Eric Sharpe, the future Baptist minister who occupied the room below Harold in 1934–5, suggests that Harold’s habits ‘reflected the protestant work ethic that characterized the atmosphere in which he had been brought up’.54 Other students shared the ethic, however, without the same results; and there was a Stakhanovite quality to Harold’s efforts which puzzled his contemporaries. His letters frequently describe the number of hours spent at his desk, as though these were an achievement in themselves. ‘I worked very hard last week,’ he wrote, typically, in March 1935; ‘touched 10½ hours one day, & 8 on several days – total – 46 hours for the week.’55 Even Harold’s own very diligent friends wondered whether ‘he led an over-regulated life, as if he feared that any minute departure from his highly disciplined routine would knock him completely out of gear.’56 Work became a kind of compulsion, of which he was never able to rid himself. Many years later he told an interviewer, revealingly, that he had ‘always been driven by a feeling that there is something to be done and I really ought to be doing it … Even now I feel myself saying that if I spend an evening enjoying myself, I shall work better next day, which is only a kind of inversion of the old feeling of guilt.’57 Possibly the knowledge of his parents’ sacrifice and hopes provided an incentive. Sharpe believes that ‘he felt he owed it to his family to be a success.’58 A later friend points a finger, specifically, at his father: ‘He had to do well because of Herbert. Harold knew he had to live up to expectations. Herbert put it all on him to fulfil his own ambitions.’59 Whatever the reason, Harold began to work with a ferocious determination that made him suddenly aware of what he might achieve.
He was a competitive, pragmatic worker, rather than an inquirer. He enjoyed the books he read, and his letters home show occasional bursts of intellectual enthusiasm. In May 1935 he described as the ‘finest book on the nineteenth century I’ve ever seen a study which he had just finished ‘all about the cross-currents of public opinion, & their effects on free trade, socialism, collectivism, factory legislation, communications, the Manchester School, etc.’ He added: ‘Dad would enjoy it.’60 Such comments, however, are less common than details about essays, marks and the flattering comments of tutors. A particular influence was his philosophy tutor, T. M. Knox, who noted his talent and encouraged him. There were only a couple of other Modern Greats undergraduates in Harold’s year at Jesus, so he was sent to other colleges for most of his economics teaching: Maurice Allen, the economic theorist, at Balliol, and R. F. Bretherton at Wadham.
Harold was not the sort of undergraduate who was taken up by the grander dons, and he was diffident, at first, about making himself known to them. It was not in his nature, however, to be anonymous, and he began tentatively to push himself forward. In the summer term, he was delighted when, after asking a question at the end of a lecture by the international affairs expert, Professor Alfred Zimmern, he was invited round by the lecturer to his house. ‘We discussed politics, international affairs, economics, armaments + everything,’ Harold told his parents. ‘In the course of conversation I asked him what was the best English newspaper on politics generally, + international affairs in particular: he answered immediately “The Manchester Guardian & not only in England but in the world …” & Zimmern is supposed to be the greatest living authority on International Affairs.’61
Meanwhile, Harold began to attend, and greatly to enjoy, academic discussion classes with G. D. H. Cole. He was one of eight or ten undergraduates taught together in this way, sitting on sofas and armchairs in Cole’s room and encouraged to smoke, which gave the occasions an atmosphere of relaxed sophistication. ‘It’s rather good to put questions to a man like him,’ wrote Harold. ‘On one of his bookshelves is a complete series of his publications – “Intelligent Man’s Guide to” etc. etc. It’s fine to look at them & listen to the author spouting.’62 In another letter, Harold wrote about having ‘some good fun’ with Cole. ‘He talks for five minutes then stops & asks “are there any questions?” I questioned him yesterday about one of his definitions which I thought implied a contradiction … he was decent enough to admit it … He’s a very nice chap!’63
Most of the undergraduates known to Harold were, like him, Nonconformist and Northern. Steel remembers him as one of a group of Jesus undergraduates from the North-West – especially from schools like Liverpool College and Liverpool Institute – who went round together. Eric Sharpe, the Baptist, had a Merseyside background, and so fits into this category. Arthur Brown, a near contemporary from another college who met Wilson at an economics seminar, had been at Bradford Grammar School. ‘It was our Northern-ness that caused us to take to each other,’ he thinks. ‘We had various places in common, the Wirral, Huddersfield and so on.’64 Steel had another link with Harold, through Gladys: both her father and his were Congregationalist ministers and, by coincidence, the Reverend Steel had succeeded the Reverend Baldwin as minister at Fulbourn.65
Though he had like-minded friends, he was not part of a set, and he lacked intimates. Sharpe, also at Jesus, thinks that ‘he did not make many close friends in college;’66 significantly Brown, who knew him outside college, assumes that Jesus was where most of his friends were to be found. He was often to be seen on his own, but imperturbably so; for Harold, social intercourse was an extra which, if need be, he could do without. Work was his favourite companion. ‘I am not wasting time going to see people and messing about in their rooms’, he wrote after an episode of particularly fierce endeavour in his third term, ‘for this is more interesting.’67 Some found him ‘in matters of personal sentiment’ to be reticent. But, though he frequently withdrew into his room for work reasons, he did not shun company. On the contrary, those who knew him speak of his openness, and describe him as gregarious and chatty. Brown’s picture is of a cheerful, self-contained young man, wrapped up in his work, yet with a sense of fun and an inveterate talker. ‘Harold was never at a loss for something to say,’ he recalls.68 Steel thinks of him as an extrovert, ‘who always had things to talk about and talked at considerable length’.69
Honor Balfour (who knew him in the Liberal Club) remembered him as ‘a trifle pompous – he talked and acted beyond his years’.70 Others give almost the opposite impression, and describe a chirpy, bouncy, overgrown schoolboy. Everybody agrees that he was an irrepressible show-off. He liked to boast about his academic and athletic successes; and to demonstrate his superior knowledge of most topics under discussion. Like his father, he also had a favourite party trick, which later became his trade mark. He enjoyed displaying his talent for recalling tiny details about trivial past events of the kind most people instantly forget. ‘He could remember things like the day he bought his pair of trousers,’ says Brown.71 He was an entertaining teller of stories, sometimes long ones. ‘You always knew he could embellish a tale in an amusing way,’ Steel remembers. He was universally considered – this was an unchanging feature, throughout his life – good-natured, without malice, and generous. Steel recalls that, as a graduate student, Harold was the proud possessor of a second-hand Austin 7 motor car. This he lent freely to friends. ‘Let me know if you want to borrow it again,’ Harold would say. So Steel got into the habit of letting him know, and passed his driving test in it.72
At the end of his first academic year, with Schools (Oxford’s final exams) not yet on the horizon, he set his sights on winning University prizes. Thomas, his room-mate, decided to put in for the Stanhope Historical Essay Prize; Harold had a shot at the Cecil Peace Prize, submitting an essay on the private manufacture of armaments, a set topic. He was unsuccessful. Before he had received this result, however, his tutors had encouraged him to consider competing for another accolade. ‘I’m definitely supposed to be going in for the Gladstone’, he wrote home in May 1936, ‘– and have been reading up some railway history.’73 His target was the Gladstone Memorial Prize, worth £100. He started to prepare a long, carefully researched and annotated paper on ‘The State and Railways 1823–63’. This combined several areas of interest: nineteenth-century politics, economics, and the Seddon family industry. The project took nearly two terms to complete, and eclipsed almost every other non-work activity. In the end, even running took second place.
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