Mary Wilson, the Prime Minister's Wife

'My idea of heaven...'

This piece has been a long time coming, I know. It turns out that Mary Wilson may not have left an actual archive or diaries, but there is quite the treasure trove of interviews, press cuttings, Desert Island Discs, and of course, her poetry. I have begun to assemble my material, and have decided to bring her to you in three parts: her life before politics took over; the build up to the 1964 General Election;, and afterwards, when she became a national figure. Of all the Wilson women, or dahlias¹, that I have promised you, Mary will be the one with the highest profile, but also the most reserved, and also possibly the most intriguing.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

When Gladys Mary Baldwin was born in January 1916, the daughter of a Congregational Minister, Britain was in the midst of the First World War. The house where she was born may have disappeared, but Diss, Norfolk is still a small, pretty market town close to the Suffolk border and the Waveney valley. Mary revisited Diss in the 1970s with her friend the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman:

We come to Diss on Market Day

And cloth-capped farmers sit around

Their booted feet firm on the ground;

They talk of sheep, the price of corn;

We find the house where I was born -

How small it seems! for memory

Has played its usual trick on me.

The chapel where my father preached

Can now, alas! only be reached

By plunging through the traffic’s roar;

Diss Congregational Chapel

Mary’s family came from northern working class stock: her parents Daniel Baldwin and Sarah Bentley probably met when they were both working in the mills in Padiham, near Burnley, Lancashire. Sarah had a responsible job, running a loom, while Daniel from the age of twelve was working in the mill by day and studying for the ministry by night. He finally became a minister at the age of 29, and married Sarah three years later, in 1910. According to Mary, his health never recovered from the near starvation rations of stewed apples and rhubarb he allowed himself while studying and living in lodgings. The couple had two children: Clifford, born in 1913, and Gladys Mary, three years later. The whole family was steeped in non-conformist religion, lightened by the father’s enthusiasm for literature and for quoting poetry - a habit that his daughter would practise with joy. From the age of six, Mary was scribbling verses for herself.

The life of a Congregational Minister in the inter-war years was uncertain and poorly paid, and involved frequent relocations. These family upheavals each time her father was posted to new parish, from Burnley to Essex, to Norfolk, to Derbyshire and back up north, upset little Gladys Mary, so at the age of 12 she was sent to board at Milton Mount College, a school which trained the daughters of Congregational ministers to be good wives, mothers and missionaries. ‘You were allowed to read novels three afternoons a week. You drew them from the library, and returned them at the end of the afternoon. Apart from that, if you were a compulsive reader, which I was, you had to read and read your set books. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury was the only one I could go on reading.’ Mary told Andrew Roth, who was interviewing her for a biography of her husband in the 1970s, ‘I was a rebel at school…I founded a club called The Rebels.’ The one bright spot in her school life appears to have been a girlish crush she developed for the French mistress, remembered in a poem published in the 1970s:

Extract from ‘Mamzelle’

She cannot get the idioms right

She weeps for Paris in the night

Or in the tension of the match,

She laughs when someone drops a catch!

The other staff are not unkind

But distant; she tries not to mind

And I would gladly go through Hell

Just to protect Mamzelle

Between the tongue-in-cheek lines, there is a heartfelt sympathy expressed here for the outsider, a recognition of how isolated someone can feel even in a busy, friendly environment if they don’t share the language or understand the games being played…Did Mary write this while sitting alone in the flat above the offices at Number 10 Downing Street?

Mary was a bright child who did well at school, winning a bursary, but although her brother Clifford had gone to Cambridge, the family felt that they could not afford the expense of sending a teenage girl to University, so at the age of sixteen Mary went to secretarial college instead to learn shorthand and typing. Bravely, by now accustomed to being away from home, she then took a job as a typist working at Port Sunlight, the Lever Brothers’ establishment on the Wirral, a step that would change her life. (I’m going to call her Mary, although until the 1950s she was usually known as Gladys. According to her family, her closest relations always knew her as Gladys, not Mary, and her husband called her Pie (short for Sweety Pie) or Finn).

Fate stepped in on 4 July 1934, when a young man called Harold Wilson, still a sixth-former studying hard for his examinations, wandered out for a breath of fresh air and spotted a lovely girl, all in white, slim and petite with blonde hair, playing tennis. Harold was aiming for a place at Oxford but was still living with his parents in Bromborough, near Port Sunlight. Within a week he had bought a racquet, joined the tennis club, and started walking her home. As they attended the same chapel every Sunday it was easy to find an excuse to see her, to invite the girl living away from her parents to join the Wilson family for tea, and to share his dreams with her. The family legend is that within three weeks he had asked her to marry him, telling her that he was going to be Prime Minister one day. The family legend also says that if she had believed him, she would never have said yes.

