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4

BEVERIDGE BOY

The day after the last exam a letter came from Marjorie saying that Herbert had been sacked. It was not entirely unexpected. The family had long had some sense of the job’s impermanence, adding to Harold’s urgency at Oxford. The Wilsons were always careful about the timing of bad news: Herbert may have withheld the information until Schools were safely out of the way. At any rate, the bombshell meant that there was little chance to celebrate. Exam pressure was immediately replaced by the pressure to find an income.

Harold responded to the emergency by applying for a job with the Manchester Guardian, which he had been cultivating since his second year. He had always considered journalism as one career option. He was successful, and received the offer of a probationary post as a leader writer. But he did not take it up, because – as top of the PPE School – he was awarded the Webb Medley Senior Scholarship, worth £300 a year. This removed immediate financial worries and made it possible to stay in Oxford. Though he never regretted his choice, he did not forget that he might have become a journalist – and he continued to take a keen interest in the newspaper profession, almost as if he had kept the possibility of a switch in reserve. His academic position was soon consolidated, however, by his appointment to a part-time lectureship at New College on a stipend of £125, supplementing his scholarship. At the age of twenty-one he had become a don, albeit a very junior one.

Harold used some of his scholarship money to pay the rent on his parents’ flat in the Wirral. This time Herbert was out of work for eighteen months. Eventually, after many applications, he found another job, at Liskeard in Cornwall, supervising the manufacture of explosives for blasting. Herbert and Ethel had lived in northern England all their lives. They now migrated south – at first Herbert on his own, living in digs, and later his wife and Marjorie, who obtained a job in a local school. Uprooted for the second time, they settled permanently, except for a period during and just after the Second World War. Their new home provided Harold and Gladys with a Cornish link, which led to post-war holidays in the Scillies.

Not every prize fell into Harold’s lap. Three months after taking Finals he sat for a Fellowship at All Souls. He was understandably hopeful. Between exams he chatted happily with Arthur Brown, another candidate, over lunch at a café in the Cornmarket. ‘Harold scared me by talking all the time about his answers to the questions on the morning’s history paper,’ Brown recalls.¹ In the outcome, Brown won a fellowship and Wilson did not. Wilson tried again the following year. Having failed by examination, he attempted the thesis method, submitting his Gladstone essay. Again he was rejected. There is no mention of this reverse in his memoirs. It may be a significant omission. Even in the 1980s he made remarks which indicated to academic acquaintances that it still rankled.²

Wilson’s success the previous summer, however, scarcely went unnoticed, and he soon received an offer which provided a first, decisive step towards a public career. Wilson’s graduation happened to coincide with the return to Oxford of Sir William Beveridge, as Master of University College. Beveridge, already a titanic figure in academic administration and the world of the social sciences, had spent twenty or so years building up the London School of Economics. Now he wished to return to serious research. The title of Beveridge’s later autobiography, Power and Influence, summed up his approach to social analysis, which he saw as a means of changing the world. His first major project was economic. With characteristic energy and conceit, he set about fulfilling what his biographer calls ‘his long-cherished ambition of unlocking the secrets of the trade cycle’.³ Casting around for an assistant to help with the project, his attention was directed to Wilson.

Harold was offered, and accepted, the job of working on a study which was intended as a sequel to Beveridge’s earlier classic, Unemployment – A Problem of Industry. Beveridge wanted a helper who could pay his own way: the Webb Medley made this possible. Wilson became his assistant and also his student, registering for a D.Phil. to be called ‘Aspects of the Demand for Labour in Great Britain’.⁴ With Herbert recently redundant, the project fitted well the Wilson family’s private concerns. Its aim, according to Beveridge, was to find out ‘(a) why there are so many thousands of unemployed in all the prosperous parts of the country and (b) how many “unemployed jobs”, i.e., unfilled vacancies there are, and of what kind and why’.⁵

This experiment in collaboration was not an episode for which Wilson ever felt much nostalgia. Though he appreciated Beveridge’s energy and discipline – and remained proud to have worked for a man whose name became synonymous with the setting up of the Welfare State⁶ – he never learnt to like him. Years later, the ambivalence in his attitude remained. In a Beveridge Memorial Lecture delivered in 1966, Wilson (by then Prime Minister) annoyed Beveridge’s stepson, Philip Mair, by the ‘disparaging manner’ in which he described his former master.⁷ He paid Beveridge the double-edged compliment of describing him as ‘a man who could inspire all who came under his dominating sway with a love of work for its own sake, of the discovery of truth for its own sake and the application of that truth for the betterment of his fellow citizens’.⁸ The reality was, however, that he found Beveridge impossible in personal relations and disastrous as a boss, because of what he described as his employer’s ‘arrogance and rudeness to those appointed to work with him and his total inability to delegate’.⁹

