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5

MINES

One reason why Wilson rejected Beveridge’s offer may have been that, almost simultaneously, he received another which he found more attractive. This was a post in the Mines Department, where there was an urgent need to modernize the method of calculating coal production figures. The appointment came about casually. ‘They wanted a statistician and asked me if I could think of somebody,’ says Sir Alec Cairncross. ‘I suggested Harold.’¹ Wilson eagerly accepted, and embarked on a new Whitehall career that led – indirectly but just about foreseeably – to a parliamentary seat. The miners were the most powerful union in the Labour Movement, sponsoring more, than a fifth of all Labour MPs; coal was rapidly becoming the most sensitive issue of the war on the Home Front. Neither point, we may guess, escaped the attention of Wilson.

Few industries in wartime were as important, or as inefficiently organized, as coal, two years after the outbreak of hostilities. At the beginning of 1942, there were no fewer than 1,135 colliery companies producing coal from an estimated 1,900 coal mines.² The fear was of a fuel crisis, which might damage vital war production. To avoid one, the Government had moved in, taking appropriate measures. One of these had been labour conscription: faced with a net loss of miners into the better paid munitions industry, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, had introduced compulsory direction under wartime powers. Although this reduced the danger of a shortage, it added to a deep dissatisfaction among miners over wages and conditions.

Because of these difficulties, the Mines Department – responsible for the machinery of state regulation – acquired a special political significance, as did the regular statistics of production. The Department was a sub-division, or satellite ministry, of the Board of Trade, and it was the Board’s President, Sir Andrew Duncan, who provided effective direction. Wilson’s job – shared with John Fulton, another Oxford don temporarily in Whitehall – was to supply Duncan (and David Grenfell, the Welsh MP who was Secretary of the Department) with a monthly dose of figures. This was made harder by the notorious inaccuracy of the statistics provided by the colliery owners. Consequently, one of Wilson’s first tasks was to work out how to treat them. The owners made much of the alleged problem of miners’ absenteeism. Wilson wrote a paper on ‘Absenteeism and Productivity’ in which he disputed the statistical basis for the owners’ claim that poor levels of production were the fault of the face workers. Instead, he explained a decline in total output in terms of the fall in the total mining workforce, which had meant that the proportion involved in unproductive but essential ‘cost work’ – safety work, winding, pumping and so on – inevitably grew, bringing down the average per shift.³ He later claimed that this was the first use of the term ‘productivity’ in an official document.⁴

Sir Andrew Duncan was replaced as President of the Board of Trade in February 1942 by Hugh Dalton, a very different kind of politician. One of the most forceful of Labour’s leaders in the Coalition, Dalton had earned a reputation as ‘Dr Dynamo’ at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, from which department he had been moved following bitter clashes with other ministers. Dalton had another attribute, of some importance to any would-be Labour politician. He made a practice, a hobby even, of talent-spotting among the promising Labour-inclined young men he encountered. Among those who had already benefited from his patronage were Christopher Mayhew, Douglas Jay and Hugh Gaitskell. Wilson now came to his attention as well.

Dalton lunched with Duncan at the beginning of March. Afterwards, he noted his predecessor’s recommendation to ‘promote Harold Wilson to be Director of Programmes’.⁵ Duncan’s opinion was reinforced by that of a young economist and temporary civil servant, Hugh Gaitskell, whom Dalton had employed as his personal assistant at his previous ministry, and now brought with him to the Board. Dalton asked Gaitskell to carry out a review of the Mines Department and its personnel. Gaitskell submitted a highly charged report which urged a major shake-up and was severely critical of some senior officials. Wilson, however, he singled out for special praise. He wrote that the young statistician was ‘extraordinarily able. He is only twenty-six, or thereabouts, and is one of the most brilliant younger people about … he has revolutionized the coal statistics … The great thing about him is that he understands what statistics are administratively important and interesting. We must on no account surrender him either to the Army or to any other department.’⁶

That both Duncan and Gaitskell spoke well of Wilson, suggests that his reputation was high at the political end of the ministry. Gaitskell’s enthusiasm, however, was not universal. A. J. Ryan, then an assistant secretary in the department, believes that the civil service departmental head, Lord Hindley, treated the young statistician with caution. Whether or not this was so, Ryan’s own opinion of Wilson was distinctly cool.

