Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

distractions – was the girl he had met at the Brotherton’s tennis club. After their first meetings, Harold had written to Gladys from Boy Scout camp. Then he had disappeared to Oxford, while she had remained at her office stool. But they kept in touch. ‘When Harold went up to Oxford we wrote to each other constantly,’ she recalls.⁷⁴ Their letters to each other were not kept. Gladys, however, figures in almost every letter from Harold to his parents. He seldom used her Christian name, as if to do so would be over-familiar – even embarrassing, giving away too much about himself. He stuck to her initials. But she was nearly always there. He had a consistent purpose: to get his mother and father to see as much of Gladys Baldwin as possible, and bring her to Oxford whenever they could.

      Since going up, Harold had one important thing in common with Gladys: both of them were living away from home. She, too, frequently felt lonely. ‘How’s G.B. going on?’ became Harold’s familiar refrain.⁷⁵ Fond thoughts about ‘G.B.’ and nostalgia for the Wilson family hearth were closely linked. He tried to make light of things. ‘Do you ever see G.M.B. (Stanley’s niece)?’ he asked in an early letter. ‘How many walk her home from chapel? Why not give her a lift home some night? It will help to preserve the link. I believe she was going to the dance at Highfield last Thursday. Don’t forget about the lift home now & again; it’s a good idea. Let me know all the news about her as well as about everybody else.’ He added, almost mournfully: ‘I’m looking forward to Xmas, partly because the confounded exam will be over by then, but also because it will be nice to come home again.’⁷⁶

      Herbert and Ethel were obliging, happy to play the part of surrogate parents to their son’s girl, a role for which she was grateful. They had her round. ‘Got a letter from G.B. this a.m.,’ Harold wrote in February 1935. ‘She wasn’t ill, she’s been working very late. Evidently she was very fed-up last weekend – homesick, & that is why she went to see you. She said she felt a lot better after it … Her pa’s preaching at Chester. Are you going to ask them along for an evening?’⁷⁷ A few days later, he wrote again: ‘Thanks for taking G B. out. I’m glad you did, because evidently she’d been feeling fed-up and homesick etc. the previous week. However she has the tennis dance on Mar. 2nd & her people are coming on the 9th so she should be OK now.’⁷⁸ He did not let the matter rest. ‘Will you see the Baldwins next week?’ he urged at the beginning of March.⁷⁹ His parents responded with an invitation.

      On his nineteenth birthday, to Harold’s intense pleasure, Gladys sent him a pen-and-pencil set. It was mid-term: he could not go to the Wirral. He decided to engineer a family visit to Oxford. His room-mate, Thomas of Tenby, had recently been in hospital for an appendicectomy. Illness, it occurred to Harold, was something that made parents concerned about their offspring, and even wish to see them. He developed stomach pains. ‘I wish you could come up next weekend, if at all possible – it would make things a lot easier – esp. re my tummy,’ he wrote. ‘If you could come –’, he added with even greater ingenuity, ‘it would make it a lot easier to settle down & work for the rest of the term … please come next weekend if at all possible (& bring G.B.). Remember me to G.B. if you see her at tennis, or anywhere – she probably won’t be down to tennis much as it’s her overtime etc. this week.’⁸⁰ The ploy was successful: the visit took place, the first of several with Gladys in the car, generally after some campaigning by Harold. Whenever his parents planned a trip to Oxford, Harold asked if they could bring ‘G.B.’

      ‘Hope G.B.’s getting on OK, thanks for “looking after her” last week,’ Harold wrote in May, beating a by now familiar drum. ‘And will you also please pay my tennis club subscription this week, so that I’m on the list of members in good time.’⁸¹ It was a joyous summer, back in the Wirral, with Gladys, the Brotherton’s club, and tales of Varsity life to tell. There was also a twinkle of ambition. That October, Harold returned to Oxford for his second year, refreshed, and with his eyes fixed on an immediate goal. He went to lectures and visited the Iffley track. He also read up about railway history. When running fixtures ceased in November, he threw himself into his research. ‘I haven’t any news as I’m spending all my time on the Gladstone just at present,’ he wrote.

