Having acquired the taste for academic honours, Harold indulged it. At the beginning of his third year, he sat the competitive exam for the George Webb Medley Junior Economics Scholarship, worth £100 per annum, and won that too – giving him financial independence of his father. It was not an unexpected success: the Gladstone had already made his name in the University as an academic force to be reckoned with. Christopher Mayhew, elected President of the Union the same term, also entered for the Webb Medley. ‘You’re a bit optimistic,’ said a friend. ‘Don’t you know that Wilson of Jesus is in for it?’91
A key event in the fast-changing discipline of economics occurred in the second term of Harold’s second year, before he sat for the Webb Medley. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by J. M. Keynes was published on 4 February 1936. Its appearance had long been heralded, and economists approached the publication date with excitement. Arthur Brown, already a Keynes enthusiast, went to Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and bought a copy the same day.92 Harold was also interested, though his response was more muted. He had yet to hear the Gladstone result, and he was short of cash; so he cast round for a benefactor. Fortunately, his twentieth birthday was coming up. At the beginning of March, he wrote home with instructions for Marjorie to buy him ‘J. M. Keynes’s bolt from the (light) blue’. It was a book, he explained, that he had to read, though he added ‘[an] Oxford don said to me that Keynes had no right to condemn the classical theory till he’d read a bit of it.’93
Wilson records in his memoirs that he read The General Theory before taking his final examination in 1937 94 – a formidable undertaking for an undergraduate. Meanwhile, he had joined a select band of invited undergraduate members (who included Arthur Brown and Donald MacDougall, future director of the Department of Economic Affairs during Wilson’s premiership) of a research seminar on econometrics run by Redvers Opie and Jacob Marschak, where Keynes’s book was discussed. Wilson, however, was practical in his approach: The General Theory was not part of the syllabus, there had been no ‘Keynesian’ question in the 1936 exam papers, and at least one of the examiners for 1937 was known to be an anti-Keynesian. The new ideas, therefore, did not form part of the corpus of knowledge which he stuffed into his head.
Much was expected of him, and he was widely tipped as ‘the brightest prospect’ of his year for the PPE degree.95 ‘His industry can only compel admiration,’ wrote one of his tutors in a testimonial for a couple of academic posts (which he did not get) shortly before his Finals.96 His methods were largely mechanical, though spiced with cunning. Swotting for his philosophy paper, he made a digest of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then made a digest of the digest, which he learnt by heart.97 The technique was remarkably effective. One of the examiners – his own economics tutor, Maurice Allen – maintained afterwards that although Wilson’s papers showed diligence, they lacked originality. They also indicated that the candidate had studied the dons who were going to mark his scripts, and played to their prejudices.98 Such a comment, however, was a grudging one, in view of Wilson’s performance. He obtained an outstanding First Class degree, with alphas on every paper. As Lord Longford (then Pakenham and himself a don) later observed, no prime minister since Wilson’s fellow Huddersfieldian, H. H. Asquith, had ever been able to boast such a good result in Schools.99
The day after the last exam a letter came from Marjorie saying that Herbert had been sacked. It was not entirely unexpected. The family had long had some sense of the job’s impermanence, adding to Harold’s urgency at Oxford. The Wilsons were always careful about the timing of bad news: Herbert may have withheld the information until Schools were safely out of the way. At any rate, the bombshell meant that there was little chance to celebrate. Exam pressure was immediately replaced by the pressure to find an income.
Harold responded to the emergency by applying for a job with the Manchester Guardian, which he had been cultivating since his second year. He had always considered journalism as one career option. He was successful, and received the offer of a probationary post as a leader writer. But he did not take it up, because – as top of the PPE School – he was awarded the Webb Medley Senior Scholarship, worth £300 a year. This removed immediate financial worries and made it possible to stay in Oxford. Though he never regretted his choice, he did not forget that he might have become a journalist – and he continued to take a keen interest in the newspaper profession, almost as if he had kept the possibility of a switch in reserve. His academic position was soon consolidated, however, by his appointment to a part-time lectureship at New College on a stipend of £125, supplementing his scholarship. At the age of twenty-one he had become a don, albeit a very junior one.
Harold used some of his scholarship money to pay the rent on his parents’ flat in the Wirral. This time Herbert was out of work for eighteen months. Eventually, after many applications, he found another job, at Liskeard in Cornwall, supervising the manufacture of explosives for blasting. Herbert and Ethel had lived in northern England all their lives. They now migrated south – at first Herbert on his own, living in digs, and later his wife and Marjorie, who obtained a job in a local school. Uprooted for the second time, they settled permanently, except for a period during and just after the Second World War. Their new home provided Harold and Gladys with a Cornish link, which led to post-war holidays in the Scillies.
Not every prize fell into Harold’s lap. Three months after taking Finals he sat for a Fellowship at All Souls. He was understandably hopeful. Between exams he chatted happily with Arthur Brown, another candidate, over lunch at a café in the Cornmarket. ‘Harold scared me by talking all the time about his answers to the questions on the morning’s history paper,’ Brown recalls.1 In the outcome, Brown won a fellowship and Wilson did not. Wilson tried again the following year. Having failed by examination, he attempted the thesis method, submitting his Gladstone essay. Again he was rejected. There is no mention of this reverse in his memoirs. It may be a significant omission. Even in the 1980s he made remarks which indicated to academic acquaintances that it still rankled.2
Wilson’s success the previous summer, however, scarcely went unnoticed, and he soon received an offer which provided a first, decisive step towards a public career. Wilson’s graduation happened to coincide with the return to Oxford of Sir William Beveridge, as Master of University College. Beveridge, already a titanic figure in academic administration and the world of the social sciences, had spent twenty or so years building up the London School of Economics. Now he wished to return to serious research. The title of Beveridge’s later autobiography, Power and Influence, summed up his approach to social analysis, which he saw as a means of changing the world. His first major project was economic. With characteristic energy and conceit, he set about fulfilling what his biographer calls ‘his long-cherished ambition of unlocking the secrets of the trade cycle’.3 Casting around for an assistant to help with the project, his attention was directed to Wilson.
Harold was offered, and accepted, the job of working on a study which was intended as a sequel to Beveridge’s earlier classic, Unemployment – A Problem of Industry. Beveridge wanted a helper who could pay his own way: the Webb Medley made this possible. Wilson became his assistant and also his student, registering for a D.Phil. to be called ‘Aspects of the Demand