The Wilson archives at Jesus College, Oxford hold Harold’s letters to his parents from his first term onwards, always with solicitous enquiries about GB, as he referred to her - had they seen her at chapel? had they invited her for tea? would they be bringing her to Oxford next time they visited? The letters between the young lovers have not survived, but one Christmas Mary gave Harold a fountain pen. Harold’s career at Oxford became increasingly illustrious - he concentrated on his studies, and occasionally athletics at the Iffley Stadium, giving the southern toffs, as he saw them, at the University Labour Club, a wide berth. In the summer of 1937 Mary would have been delighted, and perhaps stunned, to hear that her boyfriend had achieved the highest mark in his year across the University in his PPE finals, and that summer she accompanied his parents to Oxford to see him awarded the Webb Medley Scholarship, worth £300 per annum. He managed to secure a summer job as a research assistant for William Beveridge, Master of University College (‘Univ’), and by the summer of 1938 he had been appointed as a research fellow at Univ on £400 a year, with room and board in college. It was enough to allow him to formalise his engagement to Mary - the life as the wife of an Oxford don beckoned.

Mary often said that all she had ever wanted was to spend the rest of her life in Oxford, as the wife of an academic. She later told The Observer:

I thought he was going to be a University teacher. He used to talk sometimes about going into politics, later on, when he was about thirty, but I didn’t take much notice - thirty seemed ages away, anyway…I had been brought up near Cambridge and I knew Cambridge well - my brother was at Cambridge…and when Harold told me he wanted to teach at Oxford I thought it was wonderful. My idea of heaven. I can tell you, there’s nothing I would have like 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 symbolised so much for me.

As war grew nearer, Harold and Mary accelerated their plans to marry: who knew when and how Harold would be called for war service - he had already signed up. At first they made a plan for a grand spring wedding in 1940, and a honeymoon in the Scilly Isles. But when war broke out they decided to tie the knot on 1 January of that year: it was a Monday, first day of the week, first day of the year, first day of the decade - they hoped it would prove auspicious. Mary had already moved to Oxford to take a job as a typist at the Potato Marketing Board. She had a room above the Northgate Cadena Cafe, right in the heart of the City on Cornmarket, and took her meals in the restaurant. However as she planned the wedding she decided to spend the night before at a friend’s flat: the stairs down from her room were steep and she was worried about tripping on her dress. Harold was in rooms at Univ, his parents were staying in rooms above a greengrocer’s near Christ Church College.

The wedding was held in the chapel at Mansfield College (my old college!). the men wore academic dress, rather than morning suits or top hats, and Mary was lucky that clothes rationing had not yet begun and she was able to wear a long white chiffon dress, with a veil. A future Master of Univ, Professor Goodhart, said ‘It was a delightful ceremony, she looked so pretty and charming. They were both very young looking, but terribly attractive.’ The ceremony was conducted by the Principal of Mansfield, Dr Nathaniel Micklem, jointly with Mary’s father.

Perhaps again showing a little spark of rebellion, Mary did not promise to obey Harold, ‘love, honour and cherish sounds much nicer’, she said. The reception, teetotal as one might have expected from two congregationalist families, was held at the Park Royal hotel, and then as the snow began to fall the couple set off for a honeymoon in nearby Minster Lovell. Freda Wilson, later to be Mary’s sister-in-law, remembered being concerned that the back of the taxi was crammed with books. Mary and Harold, who both had developed terrible colds, spent the days walking in the snow and the evening by the log fire: they had the hotel to themselves. Mary had brought Dorothy L Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon to read: but it was a bad omen with its tale of honeymoons disrupted by work. They had only been there a week when the telegram arrived: William Beveridge was demanding Harold’s presence back in Oxford to start work, reminding him there was a war on!

‘So that was that’, said Mrs Mary Wilson. ²

To be continued….

1. See my previous post:

https://harkness.substack.com/p/a-very-particular-generation-of-women

Dahlias: late flowering, highly independent, brave, and any colour but blue….

2. Extracts from poems ‘A Mind’s Journey to Diss’ and ‘Mamzelle’ taken from Mary Wilson: New Poems, published by Hutchinson & Co, 1979. Extracts from other material held in the Bodleian Library are by kind permission of the Wilson family.