), Livia Gollancz (Victor Gollancz papers), the Gordon Walker family (Gordon-Walker papers), Lady Greenwood (Anthony Greenwood papers), Lord and Lady Kennet (Kennet papers), Labour Party Library (Labour Party archives), Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (Maurice Edelman papers and Clive Jenkins papers), the Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford (Cole papers, Fabian Society papers and Herbert Morrison papers), Hon. Francis Noel-Baker (Noel-Baker papers), National Museum of Labour History, Manchester (Parliamentary Labour Party papers), Frieda Warman-Brown (Lord George-Brown papers), Ben Whitaker (Ben Whitaker papers), the Wilson family (Wilson family papers).

I am extremely grateful to the following people, who have talked to me in connection with this book: Harold Ainley, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, Tony Benn, Sir Kenneth Berrill, H.A.R. Binney, Lord Bottomley, Professor Arthur Brown, Sir Max Brown, Sir Alec Cairncross, Lord Callaghan, Bridget Cash, Baroness Castle, Lord Cledwyn, Brian Connell, John Cousins, Lord Cudlipp, Tam Dalyell, Lord Donoughue, Baroness Falkender, Peggy Field, Michael Foot, Paul Foot, John Freeman, Lord Glenamara, Geoffrey Goodman, Lord Goodman, Joe Haines, Lord Harris of Greenwich, the late Dame Judith Hart, Roy Hattersley, Ron Hayward, Lord Healey, Janet Hewlett-Davies, Lord Houghton, Lord Hunt of Tamworth, Henry James, Lord Jay, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, the late Peter Jenkins, Jack Jones, Lady Kennet, Lord Kennet, Lord Kissin, David Leigh, Lord Lever, Sir Trevor Lloyd-Hughes, Lord Longford, Lord Lovell-Davies, David Marquand, Lord Marsh, Lord Mayhew, Lord Mellish, Ian Mikardo, Jane Mills, Sir Derek Mitchell, Sir John Morgan, Lord Murray, Sir Michael Palliser, Enoch Powell, Merlyn Rees, William Reid, Jo Richardson, George Ridley, Lord Rodgers, Andrew Roth, A.J. Ryan, Lord Scanlon, Lord Shawcross, Peter Shore, Professor Robert Steel, Sir Sigmund Sternburg, Sir Kenneth Stowe, Lord Thomson of Monifieth, Alan Watkins, Ben Whitaker, Sir Oliver Wright, Lord Wyatt of Weeford and Sir Philip Woodfield. I also interviewed a number of other people who prefer not to be named. Where it has not been possible to give the source of a quotation in the notes, I have used the words ‘Confidential interview’. I apologize for the frequency with which I have had to resort to this formula. Andrew Thomas interviewed Harold Ainley in Huddersfield, and Jim Keight, Ron Longworth and Phil MacCarthy in the North-West. I would like to thank them as well.

I am deeply grateful to Professor David Marquand who has read the whole of my manuscript, and to Dr Hugh Davies who has read the sections which touch on economic questions. Their careful and detailed comments, based on wide experience and expert knowledge, have been an invaluable help. More than is usually the case, however, it needs to be stressed that the opinions expressed in this book are those of the author alone. I am greatly indebted to Anne-Marie Rule, who typed the manuscript with her usual speed, care and professional skill, who I always have in mind as my first audience, and whose many kindnesses are part of the background to my work. I am grateful for secretarial and other much valued assistance, at various stages of the project, to Audrey Coppard, Harriet Lodge, Susan Proctor, Kim Vernon, Terry Mayer and Joanne Winning. I would also like to thank my colleagues and students at Birkbeck, who have provided an intellectual atmosphere, at once stimulating and relaxed, that creates the ideal conditions for research.

I wish to express my gratitude to Stuart Proffitt, the ideal publisher, at HarperCollins; to Rebecca Wilson, my hawk-eyed, perfectionist and tireless editor, who has been a joy to work with; and to Melanie Haselden for imaginative picture research. I would also like to thank Giles Gordon, my friend, literary agent and therapeutic counsellor. It was Giles who – over a very pleasant lunch in 1988 – was pretty much responsible for setting the whole thing in motion.

Other friends have helped in ways too numerous to mention. I should like, however, to express my special gratitude to David and Linda Valentine, and to Susannah York, who – with immense kindness – lent me their respective houses on the Ionian island of Paxos, where a large part of this book was written.

Most of all I wish to thank my wife, Jean Seaton, my cleverest and most inspiring critic, about whom I do not have words to say enough. Her insight and her passion for ideas have been vital to this book, as to everything I write.

Ben Pimlott

Gower Street

London WC1

September 1992

Part One

1

ROOTS

When James Harold Wilson was born in Cowersley, near Huddersfield, on 11 March 1916, his father Herbert was as happy and prosperous as he was ever to be in the course of a fitful working life. The cause of Herbert’s good fortune was the war. Nineteen months of conflict had turned Huddersfield into a boom town, putting money into the pockets of those employed by the nation’s most vital industry, the production of high explosives for use on the Western Front. Before Harold had reached the age of conscious memory, the illusion of wealth had been destroyed, never to return, by the Armistice. Harold’s youth was to be dominated by the consequences of this private set-back and by a defiant, purposeful, family hope that, through virtuous endeavour, the future might restore a lost sense of well-being.

Behind the endeavour, and the feeling of loss, was a sense of family tradition. Both Herbert and his wife Ethel had a pride in their heritage, as in their skills and their religion, which – they believed – set them apart. When, in 1963, Harold Wilson poured scorn on Sir Alec Douglas-Home as a ‘fourteenth Earl’, the Tory Prime Minister mildly pointed out that, if you came to think about it, his opponent was the fourteenth Mr Wilson. It was one of Sir Alec’s better jokes. But it was also unintentionally appropriate. The Wilsons, though humble, were a deeply rooted clan.

They came originally from the lands surrounding the Abbey of Rievaulx, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The connection was of very long standing: through parish records a line of descent can be traced from a fourteenth-century Thomas Wilson, villein of the Abbey lands.¹ The link with the locality remained close until the late nineteenth century, and was still an active part of family lore in Harold’s childhood: as a twelve-year-old, Harold submitted an essay on ‘Rievaulx Abbey’ to a children’s magazine. Herbert knew the house near to the Abbey where his forebears had lived. In his later years in Cornwall, he called his new bungalow ‘Rievaulx’,² and Harold included the name in his title when he became a peer.

‘When Alexander Lord Home was created the first Earl of Home and Lord Dunglass, in 1605’, researchers into Harold’s ancestry have pointed out, ‘there had already been seven or eight Wilsons in direct line of succession at Rievaulx.’³ Through many generations, Wilsons seemed to celebrate the antiquity of their family in the naming of their children. Herbert and Ethel called their son Harold, after Ethel’s brother Harold Seddon, a politician in Australia. But Harold’s first name, James, belonged to the Wilsons, starting with James Wilson, a weaver who farmed family lands at Helmsley, near Rievaulx, and died in 1613.⁴ Thereafter James was the most frequently used forename for eldest or inheriting sons. Thus James the weaver begat William, whose lineal descendants were Thomas, William, William, James, John, James, James, John, James, James, John, James, before James Herbert, father to James Harold, whose first son, born in 1943, was named Robin James, and grew up knowing that there had been James Wilsons for hundreds of years. Indeed, Harold was not just the twentieth or so Mr Wilson, but the ninth James Wilson in the direct line since the accession of the Stuarts.

Wilsons did not stray more than a few miles from the Abbey for several centuries. The religious upheaval of the Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century brought a conversion from Anglicanism to Nonconformity, an affiliation which the family retained and retains. Otherwise there were few disturbances to the pattern of a smallholding, yeoman existence, in which meagre rewards from farming were eked out by an income from minor, locally useful, crafts. Not until the nineteenth century did the importance of agriculture as a means of livelihood decline for the Wilson family.

It was Harold’s great-grandfather John, born in 1817, who first loosened the historic bond with the Abbey garth. John started work as a farmer and village shoemaker, taking over from his father and grandfather the tenancy of a farm in the manor of Rievaulx and Helmsley, and living a style of life that had altered little for the Wilsons since the Reformation. John married Esther Cole, a farmer’s daughter from the next parish of Old Byland, close to Rievaulx. (During Harold’s childhood, Herbert took his family to visit Old Byland, where they stayed with Cole cousins who ran the local inn.) In the harsh economic climate of the 1840s, however, it became difficult to make an adequate living from the traditional family occupations. At the same time, the loss of trade that had thrown thousands out of work and onto the parish in many rural areas of England, created new opportunities of a securely salaried kind. John Wilson had the good fortune, and resourcefulness, to take one of them.

In 1850, Helmsley Workhouse was in need of a new Master and Relieving Officer (for granting ‘outdoor’ relief). The incumbent had been forced to resign after an enquiry into his drunkenness and debts. At first, John Wilson agreed to take his place for a fortnight, pending the choice of a successor. The election which followed was taken with the utmost seriousness by the Helmsley Parish Guardians. An advertisement in the local newspaper produced fourteen husband-and-wife teams for the joint posts of Master and Matron of the Workhouse, which took both male and female paupers. References were submitted, all fourteen were interviewed and six were shortlisted. The ensuing contest, by the exhaustive ballot system, was tense. Though Wilson was well known locally, and had the advantage of being Master pro tem, there was strong opposition to his appointment. After the first vote, he was running in third place. After the second, with four candidates still in the race, Wilson tied with a Mr Jackson at 14 each. In the run-off, Wilson and Jackson tied again. Fortunately, Wilson was still owed two weeks’ salary by the previous Master, for the period in which he had replaced him. This tipped the scales. The minutes of the meeting record that the Chairman gave his casting vote in favour of Wilson, and declared John Wilson and Esther his wife duly elected.⁵ It was scarcely an elevated appointment. The accommodation was so restricted that the new Master and Matron were permitted to take only one of their children in with them. Yet, it was a decisive turning-point.

John was a man of restless ambition. He continued to farm the lands at Helmsley, and the appointment was partly a way of supplementing a small income. But there was more to it than that, as his later career shows. John not only became the first Helmsley Wilson to take a public office: he was also the first of his line with a vision of a future that extended beyond the parish. In 1853 he and his wife applied for and obtained posts as Master and Matron at the York Union Workhouse, Huntingdon Road, York, at salaries of £40 and £20 each, with the prospect of an increase to £50 and £30 after a year. This was appreciably more than the £55 in total which they had received at Helmsley, though it involved moving away from the small community, and the lands, which Wilsons had farmed for centuries.

The Wilsons’ desire to better themselves did not stop there. Two years after arriving at York Union, they felt secure enough to bargain their joint salaries up from £80 to £100. With this they were prepared to rest content, turning the York Union into a family undertaking, in which one of their daughters was also involved as Assistant Matron. They retired in 1879 when John Wilson became seriously ill. He died two years later. Esther survived him, and lived in York until her own death in 1895. Both she and her husband had received a pension in recognition of twenty-six years at the Workhouse in which they had ‘most efficiently, successfully and to the satisfaction of this Union discharged their duties …’⁶

John and Esther’s son James, Harold’s grandfather, was the last of Harold’s forebears to be born at Rievaulx. James finally severed the ancient link, becoming the first to give up the husbandry of the lands around the Abbey ruins. He moved to Manchester in 1860, at the age of seventeen, apprenticed as a draper, and later worked as a warehouse salesman. He was also the first to wed out of the locality. It was a significant match: his marriage to Eliza Thewlis was a socially aspirant one. Eliza’s father, Titus Thewlis, was a Huddersfield cotton-warp manufacturer who employed 104 workers (including, as was later revealed, some sweated child labour). This might have meant a generous dowry. Unfortunately for the Wilsons, however, Eliza was one of eight children.⁷ The James Wilsons themselves had five children and were never well off.

Though the Thewlis connection brought little money, it provided a new influence, with a vital impact on the next generation: an interest in political activity. ‘Why are you in politics?’ Harold was asked in an interview when he became Labour Leader. ‘Because politics are in me, as far back as I can remember,’ he replied. ‘Farther than that: they were in my family for generations before me …’⁸ Harold was not the fourteenth political member of his family, but he was far from being the first. According to Wilson legend, Grandfather James had been an ardent radical who celebrated the 1906 Liberal landslide by instructing the Sunday school of which he was superintendent to sing the hymn, ‘Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea/Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free.’⁹

There were Labour, as well as Liberal, elements in the family history. Herbert Wilson’s brother Jack (Harold’s uncle), who later set up the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions and eventually became HM Inspector of Technical Colleges, had an early career as an Independent Labour Party campaigner. In the elections of 1895 and 1900, he had acted as agent to Keir Hardie, the ILP’s founder. The most notable politician on Herbert’s side of the family, however, was Eliza Wilson’s brother, Herbert Thewlis, a Manchester alderman who became Liberal Lord Mayor of the city. Harold’s great-uncle Herbert happened to be constituency president in northwest Manchester, when Winston Churchill fought a by-election there in 1908, caused by the need to recontest the seat (in accordance with current practice) following his appointment as President of the Board of Trade. Alderman Thewlis assisted as agent, and Herbert Wilson, Harold’s father, helped as his deputy. It was a famous battle rather than a glorious one. Churchill lost the seat, and had to find another in Dundee. Nevertheless, the Churchill link was a source of gratification in the Wilson family, as the fame of the rising young politician grew, and Harold was regaled with stories about it as a child.

Herbert Wilson’s main period of political involvement had occurred before the Churchill contest. Herbert’s story was one of promise denied. Born at Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Lancashire, on 12 December 1882, he had attended local schools, and had been considered an able pupil, remaining in full-time education until he was sixteen – an unusual occurrence for all but the professional classes. There was talk of university, but not the money to turn talk into reality. Instead, he trained at Manchester Technical College and entered the dyestuffs industry in Manchester. Though he acquired skills and qualifications as an industrial chemist, it was an uncertain trade. In the early years of the century fluctuations in demand and mounting competition brought periods of unemployment. It was during these that Herbert became involved in political campaigning.¹⁰

In 1906, at the age of twenty-three, Herbert Wilson married Ethel Seddon, a few months his senior, at the Congregational Church in Openshaw, Lancashire. Ethel also had political connections, though of a different kind. Her father, William Seddon, was a railway clerk, and she had a railway ancestry on both sides of her family. The working-class element in Harold’s recent background, though already a couple of generations distant, was more Seddon than Wilson: Ethel’s two grandfathers had been a coalman and a mechanic on the railways, and her grandmothers had been the daughters of an ostler and a labourer.¹¹

Where Wilsons had been individualists, Seddons were collectivists. William Seddon was an ardent supporter of trade unionism, and so was his son Harold, the apple of the family’s eye. Ethel’s brother, of whom she was immensely proud, had emigrated to the Kalgoorlie goldfields in Western Australia, worked on the construction of the transcontinental railway, and made his political fortune through the Australian trade union movement.¹² As tales of Harold Seddon’s prosperity filtered back in letters, other Seddons joined him, including his father William, who got a job with the government railways.¹³ During Harold Wilson’s childhood, Ethel’s thoughts were always partly with the Seddon relatives, to whom she was devoted, and who, in her imagination, inhabited a world of sunshine and plenty.

Such links with the world of public affairs – actively political uncles on both sides – added to the Wilsons’ sense of difference. Yet there was nothing grand about the connections, and there was no wealth. Social definitions are risky, because they mean different things in different generations. The Wilsons, however, are easy enough to place: they were typically, and impeccably, northern lower-middle-class. Their stratum was quite different from that of Harold’s later opponent, and Oxford contemporary, Edward Heath, whose manual working-class roots are indisputable.¹⁴ But Herbert and Ethel did not belong, either, to the world of provincial doctors, lawyers and headteachers. In modern jargon, they were neither C2S nor ABs, but CIS.