One of Wilson’s jobs was to prepare statistics of coal stocks – where they were, where they needed to go, and how they were to be disposed of – for a weekly meeting which Hindley chaired. According to Ryan, Wilson exuded confidence and authority at these meetings, yet when he was challenged on his figures, he could not always justify them. Once (says Ryan) he made the cardinal error of confusing figures for output and for distribution, failing to take into account that at many pits there were insufficient trucks to carry the coal away. ‘All our troubles would be gone, if we could do that,’ said Hindley – meaning that there would be no shortage if output could be equated with distribution. Ryan sees the incident as symptomatic. ‘Wilson didn’t understand the coal business, and didn’t bother to find out what he might have,’ he maintains. Ryan’s distrust was based on the suspicion that, despite all Wilson’s years with Beveridge, establishing statistical truth was not his only objective: he was as much concerned to ingratiate himself. ‘His job was to be told by Viscount Hindley what was required, and say whether it could be done,’ recalls Ryan. ‘But he wasn’t straight. He arranged matters to suit his own convenience, rather than fact.’

Wilson seemed to Ryan semi-detached from the team spirit which bound together the small, wartime department (from June 1942, merged into 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 is clear that the decision had, in effect, already been taken. ‘His plan was to get established as a don, and then try for a seat at thirty,’ she says. ‘He enjoyed his pupils and the Oxford life. But he always intended to go into politics. He didn’t want to spend the next fifty years lecturing about politics. He wanted to take part.’ She adds: ‘If the war had not happened, Harold would probably have stayed at Univ. He would have consolidated his donnish career and then tried to find a seat.’¹⁷

Harold was due to be thirty in March 1946. The length of the war remained uncertain, but an election could not be postponed indefinitely and was likely at about that time, or possibly a little sooner. To wait might mean a delay until he was thirty-five. As a member of the civil service, his ability to involve himself in party politics was circumscribed, something he had not built into his calculations before 1939. Nevertheless, Wilson was a man of precise timetables, and it is possible that from quite early in the war, he had it in mind to stand for Parliament as soon as he could.

Identifying his wartime political activity is not easy, probably because there was very little of it. Given, indeed, the pressures of work and the need to commute, at various times, to his family in Oxford, Cornwall or Duxford, it is remarkable that he had time for any at all. Nevertheless, he seems to have begun quite early in the war, to involve himself politically in those fields which interested him. Having left Oxford for the duration, and having no permanent home in London, he joined the local Labour Party at Liskeard. In London, he attended meetings of the Fabian Society, where better known socialist intellectuals began to notice him. Douglas Jay remembers hearing him talk in favour of steel nationalization at the Fabian headquarters in Dartmouth Street. After the meeting, Wilson mounted his bicycle and said that he was riding to Cambridgeshire – presumably to Duxford, to see his family. (Jay has no recollection of Wilson in Whitehall, although they were briefly together at the Board of Trade: ‘He was not in the mainstream of the war effort,’ says Jay dismissively.)¹⁸

From Wilson’s point of view, the Fabian Society office had the advantage of being close to where he worked. Its nuts-and-bolts approach to policy-formulation also fitted in well with his own outlook. During 1943, he started to take a keen interest in recent Fabian reports, acquiring a stack of the Society’s pamphlets, and sending some to Herbert. He also made himself sufficiently well known, and useful, to leading Fabians to secure his own co-option onto the Society’s Executive. ‘Fabian affairs have moved quickly,’ he wrote to his parents at the end of October, after his American trip. ‘I yesterday had a platform ticket for the [Herbert] Morrison lecture, which 1 attended. There were twelve of us on the platform, including Morrison, John Parker, Ellen Wilkinson, M.[argaret] Cole etc. I met H.M., before and after the lecture.’¹⁹ He stayed on the Fabian Executive until 1945 – and was later remembered as having been a ‘most stimulating and useful’ member.²⁰

