Harold Wilson. Peter Hennessy

the First World War. What seemed a threat to the area in peacetime, however, became a golden opportunity as soon as the fighting began. Dyestuffs were needed for the textile and paper industries. With German supplies no longer available, British production had to increase. ‘It was not until after War had broken out with Germany’, a Huddersfield handbook observed, and the humiliating fact of our too great dependence upon that country for many valuable, nay, vital products, became unpleasantly manifest that the general British public, and even Government circles, began to realize how essential to the life of a great nation was a well-organized and highly developed coal tar industry.’ There was also another, fortuitous aspect: namely, that most high explosives used in modern warfare, in particular picric acid, trinitrotoluene (TNT) and trinitrophenylmethylmitramine (tetryl), were derivatives of coal tar, whose use and properties were familiar to the dyestuffs industry. Thus, Herbert’s first employer in Milnsbridge, Leitch and Co. (which described itself as a firm of ‘Aniline Dye Manufacturers and Makers of Intermediate Products, and Nitro Compounds for Explosives’) claimed to have been the first makers of TNT in Britain, having started to manufacture the substance as early as 1902.

      H. H. Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister in 1914, was a Huddersfield man. By leading his government into the Great War, he transformed the economy of his home town. As the importance of artillery bombardment during the great battles in Flanders and northern France grew, so the demand for high-explosive shells became insatiable. Production in Huddersfield increased tenfold, with John W. Leitch and Co. a major beneficiary. By the summer of 1915, when Harold was conceived, both the firm and the town were booming (the word seems particularly appropriate) as never before.¹⁷

      Herbert Wilson was in charge of the explosives department of Leitch and Co. Before the war, this was a job of limited importance and modest pay. The starting wage of £2.10s. per week provided for the Wilsons’ needs, but permitted few luxuries. The sudden boost in production changed all that, and Herbert’s value to the firm, and his salary, rapidly increased. By 1916 Herbert was earning £260 per annum, plus an annual profit bonus of £100. Herbert and Ethel responded to their good fortune in two ways. They decided to have another child, partly in the hope (as it was said) of a son to carry on the family name, for Herbert’s married brother only had daughters. They also decided to move to a better neighbourhood. A year after Harold’s birth, as the big guns before the Somme threw into the German trenches the best that Huddersfield and Milnsbridge had to offer, Herbert, Ethel, Marjorie and Harold moved to 40 Western Road, Milnsbridge, a more salubrious address and a larger, semidetached house with a substantial garden. Such was the Wilsons’ new-found affluence that Herbert became an owner-occupier, paying £440 for the house – £220 from savings, the rest on a mortgage.¹⁸

      For Ethel and Marjorie, it seemed like a gift from heaven. Marjorie had a large room of her own. There was a cellar, where Ethel did the laundry, and a spacious attic, which in due course became Harold’s lair, with ample room to set up his Hornby train. It was, as a school-friend says, a middle-class dwelling in a middle-class area.¹⁹ The peak of Herbert’s success, however, had not yet been reached. Eighteen months after the move, and doubtless anticipating the changed pattern of production after wartime needs had ceased, Herbert accepted a job as works chemist in charge of the dyes department at L. B. Holliday and Co., the nation’s biggest supplier of dyestuffs, at a salary of £425 per annum.²⁰ Prices had risen during the war, but even allowing for inflation, the mortgage and the baby, the Wilsons were now very much better off than they had been in 1914. At the age of thirty-six, Herbert had reached a plateau from which there would be no further ascent. His move to Holliday and Co. coincided almost exactly with the ending of the war. A contraction of the chemical industry followed, long before the onset of the national depression – placing a pall of uncertainty over all who worked in it. Yet there was no immediate cause for concern. Though demand for explosives fell sharply, it was some time before the dyestuffs industry faced pre-war levels of competition.

