Kitabı oku: «Harold Wilson», sayfa 7

There were not many entries, and the verdict was quickly reached. A small item in The Times on 18 March announced: ‘The judges have reported to the Vice-Chancellor that they have awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize, 1936, to J. H. Wilson, Exhibitioner of Jesus College.’ It was a moment, as important as getting an award at Jesus, when the world changed. The Gladstone Prize was his first public distinction, a major one in Oxford, marking him out from his contemporaries not just in Jesus but in the University. Harold’s pleasure was unbounded, and so was Herbert’s, as the letters of congratulation arrived, including several from the Colne Valley and Huddersfield. Harold, in his joy, wrote to Helen Whelan, the class teacher who had taken an interest in him at Royds. She was deeply moved. ‘What a far cry from “James Harold” who protested vigorously against the “James”, to Mr Wilson winner of the Gladstone,’ she replied, affectionately and teasingly. ‘And yet in writing to say thank you for a singularly charming letter, I feel that I am almost more pleased to renew a friendship that has many happy memories than to tell my former monitor with what very real pleasure I read of his triumph … I should like to see you so much I feel tempted to appear in Oxford when your less elderly lady friends are not besieging you for tea.’⁸⁶ Ethel and Herbert motored down from the Wirral to hear Harold give the Prize Oration in the Sheldonian Theatre. Gladys came too, the admiring girlfriend, the only lady friend that mattered. ‘I felt very proud of him,’ she remembers.⁸⁷

In Oxford, people who had barely noticed Harold, now began to do so: from being a run-of-the-mill undergraduate from an inferior college, he became a man with possibilities. Cole asked him to give a paper to his discussion class, and complimented him generously afterwards. Harold glowed. ‘Cole says he agrees with it completely & is using some of my figures – which I left with him – to produce at the Econ. Advisory Council (of the Prime Minister)’, he wrote home in May, ‘as a very strong section of that (and also “The Times”) are in favour of the Macmillan Report suggestion which I attacked from start to finish, basing my attack on facts not prejudice’.⁸⁸ He also gave a paper to the Jesus College Historical Society on ‘The Transport Revolution of the Nineteenth Century’, based on his study, which – according to the college magazine – added ‘a quite unheralded glamour to the economic problems of the day’.⁸⁹ He had been elected Secretary of the Sankey Society, the college debating club, the previous December. In June, Lord Sankey himself, just retired as Lord Chancellor, and himself a Jesus man, attended the Society’s dinner as guest of honour, sat next to the Gladstone Prizeman and talked to him at length. When a fellow member of the Society told him about Wilson’s success, Lord Sankey warmly grasped Wilson by the hand, ‘& said he remembered the result, & had a good breakfast that morning. He says he always does when a Jesus man gets anything’.⁹⁰

Having acquired the taste for academic honours, Harold indulged it. At the beginning of his third year, he sat the competitive exam for the George Webb Medley Junior Economics Scholarship, worth £100 per annum, and won that too – giving him financial independence of his father. It was not an unexpected success: the Gladstone had already made his name in the University as an academic force to be reckoned with. Christopher Mayhew, elected President of the Union the same term, also entered for the Webb Medley. ‘You’re a bit optimistic,’ said a friend. ‘Don’t you know that Wilson of Jesus is in for it?’⁹¹

A key event in the fast-changing discipline of economics occurred in the second term of Harold’s second year, before he sat for the Webb Medley. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by J. M. Keynes was published on 4 February 1936. Its appearance had long been heralded, and economists approached the publication date with excitement. Arthur Brown, already a Keynes enthusiast, went to Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and bought a copy the same day.⁹² Harold was also interested, though his response was more muted. He had yet to hear the Gladstone result, and he was short of cash; so he cast round for a benefactor. Fortunately, his twentieth birthday was coming up. At the beginning of March, he wrote home with instructions for Marjorie to buy him ‘J. M. Keynes’s bolt from the (light) blue’. It was a book, he explained, that he had to read, though he added ‘[an] Oxford don said to me that Keynes had no right to condemn the classical theory till he’d read a bit of it.’⁹³

Wilson records in his memoirs that he read The General Theory before taking his final examination in 1937 ⁹⁴ – a formidable undertaking for an undergraduate. Meanwhile, he had joined a select band of invited undergraduate members (who included Arthur Brown and Donald MacDougall, future director of the Department of Economic Affairs during Wilson’s premiership) of a research seminar on econometrics run by Redvers Opie and Jacob Marschak, where Keynes’s book was discussed. Wilson, however, was practical in his approach: The General Theory was not part of the syllabus, there had been no ‘Keynesian’ question in the 1936 exam papers, and at least one of the examiners for 1937 was known to be an anti-Keynesian. The new ideas, therefore, did not form part of the corpus of knowledge which he stuffed into his head.

