Harold Wilson

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.