Peter Hennessy - Harold Wilson

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.’ 16Marjorie 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. 17For 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.’ 18Gladys (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. 2 d . insurance. 19The 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.