On 12 March 1909, a year after the Churchill excitement, Ethel gave birth to her first child, Marjorie. Herbert’s political diversions now ceased, and for seven years the Wilsons’ attention was taken up by their cheerful, intelligent, rotund only daughter. Perhaps it was the unpredictable nature of the dyestuffs industry which deterred them from enlarging their family. At any rate, in 1912 the vagaries of the trade uprooted them from Manchester – the first of a series of nomadic moves that punctuated their lives for the next thirty years. Herbert’s search for suitable employment took him to the Colne Valley, closer to Wilson family shrines. Here he obtained a job with the firm of John W. Leitch and Co. in Milnsbridge, later moving to the rival establishment of L. B. Holliday and Co. Milnsbridge was one mile west of the boundary of Huddersfield. Herbert rented 4 Warneford Road, Cowersley, a small terraced house not far from the Leitch works and adequate for the family’s needs: with three bedrooms, a sitting-room, dining-room, and lavatory and bathroom combined, as well as small gardens back and front.¹⁵

The chemical industry was already fast expanding in Huddersfield and the outlying towns. Established early in the nineteenth century, local manufacturing had been built up partly by Read Holliday (founder of L. B. Holliday) and partly by Dan Dawson (whose successors were Leitch of Milnsbridge), who developed the use of coal tar. By 1900 Huddersfield was proudly claiming to be the nation’s chief centre for the production of coal-tar products, intermediates and dyestuffs. There were a score of factories servicing the woollen and worsted mills, providing a series of complex processes which went into the dyeing of cloth, including ‘scouring, tentering, drying, milling, blowing, raising, cropping, pressing and cutting’.¹⁶

Huddersfield, like other industrial towns, felt the disturbing impact of German rivalry in the years before the First World War. What seemed a threat to the area in peacetime, however, became a golden opportunity as soon as the fighting began. Dyestuffs were needed for the textile and paper industries. With German supplies no longer available, British production had to increase. ‘It was not until after War had broken out with Germany’, a Huddersfield handbook observed, and the humiliating fact of our too great dependence upon that country for many valuable, nay, vital products, became unpleasantly manifest that the general British public, and even Government circles, began to realize how essential to the life of a great nation was a well-organized and highly developed coal tar industry.’ There was also another, fortuitous aspect: namely, that most high explosives used in modern warfare, in particular picric acid, trinitrotoluene (TNT) and trinitrophenylmethylmitramine (tetryl), were derivatives of coal tar, whose use and properties were familiar to the dyestuffs industry. Thus, Herbert’s first employer in Milnsbridge, Leitch and Co. (which described itself as a firm of ‘Aniline Dye Manufacturers and Makers of Intermediate Products, and Nitro Compounds for Explosives’) claimed to have been the first makers of TNT in Britain, having started to manufacture the substance as early as 1902.

H. H. Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister in 1914, was a Huddersfield man. By leading his government into the Great War, he transformed the economy of his home town. As the importance of artillery bombardment during the great battles in Flanders and northern France grew, so the demand for high-explosive shells became insatiable. Production in Huddersfield increased tenfold, with John W. Leitch and Co. a major beneficiary. By the summer of 1915, when Harold was conceived, both the firm and the town were booming (the word seems particularly appropriate) as never before.¹⁷

Herbert Wilson was in charge of the explosives department of Leitch and Co. Before the war, this was a job of limited importance and modest pay. The starting wage of £2.10s. per week provided for the Wilsons’ needs, but permitted few luxuries. The sudden boost in production changed all that, and Herbert’s value to the firm, and his salary, rapidly increased. By 1916 Herbert was earning £260 per annum, plus an annual profit bonus of £100. Herbert and Ethel responded to their good fortune in two ways. They decided to have another child, partly in the hope (as it was said) of a son to carry on the family name, for Herbert’s married brother only had daughters. They also decided to move to a better neighbourhood. A year after Harold’s birth, as the big guns before the Somme threw into the German trenches the best that Huddersfield and Milnsbridge had to offer, Herbert, Ethel, Marjorie and Harold moved to 40 Western Road, Milnsbridge, a more salubrious address and a larger, semidetached house with a substantial garden. Such was the Wilsons’ new-found affluence that Herbert became an owner-occupier, paying £440 for the house – £220 from savings, the rest on a mortgage.¹⁸

For Ethel and Marjorie, it seemed like a gift from heaven. Marjorie had a large room of her own. There was a cellar, where Ethel did the laundry, and a spacious attic, which in due course became Harold’s lair, with ample room to set up his Hornby train. It was, as a school-friend says, a middle-class dwelling in a middle-class area.¹⁹ The peak of Herbert’s success, however, had not yet been reached. Eighteen months after the move, and doubtless anticipating the changed pattern of production after wartime needs had ceased, Herbert accepted a job as works chemist in charge of the dyes department at L. B. Holliday and Co., the nation’s biggest supplier of dyestuffs, at a salary of £425 per annum.²⁰ Prices had risen during the war, but even allowing for inflation, the mortgage and the baby, the Wilsons were now very much better off than they had been in 1914. At the age of thirty-six, Herbert had reached a plateau from which there would be no further ascent. His move to Holliday and Co. coincided almost exactly with the ending of the war. A contraction of the chemical industry followed, long before the onset of the national depression – placing a pall of uncertainty over all who worked in it. Yet there was no immediate cause for concern. Though demand for explosives fell sharply, it was some time before the dyestuffs industry faced pre-war levels of competition.

During Harold’s early childhood, the Wilson home was a visibly contented one, busily absorbed in the voluntary and community activities that were typical of a well-ordered, Nonconformist household. On the surface, it was not a complicated family. There were no rifts or rows or vendettas or mistresses or black sheep that we know of: and, perhaps, no wild passions or romances. If there were tensions, they were well hidden from each other and from the world. Although the Wilsons were healthy – surprisingly so, in Herbert’s case, for a man who worked with noxious chemicals – they were not handsome. Early, faded photographs display a benign, asexual chubbiness on both sides, the parents appearing undatably middle-aged before their time, the children plain, plump and bland. They were as they seemed: a family preoccupied by dutiful routines, kindly, fond, well-meaning. Were the Wilsons too good to be true? There is a lace-curtain, speak-well-of-your-neighbours, aspect to the early years of Harold which makes the sceptical modern observer uneasy, as though it masked a pent-up rage, like a coiled spring.

Eager striving best describes the Wilsons’ way of life. Frivolity had little place. Harold was taught to self-improve from a very tender age: when, at six, he wrote a letter to Father Christmas, accompanied by thirty hopeful kisses, his list of requests began with a tool box, a pair of compasses, a divider and a joiner’s pencil.²¹ Religious observance was of central importance. Both Herbert and Ethel were Congregationalists, but, in the absence of a chapel of their denomination in the locality, they went to Milnsbridge Baptist Church. Much of their Christianity was formal: grace was said before meals, and the family regularly attended church and Sunday school. ‘I would not say there was an atmosphere of religious fervour,’ Harold later maintained.²² Nevertheless, an interest in Church and faith suffused the atmosphere of the Wilson household, providing a framework for their social activities. These filled every leisure hour. Herbert ran the Church Amateur Operatic Society, Ethel founded and organized the local Women’s Guild, both taught in Sunday school. Pride of place was taken by the Scouts and Guides, in which all four members of the family were earnestly and devotedly involved.

The Boy Scout Movement, a last, moralizing echo of Empire, reached its nostalgic zenith as Harold was growing up. There was much in the Scouting ideal to appeal to the Nonconformist conscience: a simple, universal code, an emphasis on practical knowledge, on healthy, outdoor living, and on a rejection of what Lord Baden-Powell, in Scouting for Boys, called ‘unclean thoughts’. Scouting gave the Wilsons, newcomers to Cowersley and Milnsbridge, companionship and a sense of belonging to a wide, international network. It also provided an alternative ladder of promotion, with its own quaint hierarchy of quasi-military grades and positions of authority. Herbert became a District Commissioner, and is to be seen, proudly cherubic and clad in ridiculous wide-brimmed hat and neckerchief, in the local newspaper photographs which marked ritual occasions. Ethel was a Guide Captain; when Marjorie grew up she became a District Commissioner as well; and Harold rose to the level of King’s Scout.

Harold’s first serious ambition was to be a wolf cub. He joined the Milnsbridge Cubs just before his eighth birthday and in due course graduated to the 3rd Colne Valley Milnsbridge Baptist Scouts, later part of the 20th Huddersfield.²³ It was a large, active troop, which met every Friday and boasted a drum-and-bugle band. Harold was not just a keen scout, he was a passionate one. He always claimed the Scouting Movement as a formative influence, and the snapshots tell their own tale: Harold enthusiastically cooking sausages, or thrusting himself to the forefront of a group photograph, cheerful, perky, eager, and enjoying the campfire convivialities more seriously than his companions. It was in the Milnsbridge Cubs that Harold first met Harold Ainley, a school contemporary who became a Huddersfield councillor and made a speciality of giving interviews to journalists and biographers about his recollections of the future Prime Minister. Ainley is in no doubt about the importance of the Scouts, for both of them. ‘It gave us ideals and standards,’ he says.²⁴

Harold was a dedicated camper. He once travelled under the supervision of the local Baptist minister (who was also the scoutmaster) on a camping trip to a site near Nijmegen in Holland. On another occasion, as a senior patrol leader, Harold helped to wait at a scout dinner given for the Assistant County Commissioner, a Colonel Stod-dart Scott. They next met in the House of Commons as members of the parliamentary branch of the Guild of Old Scouts. Harold remained a faithful scouting alumnus. As a resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb he became chairman of the North London Scout Association, and as Labour Leader he liked to equate the Scouting Code with his own brand of socialism, quoting the Fourth Scout Law: ‘A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout.’²⁵ He was fond of remarking that the most valuable skill he acquired was an ability to tie bowline knots behind his back and tenderfoot knots wearing boxing gloves: invaluable for handling the Labour Party.²⁶

His more relaxed fellow scouts may have found him a bit over-keen, and there is an aspect to some of the anecdotes which makes him sound like Piggy in a Huddersfield version of Lord of the Flies. ‘He was a good [patrol] leader and always got the best out of his lads,’ recalled Jack Hepworth, a member of the same troop, who later worked for the Gas Board. ‘But in some ways he was not popular. He tended to be swottish and seemed to know a lot and, naturally, some of the lads didn’t always like this.’²⁷ At the age of twelve he entered a Yorkshire Post competition which called for a hundred-word sketch of a personal hero. Harold wrote about the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell, and won.²⁸ Fired by this triumph, he wrote a helpful letter to the Scouting Movement’s newspaper, The Scout. ‘I should like to use your little hint for strengthening a signalling flag in my column “Things We All Should Know”,’ replied the kindly editor, and sent him a Be Prepared pencil case as a reward.²⁹

Harold’s behaviour in the Scouts, as in school and at home, was that of a child who expects his best efforts to be warmly appreciated and applauded. There was plenty of applause at home where, from the beginning, Harold was the favourite child, almost a family project, in whom all hope was invested. Marjorie seems to have taken her usurpation in good part, at least on the surface. Harold was born the day before she was seven. ‘It was a sort of birthday present,’ she would tell interviewers, doubtless repeating what her parents said to her at the time. Even when Harold was Prime Minister, she used to speak of him as if he were half-doll, half-baby, the family adornment to be cosseted and treasured. ‘With the Press slating him left, right and centre I always feel very protective,’ she said in 1967. ‘You see, he’s always my younger brother.’³⁰

Marjorie never married. She stayed close both to her parents and to Harold. Christmases and holidays were often spent together. She became a frequent visitor at No. 10, and proudly boasted of her brother’s achievements to friends in Cornwall, where she lived in later years. But there was another side. Harold had been a birthday present, but he could also seem like a cuckoo’s egg in the cosy nest at Western Road. Fondness was combined with tension, which sprang from an inequality that was there from the beginning. Harold was the adored baby of the family: Marjorie was large, strong, sisterly but not always good-tempered. As Prime Minister, Harold confided to a Cabinet colleague that she had bullied him mercilessly.³¹ One particular incident stuck in Harold’s own memory. It took place during a summer holiday at a northern seaside resort. Like Albert and the stick with the horse’s head handle, Harold met with a nasty accident – caused, not by a lion, but by Marjorie. Walking along the shore, brother and sister had a fight. Marjorie overpowered him, and flung him, fully clad, into the sea. Harold was badly scared, and his thick flannel suit was soaked through. Cold and shaken, he was taken off to a shop to buy new clothes.

Such events happen in most families. It did not amount to much. Yet it was the violence that shocked him. ‘He was terribly frightened,’ says a friend to whom he related the story. ‘In a sense, she was taking her revenge for all the attention he got.’³² Her lot cannot, indeed, have been an easy one: she was expected to watch Harold’s brilliant successes and be enthusiastic about them, almost like a third parent.

Marjorie’s own achievements were automatically regarded as less important than her brother’s. There was a family story (such stories tend to encapsulate a truth) that when Marjorie exclaimed ‘I’ve won a scholarship!’ on winning an award to Huddersfield Girls’ High School, her four-year-old brother lisped: ‘I want a “ship” too!’³³ The point of this tale is, of course, the precocity of Harold, rather than the success of Marjorie. Later, when Herbert made a famous sightseeing trip to London, visiting Downing Street, it was Harold who accompanied him and had his photograph taken outside the door of No. 10, not his sister. When Ethel travelled to Australia to visit her father and brother, Harold went with her – Marjorie stayed in Milnsbridge to look after Herbert.

Marjorie played her part cheerfully. ‘Really they all joined together in worship of this young boy who was going to perform those great feats,’ says a friend. But Harold never forgot his sister’s ability to pounce. As an adult, he continued to regard her with wariness and awe, as well as affection. ‘I used to tease him by asking “How is Marjorie?”’ recalls a former prime ministerial aide. ‘He would put on a peculiar persecuted look and say: “Ah, Marjorie!” He saw Marjorie as somebody telling him what to do, making him do this or that.’³⁴

Marjorie was not the only powerful female member of the family. The other was Ethel, whom Harold resembled physically, while Marjorie looked like Herbert. Ethel Wilson was a source of calm and reassurance. Harold once described her as ‘very placid’.³⁵ She ‘always gave the impression of having no personal worries’,³⁶ and almost never lost her temper (a characteristic her son inherited). She had trained as a teacher, but no longer worked as such, throwing her energies into managing a family budget that was not always easy to keep in surplus, and into voluntary activities. Because she died before Harold became Labour Leader, she escaped press attention, and Herbert – who attended Labour Party Conferences and loved being interviewed – became the publicly known parent. But Ethel was the dominant figure in the family, and also the closest to Harold. ‘He had a strong bond with her,’ says Mary, Harold’s wife. ‘He was devoted to her. She was a very quiet woman with firm views.’³⁷ According to a friend, ‘Harold loved his mother more than his father.’³⁸ When Ethel died in 1957, her son felt the loss deeply. Years later, he told an interviewer: ‘I found I couldn’t believe – and I reckon I’m a pretty rational kind of man – that death was the end of my mother.’³⁹

Harold’s relationship with Herbert was affectionate, respectful yet detached: later he tended to indulge the old man’s whims, and treat him like an elderly and beloved pet, rather than look up to him. To outsiders, Herbert had a prickly Yorkshire reserve – he could seem withdrawn, aloof, even cold. He was always more volatile than Ethel, and more ambitious. Herbert’s most famous attribute, which he took little prompting to show off, was a quirky ability to do large arithmetical sums rapidly in his head. This was displayed as a party trick, but it was also an emotional defence. He loved numbers, perhaps more than people, and resorted to them in times of stress. One story (also revealing in unintended ways) recounts how, on the night before Harold’s birth, Herbert was working on some difficult calculations to do with his job. During a long and (for Ethel) painful night, he divided his time between attending to his wife, and attending to his calculations.⁴⁰ Harold inherited an interest in numbers, and also a freakish memory, from his father, though his Grandfather Seddon had a remarkable memory as well.⁴¹

Herbert’s most important influence was political. Harold turned to his mother for comfort, to his father for information and ideas. There was an element of the barrack-room intellectual about Herbert, whose romantic interest in progressive politics was linked to his own professional frustrations. Herbert felt a strong resentment towards ‘academic’ chemists who, armed with university degrees, carried a higher status within the industry. The need for qualifications became an obsession, as did his concern to provide better chances for his son. One symptom of Herbert’s bitterness was an inverted snobbery, according to which, although privately he saw himself as lower-middle-class (an accurate self-attribution), he ‘always described himself as “working-class” to Tory friends’.⁴² Another was a growing interest in the egalitarian Labour Party, which fought a general election as a national body for the first time in 1918, and had an especially notable history in the Colne Valley.

