Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson's former family home goes on sale for the first time since he sold it in 1956 | Daily Mail Online Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson's former family home goes on sale for the first time since he sold it in 1956 Former family home of PM Harold Wilson has gone on sale for £1.7 million The ex Labour leader's property went on sale on day of General Election He lived at the London home before becoming PM between 1948 and 1956 Property was created for famous Australian artist Tom Roberts in 1909 comments The family home of former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson went on the market for the first time in six decades - on General Election Day. While ballots were being cast across the country, the home of the ex-PM was put up for sale - for a cool £1.7million. Wilson lived in the Grade II listed property, in Hampstead Garden, north London, with his wife Mary and their two sons between 1948 and 1956 when he was a member of the Labour Cabinet.

The family home of former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson went on the market for the first time in six decades He then sold the house and moved next door - which bears a historic blue plaque - before relocating to 10 Downing Street in 1964. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share This is the first time the home has come to the market since that sale in 1956. The unique home's political history is not its only attraction however. It was designed by architect Geoffrey Lucas of Parker & Unwin’s architectural practice and built in 1909 in the Suburb. Wilson lived in the Grade II listed property, in Hampstead Garden, north London, with his wife Mary and their two sons between 1948 and 1956 when he was a member of the Labour Cabinet Hampstead Garden Suburb was founded on land bought from Eton College in 1907 by Dame Henrietta Barnett, who also started the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and is internationally recognised as one of the finest examples of early twentieth century domestic architecture. The home itself was created for famous Australian artist Tom Roberts - a key member of the Heidelberg School.

RESTRICTIONS ON LISTED HOMES Grade II listed properties are classed as homes or buildings which are particularly important. In the UK they are 370,000 properties which are listed - while 92 per cent of those are Grade II. Listed properties usually come with building restrictions and permitted development rights are typically suspended. Anyone wanting to carry out work must seek listed building consent from a local planning authority. Even minor changes such as painting or repairs will often need the special permission. Punishment for work without consent is tough- up to a 12-month prison sentence or an unlimited fine. And the works would still need to be rectified. But Grade I and II* buildings may be eligible for English Heritage grants for urgent major repairs. It still boasts many of its original features based around a large living room which was originally the artist's studio. The four bedroom property also includes an interconnecting kitchen and dining room, small outside cellar, large garage and off-street parking. But one of its major attractions is the large, mature south-facing garden and patio.

Philip Green, director of sellers Goldschmidt & Howland, said: 'It's unique because most of the houses in the Suburb aren't listed - they're protected by the conservation area of the Suburb but they're not listed. 'It means that parts of the house have been protected whereas a lot of the others have been changed extensively.' Nigel Walker, whose parents, Robert and Betty, originally bought the house from Wilson, told Ham & High Property: 'The house remains configured almost exactly as it was when first built although Walker’s parents made some improvements and the artist’s studio now functions as a family living room. “My mother and father knocked through the wall between the kitchen and the studio, which Mr Roberts evidently had built so that he would not be disturbed by the domestic staff! Not having the wall made the house much more convenient to live in.' The house is on the market at £1,700,000 through Goldschmidt & Howland. PRIME MINISTER HAROLD WILSON: ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL LEADERS IN LABOUR'S HISTORY Harold Wilson was one of Labour's most successful leaders - winning four out of five elections that he contested and serving eight years in Number 10.

Harold Wilson was one of Labour's most successful leaders - winning four out of five elections that he contested and serving eight years in Number 10. Wilson, the son of a chemist and teacher, was born in Huddersfield, on March 11, 1916. At just eight-years-old in 1924 he visited 10 Downing Street, which would later become his home. The Labour MP entered Parliament in 1945 and was made President of the Board of Trade two years later aged just 31 - the youngest member of the Cabinet in the 20th century. Wilson went onto serve as Shadow Chancellor from 1955 to 1961 under Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell. He then became Shadow Foreign Secretary from 1961 to 1963. After Gaitskell's sudden death, Wilson became the new Labour leader and went onto win four out of the five General Elections he contested. His first victory, in 1964 saw him win with a small majority but secured a better majority after calling an early second election.

