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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.

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       BE PREPARED

      ‘Ambition’ is a grand word with which to dignify the fantasies of childhood, even when they are later realized. Childish thoughts about the future are multifarious, and kaleidoscopic. We should not take too seriously the Downing Street photo, the declarations to parents or long-suffering teachers. Harold was not actively interested in politics until a much later age than many of his future parliamentary colleagues. Yet it is not unusual to say of somebody ‘he wanted to be a doctor’ (or a priest, or a soldier) ever since he was a child. What is so strange, therefore, about an idée fixe of a political kind?

      The Wilson family story (as related to Leslie Smith, Harold’s first ‘official’ biographer) describes a Damascus Road experience which took place in the summer of 1928 after both the Downing Street photo and the voyage to Australia. The Wilsons had travelled to Scotland on holiday, and visited Stirling. Here Herbert took Harold to see the statue of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal Prime Minister in 1905–8 and former MP for the town. Beneath the effigy, Herbert told his son about the 1906 Liberal landslide, the growth of the Labour Party, the radical history of the Colne Valley, and the careers of Mann, Grayson and Snowden.

      The effect, wrote Smith, was dramatic: politics became the only career Harold wanted to pursue. Henceforth, he felt ‘an inner certainty of destiny, an absolute conviction about his future mission and his unique fitness to undertake it’. At first (according to Smith), the only doubt in the boy’s mind was what position he was aiming at: sometimes it was Foreign Secretary, more often it was Chancellor of the Exchequer. But soon he had raised his sights. When he and his friends talked about careers, ‘Harold’s contribution was confined to the simple observation: “I should like to be Prime Minister”.’¹ No doubt there is a post hoc element to this tale. Others, however, confirm that Harold began to talk about a political future for himself early on. Harold Ainley maintains that he was not surprised to hear that his friend had entered Parliament in 1945. ‘He always said he was going to be an MP.’² A Roydsian contemporary who subsequently worked as a journalist on a local paper, fifty years later recalled Harold, aged fifteen, saying, ‘One day I might be Prime Minister.’³

      Such an idea was not quite so fanciful for a schoolboy in Huddersfield as it might have been elsewhere. In addition to Snowden, there was Asquith, a weaver’s son. A short Historical Note in the 1927 edition of the Huddersfield Official Guide ends with the information: ‘At what is now the Huddersfield College, New North Road, the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, then known as H. H. Asquith, received his early education, he being a nephew of a former most distinguished townsman and freeman of the Borough, the late J. E. Williams, J.P., LL.D.’⁴ Asquith died in 1928, the year of Harold’s Damascus Road. A. V. Alexander, a leading Labour MP, addressed a gathering of Roydsians, shortly after this event, which Huddersfield took particularly to heart, and declared patronizingly: ‘Perhaps one of these boys will one day be Prime Minister.’ Such platitudes

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