Harold entered New Street Council School in Milnsbridge in 1920, at the age of four and a half, joining a class of about forty children, mainly destined for the local textile mills. His schooldays did not start well: his first encounter with scholastic authority so upset him that he used to fantasize about jumping out of the side-car of his father’s motor cycle on the way to school and playing truant. The cause of his unhappiness was a school mistress who set the children impossible tasks and chastised them enthusiastically with a cane when they failed to carry them out. He concluded later that she was ‘either an incompetent teacher or a sadist, probably both’.⁴³ After the first year Harold’s life improved, and he quickly established himself as a brighter-than-average child, though not a remarkable one. He played cricket badly and football quite well, taking the position of goalkeeper in games on a makeshift pitch on some wasteland. In cold weather he used to skate with the other children in their wooden clogs on the sloping school playground. Harold Ainley recalls Wilson as a ‘trier’ at football, rather than a natural games player, and as a ‘very timid’ child. But he was methodical in the classroom. ‘I would say that he was a swot, definitely,’ says Ainley. He used to compete with a little girl called Jessie Hatfield. Usually, she beat him.⁴⁴

Harold was not a delicate or weakly boy, but illness stalked his childhood, as it did many of his contemporaries in the 1920s, before the availability of antibiotics or vaccination for many infectious diseases. ‘It is wise to bear in mind constantly that children are frail in health and easily sicken and die, in measure as they are young,’ a Huddersfield Public Health Department pamphlet warned, chillingly, a few years before Harold’s birth.⁴⁵ Harold came from a sensible, nurturing family. Nevertheless, his health aroused anxiety several times, and once gave cause for serious alarm.

1923, at the age of seven, he underwent an operation for appendicitis. For any little boy such an event (though in this case straightforward enough) would be upsetting, as much for the separation from his parents as for the discomfort. It is interesting that Wilson family legend links it to Harold’s earliest political utterance. ‘The first time I can remember thinking systematically about politics was when I was seven,’ he told an interviewer in 1963. ‘My parents came in to see me the night after my operation and I told them not to stay too long or they’d be too late to vote – for Philip Snowden.’⁴⁶

This anecdote appears in several accounts. Its point is to establish, not only that he was an advanced seven-year-old, but also (what critics often doubted) that he had been politically-minded from an early age. Yet even an exceptional child does not snatch such a remark out of the air. If Harold was talking about politics and Philip Snowden at the age of seven, one reason was that he happened to live in an unusual constituency.

Although geographically and economically close to Huddersfield, Milnsbridge lay just within the scattered Colne Valley electoral division, which had a strongly radical tradition. The Colne Valley Labour Party had been formed in 1891 and could claim to be the oldest in the country. Tom Mann, a pioneering leader of the Independent Labour Party, had stood for Parliament there in 1895. Trade unions were weak throughout the West Riding, and Colne Valley itself was poorly unionized, but the socialist influence was strong, extending to Milnsbridge itself. Quasi-religious, quasi-secular ‘Labour Church’ services (rituals of a short-lived movement that stood historically between Nonconformist Christianity and atheistic socialism as a missing link) were held in the Milnsbridge Labour Club in the 1890s.⁴⁷ In 1908 a Socialist Brass Band was formed in Milnsbridge, and continued to exist throughout Harold’s childhood. The best-remembered political event in Colne Valley, however, occurred in 1907, when the populist Victor Grayson put up for the seat in a by-election contest as an Independent Socialist, and won. Grayson was MP for the Valley for three years, until dissipation and scandal overtook him.

Grayson had been viewed askance by the Labour establishment. The only ILP MP to back him was the Member for Blackburn, Philip Snowden. When, after the war, Snowden lost his seat and was casting around for another, the memory of his involvement helped him to get the Colne Valley nomination.⁴⁸ In 1922 Snowden won the seat, and returned to Parliament just as the expanding Labour Party took over from the Liberals as the official Opposition. A year later Snowden, one of Labour’s leading spokesmen, faced the voters again – this time in an election at which his Party hoped to displace the Conservatives. There was a feverish mood in the Valley, and especially in radically-minded households like that of the Wilsons. There were many voices urging people to go out and vote for Philip Snowden, and Herbert and Ethel needed little prompting.

Herbert, once a Liberal, had become a keen Labour partisan. One reason was the ethical socialism of Snowden, an honest, arrogant, ascetic crusader whose appeal to a Nonconformist community like that of Colne Valley is easy to understand. Snowden’s message that ‘individual liberty is impossible so long as men have not equal access to the means of life’,⁴⁹ struck a particular chord with Herbert, who felt that his own liberty had been curtailed by the early end to his education. He was delighted and uplifted by Labour’s success in the election, and the accession in January 1924 of the first ever Labour government, in which Snowden was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. There was much talk of the Colne Valley Member in the Wilson household. A few years later, when his class was asked to write an essay on ‘Myself in 25 Years’, Harold wrote about planning his Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Nineteen twenty-four was a ragged year for Harold. After his operation, he had to spend the spring term at home convalescing. Not for the last time, confinement due to illness turned him in on himself. Separated from his school-fellows, he learnt to be self-contained, to amuse himself and to keep his own counsel. He also began to display what an early biographer calls ‘a natural disinclination to obtrude or reveal personal sentiment’. For Christmas, he received a model railway. Now, in the months of isolation, he retired to his attic empire with engines, rolling stock and Hornby Magazine, supplementing his reading with the historical sections of Marjorie’s Children’s Encyclopedia.50 An additional interest, shared later with Harold Ainley, was Meccano: piece by piece, Harold constructed an enormous model of Quebec Bridge. Both Harolds were avid readers of the Meccano Magazine; a sign of the Wilsons’ educational aspirations for their son was that they also subscribed to the wordy, up-market Children’s Newspaper.51

Education was much in Herbert’s mind when, that summer, he embarked on a week’s tour on the family motor cycle with his son in the side-car. Ethel and Marjorie were at Guide camp. Harold, eight years old, had only recently been pronounced fit: the excitement was intense. Father and son began with a few days’ sightseeing in the capital. Using a bed and breakfast in Russell Square as their base, they ventured into London’s political heartland. From an ABC café next to Westminster Bridge, they stared up at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament through a slot-machine telescope. Then they gazed at the soap-box speakers at Hyde Park Corner, and through the railings at Buckingham Palace, before riding up Downing Street to the prime minister’s residence.⁵² The short cul-de-sac, overshadowed by government buildings, was readily accessible to the public. Nobody stopped them as Harold, flat-capped and skinny from his recent illness, stood gravely on Ramsay MacDonald’s doorstep, as Herbert lowered his folding Brownie camera to snap one of the most famous photographs in British political history. The picture was pasted into the family album, where it remained until Herbert handed it to the press on the day Harold became Leader of the Labour Party.

The trip also took in tours of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Tower and St Paul’s. Finally Herbert and Harold rode to the Wembley Exhibition where they met up with Ethel, in full regalia, accompanied by a party of Guides from camp. Then father and son returned to Milnsbridge via Runnymede, Oxford, Rugby and Stratford.

The visit was a memorable event in the life of a schoolboy who had never been to London before. When Harold first took his seat as an MP in 1945 Herbert, accompanying him to the Commons, is supposed to have remarked: ‘We’ve been here before, Harold,’ and his son is said to have replied: ‘Yes. You brought me then. Now I’m bringing you.’⁵³ Much attention has been directed at the famous photo, which seemed to contain a prophecy, and also to sum up Harold’s political approach. ‘Harold was ruined by the bloody picture of him outside No. 10,’ says Ian Mikardo, who watched his later ascent at close quarters. ‘He had to make it come true.’⁵⁴ No doubt the trip, and the photo, had their effect. But many children are photographed outside famous buildings, without necessarily seeking to live in them.

A much more important journey than the 1924 visit to London took place two years later when, at the age of ten, Harold accompanied his mother to Western Australia, to visit Grandfather Seddon – believed to be seriously ill – and Uncle Harold. It is a measure of Ethel’s own will and independent spirit that, with no experience of foreign travel, she should have undertaken such a voyage without her husband and in the company of her young son. It is also an indication of the Wilsons’ continuing prosperity, soon to end, that they could afford the fare. For Harold, it was an extraordinary experience. It opened his eyes to ways of life of which he had previously known nothing. It gave him a first-hand glimpse of the pomp and glamour of politics. It also separated him, for a further protracted spell, from his class-mates.

Herbert had by now graduated from a motor cycle to a family Austin 7, and in May 1926, a few days after Britain had been convulsed by the General Strike, he drove Ethel and Harold to London, where they embarked on the RMS Esperance Bay. The young boy was entranced by the long, majestic sea journey, through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, with stops at Port Said and Colombo, before arriving at Perth. They found the extended Seddon family living on a small farm in the bush, a dozen miles from the city. Harold was a source of curiosity to his cousins, and of delight to his grandfather, whom he had not previously met. He was allowed to help them with the farm, and there were pleasurably frightening encounters with poisonous snakes and a tarantula.⁵⁵ Two-thirds of a century later, a Seddon relative still has fond memories of walking proudly to school down a dusty track, hand in hand with her older English cousin Harold. ‘I think you were 10 Harold & I was seven & I know it was just over a mile walk each way,’ the ex-Prime Minister’s cousin Joan wrote from Western Australia in March 1992. ‘… I have always remembered this as I was very proud to have my bigger and older cousin from England accompany me to school, & as I was not very keen on school at that time I thought it was terrific of Harold to volunteer to go with me & do his work.’⁵⁶

The most exciting member of the Australian Seddon tribe was undoubtedly Uncle Harold, upon whom Ethel – in common with all resident Seddons of three generations – lavished admiring attention. Harold Seddon was in his prime as a state politician when his English sister and nephew made their visit, though by this time he was no radical. In 1917 he had left the Labour Party to join the pro-conscription National Labour Party. It was as a National, following Labour’s defeat, that he had been appointed by the state government in 1922 to the Legislative Council of Western Australia.⁵⁷ It was scarcely an elevated position (the nearest British equivalent would have been an alderman, like Uncle Thewlis, in a major local authority), but it was a source of great pride and wonder in the Seddon family. When Harold Wilson became President of the Board of Trade, and Harold Seddon (supporting Robert Menzies’s Liberal Party) was President of the Legislative Council in Western Australia, Ethel remarked to a friend: ‘My brother is an Honourable and my son is a Right Honourable. What more could a woman ask?’⁵⁸ That was not quite the end of it – in the 1950s, Harold Seddon’s long service was duly acknowledged with the award of a knighthood.

One of Harold Wilson’s Australian experiences was to attend a session of the upper house of the State Legislature with his reverential relatives, and observe ‘Uncle Harold in all his dignity’.⁵⁹ On the ocean voyage back to England, he told his mother: ‘I am going to be a Member of Parliament when I grow up. I am going to be Prime Minister.’⁶⁰ This, at any rate, was the story she related. Perhaps it was exaggerated, or embroidered, the way doting mothers do. What is interesting about the remark (which many parents might have instantly forgotten as the kind of silly statement children often make) is that she remembered and treasured it. Parting from her adored brother Harold, she was glad enough to take comfort in the thought of her son Harold, one day, stepping into his shoes.

Back at New Street Council School, the children were more impressed by Harold’s skill, acquired from a ship’s steward, at making elaborate paper boats.⁶¹ Yet it was hard to fit back in, after such a long absence. New friendships had been made, new alliances forged. Harold was excluded from games and ignored. In self-protection, and to combat loneliness, he turned himself into a celebrity. Indulging his attention-seeking impulse, teachers allowed him to give talks to his school-mates on the subject of his adventure. The Wilson lecture, illustrated by the display of Australian souvenirs, lasted two hours, and was delivered in two parts, to every class in the school.⁶²

According to Ainley, Harold’s marathon performances alerted the staff to his potential.⁶³ Whether they did much to improve his popularity, we may doubt. One effect was certainly to encourage his own sense of uniqueness, of having a fund of special knowledge, not given to others. Following the voyage, Harold inundated children’s magazines with articles on Australian topics. These were marked more by an interest in technological achievement than by literary or descriptive qualities. (‘A few months ago I paid a visit to Mundaring Weir,’ began one. ‘When I arrived there I was awestruck with the terrific volume of water and the massive concrete dam that held it in check.’⁶⁴) All were politely rejected. What they do show is how big an impression the visit had made on him. It is possible to believe Wilson’s later claim that his sympathy for the Commonwealth idea began with his early experience in Australia.⁶⁵

Soon after his return to England, Harold sat for a County Minor Scholarship, the eleven-plus of its day. Along with four other members of his class he was successful, and in September 1927, proudly clad in brown blazer with pale blue piping round the collar, he entered Royds Hall Secondary School in Huddersfield.

2

BE PREPARED

‘Ambition’ is a grand word with which to dignify the fantasies of childhood, even when they are later realized. Childish thoughts about the future are multifarious, and kaleidoscopic. We should not take too seriously the Downing Street photo, the declarations to parents or long-suffering teachers. Harold was not actively interested in politics until a much later age than many of his future parliamentary colleagues. Yet it is not unusual to say of somebody ‘he wanted to be a doctor’ (or a priest, or a soldier) ever since he was a child. What is so strange, therefore, about an idée fixe of a political kind?

The Wilson family story (as related to Leslie Smith, Harold’s first ‘official’ biographer) describes a Damascus Road experience which took place in the summer of 1928 after both the Downing Street photo and the voyage to Australia. The Wilsons had travelled to Scotland on holiday, and visited Stirling. Here Herbert took Harold to see the statue of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal Prime Minister in 1905–8 and former MP for the town. Beneath the effigy, Herbert told his son about the 1906 Liberal landslide, the growth of the Labour Party, the radical history of the Colne Valley, and the careers of Mann, Grayson and Snowden.

The effect, wrote Smith, was dramatic: politics became the only career Harold wanted to pursue. Henceforth, he felt ‘an inner certainty of destiny, an absolute conviction about his future mission and his unique fitness to undertake it’. At first (according to Smith), the only doubt in the boy’s mind was what position he was aiming at: sometimes it was Foreign Secretary, more often it was Chancellor of the Exchequer. But soon he had raised his sights. When he and his friends talked about careers, ‘Harold’s contribution was confined to the simple observation: “I should like to be Prime Minister”.’¹ No doubt there is a post hoc element to this tale. Others, however, confirm that Harold began to talk about a political future for himself early on. Harold Ainley maintains that he was not surprised to hear that his friend had entered Parliament in 1945. ‘He always said he was going to be an MP.’² A Roydsian contemporary who subsequently worked as a journalist on a local paper, fifty years later recalled Harold, aged fifteen, saying, ‘One day I might be Prime Minister.’³

Such an idea was not quite so fanciful for a schoolboy in Huddersfield as it might have been elsewhere. In addition to Snowden, there was Asquith, a weaver’s son. A short Historical Note in the 1927 edition of the Huddersfield Official Guide ends with the information: ‘At what is now the Huddersfield College, New North Road, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, then known as H. H. Asquith, received his early education, he being a nephew of a former most distinguished townsman and freeman of the Borough, the late J. E. Williams, J.P., LL.D.’⁴ Asquith died in 1928, the year of Harold’s Damascus Road. A. V. Alexander, a leading Labour MP, addressed a gathering of Roydsians, shortly after this event, which Huddersfield took particularly to heart, and declared patronizingly: ‘Perhaps one of these boys will one day be Prime Minister.’ Such platitudes fed Harold’s imagination. Later he recalled thinking: ‘Didn’t he know?’5

People have often held such statements against Wilson, though generally on contradictory grounds. On the one hand, while acknowledging that he was exceptionally ambitious within a profession in which driving ambition is the norm, they have felt that such an objective in a child must be regarded as insufferably conceited and therefore unacceptable as an explanation. On the other, they have seen it as evidence of political shallowness – a sign that he calculated his path to office, with little interest in the purpose of getting there.

