Harold Wilson E-Book

Alan Johnson

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: The Prime Ministers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 174

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'The finest prose stylist in the House of Commons since Roy Jenkins' Mark Lawson WINNER OF A WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARD Harold Wilson was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. Prime Minister from 1964-70, and again from 1974-76, he won four elections as well as a referendum on UK membership of the European Community. The achievements of the Wilson Era – from legalising homosexuality to protecting ethnic minorities, from women's rights to the Open University – radically improved ordinary people's lives for the better. In Harold Wilson, former Labour cabinet minister and bestselling author Alan Johnson presents a portrait of a truly twentieth-century man, whose 'white heat' speech proclaimed a scientific and technological revolution – and who was as much a part of the sixties as the Beatles and the Profumo scandal.

Leseprobe

Also by Alan Johnson

Memoir

This BoyPlease, Mister PostmanThe Long and Winding RoadIn my Life

Novels

The Late Train to Gipsy HillOne of Our Ministers is MissingDeath on the Thames

To Sue Utting, Watford’s finest, who worked so diligently for Harold Wilson in Parliament and, thirty years later, for me.

Preface

Harold Wilson wasn’t the first British Prime Minister to be born in the twentieth century. That distinction belongs to his Conservative predecessor. However, it is fair to say that Wilson was the first Prime Minister perceived as being of the modern age. The man he succeeded had been the Fourteenth Earl of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’), before renouncing the peerage and becoming Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Often seen shooting grouse dressed in plus fours on his Scottish country estate, Douglas-Home seemed more Edwardian than new Elizabethan. As a member of the unelected House of Lords, he had no democratic mandate. Worse still, as a hereditary peer, he occupied a seat in Parliament’s upper chamber only because of the nefarious activities of his ancestors.

The contrast between the aristocratic Lord Home and plain Mr Wilson could not have been more distinct. It neatly reflected the early-1960s tension between ancient and modern Britain, as memorably described by the historian David Kynaston:

A world where the war was still fresh in the national memory, but where the end to post-war austerity meant that shopping was becoming a leisure activity; a world where homosexual relationships were still illegal, but where a new individualism in taste and identity was starting to emerge; a world where married women still mainly stayed at home and where divorce was still almost unthinkable, but where pop music was disrupting traditional cultural hierarchies and where there was a new impatience with what was now mockingly known as ‘the Establishment’.

The poet Philip Larkin famously framed it as the period when sexual intercourse began: ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’

That first album was released in March 1963, two months after Hugh Gaitskell died of lupus (a rare condition affecting the immune system). On 14 February, Labour MPs elected Harold Wilson to replace him. By then the Labour Party had been in opposition for almost 12 years, having lost three successive general elections.

The Conservative Prime Minister was Harold Macmillan, but in October of that same year, severely damaged politically by the Profumo scandal, he was hospitalised for a prostate operation and resigned his premiership on grounds of ill health. (Ironically, he was to live for another 23 years, to become the second-longest-lived Prime Minister in British history.)

The man who emerged from the Conservative ranks to replace him was Lord Home. ‘Emerged’ is the appropriate word, because the Conservative Party did not hold elections to decide its leader among either its MPs or its members. Instead, a conclave of grandees gathered in a discreet location while the British people waited to be informed as to whom these important chaps (there were no women) had decided should be their Prime Minister.

For Harold Wilson, Home was a political gift beyond anything he could have hoped for. The Fourteenth Earl personified Wilson’s trenchant criticism of an establishment that was humiliating the country and holding back its advance. He labelled the new Prime Minister ‘an elegant anachronism’, describing his appointment as a counter-revolution: ‘After half a century of democratic advance,’ Wilson thundered soon after Home’s elevation, ‘of social revolution, of rising expectation, the whole process has ground to a halt with the Fourteenth Earl.’ The attack was perfectly judged. The fully enfranchised, better-educated, less deferential population of the television age was less inclined to accept the imposed hierarchies of its ancestors.

The Conservatives were stung by Wilson’s criticism, and Lord Home spent just four days governing the country from the Lords before using legislation, pioneered ironically by Labour’s Tony Benn, to renounce his peerage. However, it would be a while before a by-election could be organised to allow the newly unennobled Alec Douglas-Home to enter the Commons in a safe Conservative seat. This hiatus produced an even greater democratic anomaly. For almost three weeks Douglas-Home was the only Prime Minister in Britain’s long constitutional history not to have a seat in either the Commons or the Lords.