      During Harold’s early childhood, the Wilson home was a visibly contented one, busily absorbed in the voluntary and community activities that were typical of a well-ordered, Nonconformist household. On the surface, it was not a complicated family. There were no rifts or rows or vendettas or mistresses or black sheep that we know of: and, perhaps, no wild passions or romances. If there were tensions, they were well hidden from each other and from the world. Although the Wilsons were healthy – surprisingly so, in Herbert’s case, for a man who worked with noxious chemicals – they were not handsome. Early, faded photographs display a benign, asexual chubbiness on both sides, the parents appearing undatably middle-aged before their time, the children plain, plump and bland. They were as they seemed: a family preoccupied by dutiful routines, kindly, fond, well-meaning. Were the Wilsons too good to be true? There is a lace-curtain, speak-well-of-your-neighbours, aspect to the early years of Harold which makes the sceptical modern observer uneasy, as though it masked a pent-up rage, like a coiled spring.

      Eager striving best describes the Wilsons’ way of life. Frivolity had little place. Harold was taught to self-improve from a very tender age: when, at six, he wrote a letter to Father Christmas, accompanied by thirty hopeful kisses, his list of requests began with a tool box, a pair of compasses, a divider and a joiner’s pencil.²¹ Religious observance was of central importance. Both Herbert and Ethel were Congregationalists, but, in the absence of a chapel of their denomination in the locality, they went to Milnsbridge Baptist Church. Much of their Christianity was formal: grace was said before meals, and the family regularly attended church and Sunday school. ‘I would not say there was an atmosphere of religious fervour,’ Harold later maintained.²² Nevertheless, an interest in Church and faith suffused the atmosphere of the Wilson household, providing a framework for their social activities. These filled every leisure hour. Herbert ran the Church Amateur Operatic Society, Ethel founded and organized the local Women’s Guild, both taught in Sunday school. Pride of place was taken by the Scouts and Guides, in which all four members of the family were earnestly and devotedly involved.

      The Boy Scout Movement, a last, moralizing echo of Empire, reached its nostalgic zenith as Harold was growing up. There was much in the Scouting ideal to appeal to the Nonconformist conscience: a simple, universal code, an emphasis on practical knowledge, on healthy, outdoor living, and on a rejection of what Lord Baden-Powell, in Scouting for Boys, called ‘unclean thoughts’. Scouting gave the Wilsons, newcomers to Cowersley and Milnsbridge, companionship and a sense of belonging to a wide, international network. It also provided an alternative ladder of promotion, with its own quaint hierarchy of quasi-military grades and positions of authority. Herbert became a District Commissioner, and is to be seen, proudly cherubic and clad in ridiculous wide-brimmed hat and neckerchief, in the local newspaper photographs which marked ritual occasions. Ethel was a Guide Captain; when Marjorie grew up she became a District Commissioner as well; and Harold rose to the level of King’s Scout.

      Harold’s first serious ambition was to be a wolf cub. He joined the Milnsbridge Cubs just before his eighth birthday and in due course graduated to the 3rd Colne Valley Milnsbridge Baptist Scouts, later part of the 20th Huddersfield.²³ It was a large, active troop, which met every Friday and boasted a drum-and-bugle band. Harold was not just a keen scout, he was a passionate one. He always claimed the Scouting Movement as a formative influence, and the snapshots tell their own tale: Harold enthusiastically cooking sausages, or thrusting himself to the forefront of a group photograph, cheerful, perky, eager, and enjoying the campfire convivialities more seriously than his companions. It was in the Milnsbridge Cubs that Harold first met Harold Ainley, a school contemporary who became a Huddersfield councillor and made a speciality of giving interviews to journalists and biographers about his recollections of the future Prime Minister. Ainley is in no doubt about the importance of the Scouts, for both of them. ‘It gave us ideals and standards,’ he says.²⁴

      Harold was a dedicated camper. He once travelled under the supervision of the local Baptist minister (who was also the scoutmaster) on a camping trip to a site near Nijmegen in Holland. On another occasion, as a senior patrol leader, Harold helped to wait at a scout dinner given for the Assistant County Commissioner, a Colonel Stod-dart Scott. They next met in the House of Commons as members of the parliamentary branch of the Guild of Old Scouts. Harold remained a faithful scouting alumnus. As a resident of Hampstead Garden Suburb he became chairman of the North London Scout