Yet it is naïve to imagine that the majority of politicians drift into Parliament. For most, long-term preparation and strategizing has been a necessity, however much they might offer alternative accounts in their memoirs. Many a student politician has dreamt of Cabinet office. In this, only the dating of Wilson’s ambition, and its lofty focus, is unusual. We should not regard the formation of such a scheme – whether to impress teachers and friends, or to earn the approval of indulgent parents, or for whatever reason – as disreputable. Neither should we consider it unbelievable.

Harold enjoyed Royds Hall, a new, mixed grammar school, opened in 1921. He threw himself into the many activities which it offered. Yet for all his cheerful energy he remained, as in the Scouts, lonely in a crowd – as if locked into a secret world, which did not fully connect with the public one. He took part in teams, but he was not a team player. Although, according to Ainley, he never showed much interest in courting girls,⁶ he was happier in their company. Later he reflected that the girls at the school ‘fulfilled a kind of mission civilisatrice’ on the boys.⁷ He was still in touch with one Royds Hall girl, Olga Gledhill, who lived in Blackpool after her marriage, when he was Prime Minister. There was also a class mistress, Helen Whelan, who liked and guided him: chiding him gently for his conceits, but also nurturing him as a talented pupil, who responded to female encouragement. It was for Miss Whelan that Harold wrote an essay, in 1928, on ‘Myself in 25 Years’ about introducing his first Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Harold gained distinctions at Oxford, she was one of the first people he told.

As at New Street Council School, there was an exhibitionist flavour to his performance. He soon discovered the school magazine. Articles poured from his pen – wit was his forte. An indifferent thirteen-year-old singer, he published a jocular ‘Diary of a Choir Boy’, which concluded:

February 12th Choir is warned of approach of speech day. Boys are advised to begin scrubbing the visible parts of their anatomy … February 19th First layer of dirt begins to show signs of dispersing. Choir practice last period, during which Miss Whelan and many first trebles nearly collapse as a result of the aforementioned first trebles singing ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ without going flat. The entire choir dances the hornpipe on hearing there will be no after-school practice. J. H. Wilson, 3B.

He was also an actor. When he took part in She Stoops to Conquer, girls from a neighbouring school gave him a glowing review. ‘Tony Lumpkin (H. Wilson) is worthy of first mention since he is the soul of the play,’ they wrote. ‘He took his part with gusto, in fact overacting in places, for he diverted the attention of the audience from the other proceedings. He was very amusing in his relations with his mother and Miss Neville (Olga Gledhill).’ His tendency to overact and thrust himself forward, in the classroom as well as on the stage, did not please all the teachers at Royds Hall, some of whom remembered him, many years later, as a tiresome prig. According to Leslie Smith (who generally put the most favourable interpretation on the observations of witnesses), ‘several of them found his manner and outlook excessively precocious.’ Harold apparently failed to notice, ‘and never realized that his attitude to them, to his work, and to his professed future career, was sometimes interpreted as an attempt either to impress or to curry favour’.

He was not, however, an academic prodigy. At first his place in class was some way from the top, and his early school reports criticized him for idleness. He was good at languages, and according to one teacher, ‘displayed more than a passing interest in Esperanto’. Eventually he headed his class, but he was never thought to be outstanding.⁸ Perhaps, under different circumstances, he would have excelled at Royds Hall, and made his mark upon the school. The opportunity, however, was denied him by two almost simultaneous traumas.

When he was fourteen and out camping with the Milnsbridge Baptist Scouts, Harold caught typhoid from a glass of milk at a nearby farm. Of a dozen people who contracted the disease during the local outbreak, six died. For a month and a half Harold’s condition was critical. While he lay in Meltham Isolation Hospital, his parents were only permitted to visit him for half an hour, once a week. For fear of spreading the disease, Marjorie – now studying chemistry at Leeds University – was not allowed to see him at all. Herbert telephoned the hospital daily throughout October 1930. At the end of the month he was told his son was out of danger, but this information was immediately followed by news of a relapse. For weeks Herbert and Ethel dreaded the telephone, in case a call from the hospital might mean that their son was dying. At last the crisis ended, and in January 1931 Harold was allowed home. During his illness his weight fell to 4½ stone. Afterwards, the whole family felt overwhelming relief, and there was a heightened sense of Harold as a special child. Appropriately, there is a family story that underlines this point. ‘The lad is being saved for something,’ Harold’s grandfather is supposed to have said.⁹

Harold was soon fully restored to health. Meanwhile, another disaster had occurred, from which there would be no easy recovery. In December 1930, while Harold sometimes seemed hours from death, Herbert had lost his job. In this, he was not alone. One worker in three in the Colne Valley was unemployed in 1930. Because of the strength of the textile industry and the growth of engineering, Huddersfield had been cushioned during the 1920s from the worst impact of the gathering depression. By the turn of the decade, however, the contraction of markets was affecting every industry, and the dyestuffs trade was badly hit. For Herbert, it was a devastating blow, as much to his self-esteem as to his pocket. For a dozen years after the ending of the war, he had hung on in a business which had undergone many changes, as Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd widened its rationalizing grip, absorbing and dismembering local firms. Despite his experience and dedication, he had been overtaken by better qualified, younger men. Herbert was forty-eight and a specialist: the chances of finding work of a suitable kind in the locality were low.

The Wilsons regarded Herbert’s unemployment as though it were a family disgrace, and hid it from the neighbours. ‘It was very much hushed up,’ Ainley remembers.¹⁰ Herbert and Ethel deliberately withheld the news from Harold until he was better. When they finally told him, he realized how serious it was. Marjorie already knew. It may have been a combination of anxiety about Herbert’s redundancy, and alarm about Harold’s illness, that caused her to fail her exams, ending her student career at Leeds University and destroying her father’s hope that she would follow in his footsteps as a chemist with the college degree he never had. Faced with mounting bills, the Wilsons considered panic measures, including the possibility that Harold might leave school at sixteen (he was fifteen in March 1931) and work for one of his uncles in Manchester. Instead, they tightened belts and lived on savings during two grim years in which Herbert wondered whether he would ever have proper work again. ‘Unemployment more than anything else’, Harold later claimed, ‘made me politically conscious.’¹¹ We need not doubt it.

During the first months of this secret domestic misery, Harold stayed at home, recovering from his illness. Though he studied privately, he fell behind in mathematics, and needed extra tuition when he returned to school after Easter. He soon caught up, and – his vigour revived – began to take an interest in the emerging political crisis in which the MP for Colne Valley was taking a prominent, and puzzling, part. The second Labour Government, formed in 1929 with Philip Snowden once again Chancellor of the Exchequer, had lasted longer than the first. In August 1931, however, the worsening economic climate precipitated its collapse. After the Cabinet failed to agree to Snowden’s demand that unemployment benefit should be cut, Ramsay MacDonald went to the Palace to tender his resignation and that of his administration. When he returned, ministers were informed that, instead of resigning, MacDonald had accepted the King’s commission to form a ‘National’ government, supported by the Conservatives and some Liberals. Snowden was one of the few Labour ministers to join him: most of the Labour Party opposed the new administration. In the general election that autumn Snowden denounced Labour’s programme as ‘bolshevism run mad’. Labour was reduced to fifty-two seats, and did not form another government until 1945.

Harold and his friends took a lively interest in these events, and in the treachery, as many saw it, of the Colne Valley Member. Snowden had a devoted following in the constituency, and his decision to turn on his former supporters caused consternation. Allegedly, Harold’s grandfather wept in angry disbelief. A year later, Harold went with a group of Roydsians to hear two Liberal MPs explain why the Liberals had withdrawn support from the National Government. One of the MPs was Dingle Foot, recently elected Liberal MP for Dundee, who was later to join the Labour Party and serve in Harold’s government.¹²

In the autumn of 1932. Herbert at last found a job – but not in Milnsbridge or Huddersfield. He was offered the post of chief chemist at Brotherton’s Chemical Works, at Bromborough, in the Wirral peninsula in Cheshire, just across the Mersey from Liverpool. Herbert was nearly fifty. It was the opportunity he needed, and a cause of intense relief to the whole family – ending the long period of unspoken suffering. The change necessitated a move. The Wilsons had lived in the Colne Valley for twenty years, and felt part of the community. The dislocation was particularly great for Harold, who had known no other home but Western Road. The churches, scout troops, schools, football teams and local personalities of Milnsbridge and Huddersfield made up his world. Though he left the area when he was sixteen, in later life he always thought of himself as a Huddersfield man.

Yet in many ways it was a positive move, creating new opportunities for Harold, as well as for his father. As part of the deal, Herbert received a Brotherton’s company flat in Spital Road. This included the spacious ground floor of a large Victorian house, set in a tree-lined garden. Bromborough, though only five miles from the centre of Liverpool, was close to beautiful countryside in the mid-Wirral. Not far away, there were fine views of the Welsh mountains across the Dee Estuary. Most of the old buildings in Bromborough had been demolished before the First World War, but Spital Road stood at the edge of Brotherton Park, and close to an ancient water-mill, which had reputedly been in continuous use for five centuries.¹³ Most important, however, was the local school.

Faced with the problem of Harold’s interrupted education, Herbert’s brother Jack recommended the newly established Wirral Grammar School: it was helpful advice. Once again, Harold benefited from the expansion of secondary education which had followed the First World War. After the conventional Royds Hall regime, however, Wirral was an awakening. Although a single-sex school (Royds had been mixed) it was modern in its outlook. Set up even more recently than Royds Hall, it was still fired by a frontier spirit. All the staff were under thirty. ‘You seem to have a high regard for teachers,’ an interviewer put it to him, after he became Leader of the Opposition. ‘Coming from my kind of background’, he replied, ‘teachers were the most important adults in your life.’¹⁴ Outside his own family, it was the teachers at Wirral Grammar School whom he had most in mind.

Harold remembered with special gratitude the history master, P. L. Norrish, the English master, W. M. Knight (who taught him that the Liverpool Daily Post was ‘one of the best papers in Britain’) and the left-wing classics master, Frank Allen, who took him to hear the radical campaigner Sir Norman Angell speaking at Birkenhead, and introduced him to the opera of Gilbert and Sullivan, which was as far as his musical education went. The influence of these men was especially strong because of an immensely happy stroke of fortune: Harold was the first sixth-former the school had ever had. As a result, he was able to receive close, individual tuition, which perfectly suited his temperament. At Royds Hall he had craved attention: at Wirral he received it, and was treated by the enthusiastic young staff as a prize specimen. As senior boy in the school, he mixed easily with the masters and identified firmly with the school establishment. At seventeen, he became Captain of the School, and his period of office was remembered for one judicious act of policy: the introduction, in the best traditions of muscular Christianity, of lunchtime soccer matches, in order to counter a disturbing inclination among fifth-formers to spend the lunch break swapping dirty jokes.¹⁵

Meanwhile, Herbert, back in work but angrier than ever about his period of humiliation, urged him on. ‘As a child and adolescent, Harold was under never-ending pressure to have the career his father never had,’ says a friend. ‘If you sat with Herbert, you could see how it all happened. He would tell you what grades Harold got in all subjects in school, a row of As with one B in such-and-such a subject in a particular form, and so on. Success was something Herbert liked.’¹⁶ Marjorie was pushed into the background.

Following his illness, Harold had begun to take sport seriously. He played rugby (the change of school meant a switch from rugby league to rugby union), but his highest achievement was in athletics: significantly, in individual rather than in team events. He became a long-distance runner, and captained the Wirral junior team in the Merseyside Championships. Running was a sport which called for practice and determination. These were his strengths in his work as well as in games. There was no indication, yet, of academic brilliance. In the small pond of a newly founded Northern grammar school, the headmaster had high hopes of him. But he was considered bright, not exceptional. Teachers became aware of his remarkable memory for facts rather than his ability to marshall them.

An indication of how he was judged is provided by a battle that took place between the headmaster and the history master at the end of his school career. His main subject was history, which he studied with English and French for the Higher School Certificate (the A levels of the day) to be taken in the summer of 1934; he took Latin and maths as subsidiaries. The headmaster, ambitious for his school as well as for his pupil, wanted to put him in for a history scholarship at Oxford before he was eighteen. The history master (who knew his work better, as well as the standard required) was so strongly opposed – on the grounds that a bad performance would prejudice a later attempt – that at first he refused to adjust Harold’s work schedule to facilitate revision. The headmaster prevailed, and proved his point – though only just. Harold was entered for a group of six colleges, and sat the exam.

Back in Bromborough the following Monday, Herbert came into Harold’s bedroom with the Manchester Guardian open in front of him – it was one of those events etched in memory – saying: ‘Open Exhibition in Modern History, Jesus College, Oxford.’ Harold had not been placed high enough for Merton, his first choice, but Jesus had an unfilled vacancy. Oxford’s network of friends and contacts had a long reach, even where Northern grammar-school boys were concerned: the philosophy tutor at Jesus, T. M. Knox, was the son of a Congregationalist minister living in the North-West. Knox surmised, rightly, that his father might have come across young Wilson. He rang the Reverend Knox, who remembered hearing Harold deliver a polished vote of thanks at a speech day. That (so the Wilson family story went) clinched it.

The important point, however, was that Harold had failed to get the scholarship he needed. Both the headmaster and the history master had been half right. Had Harold waited, he might have obtained a more valuable award at a better college. The exhibition he obtained was worth £60 per annum, which was not enough to pay both fees and board. State grants were rarities in the 1930s, but there was one possibility: a County Major Scholarship. This accolade was awarded on the basis of performance in the Higher School Certificate. In the summer of 1934, Harold sat the exam, but – to everybody’s disappointment – failed to gain a scholarship, supposedly because of a poor English mark. In the end, his headmaster succeeded in persuading the local Director of Education to top up his Oxford exhibition with a county grant, and Herbert, back at work, chipped in with an additional £50 to make Harold’s university career possible. Harold went up to Oxford, therefore, in a mood of relief, as much as of triumph.

One reason why Harold did not do well in his English papers may have been that, for once, his concentration lapsed. At any rate, it was just before the English exam that he met the girl he later married. During a break in revision, he strolled down to the tennis club within the Brotherton complex. Playing in one of the courts was a young woman, slightly older than himself, called Gladys Mary Baldwin.

Harold had not come to watch the tennis, but to see his father perform. Herbert was well known at Brotherton’s for his favourite arithmetical trick: multiplying any two numbers of up to five digits in his head and delivering the right answer within seconds. A colleague boasted of Wilson’s talent to the senior chemist at Lever Brothers, based nearby in Port Sunlight, who did not believe it. A demonstration was therefore arranged. At stake was a five-shilling bet. The challenger prepared five sets of numbers, and Herbert was given fifteen seconds for each.