There were other symptoms of a developing political objective. In his letter about ‘Fabian affairs’, Harold also drew his parents’ attention to a prominent item that had just appeared in the Birkenhead News, a Cheshire paper, about some of his recent exploits. This predicted a bright future for the young civil servant, possibly in politics. ‘It’s a good puff, Harold observed, ‘… as there’s nothing like a legend, a prophecy & a belief in inevitability for getting votes.’²¹ A few weeks later, in December 1943, he revealed his plan to enter politics to Sir William Beveridge.²² Most other people he knew remained unaware of it. Sir Alec Cairncross, however, recalls Wilson saying sometime in 1944 that he had recently visited the North of England on a number of occasions, ‘to see the miners’, and had spoken at meetings and public gatherings.²³ The implication was that the visits had been political, rather than official – though the distinction may have been blurred.

In the same year, Labour’s National Executive authorized constituency parties to adopt prospective candidates, in anticipation of the break-up of the Coalition and an election, and began to build up its own lists of approved aspirants for this purpose. Hitherto selections had been blocked because of the electoral truce; new candidatures arose only when a Labour MP died or resigned, causing a by-election. The opening up of the lists created an unprecedented number of opportunities, for there had been no election since 1935. Many members of the elderly Parliamentary Labour Party were due to retire. Labour, though not expected to win an overall majority, hoped to gain a fair number of seats. From the point of view of the would-be candidate, therefore, there was a cornucopia, but also a lottery.

Despite a large number of vacancies, the process was haphazard. Because of the war, party membership had fallen and many branches failed to meet. Selections took place hurriedly, and some service candidates were even chosen on vague recommendations, in absentia. ‘There was a tremendous element of luck in the 1945 election. Some extraordinary people ran and got in,’ says Denis Healey, who was chosen (for a seat which he narrowly failed to win) after a friend of his father’s had spoken on his behalf at a selection conference, which he could not attend because of the war.²⁴ Choices were particularly casual where there was little chance of winning: yet, because an election had not been held for so long, it was often hard to decide what was winnable and what was not. In the event, the unexpected Labour landslide brought victory in many seats regarded as hopeless at the time of selection.

Wilson was put forward for the Labour Party’s ‘B’ List of potential candidates (those not sponsored by trade unions) by Tom Smith, junior minister at Fuel and Power and a former miner, and by John Parker, General Secretary of the Fabian Society. It may have helped that Wilson had, for some time, made himself invaluable to Smith in the office, frequently helping with tricky parliamentary questions.²⁵ He was considered with a batch of others at a meeting of the National Executive Elections Sub-Committee on 9 February 1944. The minutes contain the name of Wilson, J. H., of 19 Fitzwilliam House, Little Green, Richmond, Surrey, a member of the Liskeard and Oxford University Labour Parties, as one of those accepted. At twenty-seven, Wilson was one of the younger hopefuls, but not the youngest. Another name approved on the same day was that of a twenty-two-year-old serving officer called C. A. R. Crosland.²⁶

The list was circulated to constituencies. At post-war elections, an aspirant who merely appeared on the list, and took no further step, would almost certainly be ignored in the competitive scramble for nominations. In the peculiar conditions of 1944–5, however, the number of constituency parties seeking candidates exceeded the supply of plausible contestants, so would-be MPs found themselves in a sellers’ market. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wilson – with his academic qualifications, government experience and Northern background – was approached during the spring of 1944 by several local parties, despite his lack of Labour Movement pedigree.

At his first selection conference, in Peterborough, he was runner-up. His second attempt was in the Lancashire constituency of Ormskirk, quite close to the Wirral: here he could claim to be a local boy. Ormskirk stretched from Liverpool, where 37,000 of its constituents were within the city boundary, to the coast south of Southport and almost as far as Preston. A large, sprawling territory, it included agricultural land, much of it potato fields, as well as estates of former slum-dwellers, moved out of Liverpool. At Skelmersdale and Upholland, there were mining communities, which had experienced high unemployment because of pit closures. Yet there were also owner-occupiers, with traditions of Liberal and Tory voting.

