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Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
Читать онлайн.Название Harold Wilson
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008182625
Автор произведения Peter Hennessy
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
His more relaxed fellow scouts may have found him a bit over-keen, and there is an aspect to some of the anecdotes which makes him sound like Piggy in a Huddersfield version of Lord of the Flies. ‘He was a good [patrol] leader and always got the best out of his lads,’ recalled Jack Hepworth, a member of the same troop, who later worked for the Gas Board. ‘But in some ways he was not popular. He tended to be swottish and seemed to know a lot and, naturally, some of the lads didn’t always like this.’27 At the age of twelve he entered a Yorkshire Post competition which called for a hundred-word sketch of a personal hero. Harold wrote about the founder of the Boy Scouts, Baden-Powell, and won.28 Fired by this triumph, he wrote a helpful letter to the Scouting Movement’s newspaper, The Scout. ‘I should like to use your little hint for strengthening a signalling flag in my column “Things We All Should Know”,’ replied the kindly editor, and sent him a Be Prepared pencil case as a reward.29
Harold’s behaviour in the Scouts, as in school and at home, was that of a child who expects his best efforts to be warmly appreciated and applauded. There was plenty of applause at home where, from the beginning, Harold was the favourite child, almost a family project, in whom all hope was invested. Marjorie seems to have taken her usurpation in good part, at least on the surface. Harold was born the day before she was seven. ‘It was a sort of birthday present,’ she would tell interviewers, doubtless repeating what her parents said to her at the time. Even when Harold was Prime Minister, she used to speak of him as if he were half-doll, half-baby, the family adornment to be cosseted and treasured. ‘With the Press slating him left, right and centre I always feel very protective,’ she said in 1967. ‘You see, he’s always my younger brother.’30
Marjorie never married. She stayed close both to her parents and to Harold. Christmases and holidays were often spent together. She became a frequent visitor at No. 10, and proudly boasted of her brother’s achievements to friends in Cornwall, where she lived in later years. But there was another side. Harold had been a birthday present, but he could also seem like a cuckoo’s egg in the cosy nest at Western Road. Fondness was combined with tension, which sprang from an inequality that was there from the beginning. Harold was the adored baby of the family: Marjorie was large, strong, sisterly but not always good-tempered. As Prime Minister, Harold confided to a Cabinet colleague that she had bullied him mercilessly.31 One particular incident stuck in Harold’s own memory. It took place during a summer holiday at a northern seaside resort. Like Albert and the stick with the horse’s head handle, Harold met with a nasty accident – caused, not by a lion, but by Marjorie. Walking along the shore, brother and sister had a fight. Marjorie overpowered him, and flung him, fully clad, into the sea. Harold was badly scared, and his thick flannel suit was soaked through. Cold and shaken, he was taken off to a shop to buy new clothes.
Such events happen in most families. It did not amount to much. Yet it was the violence that shocked him. ‘He was terribly frightened,’ says a friend to whom he related the story. ‘In a sense, she was taking her revenge for all the attention he got.’32 Her lot cannot, indeed, have been an easy one: she was expected to watch Harold’s brilliant successes and be enthusiastic about them, almost like a third parent.
Marjorie’s own achievements were automatically regarded as less important than her brother’s. There was a family story (such stories tend to encapsulate a truth) that when Marjorie exclaimed ‘I’ve won a scholarship!’ on winning an award to Huddersfield Girls’ High School, her four-year-old brother lisped: ‘I want a “ship” too!’33 The point of this tale is, of course, the precocity of Harold, rather than the success of Marjorie. Later, when Herbert made a famous sightseeing trip to London, visiting Downing Street, it was Harold who accompanied him and had his photograph taken outside the door of No. 10, not his sister. When Ethel travelled to Australia to visit her father and brother, Harold went with her – Marjorie stayed in Milnsbridge to look after Herbert.
Marjorie played her part cheerfully. ‘Really they all joined together in worship of this young boy who was going to perform those great feats,’ says a friend. But Harold never forgot his sister’s ability to pounce. As an adult, he continued to regard her with wariness and awe, as well as affection. ‘I used to tease him by asking “How is Marjorie?”’ recalls a former prime ministerial aide. ‘He would put on a peculiar persecuted look and say: “Ah, Marjorie!” He saw Marjorie as somebody telling him what to do, making him do this or that.’34
Marjorie was not the only powerful female member of the family. The other was Ethel, whom Harold resembled physically, while Marjorie looked like Herbert. Ethel Wilson was a source of calm and reassurance. Harold once described her as ‘very placid’.35 She ‘always gave the impression of having no personal worries’,36 and almost never lost her temper (a characteristic her son inherited). She had trained as a teacher, but no longer worked as such, throwing her energies into managing a family budget that was not always easy to keep in surplus, and into voluntary activities. Because she died before Harold became Labour Leader, she escaped press attention, and Herbert – who attended Labour Party Conferences and loved being interviewed – became the publicly known parent. But Ethel was the dominant figure in the family, and also the closest to Harold. ‘He had a strong bond with her,’ says Mary, Harold’s wife. ‘He was devoted to her. She was a very quiet woman with firm views.’37 According to a friend, ‘Harold loved his mother more than his father.’38 When Ethel died in 1957, her son felt the loss deeply. Years later, he told an interviewer: ‘I found I couldn’t believe – and I reckon I’m a pretty rational kind of man – that death was the end of my mother.’39
Harold’s relationship with Herbert was affectionate, respectful yet detached: later he tended to indulge the old man’s whims, and treat him like an elderly and beloved pet, rather than look up to him. To outsiders, Herbert had a prickly Yorkshire reserve – he could seem withdrawn, aloof, even cold. He was always more volatile than Ethel, and more ambitious. Herbert’s most famous attribute, which he took little prompting to show off, was a quirky ability to do large arithmetical sums rapidly in his head. This was displayed as a party trick, but it was also an emotional defence. He loved numbers, perhaps more than people, and resorted to them in times of stress. One story (also revealing in unintended ways) recounts how, on the night before Harold’s birth, Herbert was working on some difficult calculations to do with his job. During a long and (for Ethel) painful night, he divided his time between attending to his wife, and attending to his calculations.40 Harold inherited an interest in numbers, and also a freakish memory, from his father, though his Grandfather Seddon had a remarkable memory as well.41
Herbert’s most important influence was political. Harold turned to his mother for comfort, to his father for information and ideas. There was an element of the barrack-room intellectual about Herbert, whose romantic interest in progressive politics was linked to his own professional frustrations. Herbert felt a strong resentment towards ‘academic’ chemists who, armed with university degrees, carried a higher status within the industry. The need for qualifications became an obsession, as did his concern to provide better chances for his son. One symptom of Herbert’s bitterness was an inverted snobbery, according to which, although privately he saw himself as lower-middle-class (an accurate self-attribution), he ‘always described himself as “working-class” to Tory friends’.42 Another was a growing interest in the egalitarian Labour Party, which fought a general election as a national body for the first time in 1918, and had an especially notable history in the Colne Valley.
Harold entered New Street Council School in Milnsbridge in 1920, at the age of four and a half, joining a class of about forty children, mainly destined for the local textile mills. His schooldays did not start well: his first encounter with scholastic authority so upset him that he used to fantasize about jumping out of the side-car of his father’s motor cycle on the way to school and playing truant. The cause of his unhappiness was a school mistress who set the children impossible tasks and chastised them enthusiastically with