The test did not take long: the money was handed over, and Harold extended his break by watching the tennis. Within days, Harold was a member of the club, the owner of a racket, and walking out with his future wife.¹⁷ For a young man who had hitherto been diffident with girls, it was impressively decisive. Was it love at first sight? Harold was asked later. ‘It really was, you know,’ he replied. ‘She looked lovely in white.’¹⁸ Gladys (as she continued to be called, until the 1950s, when her preferred name became Mary) was not, however, immediately bowled over by her schoolboy admirer, and took her time.

Gladys Baldwin was a shorthand typist at Lever Brothers, whose employees were allowed to use the recreational facilities in the Brotherton complex. She had not been working long, though the fact that she was working at all distanced her at first from Harold, who was still at school. Her job placed her close to the bottom of the white-collar pecking order. She had started work at 24s. a week, from which she paid £1 for lodgings (her parents lived in Cumbria) and Is. 2d. insurance.¹⁹ The appearance of an enthusiastic young suitor was a welcome distraction in a routine and rather lonely life. They began by playing tennis together. ‘After that’, recalled Mary Wilson, ‘we used to walk a good deal in Wirral and chatter about everything under the sun.’²⁰

Gladys’s strongest bond with Harold was her Nonconformist background – both attended the Congregationalist church at Rock ferry. In Gladys’s case, however, the religious element in her upbringing had been much stronger. Her father, whom she greatly admired, had started working in a mill near Burnley at twelve, and had driven himself up a ladder of home learning in order to become a Congregationalist minister – an ambition he achieved at the age of twenty-nine. That formidable accomplishment weighed heavily in the Baldwin family, and her childhood had been one of love, duty, and oppressive puritanism. As a small girl, she had been required to attend church five times on Sundays. Where religion in the Wilson household had meant a framework for civic involvement and secular activities, in the Baldwin household it reflected deep, moral heart-searching.

Gladys retained her religious faith, in an amorphous, non-doctrinal way but she half-consciously rebelled against the narrowness of her religious training. Some of her later attitudes might be called permissive. ‘I’ve never worried much about so-called sin in personal relationships,’ she told an interviewer after Harold became Prime Minister. ‘What I mean is that I don’t care for religious attitudes and ideas of morality which seem to depend on intolerance of one kind or another. Especially intolerance of personal weaknesses, in matters of sex, for instance …’²¹ That was in principle. In practice, her strict background left her with a strong sense of guilt, and of foreboding. Another legacy of her childhood was a desire to settle down and live securely in one place. Her early memories were of frequent, disruptive moves as her father’s ministry took him all over the country: she later complained that she had moved a dozen times before she got married.

Gladys was born in the village of Diss in Norfolk, and remembered ‘an old semi-detached house standing high’, which was her birthplace.²² She lived there until she was five. When Harold was Prime Minister and she consoled herself by writing poetry, she formed a friendship by correspondence with John Betjeman, who proposed a nostalgic trip to Diss. The visit produced two poems. ‘Yes it will be bliss / To go with you by train to Diss;’ his began. ‘Your walking shoes upon your feet, / We’ll meet, my sweet, at Liverpool Street.’ She responded after the event:

We find the house where I was born –

How small it seems! for memory

Has played its usual trick on me.

The chapel where my father preached

Can now, alas, only be reached

By plunging through the traffic’s roar;

We go in by the Gothic door

To meet, within the vestry dim,

An old man who remembers him.²³

When she was five, the family moved to Fulbourn in Cambridgeshire, where they lived until she was ten.²⁴ It was this home she was recalling when she wrote another poem (‘The Old Manse’) also evoking an image of her Victorian, powerful, profoundly religious father, whom she saw as the fount of domestic happiness, as well as of domestic duty:

O what a longing, a burning deep desire

Here in my father’s house, to be a child again; …

Within the study, where the sunlight never falls

My father writes his sermon, hooded eyes down-bent;

His books of reference wait round the walls –

He shapes each phrase, deploys each argument

And turns from time to time, instinctively

To the great Bible, open on his knee.

Flowers in the garden, her brother on a bicycle, her mother baking bread in the kitchen, the village school bell summoning her to lessons, are also in this poem, providing a backcloth.²⁵

After Fulbourn the Baldwins left East Anglia and the Fens permanently and went to live in Nottinghamshire. The move upset Gladys and a little later she became ill. She began to write poems while she was convalescing, and the habit stayed with her. At first, it was a way of articulating what, in the heavily moral atmosphere of her father’s house, she felt unable to say. ‘All I know is that, [almost] as far back as I can remember, from time to time I would feel very deeply about something’, she later tried to explain, ‘and the feeling would be so strong that I had to express it, and the only way of doing this was to write a poem.’²⁶ It is notable that scarcely any of her poems touch on politics.

After her illness, she was sent to a boarding-school for the daughters of Nonconformist ministers called Milton Mount College, at Crawley in Sussex. This became a substitute for a geographically stable home, and she was happy there. Later she wrote a cheerfully witty poem about a schoolgirl’s crush on the French mistress:

My mouth is dry as she goes by –

One curving line from foot to thigh –

And with unEnglish liberty

Her bosom bounces, full and free;

Pale skin, pink lips, a wide blue stare;

Her page-boy fall of silky hair

Swings on her shoulders like a bell;

O how I love Mamzelle!²⁷

Unlike her older brother, Clifford Baldwin, who had taken an engineering degree at Cambridge and eventually became vice-chancellor of the University of Wales, she was not academically inclined. She read nineteenth-century English novels and poetry, and in later interviews mentioned her particular liking for the Brontes, Hardy, James, Keats and Tennyson. She admired scholarship in others, especially the men in her family, but had no desire to go to university herself. She left school at the age of sixteen in 1932, when her future husband was just entering Wirral Grammar School, and returned to live with her parents who by now had moved once again, to Penrith in Cumbria. Here she undertook the typical training of a girl of her age and station, for whom working life was likely to be a short interlude before marriage and the raising of a family. She attended a local establishment to learn shorthand and typing and, armed with this qualification, and with the independence which came from a boarding-school education, she left home to live in digs and take the job which brought her into contact with Harold.²⁸

Gladys later described herself as ‘round-faced, snub-nosed and pear-shaped’.²⁹ Most people who met her described her as pretty – prettier, indeed, than often appeared from photographs, in which she usually wore a blank and harassed expression. She did not yearn to make an impact upon the world, or draw attention to herself. ‘I had been brought up in a tradition in which showing-off was frowned upon, and in which the Bible was taken literally,’ she said, shortly after Harold’s retirement from office. ‘“When thou doest alms, do not send a trumpet before thee, and let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret”.’³⁰ But she was, perhaps in spite of herself, impressed by Harold and his narcissistic energy. The word ‘Oxford’ had an enticing ring: it reminded her of Cambridge, where her brother had recently graduated, and which had also been part of her childhood Eden. Because of her parents’ peripatetic life, she had few friends at home and there had been little time to acquire new ones in the Wirral. It is easy to see why this intelligent and unformed young girl, with her ‘quick sense of humour, mischievous yet compassionate, a complete lack of all pretension’ and firm set of values,³¹ turned the head of an ebullient sixth-former. At the same time Harold – cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself, confidently planning the future – filled a need for her that summer. On 4 July, three weeks after they met, he announced that he would marry her. It was a declaration, rather than a proposal. She was touched, and amused. He also told her of his boyish plan, now of many years’ standing: he was going to be a Member of Parliament and Prime Minister. She laughed that off as well. Later, the family joke was that if she had believed him it would have been a short romance.³² He did not say, however, for which party.

When Wilson became Prime Minister, much was made of his lowly origins. Yet he was by no means the first non-public school boy to reach No. 10 Downing Street. Five twentieth-century predecessors had not attended a famous school, and two – Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald – had not been to university either. But one peculiarity did mark him out. He was an English provincial.

Amongst other prime ministers not of upper- or upper-middle-class origin, only one – H. H. Asquith – came from an English town, coincidentally the same as Wilson’s. But Asquith received only his early education in the North. At the age of eleven he was sent to board at the City of London School, and to acquire the speech and habits of mind of a Southerner. Asquith went to Balliol, was called to the Bar and represented Scottish seats for the Gladstonian Liberal Party: he became an honorary gentleman. Wilson, by contrast, wore his roots like a badge, continuing to speak in a Yorkshire accent which made some people feel, by a contorted logic, that the experience of Oxford and Whitehall ought to have ironed out the regional element, and the fact that it had not done so reflected a kind of phoniness. The truth was that, for all his other conceits, Wilson was the least seducible of politicians in social terms, remaining imperturbably close in his tastes and values – as in his marriage – to the world in which he had grown up. It was a bourgeois world, of teachers, clerks and nurses: an existence which drew its strength from patterns of work, orderliness, routine, respectability, thrift, religion, family, local pride, regard for education and for qualifications. It was a world from which luxury, party-going, fashion, drink, sexual licence, art and culture were largely absent.

The Prime Minister whose social background Wilson’s most resembles is not Edward Heath or John Major, still less Jim Calla-ghan (all Southerners from differing tribes), but Margaret Thatcher. In key respects, the early lives of the two leaders were remarkably similar. Both were brought up in or near middling English industrial towns. Both came from disciplined, Church-based families and had parents who valued learning, while having little formal education themselves. Both were given more favourable attention than an elder sister, their only sibling, who, in each case, entered a worthwhile career of a lesser-professional kind (Margaret’s sister became a physiotherapist, Harold’s a primary school teacher).

Both were Nonconformists. The Robertses were Methodists. In his biography of Mrs Thatcher, Hugo Young writes: ‘[Alfred Roberts] was by nature a cautious, thrifty fellow, who had inherited an unquestioning admiration for certain Victorian values: hard work, self-help, rigorous budgeting and a firm belief in the immorality of extravagance.’ Margaret spent every Sunday of her childhood walking to and from the Methodist church in the centre of Grantham. We have already discussed the role played by Milnsbridge Baptist Church in the Wilsons’ family life. Harold’s own memoirs speak of ‘regular chapel-going and a sense of community’ and his parents’ ‘capacity for protracted hard work …’³³

Both future premiers followed the same pattern in their education. After attending a council primary school, both won places at grant-aided grammar schools, their fees paid by county scholarships. There they worked and played with a dedication brought from their homes. By coincidence, Margaret’s subject, the highly practical one of chemistry, was also Herbert’s and Marjorie’s. Their levels of attainments were similar. Both passed into Oxford (a glittering prize for any grammar school pupil), but each did so by a narrow margin. Neither was regarded as brilliant at school. For both, university was a critical launching-pad.

The early political training of the two future leaders also contains a parallel. In both families, political achievement was considered the acme of success. ‘Politics infused the atmosphere in which she was reared,’ writes Young. ‘… A political family handed down the tradition of political commitment from one generation to the next.’³⁴ Harold’s comment that politics had been ‘in my family for generations before me’, will be recalled. Harold, like Margaret, had an alderman in his family, Alderman Thewlis of Manchester, in addition to an Australian state legislator. Both Alfred and Herbert began in the Liberal Party, the characteristic political home of provincial Nonconformity, before moving in contrary directions when the Liberals fell apart in the 1920s.

The Wilsons were better educated than the Robertses and, some of the time, slightly richer. In Western Road they lived in a semidetached house with an indoor lavatory: Alderman Roberts lived over his grocer’s shop, with the lavatory in the yard. The Wilsons took more holidays, and there was the unusual adventure of the Australian trip, which Margaret’s family could scarcely have contemplated. Moreover, the psychological roles of husband and wife in the two families were to some extent the reverse of each other: Ethel, a teacher, was the strongest character in the Wilson household, whereas Margaret’s mother (as portrayed by Young) was colourless and downtrodden. Herbert lacked the steel of Alfred, a local dignitary.

Yet the similarity of the early years of the two overlapping party leaders – inhabitants of No. 10 Downing Street for nineteen years between them – in class, wealth, standard of living, interests, habits, attainment and upbringing, is such that if they had grown up at the same time in the same town they would almost certainly have known each other. There were probably several Margaret Hilda Robertses at Royds Hall, and many must have played tennis at the Brotherton’s club. It is noteworthy that one of Gladys’s cousins, Tom Baldwin, kept a grocer’s shop – like Margaret’s father.³⁵

There were, however, two differences which greatly influenced the outcome. First, Harold and Margaret were not contemporaries. Margaret was nine and a half years Harold’s junior, and from that gap huge differences in outlook arose. Second, Alfred Roberts was a self-employed businessman, while Herbert was an employee.

Harold spent his adolescence and early manhood during the worst years of the depression. The collapse of world markets, and the failure or inability of governments to soften the impact on British manufacturing industry, came close to breaking Herbert’s spirit and destroying his career. Harold’s family was uprooted, and his education interrupted, by the effects of unemployment. By contrast, Margaret entered her teens and became politically conscious only as the depression came to an end. Alfred Roberts suffered during the hard times, but never badly. Where Harold’s youthful experience was of financial uncertainty caused by factors outside the family’s control, Margaret’s memory was of a solid security, the product, as she believed, of her father’s efforts and prudence.

After his illness, Harold continued to thrive at Royds Hall, while his father looked for work. But the atmosphere at home was sometimes close to despair. ‘The adjustment, not only of the wage- or salary-earner and his wife, but also of the children in a house struck by unemployment, is hard to describe,’ Wilson later recalled, ‘… I shall never really know how the family survived … Our food became more simple, although my mother always managed to keep me adequately fed … I concentrated with ever more determination on my schooling.’³⁶ This was a state of affairs which Margaret never had to face in fully employed, Second World War Grantham.

Politicians like to emphasize their own childhood hardships, and Harold certainly made full use of his father’s periods of joblessness as a credential (just as Mrs Thatcher made use of her father’s corner shop and outside privy). Yet the fact of Herbert’s unemployment was real and so was the typical pattern of humiliation, self-recrimination, loss of professional dignity, and fear for the future which accompanied it. For Harold, the atmosphere at home was a powerful motivator, with Herbert cursing his lack of qualifications and transferring his own frustrated hopes onto his talented son. At Oxford, Harold took a professional interest in the trade cycle and the demand for labour. Later, as a politician, the prevention of unemployment became a primary aim. Unlike some of his Conservative opponents, who regarded joblessness as a form of weakness and saw the remedy in individual initiative, Harold always believed that state intervention was a necessity.

There was also a personal legacy. Herbert had imbued in his son a determination that, whatever happened, he would not end up at the mercy of his employers. The fear of sudden dismissal and exclusion stayed with Harold throughout his life, and his political career cannot be understood without seeing it as a central thread.

3

JESUS

In Oxford terms, the small college of Jesus was a backwater, which did not attract the ablest pupils from the most prestigious schools. Harold was told before he went up that it was ‘despised in Oxford’.¹ Even Wirral Grammar School regarded it as second best. Its strongest traditional link was with Wales, though there were also many boys like Harold – especially among award-winners – who came from the North.² Expectations among Jesus men were appropriately modest. Many became clergymen, schoolmasters or provincial lecturers. The ablest joined the Civil Service (the Home, not the Diplomatic), though the number of such entrants was barely more than a trickle, and averaged only one per annum in the inter-war years.³ The college’s best-known pre-war alumnus was the legendary T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Wilson is the only inter-war Jesus student to have achieved a general fame.

The unpretentiousness of Jesus made it relatively easy for the product of a provincial grammar school, and a relatively humble home, to adjust to the life of a tradition-bound university. It also meant that Wilson did not automatically rub shoulders with Oxford’s undergraduate élite. In this respect, his experience was different from that of some others who became Labour politicians after the Second World War, for whom Oxford was an entry-ticket to the governing class, if they were not members of it already. Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay, Richard Crossman (all at New College), Frank Pakenham, Patrick Gordon Walker, Christopher Mayhew (at Christ Church), Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins (at Balliol) shared staircases and ate dinners from their very first term with well-connected, well-off young men who already had a confident view of their own place in the world. Harold did not find himself in such society and did not seek it. Throughout his days as an undergraduate, he was singularly indifferent to its activities.