Facing the selection committee, Wilson must have seemed a good, if politically shaky, prospect. He knew nothing of Labour rituals or ethos. But he was energetic, knowledgeable, sharp and friendly, and could talk impressively about the mining industry. The selection conference was held in September 1944 in the Congregational Schoolroom in Ormskirk, a propitious venue. About fifty delegates attended, and listened to four candidates, ‘the proceedings being of a most amicable character’, according to the local newspaper. The content of his speech was not reported at the time: after he became MP, however, he reminded local supporters that in 1945 he had promised them ‘a new deal in regard to the basic industry of coal, and the miners of Skelmersdale now knew that they and their sons could look forward to an industry of which they could be proud under national ownership’.²⁷

At the selection meeting he faced strong competition from a local farmer from Rossendale, Alderman C. Kenyon, who later became MP for Chorley.²⁸ The other contestants were a General Workers’ Union organizer, and a railway ticket-collector. Wilson won, with Kenyon the runner-up. The outcome scarcely caused excitement, in Ormskirk or anywhere else. The seat was not a promising one for Labour, and Wilson accepted the contest as a trial run. There was some chance of winning. But it was, at best, a gamble – of an unusually complicated nature.

Ormskirk had a peculiar electoral history. S. T. Rosbotham, a local farmer, had taken the seat for Labour by a narrow majority over the Conservatives in 1929, only to desert Labour and follow Ramsay MacDonald two years later. In the ensuing election, and again in 1935, ‘National Labour’ held the seat by large majorities against orthodox Labour challengers. When the seat became vacant in 1939, Commander Stephen King-Hall, a publicist of distinctly independent views, secured the National Labour colours and was returned unopposed. By this time, adherence to National Labour meant simply that he took the Government whip, while remaining open-minded about Government policy.

From the beginning of his parliamentary career, the Commander – who was well known to the London intelligentsia for his I. F. Stone-like National News-Letter – had been extremely open-minded. In May 1940, he was one of the forty-four normal Government supporters in the Commons who voted against Chamberlain after the Norway debate. He had since become one of the Churchill administration’s least tractable critics, the more irritating to the Government because he had a regular outlet for his opinions. Indeed, his News-Letter often read like a socialist polemic. In February 1944 he castigated the Government on the need for planning to meet Britain’s post-war needs, and in April he congratulated the Government’s enemies on defeating it in Committee on the issue of equal pay for equal work in the Education Bill, urging ministers ‘to be more active and progressive on the domestic front’.²⁹ Such boat-rocking did not, of course, endear him to Conservative Central Office. Wilson knew that when the Coalition broke up, there would be a question mark over his future.

The critical issue, still undecided at the time of Wilson’s selection, was whether the Conservatives would run a candidate against King-Hall. If they did not, then Wilson’s own hope of victory was small. If they did, and the anti-Labour vote was split, his chances improved. Wilson knew King-Hall in Whitehall, where the Minister of Fuel and Power had employed him to run a propaganda drive to raise coal production. This acquaintanceship may have given Wilson some inkling of what might happen at Ormskirk before he put in for the Labour candidacy. But he could not be sure. He turned out to be lucky. Soon after his own selection, a Tory candidate was put up against King-Hall. Even so, it was impossible in 1944 to know how the votes would fall, or which of the three candidates was best placed.

Despite the uncertainty, Wilson acted decisively. The best temporaries were asked to stay in Whitehall after the war. Wilson, who had risen fast to a high post at a young age, could hope for such an opportunity, with the prospect of rising much higher. He enjoyed the civil service, but did not hesitate in his choice. Since he could not both remain an official and stand for Parliament, he left Whitehall as quickly as he could. There was some feeling (unjustified, in view of other indicators) that his real reason for standing was to secure his early release.³⁰ Eyebrows were raised at the precipitate retirement of an able-bodied young official, before Germany, let alone Japan, had been conquered. Nevertheless, his departure was crowned, in the 1945 New Year’s Honours, with the standard Whitehall reward for a temporary civil servant of his rank, an OBE. Before getting his candidacy at Ormskirk, he had been elected a Tutorial Fellow in Economics at University College, and it was to Oxford that he returned.³¹

