Lady Wilson of Rievaulx
Widow of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who hated life at No 10 Downing Street and carved her own niche as a poet
LADY WILSON OF RIEVAULX, who has died aged 102, was a reluctant chatelaine of No 10 Downing Street when her husband, Harold Wilson, was Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 – so reluctant, indeed, that when Wilson became Prime Minister again in 1974, she refused to move back there.
When Mary Balfour married the young Harold Wilson in 1940 five years before he was elected to the Commons, she looked forward to a life as the wife of an Oxford don, as Wilson then seemed set to become. “There’s nothing I would have liked so much,” she once said, “very old buildings and very young people. Everything one could want: music, theatre, congenial friends, all in a beautiful setting.” But it was a pleasure she was to enjoy only for a few brief months in 1945.
She did not believe Wilson when he had boasted shortly after they first met that he would one day be prime minister and, as Wilson himself observed, had she done so she would probably never have married him.
Mary Wilson loathed public life. She was prepared to smile loyally at election times, to rejoice in her husband’s triumphs and lament his disasters, but endless late-night debate about the state of the party was not for her. Not that she had no political views; unlike her husband she was a passionate unilateralist, and once threatened to vote Liberal unless party policy was changed.
While Wilson enjoyed life at No 10, his wife loathed the lack of privacy and recoiled at all the pompous and – to her – false trappings of power. Missing her neighbours in Hampstead Garden Suburb she would sometimes (dressed in scarf and dark glasses) take the Tube north for tea and sympathy. She longed to do her own shopping and cooking.
More poignantly she found that she did not know whom to trust: “It was very disillusioning being in the situation we were in,” she was to say later. “When you’re ‘in’, everyone rings up and wants to see you. Then there’s an election and whoosh! they’re all gone. My son Giles used to keep a black list of these fair-weather friends.”
Even more tryingly, Mary Wilson had to put up with disagreeable rumours about her marriage, often with Wilson’s political secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) cast in the role of femme fatale. Wilson’s former press secretary Joe Haines claimed in his memoir Glimmers of Twilight (2003) that Marcia Williams had once told Mary Wilson: “I have only one thing to say to you – I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956 and it wasn’t satisfactory.” On the whole the two women coexisted harmoniously, each mistress in their own sphere. But as Wilson’s official biographer Philip Zeigler observed, Marcia Williams had no doubt which was the more important sphere and sometimes let this show; Mary Wilson in consequence often felt excluded.
Yet, ever loyal to her husband, she seldom complained. She trudged the streets with him, subjected herself to the agony of interviews, listened to thousands of speeches, travelled all over the country talking to women’s groups, but always with a tired smile which seemed to suggest a cross between polite interest and sheer misery.
Behind the scenes, she played a positive, essentially supportive role. George Wigg paid tribute to her ability to “create friendly relations among the wives of members of the Government”. She was one of the few people who could soothe George Brown when he was in a tantrum and threatening resignation. “A Prime Minister’s wife is expected to be there on public occasions, to be unobtrusive at times of crisis, to be as wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove,” she said. “I always tried to be the wise owl in the oak, ‘the more she heard, the less she spoke’.”
It was perhaps a tribute to her forbearance that Harold Wilson often seemed oblivious to his wife’s feelings. Once he told Richard Crossman that he thought Mary should be used more at election meetings. Crossman remarked that she would hate it. Oh no, said Wilson, she had thoroughly enjoyed the meeting of the night before.
Crossman repeated this to Mary Wilson. “Enjoyed it!” she said. “Who told you that?” “Of course I hate it,” she told Barbara Castle on another occasion. “But then I always have. I do my job.”
Crossman was fascinated by the Wilsons’ relationship. “I am sure they are deeply together, but they are pretty separate in their togetherness. It is one of those marriages that holds despite itself because each side has evolved a self-containedness within marriage.”
On one occasion when Crossman had late-night supper at No 10, he was confronted by a dish of tinned salmon with the tin still on the table, with toast and apricot jam to follow. It was, he disdainfully observed, “deeply petit bourgeois”.
Life with the Wilsons was caricatured by Private Eye in “Mrs Wilson’s Diary”. Mary objected to the inaccuracies in this – she never drank Wincarnis, she complained, and Harold did not favour HP, but Worcester sauce. But she recognised the underlying tone was mild, even affectionate. When the Eye diaries began, though, she gave up writing her own.
Mary Wilson found solace in writing poetry. John Betjeman was her mentor. They became close friends; they exchanged poems and took nostalgic journeys together, including one to her birthplace at Diss, Norfolk. By way of thanks, Mary Wilson sent him a poem which ran:
“Beneath the soft East Anglian rain/ We chug across the ripening plain/ Where daisies stand among the hay;/ We come to Diss on market day …” She had been delighted when local reporters had failed to recognise her: “Now as we stroll beside the mere/ Reporters suddenly appear;/ You draw a crowd of passers-by/ While I gaze blandly at the sky …”
During the visit, they found the house where she had been born, but she did not have the nerve to knock on the door and ask if she could see inside.
Although she would never admit it, Mary Wilson’s poems sometimes seemed to reflect her own predicament. In one poem she wrote: “I suspect/ That in the magic of your spell, I may /Have lived my muddled life in retrospect;/ And I am troubled by the fear that I/ Like Lot’s wife,/ Looking back/ may petrify.”
