How Harold Wilson’s long-suffering wife Mary loathed life at No.10

For the best part of two decades, Mary Wilson was the most reluctant public figure in Britain. As the wife of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, she was at his side during no fewer than five turbulent general election campaigns in the Sixties and Seventies.

Even though she rarely gave interviews and shrank from speaking in public, she became a familiar sight on the nation’s television screens. Yet the irony is that she hated politics and loathed living at 10 Downing Street.

Far from craving the limelight, Mary — who has died at the age of 102 — had married Wilson in the belief that he would be content with life as an Oxford don, having become one at just 21.

As the wife of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Mary was at his side during no fewer than five turbulent general election campaigns in the Sixties and Seventies

Unfortunately, she found herself plunged into the hurly-burly of political life in an age of extraordinary tumult, with Britain beset by record inflation, crippling strikes, terrorist atrocities and a pervasive sense of national decline.

As if all that were not bad enough, she also found herself involved in one of the most peculiar and mysterious love triangles in British political history. To Westminster gossips, she was the silent but long-suffering wife, neglected by a Prime Minister who had fallen under the sway of his Machiavellian political secretary, the controversial Marcia Williams.

Later, even Wilson’s closest aides struggled to explain the mysteries of his domestic arrangements. Some claimed he and Marcia had enjoyed a brief sexual affair, although all parties denied it. The truth will probably never be known.

For Mary Wilson, of all people, to find herself at the centre of such allegations was cruelly incongruous. Unpretentious, unassuming, a woman who loved poetry, flowers and the simple pleasures of home and family, she must sometimes have felt trapped in a terrible nightmare.

Her early life, which could hardly have been more different, seems like something from a Britain that vanished long ago.

She was born during World War I, on January 12, 1916, in the quiet Norfolk town of Diss, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, the Reverend Daniel Baldwin.

The young Mary Baldwin’s family life was characterised by impecunious respectability. Her father earned £190 a year — the equivalent of £16,000 today — on which he had to support a wife and four children.

By today’s standards, Mary’s childhood looks downright puritanical. She had to attend chapel at least twice and sometimes as many as four times on Sundays, when she was also banned from such frivolities as reading novels.

When Wilson called a snap early election in 1966, Mary had to trawl dutifully around the country with him yet again

When Wilson called a snap early election in 1966, Mary had to trawl dutifully around the country with him yet again

At the age of six, having exhausted the pleasures of reading her father’s hymn books, she began amusing herself by writing verses. Poetry remained her greatest hobby for the rest of her life, although intellectuals loved to sneer at her supposedly middlebrow tastes.

But the moment that transformed her life came in 1934, after she had started work as a shorthand typist at the Lever soap factory at Port Sunlight, Cheshire. She was playing tennis at a local club when she met another teenager, a clever, good-humoured boy called Harold Wilson.

Within three weeks, Wilson had announced that he was going to marry her. Later, their family joked that if she had known it was serious, she would have called it off.

But the two teenagers had a lot in common, or seemed to. They were both earnest, well-meaning sorts of people; they both liked plays, Gilbert and Sullivan and going to church; and both had simple, unpretentious lower- middle-class tastes.

Although Wilson’s quick mind took him to Oxford, where he became an academic superstar, first as a student and then a don, their relationship never wavered, and on the first day of 1940 they married, her father presiding over the ceremony.

Mary’s future seemed assured. Life in Oxford had everything she wanted, she later said: ‘Very old buildings and very young people. There is everything anyone could want: music, theatre, congenial friends, all in a beautiful setting, and within a four-penny bus ride. It symbolised so much for me.’

Mary Wilson and her husband Harold, pictured outside Downing Street 

Mary Wilson and her husband Harold, pictured outside Downing Street 

But almost immediately, things started to go wrong. Her husband became a civil servant, then a thrusting young Labour MP.

They left Oxford and moved with their two young sons, Robin and Giles, to Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London, where Mary tried to settle into an ordinary suburban family life. Even as Harold clambered up the political ladder, joining the Cabinet, courting the party’s powerful Left wing and becoming Shadow Chancellor, the couple kept up their unassuming lifestyle. They holidayed in the Scilly Isles, read Agatha Christie novels, played Meccano with their boys and had meals with HP sauce.

Their snobbish North London neighbours, such as the louche Labour politicians Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Jenkins, sneered at them as irredeemably middlebrow. But, of course, these were the small-c conservative tastes of millions of ordinary British people — which is one reason why, when Harold became Labour leader following Gaitskell’s unexpected death in 1963, he proved so good at winning elections.

By this point, however, a much younger woman had entered the Wilsons’ lives.

Marcia Williams met Wilson while working for the Labour Party in the Fifties and soon became his indispensable private secretary. To her admirers, she was bright, loyal and ruthlessly efficient; to her critics, such as Wilson’s press secretary Joe Haines, she was domineering, tempestuous and egotistical.

But Haines recognised that, for Wilson, Marcia ‘met for a great many years a deep craving within him for someone else to whom politics was meat and drink and the very air that was breathed’. Marcia was obsessed with politics and devoted to the Labour Party. By contrast, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Mary hated politics and could not have cared less about the Party.

Of course, Mary did have opinions of her own. For example, she was opposed to Britain’s nuclear weapons, and said later that she regretted that, because she was Harold Wilson’s wife, she had never been able to go on one of the Aldermaston CND marches.

But when Harold became Prime Minister in 1964, Mary cut a disconsolate figure. This was definitely not the life she had signed up for, and she hated living in the dingy flat above Number 10.