While in power, his government abolished capital punishment, created the Open University and took steps to stop discrimination of women and minorities. He also relaxed the laws around divorce, abortion and censorship. But his first term as Prime Minister also saw him lead the country through a sterling crisis and he was forced to devalue the pound in November 1967. Wilson went into lose the 1970 election to the Conservative Party under Edward Heath but held onto leadership of the party. He formed a minority government during the hung parliament after the next General Election in 1974 and called another election on October 10, 1974 where he secured a small majority of three. Wilson went onto tackle domestic social reforms including in education, health and housing - which saw income tax on top earners reach 83 per cent - and unsuccessfully tried to deal with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In 1976, aged 60, he shocked the country by announcing plans to resign and he was replaced as PM and leader of the Labour party by James Callaghan.

Wilson's most famous quotes; A week is a long time in politics The only limits of power are the bounds of belief Whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power One man's wage increase is another man's price increase. I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat Mary Wilson: Wife of former Prime Minister Harold turning 100 years-old | The Independent Mary Wilson: Wife of former Prime Minister Harold turning 100 years-old Her family say she is in good health for someone of 99 Friday 8 January 2016 20:25 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Mary and Harold Wilson during their summer holiday on the Isles of Scilly in August 1965. Lady Wilson still owns their cottage on Scilly PA Private Eye magazine used to run a feature called Mrs Wilson’s Diary. It was a satire on the madhouse that was 10 Downing Street, viewed through the eyes of a homely, comfortably middle-class wife who only wanted to live a quiet life. That was how a generation of university students was introduced to Mary Wilson, wife of the last Labour leader before Tony Blair to win a general election.

She was a clever, self-disciplined woman, from the wartime generation brought up never to complain. Her poems were collected into two published volumes in the 1970s that sold well, although their audience was never as big as that reached by the satirists who created the fictional Mrs Wilson. Given that it was 20 years ago that her husband died, many may be surprised to learn that the real Mrs Wilson, now Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, still lives in Victoria Street, near the Houses of Parliament, in a flat that has been her London home for decades. Her family say she is in good health for someone of 99. One of Harold Wilson’s well-known foibles, when he was Prime Minister, was to take his holidays on the Scilly Isles rather than at any of the world’s more luxurious holiday spots. His widow still owns their little house on Scilly, and took a holiday there only last year. On 12 January, she will celebrate her 100th birthday. But curiously, there is another elderly lady still around who saw 10 Downing Street and Chequers from the inside, even before Mary Wilson first set foot there.

She is Clarissa Eden, Winston Churchill’s niece and the widow of his successor, Sir Anthony Eden. Lady Eden, who is 95, was moving in high-ranking Conservative circles almost from birth, but nothing in Mary Wilson’s childhood suggested a life destined to be out of the ordinary. Mary and Harold on their way to the Guildhall to receive the freedom of the city of London in 1971 Her father, the Rev Daniel Baldwin, was a Congregationalist minister in Diss, Norfolk, who insisted that his children observe Sundays by attending church twice and reading no novels. Mary missed out on university, and was working as a shorthand typist in a soap factory on the Wirral in 1934 when she met Harold Wilson, just before he went up to Oxford University. When they married, on New Year’s Day 1940, she had every reason to expect a quiet, secure future as the wife of a precocious Oxford don. But in 1945 he was swept into Parliament in a seat not held by Labour since 1929. In 1947, aged 31, he was a Cabinet minister. By 1964, he was Prime Minister.

Mary Wilson could never bring herself to think of 10 Downing Street as home. When her husband resumed the premiership after the February 1974 election, she persuaded him to not move back there. She must have been hurt by the rumours about Wilson’s mercurial relationship with his strong-willed political secretary, Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender). The rumours resurfaced in 2003, when Wilson’s former press secretary, Joe Haines, published a book giving an exact date on which he alleged the relationship had gone beyond the purely professional. The journalist Francis Wheen turned this whirlwind story into a BBC4 drama in 2006. That play had two unforeseen effects. Lady Falkender sued and the BBC settled out of court for £75,000 damages, and Lady Wilson, then 91, gave a rare newspaper interview to her husband’s old colleague, Roy Hattersley.