Summer months were spent at Beveridge’s cottage at Avebury in Wiltshire, with the great man and his formidable cousin Jessie Mair. Sir William’s habits made Harold’s seem like idleness. Every day started with two hours’ work before breakfast. That was just the beginning. ‘The regime wore him out,’ says Arthur Brown. ‘They worked all morning, played tennis all afternoon, and worked all night.’¹⁰ Wilson discovered, as he once told an interviewer, that the best way to deal with Beveridge’s intolerance was to keep working with him. Buried in his studies, he was easier to get on with.¹¹ Much of the work, however, was grindingly dull, involving a meticulous examination of unemployment figures for the cyclical period 1927–37. Later, the project took Wilson on a tour of labour exchanges to get details of the filling of vacancies – which he enjoyed more.

Fresh from his chrysalis of introverted undergraduate study, Wilson could have benefited greatly from a genuinely inspiring teacher, who was prepared to give as well as take. Instead, though he learnt from Beveridge, it was somewhat in the manner of a pack animal learning from a muleteer. His apprenticeship frequently felt like a period of servitude. Yet he survived it, toughened and unbroken, having earned, if not Beveridge’s gratitude, at least his approval. Indeed, in a professional sense, they were in some ways well suited. Both had no need to be part of a team. Both were single-minded, self-flagellatory workers who – for all Wilson’s grumbles – enjoyed the puritanical sense of applying themselves harder than anybody else. ‘Really, they had a lot in common,’ says Brown. ‘They were hyperactive and had practical interests. They liked to get their teeth into a problem and worry away at it.’¹²

Early in their partnership, Beveridge wrote to the President of the American Rockefeller Foundation, boasting with typical self-centredness about his ‘first-rate research student doing just what I am going about saying all research students should do: that is, working under my supervision on a problem that I want solved and on which I am working myself, in place of writing a thesis to please himself’.¹³ Lord Longford, who worked with Beveridge in Whitehall later, reckons that Beveridge ‘probably saw Wilson as a useful machine, not as a person’.¹⁴ Over the next few years, Beveridge continued to rely on the ‘useful machine’, turning to Wilson whenever he needed efficient, streamlined assistance. Wilson, meanwhile, reaped the benefits of their cold alliance in Beveridge’s munificent patronage.

There were other elements as well. Though Wilson kicked a little against the pricks, he acquired, during these critically formative years, something of Beveridge’s outlook. It was one that differed in significant ways from that of the other great reformer of the age, who was attracting an enthusiastic following, Maynard Keynes. In his book, Paul Foot presents Wilson accusingly as a Liberal Keynesian, citing undergraduate influences. This was certainly how Wilson wished to present himself in the 1960s, when he was eager to appear as part of the Keynesian mainstream. In his memoirs he went out of his way to identify himself as a member of the pre-war Keynesian vanguard. The reality, however, was rather different, partly because of Beveridge.

Although both men were Liberal in their politics, and progressive in their goals, Beveridge did not approve of Keynes. Their minds worked in different ways. Where Keynes was an aristocrat and a cavalier among thinkers, Beveridge was a roundhead, suspicious of ideas. While Keynes’s intellect soared, Beveridge’s rigorously empirical approach made him insist on looking at the evidence first. Thus Beveridge had reacted to The General Theory in 1936 with a furious scepticism and – like the father of Edmund Gosse, when confronted with the disconcerting hypotheses of Charles Darwin – set himself against the tide of advanced opinion by embarking on the largely negative task of disproving it.

Beveridge took particular exception to Keynes’s reduction of concepts like ‘unemployment’ and ‘demand’ to what he regarded as a high level of abstraction. The unemployed, he insisted, were a heterogeneous group who could not be lumped together. He found the Keynesian multiplier incomprehensible. Recoiling from Keynes’s new thesis, he was drawn instead to the economic ideas and policies contained in a lengthy study by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, which had taken a close, admiring and gullible look at Stalinist planning.¹⁵ In 1938 – the year after Wilson joined him – Beveridge published a book called Constructive Democracy which showed how far its author had travelled in this direction. Anticipating a possible war, Beveridge argued that planning had become the prerequisite of national survival. Beveridge’s polemical approach aroused widespread interest, especially on the Left. ‘Here at last’, wrote Richard Crossman in the New Statesman and Nation, ‘you feel is someone talking and talking angrily out of his experience.’¹⁶

