Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy
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the Ministry of Fuel and Power). If he was asked a technical question, he would give a firm answer, but Ryan ‘knew he hadn’t got authority and probably wasn’t right. He didn’t pay attention to what you were discussing. So I didn’t trust him.’ There were also symptoms, which had not been visible in the Economic Section, of a burgeoning political ambition. Ryan recalls that Wilson used to boast, only half jokingly, that one day he would become President of the Board of Trade.7
This is, of course, the evidence of just one witness, now old and frail. There is no ground for believing that Wilson was generally unpopular. However, one entry in the diary of Hugh Dalton (who was easily susceptible to flattery) is interesting in view of the sycophancy charge. As the coal crisis deepened in March 1942, and Dalton was in need of reassurance, we find him noting: ‘I hear tonight that it is being said in the Mines Department, at least by Wilson and his friends, that my paper on coal is “the best ever”.’8 It may be that this opinion was one which Wilson did not mind reaching the ears of his minister.
Wilson’s relationship with the President had some importance, because the coal crisis was rapidly turning into a political as well as an administrative problem, and a cause of inter-party dissension. On taking office, Dalton asked the ubiquitous Sir William Beveridge (his own former boss at the LSE, as well as Wilson’s at University College) to prepare a scheme for fuel rationing. Beveridge interrupted his other work on social insurance to produce a report within five weeks. This did not please Tory back-benchers or the coal-owners, who suspected Dalton (MP for a mining seat in County Durham) of sympathizing with the miners’ demand for nationalization. The resulting political row turned Beveridge’s rationing plan into ‘a sort of unacknowledged test of the relative strength of parties and interests within the Coalition and in Parliament’, behind the arguments about its administrative pros and cons.9 Meanwhile, some of the worst industrial disputes of the Second World War were brewing in the coalfields. A wave of unofficial strikes led to the appointment of a Board of Investigation, chaired by Lord Greene, Master of the Rolls. This was part of a wider compromise, which gave substantial state control of the industry, while stopping short of a complete takeover of the mines.
Harold Wilson was appointed Joint Secretary of the Board of Investigation. The Board carried out its inquiry with speed. A fortnight after it was set up in June 1942, it recommended a flat-rate increase in wages, a national minimum wage, and an output bonus. All recommendations were accepted on both sides of the industry. Dalton felt, however, that he had won on points. Bowing to Tory pressure, he withdrew on fuel rationing, which was never introduced. But there was a ‘socialist’ victory of a kind, none the less. What had begun as a Whitehall debate about a hypothetical coal shortage had ended with a significant move in the direction of public ownership. At the same time, the miners gained what they had been seeking for twenty years – a national minimum. At the 1943 Labour Party Conference, the Miners’ President, Will Lawther, underlined these achievements by telling delegates that Dalton and Bevin had done more for the industry than any of their predecessors.10
Wilson was immensely proud of his own back-room role in this crisis, which came to be seen as a key political battle of the War Coalition period, and he often boasted about it later. He claimed that, ‘momentarily forgetting my duties as a sober-sided civil servant’, he had helped to convince Lord Greene of the need for the national minimum, and had helped to fix its level.11 Whatever his influence on events, it was certainly an educative experience – his first, heady contact with real politics. It fully vindicated his decision to take the Mines Department post. He could scarcely have hoped for better: the episode had brought him face-to-face with the leaders of the miners’ union, which had several dozen safe Labour seats virtually in its gift, as well as of other big unions with a related interest, like the Transport Workers’.12
