ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
Читать онлайн.Название Harold Wilson
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008182625
Автор произведения Peter Hennessy
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
The Wilsons’ desire to better themselves did not stop there. Two years after arriving at York Union, they felt secure enough to bargain their joint salaries up from £80 to £100. With this they were prepared to rest content, turning the York Union into a family undertaking, in which one of their daughters was also involved as Assistant Matron. They retired in 1879 when John Wilson became seriously ill. He died two years later. Esther survived him, and lived in York until her own death in 1895. Both she and her husband had received a pension in recognition of twenty-six years at the Workhouse in which they had ‘most efficiently, successfully and to the satisfaction of this Union discharged their duties …’6
John and Esther’s son James, Harold’s grandfather, was the last of Harold’s forebears to be born at Rievaulx. James finally severed the ancient link, becoming the first to give up the husbandry of the lands around the Abbey ruins. He moved to Manchester in 1860, at the age of seventeen, apprenticed as a draper, and later worked as a warehouse salesman. He was also the first to wed out of the locality. It was a significant match: his marriage to Eliza Thewlis was a socially aspirant one. Eliza’s father, Titus Thewlis, was a Huddersfield cotton-warp manufacturer who employed 104 workers (including, as was later revealed, some sweated child labour). This might have meant a generous dowry. Unfortunately for the Wilsons, however, Eliza was one of eight children.7 The James Wilsons themselves had five children and were never well off.
Though the Thewlis connection brought little money, it provided a new influence, with a vital impact on the next generation: an interest in political activity. ‘Why are you in politics?’ Harold was asked in an interview when he became Labour Leader. ‘Because politics are in me, as far back as I can remember,’ he replied. ‘Farther than that: they were in my family for generations before me …’8 Harold was not the fourteenth political member of his family, but he was far from being the first. According to Wilson legend, Grandfather James had been an ardent radical who celebrated the 1906 Liberal landslide by instructing the Sunday school of which he was superintendent to sing the hymn, ‘Sound the loud timbrel o’er Egypt’s dark sea/Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free.’9
There were Labour, as well as Liberal, elements in the family history. Herbert Wilson’s brother Jack (Harold’s uncle), who later set up the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions and eventually became HM Inspector of Technical Colleges, had an early career as an Independent Labour Party campaigner. In the elections of 1895 and 1900, he had acted as agent to Keir Hardie, the ILP’s founder. The most notable politician on Herbert’s side of the family, however, was Eliza Wilson’s brother, Herbert Thewlis, a Manchester alderman who became Liberal Lord Mayor of the city. Harold’s great-uncle Herbert happened to be constituency president in northwest Manchester, when Winston Churchill fought a by-election there in 1908, caused by the need to recontest the seat (in accordance with current practice) following his appointment as President of the Board of Trade. Alderman Thewlis assisted as agent, and Herbert Wilson, Harold’s father, helped as his deputy. It was a famous battle rather than a glorious one. Churchill lost the seat, and had to find another in Dundee. Nevertheless, the Churchill link was a source of gratification in the Wilson family, as the fame of the rising young politician grew, and Harold was regaled with stories about it as a child.
Herbert Wilson’s main period of political involvement had occurred before the Churchill contest. Herbert’s story was one of promise denied. Born at Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Lancashire, on 12 December 1882, he had attended local schools, and had been considered an able pupil, remaining in full-time education until he was sixteen – an unusual occurrence for all but the professional classes. There was talk of university, but not the money to turn talk into reality. Instead, he trained at Manchester Technical College and entered the dyestuffs industry in Manchester. Though he acquired skills and qualifications as an industrial chemist, it was an uncertain trade. In the early years of the century fluctuations in demand and mounting competition brought periods of unemployment. It was during these that Herbert became involved in political campaigning.10
In 1906, at the age of twenty-three, Herbert Wilson married Ethel Seddon, a few months his senior, at the Congregational Church in Openshaw, Lancashire. Ethel also had political connections, though of a different kind. Her father, William Seddon, was a railway clerk, and she had a railway ancestry on both sides of her family. The working-class element in Harold’s recent background, though already a couple of generations distant, was more Seddon than Wilson: Ethel’s two grandfathers had been a coalman and a mechanic on the railways, and her grandmothers had been the daughters of an ostler and a labourer.11
Where Wilsons had been individualists, Seddons were collectivists. William Seddon was an ardent supporter of trade unionism, and so was his son Harold, the apple of the family’s eye. Ethel’s brother, of whom she was immensely proud, had emigrated to the Kalgoorlie goldfields in Western Australia, worked on the construction of the transcontinental railway, and made his political fortune through the Australian trade union movement.12 As tales of Harold Seddon’s prosperity filtered back in letters, other Seddons joined him, including his father William, who got a job with the government railways.13 During Harold Wilson’s childhood, Ethel’s thoughts were always partly with the Seddon relatives, to whom she was devoted, and who, in her imagination, inhabited a world of sunshine and plenty.
Such links with the world of public affairs – actively political uncles on both sides – added to the Wilsons’ sense of difference. Yet there was nothing grand about the connections, and there was no wealth. Social definitions are risky, because they mean different things in different generations. The Wilsons, however, are easy enough to place: they were typically, and impeccably, northern lower-middle-class. Their stratum was quite different from that of Harold’s later opponent, and Oxford contemporary, Edward Heath, whose manual working-class roots are indisputable.14 But Herbert and Ethel did not belong, either, to the world of provincial doctors, lawyers and headteachers. In modern jargon, they were neither C2S nor ABs, but CIS.
On 12 March 1909, a year after the Churchill excitement, Ethel gave birth to her first child, Marjorie. Herbert’s political diversions now ceased, and for seven years the Wilsons’ attention was taken up by their cheerful, intelligent, rotund only daughter. Perhaps it was the unpredictable nature of the dyestuffs industry which deterred them from enlarging their family. At any rate, in 1912 the vagaries of the trade uprooted them from Manchester – the first of a series of nomadic moves that punctuated their lives for the next thirty years. Herbert’s search for suitable employment took him to the Colne Valley, closer to Wilson family shrines. Here he obtained a job with the firm of John W. Leitch and Co. in Milnsbridge, later moving to the rival establishment of L. B. Holliday and Co. Milnsbridge was one mile west of the boundary of Huddersfield. Herbert rented 4 Warneford Road, Cowersley, a small terraced house not far from the Leitch works and adequate for the family’s needs: with three bedrooms, a sitting-room, dining-room, and lavatory and bathroom combined, as well as small gardens back and front.15
The chemical industry was already fast expanding in Huddersfield and the outlying towns. Established early in the nineteenth century, local manufacturing had been built up partly by Read Holliday (founder of L. B. Holliday) and partly by Dan Dawson (whose successors were Leitch of Milnsbridge), who developed the use of coal tar. By 1900 Huddersfield was proudly claiming to be the nation’s chief centre for the production of coal-tar products, intermediates and dyestuffs. There were a score of factories servicing the woollen and worsted mills, providing a series of complex processes which went into the dyeing of cloth, including ‘scouring, tentering, drying, milling, blowing, raising, cropping, pressing and cutting’.16
Huddersfield, like other industrial towns,