Pam Powell
Lively wife of Enoch Powell who supported him with stoicism and loyalty throughout his career
PAM POWELL, who has died aged 91, set out with two ambitions on leaving school in 1942; she wanted to marry “an interesting man”, and she was determined to “get into the war.” She succeeded in both objectives, but in marrying Enoch Powell, she also joined that unique cadre of political wives who devoted everything to sustaining their husbands not just out of love, but also as a patriotic obligation. She used to say that she felt physically sick whenever her husband planned to make another speech on immigration, and she never relished the controversy which ensued.
But the thought that anything should take precedence over her husband’s duty in speaking out on an issue which both regarded as of supreme national importance never crossed her mind. Any moment of hesitation or exasperation quickly passed, because she belonged to that generation who expected domesticity to bear sometimes the sacrifice demanded by the nation’s affairs.
Margaret Pamela Wilson was born in Liverpool on January 28 1926. Her father, Colonel Wilson, was a soldier in the 27th Punjabis, Indian Army and her first recollections as a child were of India, returning to England in 1930. The family took up residence in a five-bedroom house in Watford (her brother had been born in 1930), and this was her home until they moved to a flat in Kensington six years later.
Educated at Wycombe Abbey, she could easily have gone to university but, determined to enter the war as soon as possible, she persuaded her mother to allow her to leave school and in 1943 she trained to be a secretary at Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College.
In this way, she succeeded in entering the war as one of Whitehall’s most qualified and competent secretaries. In May 1944 she joined the typing pool of the War Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence, receiving dictation from, among other people, Field Marshall Smuts.
By May 1945, she had been promoted to Mountbatten’s Rear Link, South East Asia, and she was one of those who strongly disapproved of the general election being held while the country was still at war with Japan.
Winston Churchill was one of her heroes. She managed to be in an office just behind the balcony from which Churchill addressed the crowds on VE Day, and after the war on at least one occasion she took dictation from him at his house in Hyde Park Gate on the subject of the 1950 Conservative Manifesto. She often recounted the story of treasuring a mackintosh, and refusing to dispose of it, because it had once been held by the great man.
After the war, she remained in government service and was posted to New York to work at the UK delegation of the Military Staff Committee of the United Nations. But when this came to an end she returned to London, and in June 1947 she joined the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat (later to be the Conservative Research Department) as a secretary working for Brigadier Powell but with contact also with all the senior Conservative politicians of that period, including Anthony Eden.
Enoch Powell apparently asked of the establishment officer, before employing Pam, “What sort of secretary is this? All that a bachelor might want?” He was reassured on both questions, although love between the two did not come until the 1951 election campaign in Wolverhampton when she travelled to his constituency to offer assistance.
She married Enoch Powell on January 2 1952, and first lived at his “pretty spartan flat” in Earls Court Square where Powell promised Pam “grinding poverty and a life on the back benches,” and although this was not borne out by events, it was obvious from the start that Powell was no conventional politician, and that his career would often demand much of his wife and family. He certainly never achieved great wealth.
Their first daughter, Susan, was born in 1954 and their second daughter, Jennifer, in 1956. At that time, Pam said that all her thoughts and energies were on the children, and managing their two homes in South Eaton Place and Wolverhampton.
As the children grew older, Powell’s political career became ever more conspicuous and controversial. When Pam was asked whether at any time she had ever thought she might move into Downing Street, she replied she never thought it likely. In fact, she would have been ideal for the role of prime minister’s wife. (One of her favourite political spouses was Mary Anne Disraeli who famously withheld from her husband, just before an important event, the fact that her hand was painfully trapped in a coach door).
However much her husband was criticised, she was always liked and admired by everyone who knew her in politics, on both sides of the divide. The one politician whom she failed to charm was Edward Heath; long before her husband’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” immigration speech of 1968 she had been the victim of Heath’s bad manners.
It was after that speech that her stoicism and loyalty to her husband were put to the test. Before then, Powell had been controversial and his judgment often questioned by colleagues, but he was nevertheless acknowledged as a highranking Tory politician capable of going places.
But after April 1968, he was considered dangerous company for any ambitious politician to keep, and this altered fundamentally Pam’s life in politics. She never resented her own consequential exclusion, and never disagreed with her husband’s opposition to further immigration. When asked whether she thought it was unfair for her husband to put the family through such controversy, she replied “I didn’t feel it unfair, but I wished to God sometimes that it wasn’t happening.”
In private Pam Powell was never afraid to express her opinion to, and sometimes her disagreement with, her husband. In public, she remained fiercely loyal, even when Powell stood down from his Conservative seat and urged the country (and her) to “vote Labour” in February 1974. He saw this as the only way of getting the country out of the Common Market, membership of which Labour was then opposing. But his departure from the Conservative Party was something which she found very hard to accept. And Powell’s mother-in-law gave him a very hard time for immersing her daughter in the politics of Ulster. (He returned to Parliament in October 1974 as a Unionist MP for South Down.)
Small and lively, Pam Powell was more scared of having a picnic in a field of cows than she was of IRA terrorists. At home, she ensured that, despite the gravity of the issues, her husband and children enjoyed a happy family life, full of fun and humour, but always alert to the responsibilities of a public service.
Every year on their wedding anniversary Enoch Powell wrote his wife a poem and gave her a bunch of roses, adding an extra rose to the bunch for each year of their marriage.
Enoch Powell died in 1998. She is survived by her daughters.
Pam Powell, born January 28 1926, died November 11 2017