Kitabı oku: «Harold Wilson», sayfa 3

During Harold’s early childhood, the Wilson home was a visibly contented one, busily absorbed in the voluntary and community activities that were typical of a well-ordered, Nonconformist household. On the surface, it was not a complicated family. There were no rifts or rows or vendettas or mistresses or black sheep that we know of: and, perhaps, no wild passions or romances. If there were tensions, they were well hidden from each other and from the world. Although the Wilsons were healthy – surprisingly so, in Herbert’s case, for a man who worked with noxious chemicals – they were not handsome. Early, faded photographs display a benign, asexual chubbiness on both sides, the parents appearing undatably middle-aged before their time, the children plain, plump and bland. They were as they seemed: a family preoccupied by dutiful routines, kindly, fond, well-meaning. Were the Wilsons too good to be true? There is a lace-curtain, speak-well-of-your-neighbours, aspect to the early years of Harold which makes the sceptical modern observer uneasy, as though it masked a pent-up rage, like a coiled spring.

Eager striving best describes the Wilsons’ way of life. Frivolity had little place. Harold was taught to self-improve from a very tender age: when, at six, he wrote a letter to Father Christmas, accompanied by thirty hopeful kisses, his list of requests began with a tool box, a pair of compasses, a divider and a joiner’s pencil.²¹ Religious observance was of central importance. Both Herbert and Ethel were Congregationalists, but, in the absence of a chapel of their denomination in the locality, they went to Milnsbridge Baptist Church. Much of their Christianity was formal: grace was said before meals, and the family regularly attended church and Sunday school. ‘I would not say there was an atmosphere of religious fervour,’ Harold later maintained.²² Nevertheless, an interest in Church and faith suffused the atmosphere of the Wilson household, providing a framework for their social activities. These filled every leisure hour. Herbert ran the Church Amateur Operatic Society, Ethel founded and organized the local Women’s Guild, both taught in Sunday school. Pride of place was taken by the Scouts and Guides, in which all four members of the family were earnestly and devotedly involved.

The Boy Scout Movement, a last, moralizing echo of Empire, reached its nostalgic zenith as Harold was growing up. There was much in the Scouting ideal to appeal to the Nonconformist conscience: a simple, universal code, an emphasis on practical knowledge, on healthy, outdoor living, and on a rejection of what Lord Baden-Powell, in Scouting for Boys, called ‘unclean thoughts’. Scouting gave the Wilsons, newcomers to Cowersley and Milnsbridge, companionship and a sense of belonging to a wide, international network. It also provided an alternative ladder of promotion, with its own quaint hierarchy of quasi-military grades and positions of authority. Herbert became a District Commissioner, and is to be seen, proudly cherubic and clad in ridiculous wide-brimmed hat and neckerchief, in the local newspaper photographs which marked ritual occasions. Ethel was a Guide Captain; when Marjorie grew up she became a District Commissioner as well; and Harold rose to the level of King’s Scout.

Harold’s first serious ambition was to be a wolf cub. He joined the Milnsbridge Cubs just before his eighth birthday and in due course graduated to the 3rd Colne Valley Milnsbridge Baptist Scouts, later part of the 20th Huddersfield.²³ It was a large, active troop, which met every Friday and boasted a drum-and-bugle band. Harold was not just a keen scout, he was a passionate one. He always claimed the Scouting Movement as a formative influence, and the snapshots tell their own tale: Harold enthusiastically cooking sausages, or thrusting himself to the forefront of a group photograph, cheerful, perky, eager, and enjoying the campfire convivialities more seriously than his companions. It was in the Milnsbridge Cubs that Harold first met Harold Ainley, a school contemporary who became a Huddersfield councillor and made a speciality of giving interviews to journalists and biographers about his recollections of the future Prime Minister. Ainley is in no doubt about the importance of the Scouts, for both of them. ‘It gave us ideals and standards,’ he says.²⁴

Harold was a dedicated camper. He once travelled under the supervision of the local Baptist minister (who was also the scoutmaster) on a camping trip to a site near Nijmegen in Holland. On another occasion, as a senior patrol leader, Harold helped to wait at a scout dinner given for the Assistant County Commissioner, a Colonel Stod-dart Scott. They next met in the House of Commons as members of the parliamentary branch of the Guild of Old Scouts. Harold remained a faithful scouting alumnus. As a resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb he became chairman of the North London Scout Association, and as Labour Leader he liked to equate the Scouting Code with his own brand of socialism, quoting the Fourth Scout Law: ‘A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout.’²⁵ He was fond of remarking that the most valuable skill he acquired was an ability to tie bowline knots behind his back and tenderfoot knots wearing boxing gloves: invaluable for handling the Labour Party.²⁶

His more relaxed fellow scouts may have found him a bit over-keen, and there is an aspect to some of the anecdotes which makes him sound like Piggy in a Huddersfield version of Lord of the Flies. ‘He was a good [patrol] leader and always got the best out of his lads,’ recalled Jack Hepworth, a member of the same troop, who later worked for the Gas Board. ‘But in some ways he was not popular. He tended to be swottish and seemed to know a lot and, naturally, some of the lads didn’t always like this.’²⁷ At the age of twelve he entered a Yorkshire Post competition which called for a hundred-word sketch of a personal hero. Harold wrote about the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell, and won.²⁸ Fired by this triumph, he wrote a helpful letter to the Scouting Movement’s newspaper, The Scout. ‘I should like to use your little hint for strengthening a signalling flag in my column “Things We All Should Know”,’ replied the kindly editor, and sent him a Be Prepared pencil case as a reward.²⁹