It was a period of waiting: the outcome of the war seemed certain, but its duration – and the timing of the election – were not. While the war continued, Wilson began to be noticed as a politician, and possibly one with a bright future. Shortly after his selection, the Daily Telegraph ran a significant little story, which must have caused irritation on both sides of the civil servant–politician divide. It described Wilson as ‘one of the most prominent wartime civil servants with parliamentary ambitions’, and declared that at twenty-eight ‘Mr Wilson is looked on by Socialists as a coming President of the Board of Trade or Chancellor of the Exchequer.’³² Beveridge’s stepson Philip Mair, a fellow temporary, bumped into him in Whitehall before he resigned and asked about his future. Wilson replied that he was going into politics. ‘Isn’t that a rum sort of thing for you to do?’ said Mair, in surprise. ‘It depends what you think you can make of it,’ said Wilson. Mair took this to mean that he already had ministerial ambitions.³³

Back in Oxford, there were few undergraduates to teach, but Wilson was given the jobs of Junior Dean and Home Bursar, which placed him in charge of the college’s catering budget. At first, Gladys and Robin stayed in the Richmond flat, while Harold continued to work in London, lecturing to naval officers on current affairs. Then at Easter 1945 the whole family returned to Oxford, moving into rooms on Staircase Eleven, in University College’s Back Quad. The idyll was briefly revived. Only a handful of women lived in college, where normal rules and practices were suspended: Gladys and Robin had the run of the Fellows’ Garden. Harold’s attention, however, was elsewhere. Having taken the first important step towards politics, he directed as much of his concentrated energy to it as he had previously focused on trade cycle research and coal statistics. Before the election, he prepared a report on railway nationalization for the Railway Clerks’ Association. He also spent five weeks writing a quasi-political, quasi-academic tract, New Deal for Coal, which drew on his experience at the Mines Department and was published by an enterprising young Austrian immigrant, called George Weidenfeld, on polling day.

The book had the character of a Fabian blueprint and consisted of a sober plan for nationalizing the coal industry. Most of it was devoted to a detailed and technical account of how a National Coal Board might be set up on public corporation lines. It opposed the ‘workers’ control’ approach to the staffing of the boards of nationalized industries which had been favoured by some trade unions in the 1930s, and opted for what came to be known as the ‘Morrisonian’ method, advocating control by ‘men chosen for their ability and technical competence … the replacement, in short, of amateurs by professionals’. If it was necessary to pay £15,000 per annum for the right chairman, Wilson was in favour of doing so. His argument for nationalization was on efficiency, not ethical or doctrinal, grounds. The book concluded by (in effect) equating socialism and modernization. The aim, said the author, was to show

not only that socialism and efficiency are compatible, but also that socialism, properly applied, is the only means to full efficiency; and, finally, that, through that efficiency, the interest of the consumer, in a plentiful supply of coal at a reasonable price, can be reconciled with the right of the miner to a high standard of living, good working conditions, and an effective share in controlling the destination of the industry in which he works.³⁴

Though administrative in tone and specialist, it was polemical in intent, showing how, in practical terms, the progress towards state control which had been made during the war could be driven home. It followed a theme in Wilson’s political interests which had begun before the war. Wilson had taken a close look at the detailed mechanics of possible nationalization in a number of key industries: electricity, railways and steel – finally coal. For a nationalizing administration, such knowledge would clearly be an asset. New Deal for Coal was Wilson’s first major credential as a Labour technical expert, perfectly timed – as it turned out – to draw its author to the attention of the Party hierarchy, at the precise moment when places in a new Government had to be filled. When the book appeared, Will Lawther, the miners’ leader, helpfully described it as ‘one of the most important statements issued on this despised and rejected industry’.³⁵