‘She started with a deep suspicion that everyone disliked and despised her,’ commented one official. ‘She walked about looking terribly unhappy.’

In particular, she loathed state functions. On one occasion, a civil servant’s wife found her in tears in the ladies’, sobbing: ‘I can’t take it any more!’

When Wilson called a snap early election in 1966, Mary had to trawl dutifully around the country with him yet again. Many thought there was no need for her to do so, since the Tory leader Edward Heath was a bachelor. But Wilson saw an electoral advantage. ‘The Tories are deliberately leaving [Mary] out of the campaign because Heath has no wife,’ he told Labour colleague Richard Crossman.

Mary Wilson has died at the age of 102. She is pictured at the Labour Party conference in 1995 

Mary Wilson has died at the age of 102. She is pictured at the Labour Party conference in 1995 

‘It’s a positive advantage to us that I and Mary appear together and Heath has nothing. So I would like to see her brought back into the campaign.’

Her husband was oblivious to the misery this caused Mary, telling Crossman she loved going to political rallies.

When Crossman asked Mary if it was true that she had enjoyed it, she stared at him in horror. ‘Enjoyed it?’ she said, with ‘agony on her face’. ‘Who told you that? That man?’ By ‘that man’, of course, she meant her husband. In the meantime, Harold and his secretary were closer than ever. With Mary withdrawing into the shadows, Marcia Williams was effectively playing the part of Wilson’s political partner.

The great mystery is whether their relationship was ever consummated. Joe Haines wrote that whenever Harold and Marcia fell out — which happened often — she would ‘lift her ever-present handbag’, tap it meaningfully, and announce: ‘One call to the Daily Mail and he’ll be finished. I will destroy him.’

Haines — whose accounts were labelled ‘a book of tall tales’ by Labour’s Roy Hattersley — also recalled Wilson telling him that after a particularly blazing row, Marcia had burst in to see Mary and announced: ‘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.’ Though Harold Wilson always denied the affair, he seemed to confirm it later that day in a rueful comment to Haines: ‘Well, she has dropped her atomic bomb at last. She can’t hurt me any more.’

However, when the BBC repeated these claims in a drama, they had to pay an out-of-court settlement of £75,000 to Marcia.

The astonishing thing is that despite all this domestic turmoil, Wilson’s electoral record was extremely impressive.

Although the British people, exasperated by his failure to get a grip on the shambolic economy, booted him out in 1970, he clawed his way back into office four years later, after his rival Edward Heath had been humiliated by the striking miners.

By this point, Mary’s patience with politics was exhausted. Among other things, she was deeply opposed to her husband’s commitment to keeping Britain in Europe, and voted Leave in the 1975 referendum.

‘I just couldn’t do it,’ she said later, remembering that her husband — who, deep down, was never keen on Europe himself — was ‘very sweet about it’.

Rather than moving to Downing Street after the 1974 election, she insisted on staying put in their house in nearby Lord North Street, and devoted herself to writing poetry.

When a magazine offered to pay her £33 for some of her poems, she was advised by a civil servant that it could be interpreted as trading on her husband’s position and she meekly turned the money down.

Her first poetry book had been published in 1970. Highbrow critics sneered at her ‘amateurish, housewifely jottings’, but the public loved them, buying 75,000 copies, and Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman became a close friend.

As for Harold, he was more than ever in Marcia’s thrall. Once, when he and Joe Haines bunked off a House of Lords reception, she tracked them back to Downing Street. ‘You little c**t!’ she shouted at the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. ‘What do you think you are doing? You come back with me at once!’

For Wilson’s aides, things had gone too far. In a development too lurid for fiction, Wilson’s doctor, Joseph Stone, told Haines he could murder Marcia with sleeping pills ‘in such a way that it would seem to be from natural causes’. He added that he would sign the death certificate and that ‘there would not be a problem’.

The murder plan never came to fruition. But although Mary never knew about it, she did know that her husband’s health was cracking under the strain of office.

When Wilson unexpectedly resigned in 1976, many people suspected some sort of scandal. And when he published a hugely controversial honours list, which handed out gongs to various dodgy business cronies, the newspapers claimed that Marcia had written it herself on lavender-coloured notepaper — an allegation she strenuously denied.

In fact, Wilson was already a much-diminished man, his famously sharp mind dimmed by the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s. He and Mary vanished into the shadows, with Marcia, now Lady Falkender, trailing behind.

For Mary, retirement came as a relief. Free from the attentions of the Press, she spent her time reading poetry and caring for her husband, who endured a long, sad decline until his death in 1995.

To some observers, it seemed odd that in her waning years she became close friends with her old rival, Marcia, the two women often lunching quietly together at the House of Lords.

But it was typical of Mary’s modest but stubbornly independent nature that she did not care what people thought. After all, Marcia was a familiar face — and they had Harold in common.

In her final years, Mary drifted out of the public consciousness, which was just as she liked it.

Even in the history books she is largely absent, eclipsed by her wily husband and his controversial political secretary. But it says a great deal about Mary’s fundamental decency that after so many years in the spotlight, no one had a bad word to say about her.

It is hard, though, not to feel sorry for a woman who never got the life she wanted.

She had dreamed of a happy existence in suburban Oxford, surrounded by friends and family. Instead, she found herself at the centre of one of the most miserable and conflicted administrations in our modern political history.

‘Of course I hate it,’ she once said. ‘I always have. But I do my job.’

You have to admire her devotion to duty. But I can’t help thinking that, in its understated way, the life of Mary Wilson was a quietly tragic story. 



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