How much rubbed off on Wilson, brought into daily contact with great men, and great ideas, for the first time? Later, Wilson sought to distance himself from much of Beveridge’s work, claiming to have seen fallacies in it. He also claimed that he tried to educate Beveridge on the subject of unemployment. In their joint project, he wrote, Beveridge wanted to think in terms of ‘frictional’ unemployment – that is, unemployment caused by the immobility of labour. Wilson was impatient: Herbert had suffered from joblessness which, as the Wilson family bitterly knew, was anything but frictional. Beveridge did not seem to understand the point. ‘He didn’t realize – until much later – that there was a fundamental problem of under-demand in the economy,’ Wilson told an interviewer in the 1960s.¹⁷ He also maintained that he tried to persuade Beveridge of the basic tenets of Keynesianism. We need to treat both claims cautiously.

Wilson may not have shared Beveridge’s fierce prejudice, but he was happy enough to accept his supervisor’s intellectual framework. Wilson’s earliest published work, which took the form of academic articles, reveals no evidence of a desire to break Beveridge-imposed fetters. The first, which appeared in Economica in May 1940, analysed details of industrial production between 1717 and 1786, in order to establish the existence and chronology of a trade cycle.¹⁸ This faithfully employed a technique used by Beveridge, and started from his assumptions.

Wilson’s main undertaking, a book to be written jointly with Beveridge about the trade cycle – a subject on which Beveridge’s views differed sharply from those of Keynes – was intended for publication early in 1940. The outbreak of war killed the project, along with Wilson’s doctoral thesis.¹⁹ Nine chapters, however, were written, and Beveridge was able to plunder this research when writing a later study called Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944. In this book, Beveridge refers repeatedly to Wilson’s investigations and findings.²⁰

The first of the discarded chapters had begun, significantly, with a conversation between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes:

‘This is indeed a mystery,’ I remarked. ‘What do you imagine that it means?’

‘I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’²¹

This was intended to sum up the authors’ scorn for much modern theory, including that of Keynes. It was the essence of Beveridgism. It also encapsulated Wilson’s approach, intellectually and politically, for the rest of his career. He was a facts man. As a schoolboy and as a student he had been interested in facts: he collected them, treasured them, remembered them. His ability to reel off statistics was not just a conceit. As an historian, and later as a statistician, he saw the acquisition of data as the bricks and mortar of policy-making. It was an outlook which contrasted with the intellectual hedonism of Bloomsbury and Keynes.

After the war, Keynesianism became the universal doctrine among younger economists, and Wilson had no difficulty in adapting to it. But he did not acquire the enthusiasm for the new teaching which made others see it as a crusade, and he always retained Beveridge’s interest in the counter-doctrine of socialist planning. Part of the reason was, as we have seen, that he had been harnessed to a distinguished zealot who increasingly favoured such an approach over the mixture of state control and free enterprise favoured by Keynes and the American New Dealers.²² But there was also a negative factor: Beveridge apart, Wilson did not find himself in an environment in which Keynes’s ideas were the focal point of attention.

There is an important difference here between Wilson, a Liberal who became a socialist, and other economists with whom Wilson later had dealings, in particular Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay, two socialists who became Keynesian evangelists. For men like Gaitskell and Jay, democratic socialism’s lack of economic theory had always been a worrying deficiency: they fell on The General Theory as on a philosopher’s stone, seeing in demand management a means of giving practical effect to Labour’s egalitarian aims. In the case of Gaitskell, a junior lecturer at London University, where the fiercely classical Lionel Robbins held sway at the LSE, there was an added frisson: Keynes’s ideas provided ammunition to hurl in intra-faculty fights. For the much younger Wilson, who had read The General Theory as an undergraduate, there was much less to get worked up about.

Engrossed in his empirical study, Wilson was concerned, not to apply, but to deconstruct, aspects of Keynes’s theory. Wilson’s term-time research work was based at the recently established Institute of Statistics in Oxford High Street. Colleagues included Arthur Brown, Elizabeth Ackroyd, Goronwy Daniels, Richard Sayers, George Shackle and Richard Goodwin, among the younger economists. Unlike Cambridge, the Institute did not have ‘a strong General Theory flavour’. Unlike London, it did not have a strongly anti-General Theory flavour either: in the battle between Keynesians and Robbinsites Oxford did not take sides. There was not even a civil war. ‘I do not remember that there was any division of the sub-faculty into pro- and anti-Keynesian factions,’ says Arthur Brown. It was therefore easy and natural for Wilson to stand aside, unmoved by the claims of those who, like Gaitskell and Jay, ‘blended together into a heady mixture’ the various advances in economics of the 1930s of which The General Theory constituted only one part.²³

It would be fanciful to trace Wilson’s later affinity to the socialist Bevanites, and the Keynesian Gaitskellites’ distaste for Wilson, to this difference: yet it provides a piece in the jigsaw. Implicitly, Anthony Crosland pointed to the cerebral distinction between progressivism’s cavaliers and roundheads in The Future of Socialism, published in 1956, when he expressed an aesthete’s disdain for socialism based on a good filing system. A good filing system, plus a good slide rule, formed a central part of Wilson’s policy approach: and was one reason why Gaitskellites regarded him as a dull dog.