Instead, he remained contentedly part of the other Oxford: the Oxford treated contemptuously by Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall and ignored completely in Brideshead Revisited. There are very few novels about Harold’s Oxford. Perhaps there should be more. Harold’s friends, however, did not end up writing novels. The other Oxford was dedicated to essays, marks, exams, chapel-going, sport and college societies at which learned papers were read and discussed. It was the Oxford of the overwhelming majority of undergraduates, not just at Jesus but in most other colleges as well. Harold differed from fellow members of this Oxford only in the ferocity of his determination to do well academically, and the remarkable extent of his success.

Harold’s letters home to his family, of which many survive from his first two years, provide a fascinating glimpse of the preoccupations of his early manhood years. They are not dramatic: what is noteworthy about them is how little they contain that is unusual, or might not have been written by hundreds of contemporaries who disappeared, after graduation, into anonymous staff rooms and parsonages. They reveal a highly conventional young man deeply absorbed in the formal experiences of university life. They show him stirred, sometimes movingly, by the intellectual ambitions, and casual presumption, of Oxford, and the opportunities the university provided for him to stretch his own capacities. They do not indicate any need or desire to stray beyond the bounds of officially approved learning.

What is going on in a young man’s head and what he tells his parents need not, of course, be the same thing: but there is no guile in his writing, much of which has a child-like quality. The letters deal mainly with wants, and how he is coping. They are about money – how much he has, how much he needs, how much things cost, and how he is making ends meet, often down to the last penny. They are about food and other provisions, to be purchased at Wirral rather than Oxford prices, to supplement meagre college rations; about tutors, lectures, societies, sport, his own unquenchable thirst for parental letters; and they are about Gladys. They are, by turns, warm, generous, demanding, winsome, boastful, witty, self-possessed. Though they are sometimes lonely, they are never anxious. They are forever looking ahead, planning moves in Harold’s own life, and organizing his parents to do things on his behalf, in the confident knowledge that they will comply. They are uncomplicated and loving. They present Harold as, already, a man content with who he is, where he comes from, and the upward direction in which he is heading, fighting battles on his own, with no need for backing other than the support he takes for granted from his family.

At first he was homesick. Unlike Gladys, with her experience of boarding-school, Harold had never lived away from his parents, except during his illnesses and at Scout camp. His early letters – lengthy and poignant, stressing the lack of home comforts – are full of characteristic symptoms. The contents of Harold’s laundry feature prominently: it had been agreed that he would send this back to Bromborough to save money. ‘I think that for the first fortnight’, he wrote on arrival, ‘I’ll just send my collars, hankies, vests, pants and socks.’⁴ He explained: ‘The reason there are so many hankies is that I have a bad cold.’⁵ Another letter suggested: ‘It might pay to send butter (it is very dear here) next week with washing, also two oranges.’⁶ To Marjorie he wrote: ‘Will you please send me a 6d. meat pie? I’ll send you the cash in my next letter.’ Was he all right, were the other chaps OK? asked his sister. He was happy, he replied. ‘That’s the answer to I of your questions,’ and to the other, ‘Yes, very decent set. No snobbery.’⁷ He had been placed in a first-floor room with a young Welsh Foundation Scholar, A. H. J. Thomas of Tenby. ‘He’s an exceptionally nice fellow & we seem to have similar tastes’, wrote Harold, ‘– both keen on running, neither on smoking or drinking, and have similar views on food, etc.’⁸ To illustrate the satisfactoriness of the Wilson–Thomas set-up, Harold drew a careful sketch-map of their joint room, showing its furnishings, and with a numbered key.

In search of company and familiar surroundings, Harold responded to an invitation to join the University Congregational Society, and got to know Dr Nathaniel Micklem, Principal of Mansfield, the Congregationalist Theological College. He also took an interest in the evangelical Oxford Group, which had many Nonconformist members. ‘Am enjoying the Group, it’s the only thing I’ve seen more than skin-deep,’ he wrote at the end of October, having had little luck with the political clubs.⁹ Both the Group, which offered secular as well as religious discussions, and Mansfield, became focal points. He often attended Sunday morning services in Mansfield Chapel, as well as evensong at Jesus. Later on, he sometimes accompanied a friend to Sunday evening concerts in Balliol chapel to hear the undergraduate Edward Heath (whom he did not yet meet) play the organ.¹⁰

Voluntary chapel-going, beyond what his own college required, became a reassuring part of his weekly routine. ‘There was a deeply religious element in his make-up which influenced much of his political thinking in later years,’ considers Eric Sharpe, a friend and contemporary at Jesus who attended services with him and later became a Baptist minister.¹¹ Harold made much the same claim. ‘I have religious beliefs, yes’, he told an interviewer in 1963, ‘and they have very much affected my political views.’¹² Mary does not quite agree. ‘Religion was part of his tradition,’ she says. ‘He never questioned it, but he did not think much about wider religious questions. When he did, he believed that people should translate Christianity into good works.’¹³ Labour colleagues, mainly atheist or agnostic, viewed Harold’s piety with cynicism. Set against his cat-like manoeuvrings at Westminster, it looked like humbug. Nevertheless, religious worship was part of the mould which formed him, his political outlook, and his idiom.

Harold’s sketch-map of his room at Jesus College, and its location.

At Oxford, religion and politics were often mixed. He used to go to a Congregationalist discussion group called the Dale Society on Sunday afternoons, to hear speakers who examined the link between faith and action. He frequently intervened. ‘He spoke with clarity and force,’ recalls another Jesus contemporary, Professor Robert Steel, who matriculated also as an exhibitioner in the same year. ‘He could put a case in a very persuasive manner, and unless you felt strongly you accepted what he said.’ One popular topic at the Dale Society was the colonies – in modern terms the Third World, a topic in which Harold took a special interest. ‘If someone gave a talk on the race problem, the chances were he would go to it,’ says Steel.¹⁴ He took an active interest in college discussion societies, becoming president of a couple of them. The college magazine records that in 1936 he addressed the Henry Vaughan Society in Jesus on ‘The Last Depression and the Next’ and caused offence to a former president of the society by referring to ‘“mugs” on the Stock Exchange’.¹⁵

Harold’s greatest solace was work. As a history undergraduate, he had to take prelims at the end of his first term, based on set books which included works in medieval Latin, and an economics textbook, Public Finance, by a former LSE lecturer called Hugh Dalton. Though the pass standard was not high, the quantity of material was large. ‘I doubt if I have worked so hard in my life,’ he said later.¹⁶ He was an early riser. Steel used sometimes to meet him in the bath house before breakfast – he would be conscious of Harold’s presence because his friend would sing the same songs repeatedly, at the top of his voice. He also used to see him regularly at dinner, where they sat together at the exhibitioners’ table. ‘Harold used to study a great deal, and then have a glass of beer,’ recalls Steel. ‘We all knew that he coped very well with essay writing and that he read voraciously.’¹⁷

Apart from the occasional beer, there was little time for anything else, except sport. At school he had been a keen long-distance runner. At Oxford he played football in the college second team, and tennis, even in winter. But athletics was his real passion. He ran on the Iffley Road track most afternoons. ‘He had an obsession about physical fitness,’ says Sharpe.¹⁸ He was a half-miler, though he sometimes ran longer distances as well. One such occasion, described in a letter, occurred in his second term. ‘I’ve some very good news,’ he wrote to his parents:

Just after breakfast this morning (Saturday) the cross-country captain came in & asked me to run for the Varsity Second Team v. Reading A. C. (I tried to send you a p.c. so you would know Saturday night, but couldn’t catch the post).

Well I ran: I started badly & after 2 miles was 14th out of a field of 16. After we had topped Shotover Hill, I got my second wind & moved a lot better. I caught up 7 places in the last mile – & finished 7th (the third Oxford man home…)…

After that we were taken in a motor coach to the city & had tea in a very posh restaurant – all of us on one table in a private room: the captains made speeches etc. I felt very thrilled about it all. So I’ve represented the Varsity. If I could only get my cross-country really well up, I might get my half-blue next year.

… Still feeling very thrilled; hope you’re also duly thrilled.¹⁹

Active politics – the precocious dream of his adolescence – had a lower priority. Nevertheless, the interest was still there. In his first week, he joined the League of Nations Union, and was approached by the Secretary of the University Labour Club, ‘a very decent fellow from Wallasey’. ‘I think I shall join the Lab. Club’, he wrote home, ‘– the sub’s only 2/6. I shan’t go to many meetings, just to those addressed by G. D. H. Cole and Stafford Cripps I think – both this term.’ He joined the Oxford Union on similar grounds, ‘partly on account of debates, hearing important men – Cabinet Ministers etc.’, but more because of the library.²⁰

He made extensive use of the Union to take out books and as a place to work, and attended debates without taking part in them. The Labour Club, however, was a bitter disappointment. His first experience of it put him off. It struck him, he wrote home after attending a meeting a few weeks after going up, ‘as very petty: squabbling about tiffs with other sections of the labour party instead of getting down to something concrete’.²¹ Many years later, as a well-known politician, he elaborated on this point, maintaining that he ‘could not stomach all those Marxist public school products rambling on about the exploited workers and the need for a socialist revolution’.²² This became his standard excuse for not having taken part in Labour politics as a student. It was also a way of indicating to people who equated Bevanism with Communism that he had never belonged to the fellow-travelling left wing, while giving a side-swipe at the Labour Party’s upper-middle-class intellectuals, many of whom had started on the Left before moving rightwards.

The obvious explanation for Harold’s lack of political involvement in his first term was that he was not sufficiently interested and, with an exam a few weeks away, he had too much to do. These points are made in a very early, pencil-written note home, which accompanied his first laundry parcel, before he had yet attended a single Labour meeting. ‘Cole is speaking at the Labour Club to-night but I don’t think I’ll go,’ he wrote. ‘I’ll wait till next term for that sort of thing.’ He added a sentence which indicated the first call on his attention, after work: ‘I’ve been running twice at Iffley Road – nice track.’²³ Yet the reason he gave later is also convincing. For his arrival at Oxford happened to coincide with a moment in undergraduate politics when the student Left was as febrile, and as out of touch with reality, as it ever became in the course of a heady decade. The Labour Club in 1934 was the crucible of fashion. But fashion was something to which Harold, sometimes to the irritation or scorn of contemporaries, was unusually immune.

‘In recent months there have been unmistakable signs of an increase of political consciousness amongst the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge,’ one observer noted at the beginning of 1934, before Harold went up, adding that political activity had been ‘largely confined to socialists and, to an increasing degree, to communists.’²⁴ By the time of Harold’s arrival, a fertile generation of left-wing undergraduates that had included Barbara Betts (later Castle), Anthony Greenwood, Richard Crossman, Patrick Gordon Walker and Michael Stewart – all future members of Harold’s Cabinets – was just ending. But the memory of them was fresh. ‘Consciousness’ was the vogue word. ‘Oxford was very, very politically conscious,’ recalls a friend of Barbara Betts.²⁵ An important raiser of consciousness, and prophet of Oxford socialism, was G. D. H. Cole, an ascetic thinker whose First World War semi-syndicalist ideas had given way to a Fabian, pragmatic approach, though still with a Utopian goal. In 1930–1, Cole had gathered together a group of young disciples at Oxford which included Hugh Gaitskell, a WEA lecturer who had recently graduated from New College, to help set up two closely linked ginger groups or (as they would now be called) think tanks: the New Fabian Research Bureau and the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda (which in October 1932 merged with the pro-Labour rump of the old ILP to form the left-wing Socialist League). There was much excitement over these developments in Oxford, where Cole’s admirers were encouraged to see themselves as the vanguard of Labour’s intellectual revival.

The MacDonald and Snowden betrayal, and the subsequent Labour collapse, acted as the spur. ‘While the events of autumn 1931 lost thousands of voters to the Labour Party in the country as a whole’, recorded two young chroniclers of the University’s politics a couple of years later, ‘in Oxford the rapid growth of socialist opinion suffered no comparable set-back.’ By the end of 1932 the Labour Club had attained a record membership of almost five hundred, and a ‘Socialist Dons’ Luncheon Club’, with thirty or forty members, was meeting weekly.²⁶ The upward curve of left-wing activity continued in 1933 and 1934, the year of Harold’s arrival at Jesus. As interest increased, however, so the orientation changed, away from the careful programme-building of Cole, and towards the international vistas and harsh dogmatism of King Street and Moscow.

Communism began to be important in Oxford in 1931, when some undergraduates set up the October Club, a Communist-front body whose secret aim was to control as much of Oxford left-wing politics as possible. Within a year, the Club had a membership of 300, which included many people who were also in the Labour Club. When Harold went up in 1934, the October Club was at the peak of its recruiting zeal: one of Harold’s first decisions on taking up residence was to reject the overtures of an Octobrist who wanted him to join, explaining politely but firmly (as Harold related in a letter to Marjorie), ‘I didn’t want to.’²⁷ Many others, however, became members of both the October and the Labour Clubs, either gullibly or sympathizing with the Communist point of view.

When Harold went to his first meeting of the Labour Club, the ‘Marxist public school products’ were about to stage a Communist takeover. Anthony Blunt, the KGB spy, later described how Marxism ‘hit Cambridge’ (by which he meant smart, sophisticated Cambridge) early in 1934.²⁸ It hit Oxford a few months later. An important development for Marxists in both universities, as for Communists generally, was an alteration in Moscow’s international tactics, occasioned by Soviet concern about a resurgent Germany. The switch was not sudden: rather, there was a gradual change of approach away from the former ‘Class against Class’ line to the ‘Popular Front’, officially adopted by the Comintern at its Seventh Congress in 1935. The new line meant that democratic socialists were no longer to be denounced as social fascists; instead they were to be coaxed into alliance in a ‘popular front’, or coalition of left-wing forces. This was the theory: in practice, it meant that Communists were supposed to use every wile to subvert Labour Party citadels. In Oxford it gave zealous Octobrists a motive for a fifth-column assault on the Labour Club, in the name of a ‘popular front’.

The merger between the two Clubs was brought about by secret Communists early in Harold’s undergraduate career. Christopher (now Lord) Mayhew, Harold’s exact Oxford contemporary and a Labour activist in the University, remembers that some two hundred Communist undergraduates ‘dominated the fifteen hundred members of the Labour Club, using techniques that are familiar enough today but frequently caught us off our guard then’. It emerged that, for some time, Labour Club elections had been rigged by the simple expedient of conducting a ballot and then falsifying the results.²⁹ Philip Toynbee – who made his name as a public school runaway before going up to Oxford and becoming Communist President of the Union – later boasted that every member of the Labour Club executive was a secret member of the Communist Party, except Mayhew who ‘never seemed to have grasped that all the others were’.³⁰ Mayhew’s own claim is that, though duped for a time, he eventually saw through the ploy.³¹ Later, Mayhew led a breakaway Democratic Socialist Group – anticipating the Social Democrat split in the national Labour Party half a century later, in which some of the same people were involved, taking the same sides. Mayhew himself was the first Labour MP to cross over to the Liberals, while the leader of the 1981 Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, had also been an Oxford Democratic Socialist. Denis Healey, on the other hand, stayed with Labour in 1981 as he had done in the late 1930s when, although a Communist, he had been elected Chairman of the Labour Club.