At Whitsun 1945, Wilson attended Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, using the opportunity to cultivate his former ministerial chief, Hugh Dalton, who noted afterwards that ‘Harold Wilson, our candidate for Ormskirk’, accompanied him on the journey back to London.³⁶ Meanwhile, in Ormskirk, Harold was cutting his teeth as a platform speaker. He had little experience of public meetings. Now he took to the sport with enthusiasm. Gladys was less keen. ‘In 1945, when I went to my very first meeting, it was quiet and orderly and I said to Harold, wasn’t it nice and quiet,’ she recalled in the 1960s. ‘He didn’t think it was nice. It was too quiet and dull. The next meeting was terrible, I thought. A lot of shouting and anger and at the end of it I found I was actually trembling. But he was delighted.’³⁷ Such disturbances, however, were rare. Harold toured his potential constituency, visiting its large Liverpool estates and small villages and townships, delivering dry, fact-filled lectures to generally deferential audiences. It was like New Street Council School, after his Australian trip, over again. He was soon addicted.

After the end of the war in Europe, the Coalition broke up and a Caretaker Conservative Government took over, pending the general election which was held on 5 July. Shortly after the dissolution in June, Harold’s old friend Robert Steel, now also a don, met him by chance in Barclays Bank in Oxford High Street, opposite St Mary’s Church. ‘I’m standing in the election,’ said Harold. ‘Oh, really,’ replied Steel. ‘For which party?’ Wilson told him that he was putting up for Labour, against Commander King-Hall. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Steel cheerfully, meaning that he thought he wouldn’t.³⁸ This was the general view, though by now Harold knew he had a decent chance. Gladys did not expect him to win, and had not fully considered the implications if he did so. Their present life suited her, and she saw no reason, for the moment, why it should not continue.³⁹

Nationally, the 1945 campaign was quiet. In Ormskirk it was scarcely noticed by the disparate inhabitants. The main excitement was on the Conservative side. Tory supporters, ignoring the Labour candidate, directed personal abuse at Commander King-Hall, whom they regarded as a deserter. The Commander, who stood as a so-called Independent National, later complained bitterly in his News-Letter about the behaviour of ‘a small section of the Conservative Party’ in Ormskirk, and its ‘meaningless claptrap’.⁴⁰ Unfortunately for King-Hall, the ‘small section’ included the Prime Minister, who did his own bit to wreck the Commander’s chances by sending a telegram to the official Tory candidate, A. C. Greg, saying that he did not wish to see Commander King-Hall in the new Parliament. The Manchester Guardian rushed to King-Hall’s defence. ‘None has worked harder to “put across” the coalition idea,’ it declared.⁴¹

Wilson was delighted at the family feud among his opponents. Travelling with his father and a cheerfully chaotic band of activists, he was the least well known of the three candidates, as well as the dullest speaker. He claimed, or let others claim on his behalf, a working-class background.⁴² Mainly, he stuck to official briefs. After the result was known, a chastened King-Hall described Wilson as ‘a highly intelligent young man, who made all the stereotyped party promises’.⁴³

A series of Gallup polls, published in the News Chronicle, pointed to a Labour victory. Scarcely anybody believed them. Later, in a study of the election, Wilson’s old politics tutor, R. B. McCallum, called the 1945 election ‘the Waterloo of the political meteorologists’⁴⁴ – that is, of old-style commentators who assessed public opinion by wetting a finger. Wilson, the statistician, may have had a better sense than most of what was going to happen. If so, he did not let on. ‘We certainly weren’t sure about the result,’ says Mary.⁴⁵ After the poll and before the count (delayed for the collection of the overseas services vote) Hugh Dalton made a private guess that Labour would gain eighty seats, and cut the Tory overall majority to a hundred. Similar predictions were made by politicians and observers of all persuasions. Dalton noted, however, that the large number of triangular contests, where previously there had been straight fights, would help Labour.⁴⁶

In the intervening weeks, Harold returned to Oxford, where Gladys looked forward to a restoration of the pre-election status quo. In late July, Herbert and Harold went up to Ormskirk for the count. At first there was some doubt. The Tory candidate had polled so strongly that if the Conservatives had united behind King-Hall, Wilson would probably have been defeated. Soon, however, it became clear that a huge national swing of opinion to Labour, combined with an emphatic reassertion of the two-party system, had swept the Independent Commander into political oblivion. Wilson won by a large margin, though with a minority of votes cast: 30,126, compared with 23,104 for Greg and 11,848 for King-Hall.