In 1938 Beveridge made Wilson a Research Fellow at University College, on a stipend of £400 a year, with free rooms and meals in college. This was the first step to a full fellowship, which contemporaries assumed was his goal. At the Institute he was regarded as clever, and a fellowship was expected to come his way. But he was never considered brilliant or intellectually inspiring. ‘Harold was not top flight technically. He was more of a practical chap,’ says Brown, who knew him well in the 1938–9 academic year. ‘His strength was in applied economics. He became more and more applied, in the sense that he took current problems to pieces.’ The future mapped out for him was as a Beveridge-in-miniature, teaching and writing about economic and social policy. ‘He looked set to become the kind of academic who gets involved in looking at present-day issues,’ according to Brown. The idea that he might go into politics was not discussed in the essentially apolitical environment of the Institute. Wilson was visibly ambitious, and emanated a confident, even cocky, sense of control over his destiny. Brown recalls saying to his own father in 1939 that his friend had everything he needed to get to the top, ‘except charisma and oratory’.²⁴ But the ‘top’ Brown had in mind was academic, not political. Nobody saw Wilson as a man with strong views, or a sense of mission.

Yet this was the time when Wilson took his first tentative step towards a political career: he joined the Oxford University Labour Party. Later, he gave elaborate explanations for his change of loyalty. At a personal level, he claimed that it was ‘G. D. H. Cole as much as any man’ who pointed him towards Labour.²⁵ Wilson had come into contact with Cole, the godfather of inter-war Oxford socialism, at University College, where Cole was Economics Fellow. But he had never been a member of the famous, and somewhat exclusive, ‘Cole group’ of young Oxford socialists, that included such luminaries as Hugh Gaitskell and Evan Durbin.²⁶ Now, as a close colleague, he fell greatly under Cole’s spell, finding in him a much more congenial mentor than the irascible Beveridge. ‘Harold admired him very much,’ says Mary, who took little interest in politics, but much in Oxford and its personalities.

Cole was renowned as a recruiter of talented young men to the socialist cause, and it was very much in character that he should have provided encouragement. Since, however, Wilson had taken the significant step of resigning from the Eighty Club – thereby severing his link with leading Liberals – in February 1938, before he started at University College, his allegiances seem already to have been on the move. Wilson also cited a political factor: his concern about unemployment, based on childhood memories, his father’s recent experience, and his own practical study of the subject. But this, in itself, is not quite convincing either. The Liberals – party of Lloyd George, Beveridge and Keynes – were just as interested in unemployment as Labour.

There may not have been a single reason. However, the obvious explanation is the most plausible. If Wilson still contemplated a future in Parliament, then Labour was the only practical vehicle for such an aspiration. It is likely, indeed, that he had had such a switch long in mind. According to Mary, it was always his intention to establish himself professionally, and then look for a way to enter politics.²⁷ This was also the impression Leslie Smith received when he talked to Wilson in the early 1960s. Smith recorded that the future leader ‘never lost sight of his ultimate goal. Even during the closing stages of his intensive cramming [for Schools] he indulged in his favourite imaginings.’ Apparently his day-dream at this stage was to become Labour (not Liberal) candidate for Huddersfield or Colne Valley, and eventually to be Foreign Secretary.²⁸ If that is correct, then it did not need Cole, or Herbert’s second bout of unemployment, to persuade Harold to dump the Liberals.

It helped, of course, that the Labour Party was changing. Labour had recovered notably in the 1935 election, while the Liberals had further declined. At the same time, the Labour Party had become much more congenial to a middle-of-the-road progressive like Wilson. It had acquired a more pragmatic group of leaders, its foreign policy had hardened, and it had shed its more utopian commitments. It had also begun to develop a philosophy which many Liberals found easy to accept. Hugh Dalton’s Practical Socialism for Britain, published in 1935, advocated the kind of socialist planning within capitalism that had Beveridge’s approval. Douglas Jay’s The Socialist Case, published in 1937, injected Keynes into socialist policymaking, partly under the influence of the Oxford-based ‘Liberal–Socialist’ economist, James Meade. Both books were symptomatic of a new, policy-orientated approach which was much more to Wilson’s taste than the revolutionary flourishes that characterized the Left earlier in the decade.