It was fun to be a Communist at Oxford in the 1930s, if you had the money and the leisure to sustain the lifestyle. Toynbee claimed that when membership of the Party reached its peak in 1937 of 200 or so (eighty per cent of whom were undercover members, passing for ordinary supporters of other parties) it was far from being a public school preserve: at least half its membership came from grammar schools.³² This was not, however, the more vociferous half, and there was some justice in the comment of a critic in Isis, the undergraduate magazine, who wrote after a notable Union debate that if the Communists wanted to take power, ‘they really should insist that everyone is sent to a public school’. Oxford socialism had become an exclusive society with its own code and rituals. Labour Club members called each other ‘comrade’, not just in meetings, but also in private conversation. Isis noted that any serious office-hunter at the Union had to denounce capitalism. A socialist who wore the customary evening dress for debates needed to ensure that his bowtie was a ready-made one, ‘to show his contempt for bourgeois prejudices’.³³

Philip Toynbee, who viewed bourgeois prejudices with a mixture of aristocratic and Marxist disdain, was the symbolic leader of this kind of gay and abandoned politics, which was designed to outrage headmasters, dons, old-fashioned fathers and Times leader writers and, incidentally, to spice up the social whirl. Toynbee’s nostalgic boast in later years was that ‘you bought silk pyjamas from your tailor in the High Street, danced the night away, and then shot off to CP headquarters for your secret instructions.’³⁴ There was also an aphrodisiac quality: ideas about socialism and free love often mingled. Jessica Mitford (a left-wing Toynbee cousin) has given the best account of how, for the naughty children of the upper classes, sex, intellectual snobbery and demi-monde politics could come deliciously together.³⁵ Toynbee’s own diary entries for the 1930s reveal ‘a dizzying mélange of Communist Party activities interspersed with deb dances, drunken episodes, and night-long discussions with fellow Oxford intellectuals – Isaiah Berlin, Frank Pakenham, Maurice Bowra, Roy Harrod’.³⁶

At Cambridge, where Communism was similarly chic, not all its adherents were so frivolous: some, indeed, took it with a deadly seriousness. At Oxford the form the political fashion took depended critically on which year you happened to go up. Denis Healey, who entered Balliol in 1936, was recruited to the Communist Party the following summer by the poet Peter Hewitt, a friend of Toynbee’s. Though by now the doctrine was sweeping through political Oxford like an epidemic, its character was already changing. According to Healey, there was a key dividing line between undergraduates of his year, and those who started in 1935. ‘Peter and Philip … belonged to a different generation of Communists from me,’ he observes. ‘They had joined the “October Club” a year or two earlier, when Communists were very sectarian, got drunk, wore beards, and did not worry about their examinations.’ Following the 1935 change of Comintern line, however, a new earnestness took over: ‘Communists started shaving, tried to avoid being drunk in public, worked for first class degrees, and played down their Marxism–Leninism.’³⁷

If there were aspects of the post-1935 approach which Harold might have found congenial, had he gone up in 1936, there was nothing in the pre-1935 style to appeal to him. Communists and fellow-travellers were to be found in the posh, arrogant colleges, like Balliol and Christ Church, not in modest establishments like Jesus: Steel recalls only one leading member of the October Club among his college contemporaries. There was nothing in common between the Toynbee circle and the Wilson circle, if it could be called a circle. ‘We were very naïve and innocent,’ says a Wilson friend. ‘For example, I don’t think I had ever heard of homosexuals when I was an undergraduate, and Harold may not have either. I had no idea that spies were recruited at Oxford.’ Instead of sex and popular fronts, Harold talked about Gladys, the Wirral, and his work.³⁸ Others who came from a similar, grammar school or minor public school background, experienced Oxford political and intellectual friendships as a social elevator: chameleon-like, they adapted. Harold – and it was a disadvantage later on, as well as a strength – seemed to resist such influences. Unlike Healey and Jenkins, he never learned to sound like an Oxford man, and did not try. He did not mix with people from a different milieu. He stuck to his own. It was not that he disliked the Pakenhams, Crossmans and Gordon Walkers, young dons who helped to set the social tone as well as the socialist one, or even the Bowras, Berlins and Harrods. It was just that he never encountered them, except when he attended their lectures.

Harold did not shut himself off from politics altogether. He remained Labour-inclined for his first few months, toying with the idea of taking a more active part after the exam in December was over. At the end of the Michaelmas Term he had not yet despaired of the Labour Club: indeed, he must have participated to a certain extent because somebody nominated him as college secretary. He thought about it. One factor to be weighed in the balance was that Cole was President of the Club, ‘and all the coll. sees meet him a lot’. After the Christmas vacation, however, he decided not to accept the post, and to give up attending Labour Club meetings. The reasons, he told his parents cryptically, were ‘(a) LI. George (b) the Labour Party (c) am much more interested in foreign affairs than labour polities’. It was a clinching factor that meetings of the Labour Club clashed with a course of lectures on post-war Germany by the young New College don, Richard Crossman, which he was keen to attend. ‘These will be much more use than going to Lab. Club Friday evening meetings,’ Harold wrote to his parents.³⁹

In his second term, Harold started going to the Liberal Club instead, and found it more congenial. ‘I went to the Liberal Club dinner: it was really fine – Herbert Samuel,’ Wilson wrote home in March, adding ‘I’m getting a few new members.’ He also began to attend meetings of a Liberal discussion group.⁴⁰ Liberal activity, however, never absorbed a great deal of his time or attention, and always took third place to work and athletics. ‘Involvement in politics was somewhat peripheral in those days,’ recalls Sharpe.⁴¹ The Liberal Club is barely mentioned in Harold’s letters home after the Hilary Term of 1935, and seems to have ranked no higher than other societies in which he took a sporadic interest, like the League of Nations Union. Steel remembers only that Harold ‘went out and about and went to political meetings’ if there was an interesting speaker.⁴² Study was his preoccupation: none of his Oxford friends saw him as a politician, or even a potential one. Nevertheless, Harold’s participation in Oxford Liberal politics – limited as it undoubtedly was – contains a small mystery. It does not fit into a picture of a single-minded determination to succeed.

In a brilliantly argued polemic against Wilson, published in 1968 just as Marxism was once again in vogue, partly in response to the Labour Government headed by Wilson, the writer and journalist Paul Foot drew attention to early Liberal influences on the future Prime Minister that were supposedly formative. Foot also contrasted what he saw as the idealism of his own uncle, Michael Foot, who abandoned the Liberal Party to join Labour because he wanted to abolish capitalism, with the alleged complacency of Wilson, whose failure to make such a switch indicated that he had no such mission.⁴³ A more obvious difference between the two politicians, however, is that Michael Foot’s party had some chance of eventually coming back to power, whereas Wilson’s had none. In the mid-1930s the Labour Party looked a pretty dismal prospect, but the Liberals – despite the continued prominence of one or two individuals, like Lloyd George and Herbert Samuel – seemed to be set on a path to extinction.

When Wilson joined the Oxford Club, it was at the nadir of its fortunes. What was happening to the Liberals nationally had been replicated, on a small scale, in the university. The Oxford Club’s membership was low, and it was in debt. If Harold still wanted to be an MP, let alone a minister, joining the Liberals was scarcely a stepping-stone. The puzzle about his choice is that he should have decided, for the time being at least, to place himself on the margin.

Even if he was intending to put his political plans on ice until he was professionally established – this is Mary’s suggestion⁴⁴ – it was surprising, on the face of it, that he should have joined the one political party which offered the smallest future opportunity. Rather than a declaration of faith, or the first move in a political chess game, Harold’s decision looks like the casual act of an eighteen-year-old whose mind was principally on other things. However, few of Wilson’s other decisions were ever casual; and it is possible that this one was made, not in spite of the Liberals’ weakness, but partly because of it. What the fading Liberals offered Harold was a chance to show his mettle. There was little opportunity for him in the raucous Labour Club. The Liberals, on the other hand, gave him a leadership position almost at once. He had scarcely paid his subscription as a new member before anxious Liberal Executive members were asking him to become Treasurer. He accepted the office, took it seriously, and immediately began, with some success, to eliminate the Club’s deficit.

For the whole of his undergraduate career, Harold continued to take a benign and intermittently active interest in the Liberals. In his first year, he was even co-opted by a national Liberal Party group called the Eighty Club, which – somewhat pretentiously – regarded itself as having an ‘élite’ membership. Paul Foot regards this as evidence of a deep Liberal commitment. It may, however, have indicated nothing more than that an atrophying London dining and discussion society was seeking, by recruiting Oxford’s current officers, to replenish its ageing stock.

Wilson was a reasonably energetic participant in his first two years. During vacations he twice attended national conferences of the Union of University Liberal Students when these were held in the North-West. The first was in Liverpool after his second term, the second in Manchester after his fourth. At the latter, he spoke in support of the League of Nations, and his remarks were reported in the Manchester Guardian.45 His interest in that great newspaper, then based in Manchester and proudly Liberal in persuasion, may provide a partial explanation for his interest in Liberalism. Robert Steel recalls several occasions when he met Harold in the main quad at Jesus after dinner, and strolled with him to the Post Office in St Aldate’s in time to catch the midnight post: Harold was sending off his reports of Liberal Club meetings to the Manchester Guardian, effectively acting as a stringer.⁴⁶ Later, as we shall see, Harold toyed with the idea of a career in journalism with the same paper. Liberal Party activity may have seemed a relevant qualification.

In Oxford Wilson’s main contribution was bureaucratic rather than political. Honor Balfour, a Liberal Club President and contemporary, recalled that Wilson ‘never took any initiatives or decisions’, but was good at recruiting members and collecting subscriptions. Frank Byers (later a Liberal MP and peer) remembered him for his efficiency as Treasurer, but not for any strong political line. This negative recollection was shared by another Club President, Raymond Walton: ‘I don’t remember ever hearing him propose anything political of any kind.’ Quizzed by Paul Foot, R. B. MacCallum, Wilson’s politics tutor, recalled only that he ‘could have told that he was not a Tory. That is all.’⁴⁷ Such political blandness does not, indeed, support Foot’s own assertion of a Liberal indoctrination, or that Wilson was acquiring a stock of ineradicably Liberal ideas. We may take with a pinch of salt Wilson’s subsequent claim that in joining the Liberals he hoped ‘to convert them to my ideas of radical socialism’.⁴⁸ But the lack of a socialist commitment is not proof of an incurably Liberal one.

Wilson’s involvement petered out after his second year, and he never took any part on the wider University stage. He knew none of the Union luminaries of his day. Denis Healey, who claims to have known all the leading Liberals in 1936–7, never met Wilson. He had ‘no role’ in Oxford politics, Healey concludes.⁴⁹ Christopher Mayhew did not hear Wilson’s name mentioned until the beginning of their third year, and then it was for academic, not political reasons.⁵⁰ Surprisingly, in view of his journalistic interest, Wilson did not write for the Liberal Club’s magazine, Oxford Guardian, started in 1936. Mayhew, Crossman, Heath, Dingle Foot, Jo Grimond, Richard Shackleton, Niall MacDermot – members of different parties – all crop up in the gossip column of this journal. Wilson’s name never appears in the magazine at all, except on lists of committee members and college reps.⁵¹ By the time he took Finals, he was still technically a Liberal, but his affiliation had become a merely token one.

In December 1934 Wilson reported that he was ‘swotting hard’:⁵² his efforts were rewarded and he passed the end-of-term exam without difficulty. Before doing so, he raised with the college the possibility of switching degrees from history to the newly established ‘Modern Greats’ course, which G. D. H. Cole had pioneered and which was composed of papers in politics, philosophy and economics. Given his interest in politics and recent political history, it was a logical step. His imagination had also been engaged by problems in economics: in a pre-exam college test in the subject he had come top, with the maximum possible marks. Permission to change was therefore granted, but with the proviso that he had to offer an extra language. He therefore learnt enough German in the Christmas vacation to satisfy his tutor, and embarked on the cocktail of disciplines which was to provide the basis for his academic and political career.

He also began to study in earnest. His first term of concentrated hard work had been a dress rehearsal for a period of eighteen months’ intensive application which transformed him from a promising, but not exceptional, eighteen-year-old into the outstanding student of his generation. How and why this happened is a second mystery. There was a happy coincidence of events: his parents were now well settled in Bromborough, and taking a keen interest in his progress; he himself was adapting to Oxford, delighting in its rituals and routines, and in a college whose social atmosphere suited him perfectly; and there was the challenge of a new degree in subjects that intrigued him. Yet these factors do not, in themselves, fully explain the driving will that seemed to be behind his almost fanatical attitude to study.⁵³

Eric Sharpe, the future Baptist minister who occupied the room below Harold in 1934–5, suggests that Harold’s habits ‘reflected the protestant work ethic that characterized the atmosphere in which he had been brought up’.⁵⁴ Other students shared the ethic, however, without the same results; and there was a Stakhanovite quality to Harold’s efforts which puzzled his contemporaries. His letters frequently describe the number of hours spent at his desk, as though these were an achievement in themselves. ‘I worked very hard last week,’ he wrote, typically, in March 1935; ‘touched 10½ hours one day, & 8 on several days – total – 46 hours for the week.’⁵⁵ Even Harold’s own very diligent friends wondered whether ‘he led an over-regulated life, as if he feared that any minute departure from his highly disciplined routine would knock him completely out of gear.’⁵⁶ Work became a kind of compulsion, of which he was never able to rid himself. Many years later he told an interviewer, revealingly, that he had ‘always been driven by a feeling that there is something to be done and I really ought to be doing it … Even now I feel myself saying that if I spend an evening enjoying myself, I shall work better next day, which is only a kind of inversion of the old feeling of guilt.’⁵⁷ Possibly the knowledge of his parents’ sacrifice and hopes provided an incentive. Sharpe believes that ‘he felt he owed it to his family to be a success.’⁵⁸ A later friend points a finger, specifically, at his father: ‘He had to do well because of Herbert. Harold knew he had to live up to expectations. Herbert put it all on him to fulfil his own ambitions.’⁵⁹ Whatever the reason, Harold began to work with a ferocious determination that made him suddenly aware of what he might achieve.

He was a competitive, pragmatic worker, rather than an inquirer. He enjoyed the books he read, and his letters home show occasional bursts of intellectual enthusiasm. In May 1935 he described as the ‘finest book on the nineteenth century I’ve ever seen a study which he had just finished ‘all about the cross-currents of public opinion, & their effects on free trade, socialism, collectivism, factory legislation, communications, the Manchester School, etc.’ He added: ‘Dad would enjoy it.’⁶⁰ Such comments, however, are less common than details about essays, marks and the flattering comments of tutors. A particular influence was his philosophy tutor, T. M. Knox, who noted his talent and encouraged him. There were only a couple of other Modern Greats undergraduates in Harold’s year at Jesus, so he was sent to other colleges for most of his economics teaching: Maurice Allen, the economic theorist, at Balliol, and R. F. Bretherton at Wadham.