Her poetry allowed her to carve a niche for herself outside her husband’s career. She published two books of verse which became bestsellers. Her first book, Selected Poems (1969), sold 75,000 copies and enabled her to buy a three-bedroomed bungalow in the Scilly Isles, where the Wilsons always spent their holidays. The public, it seemed, liked her wistful, rather old-fashioned verses, and not just because they were written by the wife of the Prime Minister.
The greatest irony was that by creating her own independent image Mary Wilson became, quite unintentionally, one of the great successes of the Labour government. Everybody liked her. Her publisher Robert Lusty once wrote: “I found that Mary Wilson possessed all the virtues of charm, modesty, frankness and humour, guided by compassion and an acute awareness of life’s realities. She was at once immensely kind and friendly and a human being to whom one instantly warmed.”
Gladys Mary Balfour was born on January 12 1916 at Diss, one of two children of a Congregational minister. Her childhood was poor; there was “no wireless and three or four visits to chapel every Sunday”, but she always looked back to it with nostalgia.
The family moved to Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire, then Nottinghamshire and finally to Penrith in Cumbria. Mary was educated at a boarding school for ministers’ daughters at Crawley, Sussex, and wanted to go to university, but her parents could not afford it.
While her brother took a scholarship to Cambridge, she did a secretarial course and found a post in the central typing pool at Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight. One of the benefits of her employment was access to a local sports centre, which was where she first met her future husband in 1934.
Harold Wilson, then still a schoolboy, was on his way with his father to a competition in mental arithmetic. “We passed a tennis court on the way,” he recalled, “and I saw this pretty girl playing tennis – it was Mary – and I thought, what is life all about, Shakespeare and Faustus or pretty girls playing tennis? The following Saturday I hung up my running spikes and bought a tennis racket. A week later I told Mary I was going to marry her and become an MP. She laughed and has said a hundred times since that if she believed me she would never have married me.”
Mary was gentle and approachable and they shared the same liberal nonconformist background. But there was also an unexpected quality about her. Within the stern recognition of an overriding duty, a romantic was longing to escape. Wilson would recall how Clement Attlee once asked her which historical figures she most admired. “Charles II, Rupert of the Rhone (sic), Byron,” she replied. “Bad history, wrong people,” Attlee replied.
While Wilson was up at Oxford, Mary wrote to him twice a week and was horrified to discover that Harold took an occasional glass of beer. They married at Oxford in 1940 and spent their brief honeymoon at the Old Swan at Minster Lovell.
The first few years of their marriage were beset by interruptions and long and frustrating partings as Wilson took a series of wartime jobs in the Civil Service. His unremitting dedication to work soon left Mary in no doubt where his true priorities lay.
She hoped that after the war he would settle down in Oxford, but it was not to be. After his election to Parliament in 1945, she saw even less of him. He had begun his parliamentary career spending his weekends in Oxford, but these weekends became increasingly irregular. At one point, it was said, their marriage had “tottered”. It was not until 1947, after Wilson had been appointed President of the Board of Trade and they had bought a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb that the union was established on a sounder basis.
By now the Wilsons had two young sons. Wilson was a supportive if inevitably distant parent. Neither son would show any enthusiasm for politics.
Yet Mary Wilson shared in her husband’s triumphs and disappointments. When in 1951 he resigned from the Board of Trade, she received a letter from Winston Churchill saying he knew exactly how she felt. She was so overcome she burst into tears and sent a message back to Churchill which left him in tears: “Harold was totally fed up with both of us,” she said. “‘Every time you two send each other messages, you cry’, he grumbled.”
On the eve of Wilson’s becoming Prime Minister in 1964, she confessed how much she dreaded the social pressures of No 10. Dick Crossman tried to console her by telling her how lonely some dons’ wives were, eating cold sausage while their husbands feasted at high table. “After all,” he said, “I was an Oxford don for seven years.” “Oh I know you were,” she replied, “how lovely it must have been. He leaves me oftener than that now.”
Mary Wilson had begun writing poetry at the age of six, after reading the hymn books that were lying around the house. After her marriage, she sent her poems to various publishers, but they were all returned. She was encouraged, though, by John Betjeman whom she met at a performance at Covent Garden in 1966. In 1969 after Hutchinson approached her, her first volume of poems was published. A second volume, New Poems, was published in 1979. Her husband, she once admitted, did not read them, except when she wanted him to check a fact.
When Harold Wilson returned for a second term as Prime Minister in 1974, Mary refused to move back to No 10. In 1976, with economic crisis looming, the Government’s majority in Parliament in doubt and the Left growing in strength, it was generally thought that Mary played a crucial role in encouraging her husband to resign. She pencilled in a triumphant “D Day” on her calendar on March 16.
After his resignation, Mary Wilson confessed that she was happier than she had been for years: “It’s marvellous to have our own home again and for Harold and I to have more time together. We are very happily married.”
Yet the good times did not last long. Having suffered eight years as the wife of the Prime Minister, during the 1980s she found herself almost totally preoccupied by his physical welfare.
Her care of her husband during the last two difficult years of his life was nothing less than heroic. In 1995, on the morning of a group photograph of Labour peers, she called a friend to apologise for cancelling morning coffee: “It takes me three hours to get Harold ready.” Her anguish was acute. He died a few months later.
Lady Wilson is survived by her two sons.