It was the start of an important new phase in their lives together. Harold and Gladys had known each other for thirteen and a half years and had been married for eight: yet they had never settled down in one place, and for long periods they had not shared the same roof, or even the same town. Some politicians lived all their lives without a fixed address, camping both in London and their constituency. Gladys, however, was determined not to repeat the unsettled pattern of her childhood. The Southway house provided the fixed base she wanted, helping to bring her to terms with the now established reality of her husband’s political career. ‘I tried to bring up the children in a proper family home,’ she says. ‘I had been at boarding-school from the age of twelve. Before that I had travelled around a great deal with my father. I was so pleased that the boys lived in the same house until they were sixteen.’36 Gladys came to love the Southway house and neighbourhood. Socially and psychologically, Hampstead Garden Suburb and North Oxford were closely akin, with the same kind of unpretentious professional and literary inhabitants. She became attached to the neatly planned, inward-looking Suburb and its schools and networks, which she built into a protective barrier against Harold’s alien and, to her, increasingly distasteful political world.
Harold respected, and perhaps even liked, the barbed-wire fence erected by Gladys around her home and family life, a barrier which few political colleagues ever crossed. Fellow MPs, especially middle-class ones who lived in the locality, were variously puzzled, hurt or contemptuous at the Wilsons’ failure to join in the dinner party rituals which oiled the wheels of political intercourse amongst Labour intellectuals.37 Neither Harold, who valued his own time too highly to wish to use any of it unproductively, nor Gladys, who hated the hypocrisy, felt any loss. Instead, Harold fitted comfortably into the life of the suburban family man, as he fitted most roles he chose to adopt, and was content to recreate Milnsbridge in so far as this was possible, joining the local Free Church, and patronizing the local Boy Scouts. Gladys Baldwin, meanwhile, began her metamorphosis into Mary Wilson: the strong-willed, single-minded housewife, whose personal mission was the welfare of her family, yet who had interests of her own quite separate from her husband’s career.
She came to tolerate, but never learnt to like, Harold’s governmental life. He was never able to take her into it as a comrade-in-arms. ‘I am not’, she once firmly told an interviewer, ‘an ambitious person.’ She might have added: either for herself or for her husband. In the mid-1950s, after Harold had left the Government, she made it clear that ‘she evidently has little regret for her husband’s days as a Minister – he brought too much work home, and quite simply hadn’t time to see enough of the children.’38 Many political marriages seemed to work as a psychic continuum, the goals of one partner underpinning the actions of the other. In this sense, Harold travelled alone. Nevertheless, Gladys got on well with some of his political associates, who were often charmed by her straightforwardness, a rare quality in their world. A few old friends – Thomas Balogh, for instance, who had first known Harold at Oxford, early in the war – were allowed to cross the threshold She became especially fond of Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee, whom she treated as family friends and invited to children’s parties.
Gladys gave birth to her second child, another boy, on 7 May 1948. The creation of a well-structured family was now complete: both she and Harold came from two-children homes. The Prime Minister took a kindly interest in the event, and sent his congratulations. The proud father’s reply, informal yet stilted, with an uneasy attempt at humour, captures a flavour of Wilson’s relationship with his boss and benefactor:
My dear Clem,
On Gladys’ behalf I do thank you most sincerely for your very kind thought in sending a telegram of good wishes to her on Saturday. She very much appreciated it and will be writing herself.
You will be glad to know that she & the baby are both very fit. He for his part, although about the size and general appearance of a small trout, would, if he were capable of it, wish to be associated with me in writing to thank you for your message.
Yours ever,
Harold.39
The Wilsons asked the Attlees to be godparents, and they accepted. Harold was pleased that the almost equally apolitical Vi Attlee, who also believed that families were the first priority, liked and approved of Gladys. The baby, called Giles – after Giles Alington, a friend and colleague who shared their staircase at University College (and who happened to be a brother-in-law of Alec Dunglass, later Lord Home) – was christened in the Crypt of the House of Commons in September. Gladys now directed her attention to her home, her husband and her children. Nine years later, she told a reporter she hoped to ‘stay forever’ in the Suburb.40 She was as happy there as she could be in her married life.
There remained, meanwhile, a possibility that Harold’s political career would be brief, and that he would shortly return to academic life. Despite a sizeable majority in Ormskirk, his foothold in the constituency was by no means secure. If the next election was fought on existing boundaries, he would face a single Conservative candidate and, in all probability, a national swing against Labour; if (as seemed likely) boundary changes preceded the election, his future in Parliament was seriously in doubt. It was therefore important that he should maintain his reputation, not just as a minister, but as an assiduous Lancashire MP. He visited the constituency regularly, dealt efficiently with local complaints, delivered long and fact-filled addresses to appreciative and uncomprehending audiences, and swiftly lost the reputation of a carpet-bagger. By the beginning of 1948, however, it had become clear that Ormskirk was to be divided up as part of a major redistribution, losing two large industrial areas and becoming mainly rural. Wilson therefore had to look for another seat, just as he assumed the burdens of the Presidency of the Board of Trade. This pressure – the nightmare of any British politician – dogged him for most of the first year of his new office.
At first, he merely let it be known that he was on the market. Reports in January that he ‘may not contest Ormskirk at the next general election’ were not denied.41 In Ormskirk, there was some irritation, publicly expressed, by local officers whom he had neglected to inform.42 By now, however, he was mainly concerned to cast his line, and see what he could catch. Fortunately, the new constituency of Huyton held out a reasonably good prospect. It was composed partly of a section of the Widnes Division (represented by Hartley Shawcross’s brother Christopher, who was standing down). As it also contained part of Ormskirk, it was a natural seat for Wilson to seek to represent. Yet the effects of major boundary changes are always hard to predict, and the new Huyton division was far from a Labour certainty. Peter Longworth, a docker and Huyton councillor for more than thirty years, recalls meeting Wilson in 1948 to discuss the likely impact of redistribution. Fears were expressed that Huyton might not be safe because of the inclusion of Ecclestone and Windle, seen as Tory areas. It also included Tory-inclined Prescot and Knowsley, together with middle-class Huyton itself.
Wilson did not have the time to search for an alternative; neither was he politically strong enough or sufficiently well known to be sure of finding one. After anxious months, he decided that Huyton was his best bet. At the selection conference in November, he impressed the delegates with what he would do for them. ‘We only chose him because we wanted to be included in the Merseyside Development Area,’ says Longworth.43 Afterwards, Wilson told the press he had decided to move ‘because he felt that owing to the intense work involved in his ministerial duties and party claims throughout the country he was unable to give so large and scattered a division as Ormskirk the time and work required’,44 a disingenuous explanation which suggests a degree of embarrassment.
A poll was expected in the autumn of 1949. Until the actual month of the election in February 1950, Labour’s position in the national opinion polls did not give grounds for local optimism. For the remainder of the Parliament, Wilson had the possibility of defeat in his mind, influencing his political and private calculations. It was several years before he could be sure that he had made the right decision.
One significant intervention by the Board of Trade during Wilson’s Presidency affected films. During