Much was expected of him, and he was widely tipped as ‘the brightest prospect’ of his year for the PPE degree.⁹⁵ ‘His industry can only compel admiration,’ wrote one of his tutors in a testimonial for a couple of academic posts (which he did not get) shortly before his Finals.⁹⁶ His methods were largely mechanical, though spiced with cunning. Swotting for his philosophy paper, he made a digest of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then made a digest of the digest, which he learnt by heart.⁹⁷ The technique was remarkably effective. One of the examiners – his own economics tutor, Maurice Allen – maintained afterwards that although Wilson’s papers showed diligence, they lacked originality. They also indicated that the candidate had studied the dons who were going to mark his scripts, and played to their prejudices.⁹⁸ Such a comment, however, was a grudging one, in view of Wilson’s performance. He obtained an outstanding First Class degree, with alphas on every paper. As Lord Longford (then Pakenham and himself a don) later observed, no prime minister since Wilson’s fellow Huddersfieldian, H. H. Asquith, had ever been able to boast such a good result in Schools.⁹⁹

4

BEVERIDGE BOY

The day after the last exam a letter came from Marjorie saying that Herbert had been sacked. It was not entirely unexpected. The family had long had some sense of the job’s impermanence, adding to Harold’s urgency at Oxford. The Wilsons were always careful about the timing of bad news: Herbert may have withheld the information until Schools were safely out of the way. At any rate, the bombshell meant that there was little chance to celebrate. Exam pressure was immediately replaced by the pressure to find an income.

Harold responded to the emergency by applying for a job with the Manchester Guardian, which he had been cultivating since his second year. He had always considered journalism as one career option. He was successful, and received the offer of a probationary post as a leader writer. But he did not take it up, because – as top of the PPE School – he was awarded the Webb Medley Senior Scholarship, worth £300 a year. This removed immediate financial worries and made it possible to stay in Oxford. Though he never regretted his choice, he did not forget that he might have become a journalist – and he continued to take a keen interest in the newspaper profession, almost as if he had kept the possibility of a switch in reserve. His academic position was soon consolidated, however, by his appointment to a part-time lectureship at New College on a stipend of £125, supplementing his scholarship. At the age of twenty-one he had become a don, albeit a very junior one.

Harold used some of his scholarship money to pay the rent on his parents’ flat in the Wirral. This time Herbert was out of work for eighteen months. Eventually, after many applications, he found another job, at Liskeard in Cornwall, supervising the manufacture of explosives for blasting. Herbert and Ethel had lived in northern England all their lives. They now migrated south – at first Herbert on his own, living in digs, and later his wife and Marjorie, who obtained a job in a local school. Uprooted for the second time, they settled permanently, except for a period during and just after the Second World War. Their new home provided Harold and Gladys with a Cornish link, which led to post-war holidays in the Scillies.

Not every prize fell into Harold’s lap. Three months after taking Finals he sat for a Fellowship at All Souls. He was understandably hopeful. Between exams he chatted happily with Arthur Brown, another candidate, over lunch at a café in the Cornmarket. ‘Harold scared me by talking all the time about his answers to the questions on the morning’s history paper,’ Brown recalls.¹ In the outcome, Brown won a fellowship and Wilson did not. Wilson tried again the following year. Having failed by examination, he attempted the thesis method, submitting his Gladstone essay. Again he was rejected. There is no mention of this reverse in his memoirs. It may be a significant omission. Even in the 1980s he made remarks which indicated to academic acquaintances that it still rankled.²

Wilson’s success the previous summer, however, scarcely went unnoticed, and he soon received an offer which provided a first, decisive step towards a public career. Wilson’s graduation happened to coincide with the return to Oxford of Sir William Beveridge, as Master of University College. Beveridge, already a titanic figure in academic administration and the world of the social sciences, had spent twenty or so years building up the London School of Economics. Now he wished to return to serious research. The title of Beveridge’s later autobiography, Power and Influence, summed up his approach to social analysis, which he saw as a means of changing the world. His first major project was economic. With characteristic energy and conceit, he set about fulfilling what his biographer calls ‘his long-cherished ambition of unlocking the secrets of the trade cycle’.³ Casting around for an assistant to help with the project, his attention was directed to Wilson.