      Harold barely noticed the general election on 14 November, at which Labour – led by a hitherto obscure MP called Clement Attlee – staged a modest recovery. He joined fellow undergraduates at the Oxford Union, to hear the results read out as telegrams came through. His interest in them, however, was largely parochial. ‘Fancy that wet Marklew getting in, and that hopeless Mabane’, he wrote, ‘– but he only had Pickles of Crow Lane School against him.’ Ernest Marklew was a Grimsby fish merchant, who won the Colne Valley division for Labour; W. Mabane was the sitting Liberal National MP for Huddersfield. Harold was pleased by the victory in one of the Oxford University seats of the author and barrister A. P. Herbert, standing as an Independent, who defeated a man called Cruttwell: ‘very unpopular – a snob’, wrote Wilson. In his current, Oxford-enhanced, scale of values, social snobbery was one of the worst sins.⁸² That the Liberals lost ground badly does not seem to have bothered him greatly.

      During the Christmas vacation he continued his researches at the Picton Library in Liverpool, consulting Government Blue Books and volumes of Hansard, for parliamentary debates. Back in Oxford, he did not let up. ‘The Gladstone is dragging on: I’m more or less in sight of the end of it,’ he wrote at the end of January.⁸³ His attention was diverted by the triumph of one of his lecturers. ‘Have you heard about Crossman?’ he asked his parents rhetorically – it was unlikely that they had. ‘At New College the Sub-Wardenship circulates among the fellows, & this year it is Crossman’s turn. As H. A. L. Fisher (Warden) is off for six months, Crossman (aged 26) is acting warden for the year!!!’⁸⁴ It was difficult to imagine a more dizzying achievement. Compared with this, Harold’s own efforts seemed mundane: but he pressed on. Early in March he handed in his paper, which he had paid to have professionally typed. ‘Into the unsettled England of the eighteen twenties the locomotive burst its way,’ it began, ‘heralding the new industrial order of which it was to form so important a part.’ While he waited anxiously for the result, he speculated about the length of his bibliography, and about tales of previous, streetwise, contestants who had hoodwinked the assessors by listing large numbers of books they hadn’t read.⁸⁵

      There were not many entries, and the verdict was quickly reached. A small item in The Times on 18 March announced: ‘The judges have reported to the Vice-Chancellor that they have awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize, 1936, to J. H. Wilson, Exhibitioner of Jesus College.’ It was a moment, as important as getting an award at Jesus, when the world changed. The Gladstone Prize was his first public distinction, a major one in Oxford, marking him out from his contemporaries not just in Jesus but in the University. Harold’s pleasure was unbounded, and so was Herbert’s, as the letters of congratulation arrived, including several from the Colne Valley and Huddersfield. Harold, in his joy, wrote to Helen Whelan, the class teacher who had taken an interest in him at Royds. She was deeply moved. ‘What a far cry from “James Harold” who protested vigorously against the “James”, to Mr Wilson winner of the Gladstone,’ she replied, affectionately and teasingly. ‘And yet in writing to say thank you for a singularly charming letter, I feel that I am almost more pleased to renew a friendship that has many happy memories than to tell my former monitor with what very real pleasure I read of his triumph … I should like to see you so much I feel tempted to appear in Oxford when your less elderly lady friends are not besieging you for tea.’⁸⁶ Ethel and Herbert motored down from the Wirral to hear Harold give the Prize Oration in the Sheldonian Theatre. Gladys came too, the admiring girlfriend, the only lady friend that mattered. ‘I felt very proud of him,’ she remembers.⁸⁷

      In Oxford, people who had barely noticed Harold, now began to do so: from being a run-of-the-mill undergraduate from an inferior college, he became a man with possibilities. Cole asked him to give a paper to his discussion class, and complimented him generously afterwards. Harold glowed. ‘Cole says he agrees with it completely & is using some of my figures – which I left with him – to produce at the Econ. Advisory Council (of the Prime Minister)’, he wrote home in May, ‘as a very strong section of that (and also “The Times”) are in favour of the Macmillan Report