It was not exactly a traumatic leap. Wilson’s initial involvement in the party he had just joined was as an academic specialist, rather than as a campaigner. The Fabian Society (which amalgamated with Cole’s New Fabian Research Bureau in 1939) absorbed some of his attention. At Cole’s suggestion he wrote a chapter on ‘Government Control of Railways’ for a projected book to be edited by the former Oxford Union President (and future Foreign Secretary), Michael Stewart. In September1939 this was read for the Society by the social scientist W. A. Robson, who criticized it sharply for failing to analyse the present structure of the industry, and pointed out that two-thirds of it was devoted to a history of the railways up to 1921.²⁹

Occasionally, Wilson was to be seen at Labour political gatherings in Oxford. Mayhew remembers first hearing him speak at one of these just before the war. Wilson addressed the meeting so knowledgeably on the issue of electricity nationalization, that Mayhew mentioned it in a letter to his parents.³⁰ Yet Wilson could scarcely be described, in this phase, as a Labour Party activist. He was very much on the fringe, ignored by the Pakenhams and Gordon Walkers who dominated Oxford Labour affairs. He took no conspicuous part in the debates over appeasement and rearmament that rocked the city in the year of Munich, and split the Oxford Labour Party on the issue of A. D. Lindsay’s ‘Popular Front’ candidature in the Oxford by-election. Local Labour Party members barely knew him. Friends had no inkling of his long-term plans.

For the moment, he was content to build on the foundations of his academic career. Until mid-1939, his parents’ lives were in turmoil, with much toing and froing from the Wirral and Liskeard. Only when Ethel joined Herbert in Cornwall, shortly before the outbreak of war, was calm restored on the domestic front. Harold’s appointments at New College and University College, though prestigious, were temporary ones. Unlike the public school socialists, Wilson did not have the wherewithal to be a half-time politician. Nor did he, even now, mix in the same circles. Harold’s friends were not trendy dons or well-known journalists. They were fellow economists at the Institute, where life revolved around academic research, and modest convivialities.

Despite the Beveridge oppression, Harold had more time for socializing than before his Finals. His world was still more Liberal than Labour; he was friendly with the pretty undergraduate granddaughter of a prime minister, Valerie Lloyd George, and introduced her to her future husband, the economist Goronwy Daniels (the Daniels family legend has it that the introduction began with Harold saying to Goronwy: ‘You must meet Valerie Lloyd George. She’s a bit of all right’).³¹ Sometimes at weekends he took Arthur Brown in his car to the Beveridge house at Avebury, when Beveridge was away, and cheerfully raided the larder. ‘That seemed to be part of the deal,’ says Steel.³² He saw Gladys frequently at weekends in Oxford, but, for her, Avebury was out of bounds.³³ That part of his life, like his politics, belonged to a separate compartment.

Early in September 1939, Harold motored to Dundee to attend the annual conference of the British Association, and to deliver a paper on exports and the trade cycle, based on his work with Beveridge, who was also present. The gathering included a young Scottish economist called Alec (now Sir Alec) Cairncross. Cairncross remembers thinking Wilson ‘very bright, though rather quiet and retiring’, without his later habit of spicing a paper or speech with quips. Perhaps he was overawed by the company. Cairncross recalls that the statistician A. L. Bowley savaged the paper, accusing Wilson of ‘multicollinarity and other statistical sins’.³⁴ Bowley’s attack may have been directed as much at Beveridge, his former boss at the LSE, as at his researcher: but in any case, few of those present were greatly concerned with what the paper said, for the same day the Germans began their invasion of Poland. Harold offered his friend Robert Steel, also at the conference, a lift back to Oxford. Steel recalls driving past Dundee railway station, and seeing scores of bewildered children with labels round their necks waiting to be evacuated from a city that was expected to be an early bombing target. They spent the first night together, in cramped conditions, in a Scottish bed and breakfast, and the second with Gladys and her parents, now in Blackpool.³⁵