Harold was offered, and accepted, the job of working on a study which was intended as a sequel to Beveridge’s earlier classic, Unemployment – A Problem of Industry. Beveridge wanted a helper who could pay his own way: the Webb Medley made this possible. Wilson became his assistant and also his student, registering for a D.Phil. to be called ‘Aspects of the Demand for Labour in Great Britain’.⁴ With Herbert recently redundant, the project fitted well the Wilson family’s private concerns. Its aim, according to Beveridge, was to find out ‘(a) why there are so many thousands of unemployed in all the prosperous parts of the country and (b) how many “unemployed jobs”, i.e., unfilled vacancies there are, and of what kind and why’.⁵

This experiment in collaboration was not an episode for which Wilson ever felt much nostalgia. Though he appreciated Beveridge’s energy and discipline – and remained proud to have worked for a man whose name became synonymous with the setting up of the Welfare State⁶ – he never learnt to like him. Years later, the ambivalence in his attitude remained. In a Beveridge Memorial Lecture delivered in 1966, Wilson (by then Prime Minister) annoyed Beveridge’s stepson, Philip Mair, by the ‘disparaging manner’ in which he described his former master.⁷ He paid Beveridge the double-edged compliment of describing him as ‘a man who could inspire all who came under his dominating sway with a love of work for its own sake, of the discovery of truth for its own sake and the application of that truth for the betterment of his fellow citizens’.⁸ The reality was, however, that he found Beveridge impossible in personal relations and disastrous as a boss, because of what he described as his employer’s ‘arrogance and rudeness to those appointed to work with him and his total inability to delegate’.⁹

Summer months were spent at Beveridge’s cottage at Avebury in Wiltshire, with the great man and his formidable cousin Jessie Mair. Sir William’s habits made Harold’s seem like idleness. Every day started with two hours’ work before breakfast. That was just the beginning. ‘The regime wore him out,’ says Arthur Brown. ‘They worked all morning, played tennis all afternoon, and worked all night.’¹⁰ Wilson discovered, as he once told an interviewer, that the best way to deal with Beveridge’s intolerance was to keep working with him. Buried in his studies, he was easier to get on with.¹¹ Much of the work, however, was grindingly dull, involving a meticulous examination of unemployment figures for the cyclical period 1927–37. Later, the project took Wilson on a tour of labour exchanges to get details of the filling of vacancies – which he enjoyed more.

Fresh from his chrysalis of introverted undergraduate study, Wilson could have benefited greatly from a genuinely inspiring teacher, who was prepared to give as well as take. Instead, though he learnt from Beveridge, it was somewhat in the manner of a pack animal learning from a muleteer. His apprenticeship frequently felt like a period of servitude. Yet he survived it, toughened and unbroken, having earned, if not Beveridge’s gratitude, at least his approval. Indeed, in a professional sense, they were in some ways well suited. Both had no need to be part of a team. Both were single-minded, self-flagellatory workers who – for all Wilson’s grumbles – enjoyed the puritanical sense of applying themselves harder than anybody else. ‘Really, they had a lot in common,’ says Brown. ‘They were hyperactive and had practical interests. They liked to get their teeth into a problem and worry away at it.’¹²

Early in their partnership, Beveridge wrote to the President of the American Rockefeller Foundation, boasting with typical self-centredness about his ‘first-rate research student doing just what I am going about saying all research students should do: that is, working under my supervision on a problem that I want solved and on which I am working myself, in place of writing a thesis to please himself’.¹³ Lord Longford, who worked with Beveridge in Whitehall later, reckons that Beveridge ‘probably saw Wilson as a useful machine, not as a person’.¹⁴ Over the next few years, Beveridge continued to rely on the ‘useful machine’, turning to Wilson whenever he needed efficient, streamlined assistance. Wilson, meanwhile, reaped the benefits of their cold alliance in Beveridge’s munificent patronage.