Read more The truth about Harold Wilson - after 30 years of scandalous rumours | Daily Mail Online The truth about Harold Wilson - after 30 years of scandalous rumours By ROY HATTERSLEY Last updated at 10:12 24 June 2007 The real Mary Wilson is dramatically different from the dull suburban housewife who was caricatured so ruthlessly during her husband Harold's years of power. Her reputation for doing little more than "standing by her man" was acquired in an era before Prime Ministers' wives became personalities in their own right. It was exacerbated by Mrs Wilson's Diary - a long-running spoof in the satirical magazine Private Eye that mocked her apparent meekness and fondness for composing verse. Mary never complained, and finally faded from public view during the many years she devotedly nursed her husband as he was gradually consumed by Alzheimer's. Scroll down for more...Today, the "little woman" calumny is regurgitated whenever so-called new "revelations" about Wilson's premiership - which ended prematurely in 1976 after he resigned under rather mysterious circumstances - are spewed out by one of his "loyal" lieutenants.

But his widow must also take some responsibility for all the nonsense that is so often written, because she adamantly refuses to take on her husband's detractors. An intensely private woman, she despises the cult of personality that has infested modern politics. And she emphatically does not believe in letting her emotions show. Now aged 90, she lives alone in a Westminster flat and observes the world through eyes that have lost none of their sharpness. Despite all her years as a political wife (Harold became an MP in 1945), she has rarely talked to the media and has never given a full-blown newspaper interview. That she is giving one at all now - coincidentally, as yet another Prime Minister prepares to step down before the end of his term - is because we have known each other for more than 40 years. Time after time, she prefaces her words by saying: "I have never told this to anyone before." But equally, time after time, she stops me from delving any further. It is a matter of principle that she will never retaliate against those who tell lies about her husband by telling the discreditable truth about them.

Of course, the story that has resurfaced the most persistently pivots on the role of Marcia Williams - now Lady Falkender - who served as Harold Wilson's political secretary for nearly 30 years, including his eight years as Prime Minister. In 2003, Joe Haines, Wilson's former Press secretary, published a book which claimed that Marcia had had an affair with the Prime Minister and that she had treated him with derision. One of his tallest tales - repeated in a BBC drama last year - had Marcia once telling Mary: "I've slept with your husband six times and it wasn't very satisfactory." (Subsequently, the BBC was forced to issue an apology.) Mary Wilson, who combines moral certainty with the no-nonsense approach of a Northerner, says such allegations are beneath contempt and unworthy of comment. When I ask if her disdain for scandal-mongering is built on her knowledge that none of the stories are true, she allows herself a contented smile. To understand Mary Wilson's character, it is necessary to know something of her upbringing as "a daughter of the manse". Her father, a Congregationalist minister, encouraged plain living and high thinking.

("Church twice on Sundays and no novels to be read on the day of prayer," recalls Mary.) Little wonder, then, that the family watchwords were "pride" and "propriety". Her background also goes some way to explaining why she has never complained about the Cabinet Office's decision, regarded by some as a disgrace, to halve her pension - to £15,000 - when her husband died in 1995. All she will say is: "I have a small annuity." Mary Wilson is part of a disappearing generation that is determined to go through life without whining, blaming and emoting. There is not a trace of self-pity when she describes her husband's final, terrible illness, which became evident after he resigned from office in 1976. As she charts his decline, she gives the lie to the persistent rumour that there was something deeply mysterious about his surprise resignation. Among the more sinister whispers was that MI5 had been about to expose him as a KGB agent.

At the time, Harold Wilson was a fixture in everyone's lives: the pipe-smoking PM who had devalued "the pound in your pocket", confirmed our membership of the Common Market and predicted the "white heat" of the coming technological revolution. There seemed no reason for him to step down - and no convincing explanation was put forward. But the truth, Mary says, is simple. After his unexpected election victory in 1974, "Harold always meant to go quite quickly". So why did he choose to make his announcement in the spring of 1976? "He'd had enough. There was a seamen's strike, which he had just dealt with. He told me that he could not deal with it with the same level of energy, the same zest . . . and, possibly, he began to feel that his memory was going." We will never know whether Wilson feared the early onset of Alzheimer's or if he thought he was just growing old - though, at 60, he was still a comparatively young prime minister. But the truth is that he felt he could no longer do the job in the way that he wanted.