The United States had already elected its first President born in the twentieth century: a man who epitomised the determination of a new generation to sweep away the ancien régime. While Wilson, the President’s elder by just one year, couldn’t match the dazzling glamour of JFK, the British press was soon describing him as ‘the British Kennedy’.

Apart from a brief introduction during Kennedy’s time as a senator, the two men met only once, on 2 April 1963, when Wilson flew to Washington to fulfil an engagement originally arranged for Gaitskell. Wilson later described Kennedy as ‘the most full-time an active President’s been in this century’. Referring to the tradition in Britain of older men in their sixties becoming Prime Minister, Wilson pointed out that Kennedy ‘shifted the whole idea to a younger generation’. The two men got on well, but the next general election in Britain was then still 18 months away, and given the Labour Party’s habitual knack of losing elections it was by no means certain that its popular new leader would ever become Prime Minister.

These twentieth-century men never had the opportunity to work together as President and Prime Minister, but that had nothing to do with the electorate. Larkin’s poem immortalised the release of the Beatles’ first LP, but the second had a far more significant release date: 22 November 1963, the day the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was assassinated.

1

James Harold Wilson ended his life as Lord Wilson of Rievaulx, and it was at Rievaulx, a village in North Yorkshire (which Wilson pronounced ‘Rivers’), that generations of Wilsons had worked the land, adding the occasional supplementary occupation to increase their income. Harold’s great-grandfather, John, for instance, was the village cobbler. It was John who was to break with the family’s agricultural tradition, lifting the Wilsons a few notches up the social class scale by moving to a salaried profession.

A vacancy had occurred for a new master at the workhouse in Helmsley, the market town closest to Rievaulx. The severe economic recession of 1837 had caused a significant surge in demand for workhouse places. It was only by living in such establishments that any kind of municipal assistance could be accessed. Originally, John Wilson took on the role to supplement his meagre income, but he came to see that while Helmsley Workhouse represented destitution for its occupants, it could provide him with a route to a more prosperous future. And so he became the first Wilson to hold public office.

Three years after John’s recruitment at Helmsley, he and his wife, Esther, became master and matron of a workhouse in York, where they remained for 26 years. Not only was this a more secure occupation than working the land, it carried a pension, which Esther relied on when John died in 1881. John and Esther’s son, James (Harold Wilson’s grandfather), had been the last Wilson to be born at Rievaulx, eventually following his father’s example but in a more radical direction. James not only left the land, he left Yorkshire – crossing the Pennines to be an apprentice draper in Manchester at the age of 17.

Continuing the Wilsons’ upward social trajectory, James married Eliza Thewlis, whose father, Titus, while based in Manchester, employed over a hundred men at a cotton-warp factory 50 miles away in Huddersfield. Titus was politically active. His son Herbert (James’s brother-in-law) was an alderman and became a Lord Mayor of Manchester. Under the Thewlis influence, James began to take an interest in politics, defining himself as a radical Liberal.

Jack Wilson, the eldest of James and Eliza’s six children, took that radicalism to a new level by becoming Keir Hardie’s election agent at Merthyr Tydfil in the 1900 general election. That was the year in which 126 trade unionists meeting under the auspices of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) had formed the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), with Hardie as its secretary. Six years later, the LRC renamed itself the Labour Party. Like a substantial proportion of the voting population, the Wilsons were gradually shifting their political allegiance from Liberal to Labour, and Jack’s political activity was bound to influence his younger brother, Herbert – Harold Wilson’s father.

Born in 1882, Herbert Wilson was by all accounts a kind and benevolent man, but he had a lasting regret. While remaining in education until the unusually late age of 18, he’d never achieved his ambition of going to university. Given that higher education was the preserve of a tiny, prosperous elite, this was hardly a failure, but it intensified the ambition he would harbour for his children.

Herbert went to Manchester Technical College, training to become an industrial chemist. In 1906, at the age of 23, he married Ethel Seddon, the daughter of a railway clerk. The Seddons were committed trade unionists. When William Seddon, Ethel’s father, had been advised to move to a warmer climate to ease his chest infection, the family decided to emigrate to Australia. Ethel was by then engaged to Herbert and so stayed behind, but her brother (another Harold) became a senior union official in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where he worked on constructing the transcontinental railway.

As far as we know, Herbert Wilson never contemplated following the Seddons to Australia, but, in 1912, after two generations of living west of the Pennines, he took the Wilsons back to their Yorkshire roots – to Milnsbridge, a small town in the Colne Valley a mile from Huddersfield. Herbert had become the manager at a dye manufacturer, where he oversaw the complex process of fabric production: scouring, tentering, drying, milling, blowing, raising, cropping, pressing and cutting. It was dirty, dangerous work that was soon to develop a lethal offshoot.