There were other elements as well. Though Wilson kicked a little against the pricks, he acquired, during these critically formative years, something of Beveridge’s outlook. It was one that differed in significant ways from that of the other great reformer of the age, who was attracting an enthusiastic following, Maynard Keynes. In his book, Paul Foot presents Wilson accusingly as a Liberal Keynesian, citing undergraduate influences. This was certainly how Wilson wished to present himself in the 1960s, when he was eager to appear as part of the Keynesian mainstream. In his memoirs he went out of his way to identify himself as a member of the pre-war Keynesian vanguard. The reality, however, was rather different, partly because of Beveridge.

Although both men were Liberal in their politics, and progressive in their goals, Beveridge did not approve of Keynes. Their minds worked in different ways. Where Keynes was an aristocrat and a cavalier among thinkers, Beveridge was a roundhead, suspicious of ideas. While Keynes’s intellect soared, Beveridge’s rigorously empirical approach made him insist on looking at the evidence first. Thus Beveridge had reacted to The General Theory in 1936 with a furious scepticism and – like the father of Edmund Gosse, when confronted with the disconcerting hypotheses of Charles Darwin – set himself against the tide of advanced opinion by embarking on the largely negative task of disproving it.

Beveridge took particular exception to Keynes’s reduction of concepts like ‘unemployment’ and ‘demand’ to what he regarded as a high level of abstraction. The unemployed, he insisted, were a heterogeneous group who could not be lumped together. He found the Keynesian multiplier incomprehensible. Recoiling from Keynes’s new thesis, he was drawn instead to the economic ideas and policies contained in a lengthy study by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, which had taken a close, admiring and gullible look at Stalinist planning.¹⁵ In 1938 – the year after Wilson joined him – Beveridge published a book called Constructive Democracy which showed how far its author had travelled in this direction. Anticipating a possible war, Beveridge argued that planning had become the prerequisite of national survival. Beveridge’s polemical approach aroused widespread interest, especially on the Left. ‘Here at last’, wrote Richard Crossman in the New Statesman and Nation, ‘you feel is someone talking and talking angrily out of his experience.’¹⁶

How much rubbed off on Wilson, brought into daily contact with great men, and great ideas, for the first time? Later, Wilson sought to distance himself from much of Beveridge’s work, claiming to have seen fallacies in it. He also claimed that he tried to educate Beveridge on the subject of unemployment. In their joint project, he wrote, Beveridge wanted to think in terms of ‘frictional’ unemployment – that is, unemployment caused by the immobility of labour. Wilson was impatient: Herbert had suffered from joblessness which, as the Wilson family bitterly knew, was anything but frictional. Beveridge did not seem to understand the point. ‘He didn’t realize – until much later – that there was a fundamental problem of under-demand in the economy,’ Wilson told an interviewer in the 1960s.¹⁷ He also maintained that he tried to persuade Beveridge of the basic tenets of Keynesianism. We need to treat both claims cautiously.

Wilson may not have shared Beveridge’s fierce prejudice, but he was happy enough to accept his supervisor’s intellectual framework. Wilson’s earliest published work, which took the form of academic articles, reveals no evidence of a desire to break Beveridge-imposed fetters. The first, which appeared in Economica in May 1940, analysed details of industrial production between 1717 and 1786, in order to establish the existence and chronology of a trade cycle.¹⁸ This faithfully employed a technique used by Beveridge, and started from his assumptions.

Wilson’s main undertaking, a book to be written jointly with Beveridge about the trade cycle – a subject on which Beveridge’s views differed sharply from those of Keynes – was intended for publication early in 1940. The outbreak of war killed the project, along with Wilson’s doctoral thesis.¹⁹ Nine chapters, however, were written, and Beveridge was able to plunder this research when writing a later study called Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944. In this book, Beveridge refers repeatedly to Wilson’s investigations and findings.²⁰

The first of the discarded chapters had begun, significantly, with a conversation between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes:

‘This is indeed a mystery,’ I remarked. ‘What do you imagine that it means?’