After the hand-over to Jim Callaghan, four good years followed before the brilliant mind began to go. I remind Mary of a story that Callaghan told me about his own investiture as Knight of the Garter in 1980, attended by the Wilsons. Callaghan said: "Mary was marvellous. She spent every moment looking after Harold. Got him in and out of all those robes and chains. She couldn't have enjoyed it much herself." This triggers difficult memories. "I've never told anyone this before," says Mary. "At the beginning, when Harold knew that he couldn't remember, he was very distressed. But the time came when he didn't remember at all and we settled down into a sort of calm. "It was a very quiet time after he got over his anxieties. Sometimes, he would say: 'I must go home. My mother and father [long since dead] aren't well.' "So I would just take him out for a walk round the block.

Strangely enough, it became a very calm period." Leading up to that time, there was also the half-world between memory and oblivion when Wilson (by then Lord Wilson of Rievaulx) was still intent on attending the House of Lords. "I'd take him early in the afternoon. Jim Callaghan would make room for him on the [Privy Councillors'] bench. Harold would keep an eye on me, sitting down there with the other peers' wives. After about an hour, I'd give him a thumbs-up sign and he'd come out for me to take him to tea." But then the hard work - she dismisses the notion of suffering or sacrifice - began. It is only when we come to her recollections of Wilson's last few months that there is a rare expression of resentment. "Roy Jenkins was the only one [of his old Cabinet ministers] who came to see him. And he wasn't even still a member of our party." (Jenkins had defected to help found the SDP). My suggestion that people find it hard to deal with Alzheimer's produces a flash of steel. "Then they should try harder!" Yet it was all worth it.

"Above all, I didn't want him to go into a home. He stayed here with me right until the last two days, when he had to go into hospital." Her devotion has never wavered. Pictures of him - Oxford don in cap and gown, young President of the Board of Trade, grave and greying Prime Minister - stand on every table and bookshelf in her living room. She shows me the hand-written poem that she composed to mark her husband's funeral in the Scilly Isles, where they had spent many enjoyable family holidays: "My love you have stumbled slowly On the quiet way to death And you lie where the wind blows strongly With a salty spray on its breath For this men of the island bore you Down paths where the branches meet And the only sounds were the crunching grind Of the gravel beneath their feet And the sighing slide of the ebbing tide On the beach where the breakers meet." Mary Wilson has published three volumes of verse and has always turned to poetry during times of crisis and disappointment. The first of these was when she decided not to go to university - because it would have been an expense too far for her father. "I have regretted it all my life," she tells me.

"All my life." Instead, she enrolled in a business college and became a secretary in the Lever Brothers soap factory at Port Sunlight. In the summer of 1934, Harold Wilson - preparing to go to Oxford University - visited the tennis club where she was a member. He claimed it was love at almost first sight. But Mary says she took much longer to make up her mind. Harold Wilson and Gladys Mary Baldwin were married in January 1940. He had just been elected a Fellow and she neither expected, nor wanted, to become a political wife. And perhaps that sowed the seeds of her second great regret. "I loved being the wife of a don and would have been happy to remain one all my life," she says. But fate intervened. After wartime service as a high-powered civil servant, Wilson (who had joined the Labour Party as a student) was nominated as candidate for a constituency no one expected him to win. On the crest of the 1945 Labour landslide, he was swept into Westminster - and so began one of the most meteoric careers in parliamentary history.

Within months, Wilson was a parliamentary secretary and, in 1947, at the age of 31, was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Every step up the ladder came as "rather a shock" to Mary. "I didn't know a thing about [the business of politics]." But she was never the passive little woman of Mrs Wilson's Diary. Indeed, there were spirited arguments with Clement Attlee, Labour's greatest Prime Minister, about historical figures. "Bad choice, bad history," he told her, when she leapt to the defence of her heroes (Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles II and Lord Byron). And, in 1975, she had the courage to follow her convictions and vote against one of her husband's flagship policies. His government had decided to let the people decide, through a referendum, if Britain should confirm its membership of the Common Market. After the Wilsons had returned to their ministerial car from the polling booth, Mary told her husband: "I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it." Wilson had voted for Britain to remain in Europe, and his wife had voted to come out. "He was very sweet about it," says Mary.

