Something for Remembrance Day

'Oxford in Wartime'

The Battle of Britain monument, Victoria Embankment, London

In 1938, a shy young woman called Gladys Baldwin, who had been working as a shorthand typist at Lever Brothers on the Wirral, took the dramatic step of moving to Oxford and taking lodgings on Walton Street. She was following her boyfriend, Harold, as they had recently become engaged. Harold was a very clever and hard-working young man, who after graduation had become a research assistant to Sir William Beveridge at University College. Although Gladys certainly was bright enough for University, having won a bursary aged 12 to Milton Mount College (for the daughters of Congregationalist ministers), sadly the school’s ambition did not stretch beyond training girls to be wives, mothers and missionaries. She won prizes for her school essays and began writing poetry, but the money that might have paid for her to go on to higher education had been spent on her brother instead. So she took a course at a secretarial college.

Gladys had met Harold when they were both 16, at the local tennis club. After a week of courtship, he had told her that they were going to marry and that he was going to be an MP “She laughed,” Harold later wrote, “and has said a hundred times since that if she had believed me she would never have married me.” Now she found herself a clerical job at the Potato Marketing Board and began to plan a wedding.

The outbreak of War meant that plans should be put rapidly into action, and on 1 January 1940 Harold and Gladys were married in the chapel at my old college, Mansfield. A honeymoon in the snow at nearby Minster Lovell was cut short when her husband was summoned back to work by his boss Beveridge. Needing to spend time in London, where Harold was given a job with the Ministry of Supply (in place of military service) the young couple took a flat in Twickenham and Gladys volunteered as an Air Raid Warden. But when the Blitz began, Gladys retreated to the relative safety of Oxford, and in 1943 her first child was born.

(Gladys) Mary Wilson (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

There is no doubt that Gladys, or Mary as she later began to call herself, fell in love with the dreaming spires of Oxford, and nothing would have made her happier than to have spent the rest of her days as the wife of an Economics Don, living in the Banbury Road. But in 1945 Harold Wilson was elected MP for Ormskirk, and the rest is history. There may never have been a less-enthusiastic occupant of 10 Downing Street. She wrote about wartime Oxford in one of her lovelier poems:

The silenced bells hang mutely in the towers,

The stained-glass windows have been taken down

To Wales, to shelter underneath the mountains;

And battledress has shouldered-out the gown.

And undergraduates, waiting for the call-up,

And feeling restless and dissatisfied

Are fighting with Australians in the Milk Bar;

Yet soon they will be serving side by side….

The poem is brim-full of memories, but there is the rising beat of War, and the impact it is having on young men…

And as the evening mists rise over Isis,

The RAF flood in from Abingdon

To the Kings Arms, to play bar billiards;

…

And we all live as if there’s no tomorrow -

Indeed for some of us, there will not be -

And ‘til the bugle calls us to the conflict

We sit in the Cadena drinking tea.

So far, so nothing special…But it is the final verse that always brings a lump to my throat and a mist to my eyes:

Those wartime years have gone, and left no traces,

Fresh tides of youth have swept them all away;

New buildings have arisen by the river,

And there are few who think of yesterday;

Yet sometimes, in the middle of September

Though Spitfires scream no more across the sky,

As dusk comes down, you cannot see the pavement

Where ghosts in blue are walking down the High.

Oxford in Wartime, from New Poems, by Mary Wilson.

Gladys Mary, Harold and little Robin Wilson in 1946