The job also extended his range in other ways. Early in 1943, he became Joint Secretary of a sub-committee of the Anglo–American Combined Chiefs of Staff, which was given responsibility for ensuring that coal stocks were built up in each of the invasion loading ports. In October, he travelled by air to the United States, via Ireland and Newfoundland. It was an arduous journey in a Hudson bomber without seats or air pressure, which brought out his boy-scouting instincts: the passengers had to wear oxygen masks at high altitudes. In Washington, he was delighted to discover that one of his American opposite numbers was a former Oxford pupil, an ex-Rhodes Scholar called Harland Cleveland, who later became a member of Lyndon Johnson’s Cabinet. He also met the film magnate Alexander Korda – with whom he was later to have dealings as a minister. Korda presented him with a white silk layette, as a gift for Gladys, who was expecting their first child.13
Although it was a hard-working, hard-bargaining visit, Wilson also had time to enjoy his first trip to America as a tourist, marvelling at a country of bright lights, plentiful food and a wide range of consumer goods, which contrasted sharply with wartime England. He was exhilarated by New York. ‘Every other shop … is a drugstore, where in addition to pharmaceutical products, you can get all a milk-bar’s confections & everything a snack-bar would sell, as well as a lot of general goods (e.g. umbrellas & often clothes),’ he enlightened his parents. ‘It is really a cross between a milk-bar, a snack-bar, a chemist’s, a tobacconist’s & sweetshop & Marks & Spencers, plus some more.’ However, he liked Washington best – ‘a wonderful city – the loveliest I’ve seen: even the busiest streets have trees all down the side & birds are singing all the time, while squirrels run out & over one’s feet’. In the American capital, he had been booked into a suite in the Hotel Roosevelt, which he described as ‘the most luxurious thing I’ve ever seen (more so than the Savoy)’. Luxury, however, was not his style, and he quickly moved into a cheaper hotel, spending the money he had saved out of his ‘Mission allowance’ to stock up with goods that were prized at home: stockings, razor-blades and a food-parcel for his parents and friends, and clothes for himself. ‘In NY or Washington’, he reported, ‘I bought… a new suit (dark blue tweed), a lightweight imitation gaberdine, made of spun glass … , 5 good shirts, 8 prs. pants, 3 prs. socks, 4 ties.’ Greatly impressed by the size and splendour of American newspapers, with their many weekend sections, he took out a mail order subscription to the New York Times.
For the expected addition to his family – known, while in utero, as ‘Bogus’ – he brought home some nappies and two sets of baby clothes. ‘I found G. quite well & going on fine,’ Harold told his parents on his return, adding: ‘Her doctor has told her he thinks Bogus is a lady.’14 In fact, Bogus turned out to be a boy: Robin, their first child, was born on 5 December 1943.
The birth followed a series of changes of accommodation. Like everybody else living in or close to central London, the Wilsons had suffered the strain and loss of sleep caused by the Blitz, the worst of which was now over. When the bombing was at its most intense, Gladys had gone to stay with Harold’s parents in Cornwall; then, for a time, she had lodged with a colleague of Harold’s in Oxford, while her husband travelled down at weekends. After the raids diminished, they rented another flat in Richmond, where they were living during Gladys’s pregnancy. After the birth, the bombing got bad again, and Gladys took the baby away to Cornwall and then for a period to her own parents’ house in Duxford, Cambridgeshire – returning to Richmond in the late spring of 1944. ‘We came back just before the buzz bombs hit London,’ she recalls.15
The V-I (flying-bomb) attacks began in June – restoring some of the comradeship that had existed among London residents and workers during the worst raids of 1940 and 1941. Harold got into the habit of sleeping in shelter accommodation in Whitehall, where there was an easy informality. During attacks he had a chance to talk to Gwilym Lloyd George, the Minister of Fuel and Power (who had taken over the Mines Department’s responsibilities from Dalton in June 1942). Lloyd George told him tales about his father. Wilson liked Gwilym as a man and was flattered by his attentions, but thought little of him as a minister. Later, he divided the four ministers he worked for during the war into those who got things done, and those who did not. The two who did were Duncan and Dalton; those who did not were Grenfell and Lloyd George. Nevertheless, he claimed to have confided in Lloyd George ‘my own rapidly forming decision to sit as a Labour candidate as soon as a general election was called’.16
Mary