‘I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’²¹

This was intended to sum up the authors’ scorn for much modern theory, including that of Keynes. It was the essence of Beveridgism. It also encapsulated Wilson’s approach, intellectually and politically, for the rest of his career. He was a facts man. As a schoolboy and as a student he had been interested in facts: he collected them, treasured them, remembered them. His ability to reel off statistics was not just a conceit. As an historian, and later as a statistician, he saw the acquisition of data as the bricks and mortar of policy-making. It was an outlook which contrasted with the intellectual hedonism of Bloomsbury and Keynes.

After the war, Keynesianism became the universal doctrine among younger economists, and Wilson had no difficulty in adapting to it. But he did not acquire the enthusiasm for the new teaching which made others see it as a crusade, and he always retained Beveridge’s interest in the counter-doctrine of socialist planning. Part of the reason was, as we have seen, that he had been harnessed to a distinguished zealot who increasingly favoured such an approach over the mixture of state control and free enterprise favoured by Keynes and the American New Dealers.²² But there was also a negative factor: Beveridge apart, Wilson did not find himself in an environment in which Keynes’s ideas were the focal point of attention.

There is an important difference here between Wilson, a Liberal who became a socialist, and other economists with whom Wilson later had dealings, in particular Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, two socialists who became Keynesian evangelists. For men like Gaitskell and Jay, democratic socialism’s lack of economic theory had always been a worrying deficiency: they fell on The General Theory as on a philosopher’s stone, seeing in demand management a means of giving practical effect to Labour’s egalitarian aims. In the case of Gaitskell, a junior lecturer at London University, where the fiercely classical Lionel Robbins held sway at the LSE, there was an added frisson: Keynes’s ideas provided ammunition to hurl in intra-faculty fights. For the much younger Wilson, who had read The General Theory as an undergraduate, there was much less to get worked up about.

Engrossed in his empirical study, Wilson was concerned, not to apply, but to deconstruct, aspects of Keynes’s theory. Wilson’s term-time research work was based at the recently established Institute of Statistics in Oxford High Street. Colleagues included Arthur Brown, Elizabeth Ackroyd, Goronwy Daniels, Richard Sayers, George Shackle and Richard Goodwin, among the younger economists. Unlike Cambridge, the Institute did not have ‘a strong General Theory flavour’. Unlike London, it did not have a strongly anti-General Theory flavour either: in the battle between Keynesians and Robbinsites Oxford did not take sides. There was not even a civil war. ‘I do not remember that there was any division of the sub-faculty into pro- and anti-Keynesian factions,’ says Arthur Brown. It was therefore easy and natural for Wilson to stand aside, unmoved by the claims of those who, like Gaitskell and Jay, ‘blended together into a heady mixture’ the various advances in economics of the 1930s of which The General Theory constituted only one part.²³

It would be fanciful to trace Wilson’s later affinity to the socialist Bevanites, and the Keynesian Gaitskellites’ distaste for Wilson, to this difference: yet it provides a piece in the jigsaw. Implicitly, Anthony Crosland pointed to the cerebral distinction between progressivism’s cavaliers and roundheads in The Future of Socialism, published in 1956, when he expressed an aesthete’s disdain for socialism based on a good filing system. A good filing system, plus a good slide rule, formed a central part of Wilson’s policy approach: and was one reason why Gaitskellites regarded him as a dull dog.

In 1938 Beveridge made Wilson a Research Fellow at University College, on a stipend of £400 a year, with free rooms and meals in college. This was the first step to a full fellowship, which contemporaries assumed was his goal. At the Institute he was regarded as clever, and a fellowship was expected to come his way. But he was never considered brilliant or intellectually inspiring. ‘Harold was not top flight technically. He was more of a practical chap,’ says Brown, who knew him well in the 1938–9 academic year. ‘His strength was in applied economics. He became more and more applied, in the sense that he took current problems to pieces.’ The future mapped out for him was as a Beveridge-in-miniature, teaching and writing about economic and social policy. ‘He looked set to become the kind of academic who gets involved in looking at present-day issues,’ according to Brown. The idea that he might go into politics was not discussed in the essentially apolitical environment of the Institute. Wilson was visibly ambitious, and emanated a confident, even cocky, sense of control over his destiny. Brown recalls saying to his own father in 1939 that his friend had everything he needed to get to the top, ‘except charisma and oratory’.²⁴ But the ‘top’ Brown had in mind was academic, not political. Nobody saw Wilson as a man with strong views, or a sense of mission.

