Harold Wilson

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).