Tributes to Lady Wilson, poet and widow of former Prime Minister
LABOUR LEADER Jeremy Corbyn has led the tributes to Mary Wilson, widow of former prime minister Harold Wilson, after her death at 102.
Mr Corbyn said Lady Wilson was a “wonderful poet” who had provided huge support to her husband in his general election victories in the 1960s and 70s.
A friend of Sir John Betjeman, she was a published poet whose works sold in the tens of thousands.
She died on Wednesday at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.
Former Labour Minister David Hanson also paid tribute to her and praised her support of the party.
Lady Wilson outlived her husband of 55 years, who was born in Huddersfield and served as MP for Huyton in Merseyside, by more than two decades.
The pair had homes in London and the Isles of Scilly, where they holidayed.
During her time in Downing Street, which Lady Wilson was said to dislike intensely, the prime minister’s wife inspired the Private Eye parody Mrs Wilson’s Diary, supposedly the jottings of a suburban housewife with artistic pretensions, and written in the style of the radio serial Mrs Dale’s Diary.
But she was a bona fide member of the literary set. She hosted Betjeman at No 10 and he wrote a piece about a journey they took together to the Norfolk town of Diss, which had been her birthplace.
Lady Wilson was born Gladys Mary Baldwin in January 1916.
The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, she grew up in a strict household where fiction on weekdays was reportedly banned, and it was during her childhood that her love of poetry was born.
Her father’s work meant the family moved around, and in the 1930s they pitched up in Cheshire, where after leaving school Mary took a job as a shorthand typist at the Lever Brothers soap factory in Port Sunlight.
It was in that area that she met her future husband, a brilliant statistician about to go up to Oxford.
They married on New Year’s Day in 1940, Lady Wilson saying later that she had not imagined she was committing to a life as a politician’s wife.
Elected to parliament in the post-war Labour landslide, her husband would go on to serve two terms as Prime Minister, eventually retiring in 1976. He died from colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease in May 1995, aged 79.
They had two sons, Robin and Giles, the former now an emeritus professor in mathematics at the Open University, which was founded under his father’s government in the 1960s.