Harold was not the sort of undergraduate who was taken up by the grander dons, and he was diffident, at first, about making himself known to them. It was not in his nature, however, to be anonymous, and he began tentatively to push himself forward. In the summer term, he was delighted when, after asking a question at the end of a lecture by the international affairs expert, Professor Alfred Zimmern, he was invited round by the lecturer to his house. ‘We discussed politics, international affairs, economics, armaments + everything,’ Harold told his parents. ‘In the course of conversation I asked him what was the best English newspaper on politics generally, + international affairs in particular: he answered immediately “The Manchester Guardian & not only in England but in the world …” & Zimmern is supposed to be the greatest living authority on International Affairs.’⁶¹

Meanwhile, Harold began to attend, and greatly to enjoy, academic discussion classes with G. D. H. Cole. He was one of eight or ten undergraduates taught together in this way, sitting on sofas and armchairs in Cole’s room and encouraged to smoke, which gave the occasions an atmosphere of relaxed sophistication. ‘It’s rather good to put questions to a man like him,’ wrote Harold. ‘On one of his bookshelves is a complete series of his publications – “Intelligent Man’s Guide to” etc. etc. It’s fine to look at them & listen to the author spouting.’⁶² In another letter, Harold wrote about having ‘some good fun’ with Cole. ‘He talks for five minutes then stops & asks “are there any questions?” I questioned him yesterday about one of his definitions which I thought implied a contradiction … he was decent enough to admit it … He’s a very nice chap!’⁶³

Most of the undergraduates known to Harold were, like him, Nonconformist and Northern. Steel remembers him as one of a group of Jesus undergraduates from the North-West – especially from schools like Liverpool College and Liverpool Institute – who went round together. Eric Sharpe, the Baptist, had a Merseyside background, and so fits into this category. Arthur Brown, a near contemporary from another college who met Wilson at an economics seminar, had been at Bradford Grammar School. ‘It was our Northern-ness that caused us to take to each other,’ he thinks. ‘We had various places in common, the Wirral, Huddersfield and so on.’⁶⁴ Steel had another link with Harold, through Gladys: both her father and his were Congregationalist ministers and, by coincidence, the Reverend Steel had succeeded the Reverend Baldwin as minister at Fulbourn.⁶⁵

Though he had like-minded friends, he was not part of a set, and he lacked intimates. Sharpe, also at Jesus, thinks that ‘he did not make many close friends in college;’⁶⁶ significantly Brown, who knew him outside college, assumes that Jesus was where most of his friends were to be found. He was often to be seen on his own, but imperturbably so; for Harold, social intercourse was an extra which, if need be, he could do without. Work was his favourite companion. ‘I am not wasting time going to see people and messing about in their rooms’, he wrote after an episode of particularly fierce endeavour in his third term, ‘for this is more interesting.’⁶⁷ Some found him ‘in matters of personal sentiment’ to be reticent. But, though he frequently withdrew into his room for work reasons, he did not shun company. On the contrary, those who knew him speak of his openness, and describe him as gregarious and chatty. Brown’s picture is of a cheerful, self-contained young man, wrapped up in his work, yet with a sense of fun and an inveterate talker. ‘Harold was never at a loss for something to say,’ he recalls.⁶⁸ Steel thinks of him as an extrovert, ‘who always had things to talk about and talked at considerable length’.⁶⁹

Honor Balfour (who knew him in the Liberal Club) remembered him as ‘a trifle pompous – he talked and acted beyond his years’.⁷⁰ Others give almost the opposite impression, and describe a chirpy, bouncy, overgrown schoolboy. Everybody agrees that he was an irrepressible show-off. He liked to boast about his academic and athletic successes; and to demonstrate his superior knowledge of most topics under discussion. Like his father, he also had a favourite party trick, which later became his trade mark. He enjoyed displaying his talent for recalling tiny details about trivial past events of the kind most people instantly forget. ‘He could remember things like the day he bought his pair of trousers,’ says Brown.⁷¹ He was an entertaining teller of stories, sometimes long ones. ‘You always knew he could embellish a tale in an amusing way,’ Steel remembers. He was universally considered – this was an unchanging feature, throughout his life – good-natured, without malice, and generous. Steel recalls that, as a graduate student, Harold was the proud possessor of a second-hand Austin 7 motor car. This he lent freely to friends. ‘Let me know if you want to borrow it again,’ Harold would say. So Steel got into the habit of letting him know, and passed his driving test in it.⁷²

At the end of his first academic year, with Schools (Oxford’s final exams) not yet on the horizon, he set his sights on winning University prizes. Thomas, his room-mate, decided to put in for the Stanhope Historical Essay Prize; Harold had a shot at the Cecil Peace Prize, submitting an essay on the private manufacture of armaments, a set topic. He was unsuccessful. Before he had received this result, however, his tutors had encouraged him to consider competing for another accolade. ‘I’m definitely supposed to be going in for the Gladstone’, he wrote home in May 1936, ‘– and have been reading up some railway history.’⁷³ His target was the Gladstone Memorial Prize, worth £100. He started to prepare a long, carefully researched and annotated paper on ‘The State and Railways 1823–63’. This combined several areas of interest: nineteenth-century politics, economics, and the Seddon family industry. The project took nearly two terms to complete, and eclipsed almost every other non-work activity. In the end, even running took second place.

He was content. More than that, he was happy – and never happier than when he was alone with his books. Helping to sustain his happiness, meanwhile – and enabling him to ignore Oxford’s many distractions – was the girl he had met at the Brotherton’s tennis club. After their first meetings, Harold had written to Gladys from Boy Scout camp. Then he had disappeared to Oxford, while she had remained at her office stool. But they kept in touch. ‘When Harold went up to Oxford we wrote to each other constantly,’ she recalls.⁷⁴ Their letters to each other were not kept. Gladys, however, figures in almost every letter from Harold to his parents. He seldom used her Christian name, as if to do so would be over-familiar – even embarrassing, giving away too much about himself. He stuck to her initials. But she was nearly always there. He had a consistent purpose: to get his mother and father to see as much of Gladys Baldwin as possible, and bring her to Oxford whenever they could.

Since going up, Harold had one important thing in common with Gladys: both of them were living away from home. She, too, frequently felt lonely. ‘How’s G.B. going on?’ became Harold’s familiar refrain.⁷⁵ Fond thoughts about ‘G.B.’ and nostalgia for the Wilson family hearth were closely linked. He tried to make light of things. ‘Do you ever see G.M.B. (Stanley’s niece)?’ he asked in an early letter. ‘How many walk her home from chapel? Why not give her a lift home some night? It will help to preserve the link. I believe she was going to the dance at Highfield last Thursday. Don’t forget about the lift home now & again; it’s a good idea. Let me know all the news about her as well as about everybody else.’ He added, almost mournfully: ‘I’m looking forward to Xmas, partly because the confounded exam will be over by then, but also because it will be nice to come home again.’⁷⁶

Herbert and Ethel were obliging, happy to play the part of surrogate parents to their son’s girl, a role for which she was grateful. They had her round. ‘Got a letter from G.B. this a.m.,’ Harold wrote in February 1935. ‘She wasn’t ill, she’s been working very late. Evidently she was very fed-up last weekend – homesick, & that is why she went to see you. She said she felt a lot better after it … Her pa’s preaching at Chester. Are you going to ask them along for an evening?’⁷⁷ A few days later, he wrote again: ‘Thanks for taking G B. out. I’m glad you did, because evidently she’d been feeling fed-up and homesick etc. the previous week. However she has the tennis dance on Mar. 2nd & her people are coming on the 9th so she should be OK now.’⁷⁸ He did not let the matter rest. ‘Will you see the Baldwins next week?’ he urged at the beginning of March.⁷⁹ His parents responded with an invitation.

On his nineteenth birthday, to Harold’s intense pleasure, Gladys sent him a pen-and-pencil set. It was mid-term: he could not go to the Wirral. He decided to engineer a family visit to Oxford. His room-mate, Thomas of Tenby, had recently been in hospital for an appendicectomy. Illness, it occurred to Harold, was something that made parents concerned about their offspring, and even wish to see them. He developed stomach pains. ‘I wish you could come up next weekend, if at all possible – it would make things a lot easier – esp. re my tummy,’ he wrote. ‘If you could come –’, he added with even greater ingenuity, ‘it would make it a lot easier to settle down & work for the rest of the term … please come next weekend if at all possible (& bring G.B.). Remember me to G.B. if you see her at tennis, or anywhere – she probably won’t be down to tennis much as it’s her overtime etc. this week.’⁸⁰ The ploy was successful: the visit took place, the first of several with Gladys in the car, generally after some campaigning by Harold. Whenever his parents planned a trip to Oxford, Harold asked if they could bring ‘G.B.’

‘Hope G.B.’s getting on OK, thanks for “looking after her” last week,’ Harold wrote in May, beating a by now familiar drum. ‘And will you also please pay my tennis club subscription this week, so that I’m on the list of members in good time.’⁸¹ It was a joyous summer, back in the Wirral, with Gladys, the Brotherton’s club, and tales of Varsity life to tell. There was also a twinkle of ambition. That October, Harold returned to Oxford for his second year, refreshed, and with his eyes fixed on an immediate goal. He went to lectures and visited the Iffley track. He also read up about railway history. When running fixtures ceased in November, he threw himself into his research. ‘I haven’t any news as I’m spending all my time on the Gladstone just at present,’ he wrote.

Harold barely noticed the general election on 14 November, at which Labour – led by a hitherto obscure MP called Clement Attlee – staged a modest recovery. He joined fellow undergraduates at the Oxford Union, to hear the results read out as telegrams came through. His interest in them, however, was largely parochial. ‘Fancy that wet Marklew getting in, and that hopeless Mabane’, he wrote, ‘– but he only had Pickles of Crow Lane School against him.’ Ernest Marklew was a Grimsby fish merchant, who won the Colne Valley division for Labour; W. Mabane was the sitting Liberal National MP for Huddersfield. Harold was pleased by the victory in one of the Oxford University seats of the author and barrister A. P. Herbert, standing as an Independent, who defeated a man called Cruttwell: ‘very unpopular – a snob’, wrote Wilson. In his current, Oxford-enhanced, scale of values, social snobbery was one of the worst sins.⁸² That the Liberals lost ground badly does not seem to have bothered him greatly.

During the Christmas vacation he continued his researches at the Picton Library in Liverpool, consulting Government Blue Books and volumes of Hansard, for parliamentary debates. Back in Oxford, he did not let up. ‘The Gladstone is dragging on: I’m more or less in sight of the end of it,’ he wrote at the end of January.⁸³ His attention was diverted by the triumph of one of his lecturers. ‘Have you heard about Crossman?’ he asked his parents rhetorically – it was unlikely that they had. ‘At New College the Sub-Wardenship circulates among the fellows, & this year it is Crossman’s turn. As H. A. L. Fisher (Warden) is off for six months, Crossman (aged 26) is acting warden for the year!!!’⁸⁴ It was difficult to imagine a more dizzying achievement. Compared with this, Harold’s own efforts seemed mundane: but he pressed on. Early in March he handed in his paper, which he had paid to have professionally typed. ‘Into the unsettled England of the eighteen twenties the locomotive burst its way,’ it began, ‘heralding the new industrial order of which it was to form so important a part.’ While he waited anxiously for the result, he speculated about the length of his bibliography, and about tales of previous, streetwise, contestants who had hoodwinked the assessors by listing large numbers of books they hadn’t read.⁸⁵

There were not many entries, and the verdict was quickly reached. A small item in The Times on 18 March announced: ‘The judges have reported to the Vice-Chancellor that they have awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize, 1936, to J. H. Wilson, Exhibitioner of Jesus College.’ It was a moment, as important as getting an award at Jesus, when the world changed. The Gladstone Prize was his first public distinction, a major one in Oxford, marking him out from his contemporaries not just in Jesus but in the University. Harold’s pleasure was unbounded, and so was Herbert’s, as the letters of congratulation arrived, including several from the Colne Valley and Huddersfield. Harold, in his joy, wrote to Helen Whelan, the class teacher who had taken an interest in him at Royds. She was deeply moved. ‘What a far cry from “James Harold” who protested vigorously against the “James”, to Mr Wilson winner of the Gladstone,’ she replied, affectionately and teasingly. ‘And yet in writing to say thank you for a singularly charming letter, I feel that I am almost more pleased to renew a friendship that has many happy memories than to tell my former monitor with what very real pleasure I read of his triumph … I should like to see you so much I feel tempted to appear in Oxford when your less elderly lady friends are not besieging you for tea.’⁸⁶ Ethel and Herbert motored down from the Wirral to hear Harold give the Prize Oration in the Sheldonian Theatre. Gladys came too, the admiring girlfriend, the only lady friend that mattered. ‘I felt very proud of him,’ she remembers.⁸⁷

In Oxford, people who had barely noticed Harold, now began to do so: from being a run-of-the-mill undergraduate from an inferior college, he became a man with possibilities. Cole asked him to give a paper to his discussion class, and complimented him generously afterwards. Harold glowed. ‘Cole says he agrees with it completely & is using some of my figures – which I left with him – to produce at the Econ. Advisory Council (of the Prime Minister)’, he wrote home in May, ‘as a very strong section of that (and also “The Times”) are in favour of the Macmillan Report suggestion which I attacked from start to finish, basing my attack on facts not prejudice’.⁸⁸ He also gave a paper to the Jesus College Historical Society on ‘The Transport Revolution of the Nineteenth Century’, based on his study, which – according to the college magazine – added ‘a quite unheralded glamour to the economic problems of the day’.⁸⁹ He had been elected Secretary of the Sankey Society, the college debating club, the previous December. In June, Lord Sankey himself, just retired as Lord Chancellor, and himself a Jesus man, attended the Society’s dinner as guest of honour, sat next to the Gladstone Prizeman and talked to him at length. When a fellow member of the Society told him about Wilson’s success, Lord Sankey warmly grasped Wilson by the hand, ‘& said he remembered the result, & had a good breakfast that morning. He says he always does when a Jesus man gets anything’.⁹⁰

Having acquired the taste for academic honours, Harold indulged it. At the beginning of his third year, he sat the competitive exam for the George Webb Medley Junior Economics Scholarship, worth £100 per annum, and won that too – giving him financial independence of his father. It was not an unexpected success: the Gladstone had already made his name in the University as an academic force to be reckoned with. Christopher Mayhew, elected President of the Union the same term, also entered for the Webb Medley. ‘You’re a bit optimistic,’ said a friend. ‘Don’t you know that Wilson of Jesus is in for it?’⁹¹

A key event in the fast-changing discipline of economics occurred in the second term of Harold’s second year, before he sat for the Webb Medley. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by J. M. Keynes was published on 4 February 1936. Its appearance had long been heralded, and economists approached the publication date with excitement. Arthur Brown, already a Keynes enthusiast, went to Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and bought a copy the same day.⁹² Harold was also interested, though his response was more muted. He had yet to hear the Gladstone result, and he was short of cash; so he cast round for a benefactor. Fortunately, his twentieth birthday was coming up. At the beginning of March, he wrote home with instructions for Marjorie to buy him ‘J. M. Keynes’s bolt from the (light) blue’. It was a book, he explained, that he had to read, though he added ‘[an] Oxford don said to me that Keynes had no right to condemn the classical theory till he’d read a bit of it.’⁹³

Wilson records in his memoirs that he read The General Theory before taking his final examination in 1937 ⁹⁴ – a formidable undertaking for an undergraduate. Meanwhile, he had joined a select band of invited undergraduate members (who included Arthur Brown and Donald MacDougall, future director of the Department of Economic Affairs during Wilson’s premiership) of a research seminar on econometrics run by Redvers Opie and Jacob Marschak, where Keynes’s book was discussed. Wilson, however, was practical in his approach: The General Theory was not part of the syllabus, there had been no ‘Keynesian’ question in the 1936 exam papers, and at least one of the examiners for 1937 was known to be an anti-Keynesian. The new ideas, therefore, did not form part of the corpus of knowledge which he stuffed into his head.

Much was expected of him, and he was widely tipped as ‘the brightest prospect’ of his year for the PPE degree.⁹⁵ ‘His industry can only compel admiration,’ wrote one of his tutors in a testimonial for a couple of academic posts (which he did not get) shortly before his Finals.⁹⁶ His methods were largely mechanical, though spiced with cunning. Swotting for his philosophy paper, he made a digest of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then made a digest of the digest, which he learnt by heart.⁹⁷ The technique was remarkably effective. One of the examiners – his own economics tutor, Maurice Allen – maintained afterwards that although Wilson’s papers showed diligence, they lacked originality. They also indicated that the candidate had studied the dons who were going to mark his scripts, and played to their prejudices.⁹⁸ Such a comment, however, was a grudging one, in view of Wilson’s performance. He obtained an outstanding First Class degree, with alphas on every paper. As Lord Longford (then Pakenham and himself a don) later observed, no prime minister since Wilson’s fellow Huddersfieldian, H. H. Asquith, had ever been able to boast such a good result in Schools.⁹⁹

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