Harold was not a delicate or weakly boy, but illness stalked his childhood, as it did many of his contemporaries in the 1920s, before the availability of antibiotics or vaccination for many infectious diseases. ‘It is wise to bear in mind constantly that children are frail in health and easily sicken and die, in measure as they are young,’ a Huddersfield Public Health Department pamphlet warned, chillingly, a few years before Harold’s birth.45 Harold came from a sensible, nurturing family. Nevertheless, his health aroused anxiety several times, and once gave cause for serious alarm.
1923, at the age of seven, he underwent an operation for appendicitis. For any little boy such an event (though in this case straightforward enough) would be upsetting, as much for the separation from his parents as for the discomfort. It is interesting that Wilson family legend links it to Harold’s earliest political utterance. ‘The first time I can remember thinking systematically about politics was when I was seven,’ he told an interviewer in 1963. ‘My parents came in to see me the night after my operation and I told them not to stay too long or they’d be too late to vote – for Philip Snowden.’46
This anecdote appears in several accounts. Its point is to establish, not only that he was an advanced seven-year-old, but also (what critics often doubted) that he had been politically-minded from an early age. Yet even an exceptional child does not snatch such a remark out of the air. If Harold was talking about politics and Philip Snowden at the age of seven, one reason was that he happened to live in an unusual constituency.
Although geographically and economically close to Huddersfield, Milnsbridge lay just within the scattered Colne Valley electoral division, which had a strongly radical tradition. The Colne Valley Labour Party had been formed in 1891 and could claim to be the oldest in the country. Tom Mann, a pioneering leader of the Independent Labour Party, had stood for Parliament there in 1895. Trade unions were weak throughout the West Riding, and Colne Valley itself was poorly unionized, but the socialist influence was strong, extending to Milnsbridge itself. Quasi-religious, quasi-secular ‘Labour Church’ services (rituals of a short-lived movement that stood historically between Nonconformist Christianity and atheistic socialism as a missing link) were held in the Milnsbridge Labour Club in the 1890s.47 In 1908 a Socialist Brass Band was formed in Milnsbridge, and continued to exist throughout Harold’s childhood. The best-remembered political event in Colne Valley, however, occurred in 1907, when the populist Victor Grayson put up for the seat in a by-election contest as an Independent Socialist, and won. Grayson was MP for the Valley for three years, until dissipation and scandal overtook him.
Grayson had been viewed askance by the Labour establishment. The only ILP MP to back him was the Member for Blackburn, Philip Snowden. When, after the war, Snowden lost his seat and was casting around for another, the memory of his involvement helped him to get the Colne Valley nomination.48 In 1922 Snowden won the seat, and returned to Parliament just as the expanding Labour Party took over from the Liberals as the official Opposition. A year later Snowden, one of Labour’s leading spokesmen, faced the voters again – this time in an election at which his Party hoped to displace the Conservatives. There was a feverish mood in the Valley, and especially in radically-minded households like that of the Wilsons. There were many voices urging people to go out and vote for Philip Snowden, and Herbert and Ethel needed little prompting.
Herbert, once a Liberal, had become a keen Labour partisan. One reason was the ethical socialism of Snowden, an honest, arrogant, ascetic crusader whose appeal to a Nonconformist community like that of Colne Valley is easy to understand. Snowden’s message that ‘individual liberty is impossible so long as men have not equal access to the means of life’,49 struck a particular chord with Herbert, who felt that his own liberty had been curtailed by the early end to his education. He was delighted and uplifted by Labour’s success in the election, and the accession in January 1924 of the first ever Labour government, in which Snowden was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. There was much talk of the Colne Valley Member in the Wilson household. A few years later, when his class was asked to write an essay on ‘Myself in 25 Years’, Harold wrote about planning his Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Nineteen twenty-four was a ragged year for Harold. After his operation, he had to spend the spring term at home convalescing. Not for the last time, confinement due to illness turned him in on himself. Separated from his school-fellows, he learnt to be self-contained, to amuse himself and to keep his own counsel. He also began to display what an early biographer calls ‘a natural disinclination to obtrude or reveal personal sentiment’. For Christmas, he received a model railway. Now, in the months of isolation, he retired to his attic empire with engines, rolling stock and Hornby Magazine, supplementing his reading with the historical sections of Marjorie’s Children’s Encyclopedia.50 An additional interest, shared later with Harold Ainley, was Meccano: piece by piece, Harold constructed an enormous model of Quebec Bridge. Both Harolds were avid readers of the Meccano Magazine; a sign of the Wilsons’ educational aspirations for their son was that they also subscribed to the wordy, up-market Children’s Newspaper.51
Education was much in Herbert’s mind when, that summer, he embarked on a week’s tour on the family motor cycle with his son in the side-car. Ethel and Marjorie were at Guide camp. Harold, eight years old, had only recently been pronounced fit: the excitement was intense. Father and son began with a few days’ sightseeing in the capital. Using a bed and breakfast in Russell Square as their base, they ventured into London’s political heartland. From an ABC café next to Westminster Bridge, they stared up at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament through a slot-machine telescope. Then they gazed at the soap-box speakers at Hyde Park Corner, and through the railings at Buckingham Palace, before riding up Downing Street to the prime minister’s residence.52 The short cul-de-sac, overshadowed by government buildings, was readily accessible to the public. Nobody stopped them as Harold, flat-capped and skinny from his recent illness, stood gravely on Ramsay MacDonald’s doorstep, as Herbert lowered his folding Brownie camera to snap one of the most famous photographs in British political history. The picture was pasted into the family album, where it remained until Herbert handed it to the press on the day Harold became Leader of the Labour Party.
The trip also took in tours of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Tower and St Paul’s. Finally Herbert and Harold rode to the Wembley Exhibition where they met up with Ethel, in full regalia, accompanied by a party of Guides from camp. Then father and son returned to Milnsbridge via Runnymede, Oxford, Rugby and Stratford.
The visit was a memorable event in the life of a schoolboy who had never been to London before. When Harold first took his seat as an MP in 1945 Herbert, accompanying him to the Commons, is supposed to have remarked: ‘We’ve been here before, Harold,’ and his son is said to have replied: ‘Yes. You brought me then. Now I’m bringing you.’53 Much attention has been directed at the famous photo, which seemed to contain a prophecy, and also to sum up Harold’s political approach. ‘Harold was ruined by the bloody picture of him outside No. 10,’ says Ian Mikardo, who watched his later ascent at close quarters. ‘He had to make it come true.’54 No doubt the trip, and the photo, had their effect. But many children are photographed outside famous buildings, without necessarily seeking to live in them.
A much more important journey than the 1924 visit to London took place two years later when, at the age of ten, Harold accompanied his mother to Western Australia, to visit Grandfather Seddon – believed to be seriously ill – and Uncle Harold. It is a measure of Ethel’s own will and independent spirit that, with no experience of foreign travel, she should have undertaken such a voyage without her husband and