When the First World War began in 1914, there was a surge in demand for coal tar, an important ingredient in the manufacture of explosives. The substance and its derivatives were used widely in the dyestuffs sector: indeed, the company Herbert worked for claimed to have been the first British manufacturer of TNT. What was undeniable was that while the Great War was killing the city’s sons, the reliance on artillery bombardment was making Huddersfield one of the most prosperous towns in the country. Herbert was placed in charge of the explosives department, and two years into the war had his salary increased substantially. Herbert and Ethel, whose daughter, Marjorie, had been born in 1909, could therefore afford to have a second child. It was at 4 Warneford Road, Milnsbridge, Huddersfield, a rented three-bedroom house, that James Harold Wilson was born on Saturday, 11 March 1916. The Prime Minister at the time was the Liberal H. H. Asquith, another Yorkshireman, born just ten miles away from the Wilsons, in Morley. Few would have believed that a second Prime Minister could be born in such close proximity.

2

A year after his son was born, Herbert Wilson became a homeowner, buying a larger, semi-detached house in a better part of Milnsbridge – 40 Western Road. As the war was ending, he also made a propitious move in the jobs market, returning to his profession as an industrial chemist but with a new employer, L. B. Holliday & Co., Britain’s biggest supplier of dyestuffs. The wartime need for explosives was declining rapidly, but the dyestuffs industry was prospering. For a time, fortune smiled on the Wilsons. Four-year-old Harold (‘James’ had already been discarded in favour of his middle name) was enrolled at New Street Elementary School, where he was soon excelling academically. His prodigious memory became apparent by the age of six, when he could effortlessly reproduce entire pages of the textbooks he’d read, complete with their complicated lists of figures. He made progress at school despite rather than because of his first teacher, Miss Oddy, whom in his memoirs Harold described as being ‘either an incompetent teacher or a sadist, probably both’.

Aged eight, he appeared in what was to become the most celebrated childhood photograph of a Prime Minister. Taken on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1924, in short trousers, capped and tightly jacketed, Harold Wilson stands in front of the famous black-lacquered door he was destined to walk through as Prime Minister 40 years later. In capturing his alleged precocity, the photo helped build a myth about Wilson having an all-consuming ambition to be Prime Minister. But the London excursion only happened because Harold had been hospitalised to have his appendix removed and Herbert, anxious to give his son a treat while Ethel and Marjorie were away, placed him in the sidecar of his motorbike for a week of travel which included an overnight stay at a cheap bed and breakfast in London. In those days (until 1982), tourists could stroll into London’s most famous cul-de-sac to pose for photos outside No. 10. It would have been perverse for Herbert not to have done what most visitors to London did. Ironically, the occupier at the time was Ramsay MacDonald, who led a minority Labour administration for nine months during 1924, thus becoming Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister – the little boy on his doorstep that day would become the third.

Four years after the Downing Street photograph, Harold won a Yorkshire Post competition to eulogise his greatest hero in fewer than a hundred words. His subject was Robert Baden-Powell. Wilson was an enthusiastic Boy Scout in a family of Baden-Powell devotees. Begun in 1908, the Scouting movement was making an enormous impact, particularly in God-fearing, Nonconformist households like the Wilsons’. Herbert became a Scout commissioner, Ethel a Guide captain, and Harold’s sister, Marjorie, dedicated most of her life to the cause.

At that stage of his life, if he hadn’t chosen Baden-Powell, Wilson would probably have plumped for Billy Smith or another footballer from the brilliant Huddersfield Town team that won the FA Cup in 1922 and were then league champions for three successive seasons between 1923 and 1926. Harold attended the Leeds Road stadium for most home fixtures.

It was in the last of those league-winning years, just after the General Strike, that he was to embark upon a great adventure, spending six months in Australia. His mother took him with her when she travelled to see her father, Grandad Seddon, whom she’d been told was at death’s door. For a woman to set off without her husband on such a long journey would have been a bold thing to do in the 1920s. The cost alone was prohibitive, even for middle-class families like the Wilsons. It was a demonstration of Herbert’s enlightenment as well as his prosperity that he drove his wife and son to the London docks (in the Austin 7 that had succeeded the motorbike) for the long journey to Perth, Western Australia, on HMS Esperance Bay. When Harold eventually returned to New Street School, he chose to relate his experiences in a series of two-hour lectures which every class had to attend. He also sent articles on aspects of his adventure, such as ‘My visit to a gold mine’, to children’s magazines, although none were published. The trip may have formed his lifelong interest in Commonwealth affairs. It was certainly responsible for the first stirring of his political ambition, since it enabled him to witness his Uncle Harold, the trade unionist who’d worked on the transcontinental railway, become an elected representative of the Legislative Council of Western Australia.

