Harold Wilson

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