Yet this was the time when Wilson took his first tentative step towards a political career: he joined the Oxford University Labour Party. Later, he gave elaborate explanations for his change of loyalty. At a personal level, he claimed that it was ‘G. D. H. Cole as much as any man’ who pointed him towards Labour.²⁵ Wilson had come into contact with Cole, the godfather of inter-war Oxford socialism, at University College, where Cole was Economics Fellow. But he had never been a member of the famous, and somewhat exclusive, ‘Cole group’ of young Oxford socialists, that included such luminaries as Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin.²⁶ Now, as a close colleague, he fell greatly under Cole’s spell, finding in him a much more congenial mentor than the irascible Beveridge. ‘Harold admired him very much,’ says Mary, who took little interest in politics, but much in Oxford and its personalities.

Cole was renowned as a recruiter of talented young men to the socialist cause, and it was very much in character that he should have provided encouragement. Since, however, Wilson had taken the significant step of resigning from the Eighty Club – thereby severing his link with leading Liberals – in February 1938, before he started at University College, his allegiances seem already to have been on the move. Wilson also cited a political factor: his concern about unemployment, based on childhood memories, his father’s recent experience, and his own practical study of the subject. But this, in itself, is not quite convincing either. The Liberals – party of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes – were just as interested in unemployment as Labour.

There may not have been a single reason. However, the obvious explanation is the most plausible. If Wilson still contemplated a future in Parliament, then Labour was the only practical vehicle for such an aspiration. It is likely, indeed, that he had had such a switch long in mind. According to Mary, it was always his intention to establish himself professionally, and then look for a way to enter politics.²⁷ This was also the impression Leslie Smith received when he talked to Wilson in the early 1960s. Smith recorded that the future leader ‘never lost sight of his ultimate goal. Even during the closing stages of his intensive cramming [for Schools] he indulged in his favourite imaginings.’ Apparently his day-dream at this stage was to become Labour (not Liberal) candidate for Huddersfield or Colne Valley, and eventually to be Foreign Secretary.²⁸ If that is correct, then it did not need Cole, or Herbert’s second bout of unemployment, to persuade Harold to dump the Liberals.

It helped, of course, that the Labour Party was changing. Labour had recovered notably in the 1935 election, while the Liberals had further declined. At the same time, the Labour Party had become much more congenial to a middle-of-the-road progressive like Wilson. It had acquired a more pragmatic group of leaders, its foreign policy had hardened, and it had shed its more utopian commitments. It had also begun to develop a philosophy which many Liberals found easy to accept. Hugh Dalton’s Practical Socialism for Britain, published in 1935, advocated the kind of socialist planning within capitalism that had Beveridge’s approval. Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case, published in 1937, injected Keynes into socialist policymaking, partly under the influence of the Oxford-based ‘Liberal–Socialist’ economist, James Meade. Both books were symptomatic of a new, policy-orientated approach which was much more to Wilson’s taste than the revolutionary flourishes that characterized the Left earlier in the decade.

It was not exactly a traumatic leap. Wilson’s initial involvement in the party he had just joined was as an academic specialist, rather than as a campaigner. The Fabian Society (which amalgamated with Cole’s New Fabian Research Bureau in 1939) absorbed some of his attention. At Cole’s suggestion he wrote a chapter on ‘Government Control of Railways’ for a projected book to be edited by the former Oxford Union President (and future Foreign Secretary), Michael Stewart. In September1939 this was read for the Society by the social scientist W. A. Robson, who criticized it sharply for failing to analyse the present structure of the industry, and pointed out that two-thirds of it was devoted to a history of the railways up to 1921.²⁹

Occasionally, Wilson was to be seen at Labour political gatherings in Oxford. Mayhew remembers first hearing him speak at one of these just before the war. Wilson addressed the meeting so knowledgeably on the issue of electricity nationalization, that Mayhew mentioned it in a letter to his parents.³⁰ Yet Wilson could scarcely be described, in this phase, as a Labour Party activist. He was very much on the fringe, ignored by the Pakenhams and Gordon Walkers who dominated Oxford Labour affairs. He took no conspicuous part in the debates over appeasement and rearmament that rocked the city in the year of Munich, and split the Oxford Labour Party on the issue of A. D. Lindsay’s ‘Popular Front’ candidature in the Oxford by-election. Local Labour Party members barely knew him. Friends had no inkling of his long-term plans.