3

In September 1927, 11-year-old Harold Wilson began his secondary education at Royds Hall Grammar School, having passed the County Minor Scholarship (a forerunner of the eleven-plus), as Marjorie had done seven years earlier. Both were beneficiaries of their father’s resolve for his children to enjoy the educational opportunities he’d been denied. Marjorie was to become that rarity of the age, a university-educated woman, studying Chemistry at Leeds. After failing her finals, she switched to teaching, which, together with the Girl Guides, became her vocation.

Harold threw himself into the extracurricular activities available at Royds Hall, particularly drama and sport. What he did not appear to excel at particularly was schoolwork. Early reports referred more often to his indolence than to his erudition. Only one teacher disturbed this consensus, pointing out that young Harold shone at languages, even dabbling at one stage in Esperanto.

In his second year at the school the boys had to produce an essay under the heading ‘Myself in 25 Years’. It’s here that we detect the first evidence of an ambition to hold high political office, although in his contribution Wilson saw himself not as Prime Minister, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The essay even contained details of his first Budget, including the introduction of a tax on gramophones, which young Harold considered a frivolity for the idle rich. His focus on the Treasury was understandable given that his local MP, Philip Snowden, had been Chancellor in that first Labour government of 1924 (and was to occupy the post again when the party returned to power in 1929). Snowden was greatly admired by Herbert Wilson, and it was hardly surprising that this influenced his increasingly politically aware son.

Two disruptive events happened in quick succession during Harold Wilson’s grammar school education. The first could have ended his life; the second had a profound influence on the course it was to take.

In 1930 he was part of a Scout troop camping in the Yorkshire countryside. Together with a pal, he visited a local farm offering fresh milk straight from the cow. Harold accidentally knocked over his friend’s glass but drank his own, becoming one of the 12 unfortunates who developed typhoid from the unsterilised milk. Before the discovery of antibiotics, typhoid was a killer. Half of those infected in this outbreak died. Boy Scout Harold narrowly escaped the mortuary, but spent almost four months incarcerated at Meltham Isolation Hospital in a critical condition. A beefy, strapping lad, his weight plummeted to four and a half stone, and he would walk with a stoop for the rest of his life. As visiting times were restricted to half an hour a week, there were few opportunities to learn about what was going on at home. But the main news (about the second disaster to afflict the family) would have been kept from him for his own good.

When he was discharged, it could be kept secret no longer: Herbert Wilson had lost his job. A third of men in the Colne Valley were out of work and Huddersfield, which had been protected from the worst of the recession by the strength of its textile and engineering sectors, had finally fallen to the scourge of the age. At 48, Herbert had to finance the family from his savings, which led to a significant decline in their standard of living. His period of enforced idleness had a defining political influence on his son. Too young to understand fully his father’s despair, Harold always regretted thoughtlessly asking for the three shillings and sixpence (17½p) he needed to buy a sheath knife. His father’s awkward and disconsolate response – ‘I can’t just now, you know how it is’ – was so seared upon his son’s memory that it was recorded word for word in Wilson’s memoirs.

The wonder is that these two significant setbacks did not have a more negative impact on Harold’s education. Without his father’s single-mindedness, he may well have been forced to leave school at 16 and contribute to the family income. The typhoid put him behind academically, but this would have been far more damaging were it not for the extra tuition given by his Maths teacher, who coached Harold in geometry and algebra free of charge after school. The teacher was a member of Huddersfield Labour Party, and so his influence was political as well as pedagogic.

This was a particularly turbulent period in Labour history. Philip Snowden (the Wilsons’ MP) precipitated a crisis when, as Chancellor in MacDonald’s second administration, he insisted upon a cut in unemployment benefit as part of a package of measures to counter the economic slump. The Cabinet refused to endorse Snowden’s plan; the government collapsed, and when Ramsay MacDonald went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation, he was instead persuaded by King George V to return to Downing Street as head of a ‘National Government’ supported by the Conservatives and some Liberals. Snowden, as one of the few Labour ministers to join that government, was expelled from the party (along with MacDonald).