Harold’s behaviour in the Scouts, as in school and at home, was that of a child who expects his best efforts to be warmly appreciated and applauded. There was plenty of applause at home where, from the beginning, Harold was the favourite child, almost a family project, in whom all hope was invested. Marjorie seems to have taken her usurpation in good part, at least on the surface. Harold was born the day before she was seven. ‘It was a sort of birthday present,’ she would tell interviewers, doubtless repeating what her parents said to her at the time. Even when Harold was Prime Minister, she used to speak of him as if he were half-doll, half-baby, the family adornment to be cosseted and treasured. ‘With the Press slating him left, right and centre I always feel very protective,’ she said in 1967. ‘You see, he’s always my younger brother.’³⁰

Marjorie never married. She stayed close both to her parents and to Harold. Christmases and holidays were often spent together. She became a frequent visitor at No. 10, and proudly boasted of her brother’s achievements to friends in Cornwall, where she lived in later years. But there was another side. Harold had been a birthday present, but he could also seem like a cuckoo’s egg in the cosy nest at Western Road. Fondness was combined with tension, which sprang from an inequality that was there from the beginning. Harold was the adored baby of the family: Marjorie was large, strong, sisterly but not always good-tempered. As Prime Minister, Harold confided to a Cabinet colleague that she had bullied him mercilessly.³¹ One particular incident stuck in Harold’s own memory. It took place during a summer holiday at a northern seaside resort. Like Albert and the stick with the horse’s head handle, Harold met with a nasty accident – caused, not by a lion, but by Marjorie. Walking along the shore, brother and sister had a fight. Marjorie overpowered him, and flung him, fully clad, into the sea. Harold was badly scared, and his thick flannel suit was soaked through. Cold and shaken, he was taken off to a shop to buy new clothes.

Such events happen in most families. It did not amount to much. Yet it was the violence that shocked him. ‘He was terribly frightened,’ says a friend to whom he related the story. ‘In a sense, she was taking her revenge for all the attention he got.’³² Her lot cannot, indeed, have been an easy one: she was expected to watch Harold’s brilliant successes and be enthusiastic about them, almost like a third parent.

Marjorie’s own achievements were automatically regarded as less important than her brother’s. There was a family story (such stories tend to encapsulate a truth) that when Marjorie exclaimed ‘I’ve won a scholarship!’ on winning an award to Huddersfield Girls’ High School, her four-year-old brother lisped: ‘I want a “ship” too!’³³ The point of this tale is, of course, the precocity of Harold, rather than the success of Marjorie. Later, when Herbert made a famous sightseeing trip to London, visiting Downing Street, it was Harold who accompanied him and had his photograph taken outside the door of No. 10, not his sister. When Ethel travelled to Australia to visit her father and brother, Harold went with her – Marjorie stayed in Milnsbridge to look after Herbert.

Marjorie played her part cheerfully. ‘Really they all joined together in worship of this young boy who was going to perform those great feats,’ says a friend. But Harold never forgot his sister’s ability to pounce. As an adult, he continued to regard her with wariness and awe, as well as affection. ‘I used to tease him by asking “How is Marjorie?”’ recalls a former prime ministerial aide. ‘He would put on a peculiar persecuted look and say: “Ah, Marjorie!” He saw Marjorie as somebody telling him what to do, making him do this or that.’³⁴

Marjorie was not the only powerful female member of the family. The other was Ethel, whom Harold resembled physically, while Marjorie looked like Herbert. Ethel Wilson was a source of calm and reassurance. Harold once described her as ‘very placid’.³⁵ She ‘always gave the impression of having no personal worries’,³⁶ and almost never lost her temper (a characteristic her son inherited). She had trained as a teacher, but no longer worked as such, throwing her energies into managing a family budget that was not always easy to keep in surplus, and into voluntary activities. Because she died before Harold became Labour Leader, she escaped press attention, and Herbert – who attended Labour Party Conferences and loved being interviewed – became the publicly known parent. But Ethel was the dominant figure in the family, and also the closest to Harold. ‘He had a strong bond with her,’ says Mary, Harold’s wife. ‘He was devoted to her. She was a very quiet woman with firm views.’³⁷ According to a friend, ‘Harold loved his mother more than his father.’³⁸ When Ethel died in 1957, her son felt the loss deeply. Years later, he told an interviewer: ‘I found I couldn’t believe – and I reckon I’m a pretty rational kind of man – that death was the end of my mother.’³⁹

Harold’s relationship with Herbert was affectionate, respectful yet detached: later he tended to indulge the old man’s whims, and treat him like an elderly and beloved pet, rather than look up to him. To outsiders, Herbert had a prickly Yorkshire reserve – he could seem withdrawn, aloof, even cold. He was always more volatile than Ethel, and more ambitious. Herbert’s most famous attribute, which he took little prompting to show off, was a quirky ability to do large arithmetical sums rapidly in his head. This was displayed as a party trick, but it was also an emotional defence. He loved numbers, perhaps more than people, and resorted to them in times of stress. One story (also revealing in unintended ways) recounts how, on the night before Harold’s birth, Herbert was working on some difficult calculations to do with his job. During a long and (for Ethel) painful night, he divided his time between attending to his wife, and attending to his calculations.⁴⁰ Harold inherited an interest in numbers, and also a freakish memory, from his father, though his Grandfather Seddon had a remarkable memory as well.⁴¹

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.