Occasionally, Wilson was to be seen at Labour political gatherings in Oxford. Mayhew remembers first hearing him speak at one of these just before the war. Wilson addressed the meeting so knowledgeably on the issue of electricity nationalization, that Mayhew mentioned it in a letter to his parents.30 Yet Wilson could scarcely be described, in this phase, as a Labour Party activist. He was very much on the fringe, ignored by the Pakenhams and Gordon Walkers who dominated Oxford Labour affairs. He took no conspicuous part in the debates over appeasement and rearmament that rocked the city in the year of Munich, and split the Oxford Labour Party on the issue of A. D. Lindsay’s ‘Popular Front’ candidature in the Oxford by-election. Local Labour Party members barely knew him. Friends had no inkling of his long-term plans.
For the moment, he was content to build on the foundations of his academic career. Until mid-1939, his parents’ lives were in turmoil, with much toing and froing from the Wirral and Liskeard. Only when Ethel joined Herbert in Cornwall, shortly before the outbreak of war, was calm restored on the domestic front. Harold’s appointments at New College and University College, though prestigious, were temporary ones. Unlike the public school socialists, Wilson did not have the wherewithal to be a half-time politician. Nor did he, even now, mix in the same circles. Harold’s friends were not trendy dons or well-known journalists. They were fellow economists at the Institute, where life revolved around academic research, and modest convivialities.
Despite the Beveridge oppression, Harold had more time for socializing than before his Finals. His world was still more Liberal than Labour; he was friendly with the pretty undergraduate granddaughter of a prime minister, Valerie Lloyd George, and introduced her to her future husband, the economist Goronwy Daniels (the Daniels family legend has it that the introduction began with Harold saying to Goronwy: ‘You must meet Valerie Lloyd George. She’s a bit of all right’).31 Sometimes at weekends he took Arthur Brown in his car to the Beveridge house at Avebury, when Beveridge was away, and cheerfully raided the larder. ‘That seemed to be part of the deal,’ says Steel.32 He saw Gladys frequently at weekends in Oxford, but, for her, Avebury was out of bounds.33 That part of his life, like his politics, belonged to a separate compartment.
Early in September 1939, Harold motored to Dundee to attend the annual conference of the British Association, and to deliver a paper on exports and the trade cycle, based on his work with Beveridge, who was also present. The gathering included a young Scottish economist called Alec (now Sir Alec) Cairncross. Cairncross remembers thinking Wilson ‘very bright, though rather quiet and retiring’, without his later habit of spicing a paper or speech with quips. Perhaps he was overawed by the company. Cairncross recalls that the statistician A. L. Bowley savaged the paper, accusing Wilson of ‘multicollinarity and other statistical sins’.34 Bowley’s attack may have been directed as much at Beveridge, his former boss at the LSE, as at his researcher: but in any case, few of those present were greatly concerned with what the paper said, for the same day the Germans began their invasion of Poland. Harold offered his friend Robert Steel, also at the conference, a lift back to Oxford. Steel recalls driving past Dundee railway station, and seeing scores of bewildered children with labels round their necks waiting to be evacuated from a city that was expected to be an early bombing target. They spent the first night together, in cramped conditions, in a Scottish bed and breakfast, and the second with Gladys and her parents, now in Blackpool.35
The outbreak of war changed Harold’s plans, as it did everybody else’s. The first effect was to induce a period of intense restlessness on the part of his employer. Convinced that ‘the present crew have no conception at all how to plan for the war’,36 Beveridge began to bombard Whitehall with offers of assistance. At first, his requests were politely rejected. He was not in good standing with the Chamberlain Government. One of a number of what he called ‘ancient war horses’ who had had leading roles in 1914–18, Beveridge was considered, accurately, as a potential trouble-maker.37 Eventually, and without much official enthusiasm, he was brought into government as a part-time adviser to the Ministry of Labour. Harold, meanwhile, registered at the local employment exchange under the Military Service Act. He was categorized as a specialist, but there was no immediate demand for his specialism. (At the end of the war, he was keen to stress that he had ‘tried to volunteer for the Services’ but that ‘the Recruitment Board ordered him to do Government Department work.’38 His efforts to get into uniform, however, do not appear to have been particularly strenuous.) For lack of anything more suitable, he was set to work with the Ministry of Food’s Potato Control in Oxford, remaining in college rooms for the first months of the war. His work for Beveridge continued. Harold was the last person, other than a member of the family, to sign Sir William’s visitors’ book at Avebury before the house was closed for the duration at the end of 1939.39
Meanwhile, Harold’s five-year courtship with Gladys came to fruition. They had become engaged in the summer of 1938, with plans to marry in the spring of 1940. The original idea had been that Gladys, having given up her job with Lever Brothers, would spend six months at home with her parents ‘learning about housework’ before the wedding.40 In view of wartime uncertainties, however, the wedding was brought forward and Gladys moved to Oxford, living in digs over a cafe, and taking a clerical job.
They were married on the first day of the new decade by Gladys’s father and by Nathaniel Micklem, Principal of Mansfield, in the college chapel. John Webster, the organist at University College, played the academic march ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’. Harold’s best man was Pat Duncan, a former undergraduate at Jesus, later killed in the Far East. There were fifty guests, including many other young dons. Instead of morning dress, graduate members of the congregation (including the groom) wore academic gowns. They had planned a honeymoon in the Isles of Scilly, but the war made this impossible. Instead, in cold, foggy weather, they drove to The Old Swan, Minster Lovell, a village near Oxford. Like many wartime honeymoons it was brief: in this case, cut short by Beveridge, who rang Harold after five days and ordered him peremptorily back to his desk. For Gladys, this brusque termination was to seem like an omen: of the intrusion of public demands into private spheres that characterized most of their life together.
After their marriage, the young couple moved into a furnished one-room flat in South Parks Road. The adjustment was much greater for Gladys, whose life since they had met had been so different from that of Harold. Yet she loved Oxford, and – at least in memory – was happiest there. For her it was a mythic place, visited fleetingly and always in a mood of celebration. ‘When Harold told me he wanted to teach at Oxford I thought it was wonderful,’ she recalled. ‘My idea of heaven. I can tell you there’s nothing I would have liked so much as being a don’s wife … very old buildings and very young people. There is everything anyone could want, music, theatre, congenial friends, all in a beautiful setting and within a fourpenny bus ride. It symbolized so much for me.’41 One thing it symbolized was the security of her own childhood, part of which had been spent close to another university town, Cambridge.
For a brief period the symbol became her life, while Harold – awaiting his fate – continued as a research fellow and underemployed civil servant in an Oxford where there was business not-quite-as-usual. Mary described the atmosphere in one of her best poems, ‘Oxford in Wartime’, which paints a vivid picture of colleges full of government officials, with washing hanging up in the Fellows’ Garden, and an air of indolent expectancy.42 ‘The poem is a sort of composite’, she says, ‘based on different times. Though we did not live in Oxford for most of the war, we visited it quite often.’43
For Gladys, one of the good things about Oxford was that she had her husband beside her. Harold, however, was itching for a serious role in the war. An opportunity was not long in coming. Economists he had met at the conference of the British Association in Dundee included Stanley Dennison, a young lecturer at King’s College, Newcastle, who had recently joined the Cabinet Office and had been seconded as economic adviser to Jean Monnet, Chairman in London of the Anglo–French Co-ordinating Committee, which dealt