The outbreak of war changed Harold’s plans, as it did everybody else’s. The first effect was to induce a period of intense restlessness on the part of his employer. Convinced that ‘the present crew have no conception at all how to plan for the war’,³⁶ Beveridge began to bombard Whitehall with offers of assistance. At first, his requests were politely rejected. He was not in good standing with the Chamberlain Government. One of a number of what he called ‘ancient war horses’ who had had leading roles in 1914–18, Beveridge was considered, accurately, as a potential trouble-maker.³⁷ Eventually, and without much official enthusiasm, he was brought into government as a part-time adviser to the Ministry of Labour. Harold, meanwhile, registered at the local employment exchange under the Military Service Act. He was categorized as a specialist, but there was no immediate demand for his specialism. (At the end of the war, he was keen to stress that he had ‘tried to volunteer for the Services’ but that ‘the Recruitment Board ordered him to do Government Department work.’³⁸ His efforts to get into uniform, however, do not appear to have been particularly strenuous.) For lack of anything more suitable, he was set to work with the Ministry of Food’s Potato Control in Oxford, remaining in college rooms for the first months of the war. His work for Beveridge continued. Harold was the last person, other than a member of the family, to sign Sir William’s visitors’ book at Avebury before the house was closed for the duration at the end of 1939.³⁹

Meanwhile, Harold’s five-year courtship with Gladys came to fruition. They had become engaged in the summer of 1938, with plans to marry in the spring of 1940. The original idea had been that Gladys, having given up her job with Lever Brothers, would spend six months at home with her parents ‘learning about housework’ before the wedding.⁴⁰ In view of wartime uncertainties, however, the wedding was brought forward and Gladys moved to Oxford, living in digs over a cafe, and taking a clerical job.

They were married on the first day of the new decade by Gladys’s father and by Nathaniel Micklem, Principal of Mansfield, in the college chapel. John Webster, the organist at University College, played the academic march ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’. Harold’s best man was Pat Duncan, a former undergraduate at Jesus, later killed in the Far East. There were fifty guests, including many other young dons. Instead of morning dress, graduate members of the congregation (including the groom) wore academic gowns. They had planned a honeymoon in the Isles of Scilly, but the war made this impossible. Instead, in cold, foggy weather, they drove to The Old Swan, Minster Lovell, a village near Oxford. Like many wartime honeymoons it was brief: in this case, cut short by Beveridge, who rang Harold after five days and ordered him peremptorily back to his desk. For Gladys, this brusque termination was to seem like an omen: of the intrusion of public demands into private spheres that characterized most of their life together.

After their marriage, the young couple moved into a furnished one-room flat in South Parks Road. The adjustment was much greater for Gladys, whose life since they had met had been so different from that of Harold. Yet she loved Oxford, and – at least in memory – was happiest there. For her it was a mythic place, visited fleetingly and always in a mood of celebration. ‘When Harold told me he wanted to teach at Oxford I thought it was wonderful,’ she recalled. ‘My idea of heaven. I can tell you there’s nothing I would have liked so much as being a don’s wife … 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 fourpenny bus ride. It symbolized so much for me.’⁴¹ One thing it symbolized was the security of her own childhood, part of which had been spent close to another university town, Cambridge.

For a brief period the symbol became her life, while Harold – awaiting his fate – continued as a research fellow and underemployed civil servant in an Oxford where there was business not-quite-as-usual. Mary described the atmosphere in one of her best poems, ‘Oxford in Wartime’, which paints a vivid picture of colleges full of government officials, with washing hanging up in the Fellows’ Garden, and an air of indolent expectancy.⁴² ‘The poem is a sort of composite’, she says, ‘based on different times. Though we did not live in Oxford for most of the war, we visited it quite often.’⁴³

For Gladys, one of the good things about Oxford was that she had her husband beside her. Harold, however, was itching for a serious role in the war. An opportunity was not long in coming. Economists he had met at the conference of the British Association in Dundee included Stanley Dennison, a young lecturer at King’s College, Newcastle, who had recently joined the Cabinet Office and had been seconded as economic adviser to Jean Monnet, Chairman in London of the Anglo–French Co-ordinating Committee, which dealt with economic and trade aspects of the Alliance. In April Dennison contacted Wilson: a dinner followed, with Dennison, Lionel Robbins and another member of the British Association. The outcome was that Wilson accepted an invitation to join Dennison as a research statistician. The Oxford idyll was over: the Wilsons moved first to temporary digs in Earl’s Court and Pimlico, then to a rented flat in Twickenham,⁴⁴ and Harold joined the swelling civilian army of Whitehall ‘temporaries’ which greatly expanded, and to a large extent revolutionized, the official machine.

