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have often held such statements against Wilson, though generally on contradictory grounds. On the one hand, while acknowledging that he was exceptionally ambitious within a profession in which driving ambition is the norm, they have felt that such an objective in a child must be regarded as insufferably conceited and therefore unacceptable as an explanation. On the other, they have seen it as evidence of political shallowness – a sign that he calculated his path to office, with little interest in the purpose of getting there.

      Yet it is naïve to imagine that the majority of politicians drift into Parliament. For most, long-term preparation and strategizing has been a necessity, however much they might offer alternative accounts in their memoirs. Many a student politician has dreamt of Cabinet office. In this, only the dating of Wilson’s ambition, and its lofty focus, is unusual. We should not regard the formation of such a scheme – whether to impress teachers and friends, or to earn the approval of indulgent parents, or for whatever reason – as disreputable. Neither should we consider it unbelievable.

      Harold enjoyed Royds Hall, a new, mixed grammar school, opened in 1921. He threw himself into the many activities which it offered. Yet for all his cheerful energy he remained, as in the Scouts, lonely in a crowd – as if locked into a secret world, which did not fully connect with the public one. He took part in teams, but he was not a team player. Although, according to Ainley, he never showed much interest in courting girls,⁶ he was happier in their company. Later he reflected that the girls at the school ‘fulfilled a kind of mission civilisatrice’ on the boys.⁷ He was still in touch with one Royds Hall girl, Olga Gledhill, who lived in Blackpool after her marriage, when he was Prime Minister. There was also a class mistress, Helen Whelan, who liked and guided him: chiding him gently for his conceits, but also nurturing him as a talented pupil, who responded to female encouragement. It was for Miss Whelan that Harold wrote an essay, in 1928, on ‘Myself in 25 Years’ about introducing his first Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Harold gained distinctions at Oxford, she was one of the first people he told.

      As at New Street Council School, there was an exhibitionist flavour to his performance. He soon discovered the school magazine. Articles poured from his pen – wit was his forte. An indifferent thirteen-year-old singer, he published a jocular ‘Diary of a Choir Boy’, which concluded:

      February 12th Choir is warned of approach of speech day. Boys are advised to begin scrubbing the visible parts of their anatomy … February 19th First layer of dirt begins to show signs of dispersing. Choir practice last period, during which Miss Whelan and many first trebles nearly collapse as a result of the aforementioned first trebles singing ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ without going flat. The entire choir dances the hornpipe on hearing there will be no after-school practice. J. H. Wilson, 3B.

      He was also an actor. When he took part in She Stoops to Conquer, girls from a neighbouring school gave him a glowing review. ‘Tony Lumpkin (H. Wilson) is worthy of first mention since he is the soul of the play,’ they wrote. ‘He took his part with gusto, in fact overacting in places, for he diverted the attention of the audience from the other proceedings. He was very amusing in his relations with his mother and Miss Neville (Olga Gledhill).’ His tendency to overact and thrust himself forward, in the classroom as well as on the stage, did not please all the teachers at Royds Hall, some of whom remembered him, many years later, as a tiresome prig. According to Leslie Smith (who generally put the most favourable interpretation on the observations of witnesses), ‘several of them found his manner and outlook excessively precocious.’ Harold apparently failed to notice, ‘and never realized that his attitude to them, to his work, and to his professed future career, was sometimes interpreted as an attempt either to impress or to curry favour’.

      He was not, however, an academic prodigy. At first his place in class was some way from the top, and his early school reports criticized him for idleness. He was good at languages, and according to one teacher, ‘displayed more than a passing interest in Esperanto’. Eventually he headed his class, but he was never thought to be outstanding.⁸ Perhaps, under different circumstances, he would have excelled at Royds Hall, and made his mark upon the school. The opportunity, however, was denied him by two almost simultaneous traumas.

      When he was fourteen and out camping with the Milnsbridge Baptist Scouts, Harold caught typhoid from a glass of milk at a nearby farm. Of a dozen people who contracted the disease during the local outbreak, six died. For a month and a half Harold’s condition was critical. While he lay in Meltham Isolation Hospital, his parents were only permitted to visit him for half an hour, once a week. For fear of spreading the disease, Marjorie – now studying chemistry at Leeds University – was not allowed to see him at all. Herbert telephoned the hospital daily throughout October 1930. At the end of the month he was told his son was out of danger, but this information was immediately followed by news of a relapse. For weeks Herbert and Ethel dreaded the telephone, in case a call from the hospital might mean that their son was dying. At last the crisis ended, and in January 1931 Harold was allowed home. During his illness his weight fell to 4½ stone. Afterwards, the whole family felt overwhelming relief, and there was a heightened sense of Harold as a special child. Appropriately, there is a family story that underlines this point. ‘The lad is being saved for something,’ Harold’s grandfather is supposed to have said.⁹

      Harold was soon fully restored to health. Meanwhile, another disaster had occurred, from which there would be no easy recovery. In December 1930, while Harold sometimes seemed hours from death, Herbert had lost his job. In this, he was not alone. One worker in three in the Colne Valley was unemployed in 1930. Because of the strength of the textile industry and the growth of engineering, Huddersfield had been cushioned during the 1920s from the worst impact of the gathering depression. By the turn of the decade, however, the contraction of markets was affecting every industry, and the dyestuffs trade was badly hit. For Herbert, it was a devastating blow, as much to his self-esteem as to his pocket. For a dozen years after the ending of the war, he had hung on in a business which had undergone many changes, as Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd widened its rationalizing grip, absorbing and dismembering local firms. Despite his experience and dedication, he had been overtaken by better qualified, younger men. Herbert was forty-eight and a specialist: the chances of finding work of a suitable kind in the locality were low.

      The Wilsons regarded Herbert’s unemployment as though it were a family disgrace, and hid it from the neighbours. ‘It was very much hushed up,’ Ainley remembers.¹⁰ Herbert and Ethel deliberately withheld the news from Harold until he was better. When they finally told him, he realized how serious it was. Marjorie already knew. It may have been a combination of anxiety about Herbert’s redundancy, and alarm about Harold’s illness, that caused her to fail her exams, ending her student career at Leeds University and destroying her father’s hope that she would follow in his footsteps as a chemist with the college degree he never had. Faced with mounting bills, the Wilsons considered panic measures, including the possibility that Harold might leave school at sixteen (he was fifteen in March 1931) and work for one of his uncles in Manchester. Instead, they tightened belts and lived on savings during two grim years in which Herbert wondered whether he would ever have proper work again. ‘Unemployment more than anything else’, Harold later claimed, ‘made me politically conscious.’¹¹ We need not doubt it.

      During the first months of this secret domestic misery, Harold stayed at home, recovering from his illness. Though he studied privately, he fell behind in mathematics, and needed extra tuition when he returned to school after Easter. He soon caught up, and – his vigour revived – began to take an interest in the emerging political crisis in which the MP for Colne Valley was taking a prominent, and puzzling, part. The second Labour Government, formed in 1929 with Philip Snowden once again Chancellor of the Exchequer, had lasted longer than the first. In August 1931, however, the worsening economic climate precipitated its collapse. After the Cabinet failed to agree to Snowden’s demand that unemployment benefit should be cut, Ramsay MacDonald went to the Palace to tender his resignation and that of his administration. When he returned, ministers were informed that, instead of resigning, MacDonald had accepted the King’s commission to form a ‘National’ government, supported by the Conservatives and some Liberals. Snowden was one of the few Labour ministers to join him: most of the Labour Party

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