LITMIR.BIZ

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from office. ‘“When thou doest alms, do not send a trumpet before thee, and let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret”.’³⁰ But she was, perhaps in spite of herself, impressed by Harold and his narcissistic energy. The word ‘Oxford’ had an enticing ring: it reminded her of Cambridge, where her brother had recently graduated, and which had also been part of her childhood Eden. Because of her parents’ peripatetic life, she had few friends at home and there had been little time to acquire new ones in the Wirral. It is easy to see why this intelligent and unformed young girl, with her ‘quick sense of humour, mischievous yet compassionate, a complete lack of all pretension’ and firm set of values,³¹ turned the head of an ebullient sixth-former. At the same time Harold – cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself, confidently planning the future – filled a need for her that summer. On 4 July, three weeks after they met, he announced that he would marry her. It was a declaration, rather than a proposal. She was touched, and amused. He also told her of his boyish plan, now of many years’ standing: he was going to be a Member of Parliament and Prime Minister. She laughed that off as well. Later, the family joke was that if she had believed him it would have been a short romance.³² He did not say, however, for which party.

      When Wilson became Prime Minister, much was made of his lowly origins. Yet he was by no means the first non-public school boy to reach No. 10 Downing Street. Five twentieth-century predecessors had not attended a famous school, and two – Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald – had not been to university either. But one peculiarity did mark him out. He was an English provincial.

      Amongst other prime ministers not of upper- or upper-middle-class origin, only one – H. H. Asquith – came from an English town, coincidentally the same as Wilson’s. But Asquith received only his early education in the North. At the age of eleven he was sent to board at the City of London School, and to acquire the speech and habits of mind of a Southerner. Asquith went to Balliol, was called to the Bar and represented Scottish seats for the Gladstonian Liberal Party: he became an honorary gentleman. Wilson, by contrast, wore his roots like a badge, continuing to speak in a Yorkshire accent which made some people feel, by a contorted logic, that the experience of Oxford and Whitehall ought to have ironed out the regional element, and the fact that it had not done so reflected a kind of phoniness. The truth was that, for all his other conceits, Wilson was the least seducible of politicians in social terms, remaining imperturbably close in his tastes and values – as in his marriage – to the world in which he had grown up. It was a bourgeois world, of teachers, clerks and nurses: an existence which drew its strength from patterns of work, orderliness, routine, respectability, thrift, religion, family, local pride, regard for education and for qualifications. It was a world from which luxury, party-going, fashion, drink, sexual licence, art and culture were largely absent.

      The Prime Minister whose social background Wilson’s most resembles is not Edward Heath or John Major, still less Jim Calla-ghan (all Southerners from differing tribes), but Margaret Thatcher. In key respects, the early lives of the two leaders were remarkably similar. Both were brought up in or near middling English industrial towns. Both came from disciplined, Church-based families and had parents who valued learning, while having little formal education themselves. Both were given more favourable attention than an elder sister, their only sibling, who, in each case, entered a worthwhile career of a lesser-professional kind (Margaret’s sister became a physiotherapist, Harold’s a primary school teacher).

      Both were Nonconformists. The Robertses were Methodists. In his biography of Mrs Thatcher, Hugo Young writes: ‘[Alfred Roberts] was by nature a cautious, thrifty fellow, who had inherited an unquestioning admiration for certain Victorian values: hard work, self-help, rigorous budgeting and a firm belief in the immorality of extravagance.’ Margaret spent every Sunday of her childhood walking to and from the Methodist church in the centre of Grantham. We have already discussed the role played by Milnsbridge Baptist Church in the Wilsons’ family life. Harold’s own memoirs speak of ‘regular chapel-going and a sense of community’ and his parents’ ‘capacity for protracted hard work …’³³

      Both future premiers followed the same pattern in their education. After attending a council primary school, both won places at grant-aided grammar schools, their fees paid by county scholarships. There they worked and played with a dedication brought from their homes. By coincidence, Margaret’s subject, the highly practical one of chemistry, was also Herbert’s and Marjorie’s. Their levels of attainments were similar. Both passed into Oxford (a glittering prize for any grammar school pupil), but each did so by a narrow margin. Neither was regarded as brilliant at school. For both, university was a critical launching-pad.

      The early political training of the two future leaders also contains a parallel. In both families, political achievement was considered the acme of success. ‘Politics infused the atmosphere in which she was reared,’ writes Young. ‘… A political family handed down the tradition of political commitment from one generation to the next.’³⁴ Harold’s comment that politics had been ‘in my family for generations before me’, will be recalled. Harold, like Margaret, had an alderman in his family, Alderman Thewlis of Manchester, in addition to an Australian state legislator. Both Alfred and Herbert began in the Liberal Party, the characteristic political home of provincial Nonconformity, before moving in contrary directions when the Liberals fell apart in the 1920s.

      The Wilsons were better educated than the Robertses and, some of the time, slightly richer. In Western Road they lived in a semidetached house with an indoor lavatory: Alderman Roberts lived over his grocer’s shop, with the lavatory in the yard. The Wilsons took more holidays, and there was the unusual adventure of the Australian trip, which Margaret’s family could scarcely have contemplated. Moreover, the psychological roles of husband and wife in the two families were to some extent the reverse of each other: Ethel, a teacher, was the strongest character in the Wilson household, whereas Margaret’s mother (as portrayed by Young) was colourless and downtrodden. Herbert lacked the steel of Alfred, a local dignitary.

      Yet the similarity of the early years of the two overlapping party leaders – inhabitants of No. 10 Downing Street for nineteen years between them – in class, wealth, standard of living, interests, habits, attainment and upbringing, is such that if they had grown up at the same time in the same town they would almost certainly have known each other. There were probably several Margaret Hilda Robertses at Royds Hall, and many must have played tennis at the Brotherton’s club. It is noteworthy that one of Gladys’s cousins, Tom Baldwin, kept a grocer’s shop – like Margaret’s father.³⁵

      There were, however, two differences which greatly influenced the outcome. First, Harold and Margaret were not contemporaries. Margaret was nine and a half years Harold’s junior, and from that gap huge differences in outlook arose. Second, Alfred Roberts was a self-employed businessman, while Herbert was an employee.

      Harold spent his adolescence and early manhood during the worst years of the depression. The collapse of world markets, and the failure or inability of governments to soften the impact on British manufacturing industry, came close to breaking Herbert’s spirit and destroying his career. Harold’s family was uprooted, and his education interrupted, by the effects of unemployment. By contrast, Margaret entered her teens and became politically conscious only as the depression came to an end. Alfred Roberts suffered during the hard times, but never badly. Where Harold’s youthful experience was of financial uncertainty caused by factors outside the family’s control, Margaret’s memory was of a solid security, the product, as she believed, of her father’s efforts and prudence.

      After his illness, Harold continued to thrive at Royds Hall, while his father looked for work. But the atmosphere at home was sometimes close to despair. ‘The adjustment, not only of the wage- or salary-earner and his wife, but also of the children in a house struck by unemployment, is hard to describe,’ Wilson later recalled, ‘… I shall never really know how the family survived … Our food became more simple, although my mother always managed to keep me adequately fed … I concentrated with ever more determination on my schooling.’³⁶ This was a state of affairs which Margaret never had to face in fully employed, Second World War Grantham.

      Politicians like to emphasize their own childhood hardships, and Harold

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