It was a sharp jolt. The appointment kept Harold and Gladys together, and kept Harold out of active service. But it was an interruption in Harold’s hitherto smooth upward progress, and it placed both of them in unfamiliar and uncongenial surroundings. Neither of them knew or liked London. Harold lost the illusory sense of importance which the status of even a very minor don in Oxford conveys: Gladys, stuck in a two-room flat contemplating the hire-purchase furniture, and knowing nobody, was lonely and disorientated. Very soon, however, the pace of the war quickened for everybody.

The previous Christmas, Clement Attlee – Leader of the Labour Party, and a University College man – attended a gaudy at his old college, and met Wilson for the first time. There was talk of Winston Churchill: should he be brought in as war leader? ‘Not Churchill’, Wilson remembered Attlee saying dismissively. ‘Sixty-five, old for a Churchill.’⁴⁵ In May the Government collapsed and Churchill became Prime Minister, just as the Germans launched their invasion of the Low Countries, breaking through the French defences at Sedan.

Wilson was suddenly and briefly very busy. His responsibilities with the Anglo-French Committee, of which he was now Joint Secretary, included the preparation of weekly, then daily, reports on available supply routes, as port after port fell to the enemy.⁴⁶ The fall of France, however, also brought about the fall of the Committee. In July Wilson and Dennison were both transferred to the Economic Section of the Cabinet Secretariat, of which Professor John Jewkes was currently head. Wilson was put to work on forward estimates of industrial manpower requirements: and found himself touring some of the places he had visited in the course of his work with Beveridge.⁴⁷

The Economic Section, first under Jewkes and later under Lionel Robbins, became a power-house of influential advice on the running of the war, casting a spider’s web of bright individuals and innovative ideas through the committee system of Whitehall. In the judicious words of Edward Bridges, Secretary to the Cabinet, it marked ‘a great step forward in the use made of economists in relation to the central problems of Government’. Containing many of the most promising young economists in the country, it operated as a highly practical senior common room or university department, with the Government as its laboratory. It was also, implicitly, a Keynesian fifth column. Maynard Keynes had been drafted back into the Treasury as Economic Adviser, and Sir Kingsley Wood’s 1941 Budget showed the clear impact of his influence, inaugurating the ‘Keynesian’ Revolution. The Economic Section helped to consolidate it. Charged with the duty of presenting ‘a co-ordinated and objective picture of the economic situation as a whole and the economic aspects of projected Government policies’,⁴⁸ the Section brought the revolutionary Keynesian teaching to departments and officials who had not previously encountered it, and helped to turn it into the new orthodoxy.

Wilson’s recruitment to the Section was part of an expansion which took place in the spring and early summer of 1940. Other newcomers between April and July included Lionel Robbins, James Meade, Norman Chester, Peggy Joseph, Evan Durbin and Richard Stone. By July there were seventeen members in all,⁴⁹ of whom Wilson – barely twenty-four – was by far the youngest. ‘Harold was a little shy of us,’ recalls Sir Alec Cairncross, himself an earlier recruit. Wilson kept his own counsel, associating more with the much older Jewkes than with those closer to him in age. Despite this element of distance, he was seen as a useful member of the Section. ‘He was obviously very clever’, says Cairncross, ‘and he was very witty and entertaining.’ As at the Institute, he was not regarded as an intellectual high-flyer, or the source of ideas, but as a practical expert.

Nobody associated any particular political outlook with him. He seemed much less political than his colleague Evan Durbin, also a future Labour MP.⁵⁰ Durbin ‘looked at the war economy through the eyes of an aspiring politician’, while Wilson ‘at no time confessed to any political ambitions’. Cairncross did not discover that Wilson had any political opinions at all until they had known each other for several months. In a discussion over dinner, Wilson surprised his companions by attacking the ideas of Lionel Robbins, who (though by now won over by Keynes) retained his fiercely anti-socialist reputation. ‘You don’t believe all that stuff Lionel is putting out, do you?’ said Wilson suddenly. But he gave no indication, then or later, of distrusting the market mechanism.⁵¹

If Wilson had imagined that Whitehall would liberate him from Sir William Beveridge, he was shortly to be disillusioned. Because of his own background in the field, he was detailed to attend the Manpower Requirements Committee of the Production Council, of which he was made Joint Secretary. The Chairman of the Committee, the last of the ‘ancient war horses’ to be brought back into government, was Beveridge. The master–servant nexus was thus restored. Early in 1941, Beveridge, who had been made an under-secretary at the Ministry of Labour, invited Wilson to join him as head of the Ministry’s Manpower, Statistics and Intelligence Branch.⁵² Wilson – despite all his reservations about his old boss – accepted, and left the Cabinet Secretariat.

Even before making the move, Wilson had spent more time with Beveridge than with his Section colleagues, apart from Jewkes and Dennison. To a large extent, Wilson remained what he had been before the war: Beveridge’s research assistant. But in some ways, the relationship had changed. Wilson had acquired the ability to manage his master. According to Cairncross, Jewkes (who was also working on Manpower) ‘used to explain that he and Harold Wilson tried to handle Beveridge in the way a wild elephant is tamed by being led between two tame elephants: the wild elephant pushes in one direction and gets pushed back. In this way the wild elephant learns to keep to the road set for it.’⁵³

Jewkes and Wilson also occasionally had to deal with another rogue elephant in government: the Prime Minister. As members of the War Cabinet Secretariat, they took their share of more general official duties. Once, on night duty, they took a telephone call direct from President Roosevelt. They had to get the Cabinet Secretary to wake Churchill, and then they listened as Roosevelt promised fifty destroyers, exacting in return an assurance that if the Germans invaded and gained ground, the ships would be returned. On another occasion, Wilson had to take notes at No. 10 during a conversation between the Prime Minister and General de Gaulle, in which the leader of the Free French asked for the transfer of French gold, held by the Bank of England. Wilson recalled Churchill protesting in schoolboy French to the insistent soldier: ‘Mon cher Général, quand je me trouve en face de la Vieille Dame de Threadneedle Street, alors je suis tout à fait impotent.’⁵⁴

For Beveridge, the first months after his return to Whitehall were a twilight period, as he struggled angrily for a role worthy of his talents. The chairmanship of the Manpower Committee was not an important post, and carried no executive responsibility. It did, however, give him a foothold in an area that interested him. It also helped to create a leftish team of University College dons dealing with manpower: in addition to Wilson, there was G. D. H. Cole, responsible for local fieldwork. Clashes with Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, however, led to Beveridge’s eventual sacking. In June 1941 Beveridge was removed from administrative work and put in charge of an investigation into the use of skilled manpower in the armed forces, while retaining the services of Wilson, as Secretary of the Committee, and those of another Oxford don, Frank Pakenham, as one of his personal assistants.

Beveridge also agreed to chair an interdepartmental inquiry, which began work in July, into the co-ordination of social insurance.⁵⁵ He asked Wilson to act as secretary, ‘but by this time’, Wilson records, ‘I was fully involved in other work and had to decline.’⁵⁶ If he had not been, the offer might have been resistible: for Beveridge was gaining a Whitehall reputation as a nuisance, and his inquiry was regarded as a form of exile. Later, Wilson must have kicked himself for missing the opportunity. In May 1942 Beveridge turned his undivided attention, not just to the problem of social insurance, but also to the much wider question of post-war social reform.⁵⁷ In December 1942, his report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, the contents of which had already been leaked to the press, was published against a background of unprecedented public interest and enthusiasm.

The Beveridge Report became the main pillar of the post-war Welfare State, its prescriptions guiding the 1945 Attlee Government and its successors. When the report came out, Beveridge told Wilson: ‘This is the greatest advance in our history. There can be no turning back. From now on Beveridge is not the name of a man; it is the name of a way of life, and not only for Britain, but for the whole of the civilized world.’⁵⁸ Such was Wilson’s professional intimacy with Beveridge, that he would almost certainly have played a major part in the construction of the report, if he had been involved. To have been closely associated with such a document would have been a magnificent springboard for a political career.

It did not happen: instead, eighteen months before the publication of the Beveridge Report, and after four years of the closest possible association, the two went their separate ways. Yet the imprint of Beveridge upon Wilson was deep, and Wilson would have been a very different person, and political animal, if their paths had not crossed. For all his bitterness towards his employer, Wilson had obtained much from a man of great intellect, energy and ingenuity as well as of personal selfishness, coldness and conceit. He had been tested, trained, exploited, and transformed from a clever fledgling graduate into a statistical analyst of unique experience and immense stamina. He had been brought into contact with leading academic and political figures, and had taken their measure. He had acquired habits of work, and habits of mind, even more formidably diligent and disciplined than those he had taught himself. (He was fond of claiming later that he had learnt from Beveridge ‘that a great man does his own work. His own essential work, at any rate. Beveridge had his research assistant, but only so that more could be done than he could do himself, not to save himself doing everything.’)⁵⁹

Finally, and perhaps most important, Beveridge gave him a sense of possibility. To work at close quarters with a man of world renown, to see his weaknesses as well as his strengths, and to observe his techniques, is a good way to cultivate an ambition. The enormous success and popularity of the Beveridge Report, over a year after they had parted company, increased Wilson’s sense of what was within reach.