Asked if she still holds the same view, the best she can say about Britain's European destiny is: "You can't unscramble eggs." Mary insists that she enjoyed her role in Downing Street, though she hated the house. "Everybody who has lived there seems to. I missed my real home, where I was cook, mother and gardener." Was that one of the reasons why, after winning the 1974 election, the Wilsons chose to stay at their flat in nearby Lord North Street rather than move back into "that little flat upstairs"? "We knew that even if we moved, we wouldn't be in Downing Street for long," she says, confirming that even at the moment of victory, Harold's departure had already been planned. Despite her dislike of Number 10, Mary Wilson says that she "adored Chequers". Intriguingly, she says she plans to send a letter to Gordon Brown's wife, Sarah (whom she describes as "splendid"), urging her to persuade her husband to change his mind and use the Prime Minister's Buckinghamshire country residence at weekends.

She is far too canny and discreet to give her views on Tony Blair, but her comment: "After you've left the bridge, you don't spit on the deck" may provide a clue to her feelings. As, indeed, does her admission that she is "Old Labour". As for how Cherie Blair has performed in the role of Prime Minister's wife, she says: "We all see things differently, and times have changed." Then, conscious this remark sounds frosty, she adds: "Cherie has been very kind to me. I like her very much." Throughout her own years as a prime minister's wife, Mary Wilson was sustained by two great friendships: the poet John Betjeman, who was "a breath of fresh air", and Marcia Falkender, who particularly helped her though the early days. Mary says: "She was a real politician. I wasn't. She knew all the ropes. Marcia never decided my diary - I decided where to go for myself - but she was a great help." The women remain the firmest of friends and lunch together almost every Wednesday - most often in the House of Lords - and talk "both about the old days and what's going on now".

The sincerity of her affection for Harold's former political secretary cannot be doubted. Since Lady Falkender had a minor stroke five years ago, I have never met Mary Wilson without being given a bulletin about the health of her long-standing friend. Scroll down for more... So why will she not denounce Lady Falkender's detractors? "I just don't talk about such things," she replies. Once again, her tone is overlaid with contempt. However, she does paint a vivid scene from the Downing Street years that provides a kind of answer. One of Lady Falkender's detractors, she says, once "went absolutely wild" because he was required to canvass during a General Election campaign after a lunch of no more than cold ham. "He was very unpleasant to the Downing Street housekeeper." Clearly, being unpleasant to the staff is regarded by Mary Wilson as unforgivable. But the offender's name, she tells me, must not be mentioned. She holds the view that you cannot complain about character assassination if you wield the assassin's knife. What, I ask Mary, are her happiest memories? The greatest joys, she says, were the births of her two sons. And the worst? Election defeats - but only because of the disappointment they caused Harold.

And, of course, the slow realisation that he was suffering from an incurable disease which, she believes, was worsened by a (successful) operation in 1980 for colon cancer. "Afterwards, he was never the same again." How has she coped since his death? Faith has helped, she says. So has the support of her sons and their families. And, of course, her stern upbringing as a daughter of the manse has taught her to face pain with fortitude. But, most important of all have been her memories of Harold, the lasting legacy of a close and happy relationship. She says that during moments of doubt and sorrow, she still "talks" to him. "Sometimes, just inside my head - sometimes, when I am alone, out loud." Three or four times a year, she returns to the Scilly Isles. One of these visits is an annual pilgrimage and act of remembrance, with a service at the Methodist church where Harold's funeral was held. This is followed by a graveside reading from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Harold Wilson was lucky to have found Mary.

Without him, she might have done more and better in the eyes of the world, but she is in no doubt that she was equally lucky to have found him. Mary Wilson: Wife of former Labour leader Harold reaches her century | The Independent Voices Mary Wilson: Wife of former Labour leader Harold reaches her century We wish her a happy birthday, and thank her for her quietly dignified contribution to our national life Friday 8 January 2016 20:48 BST Click to follow The Independent Online Mary and Harold Wilson in 1971 Getty Images It was said that Mary Wilson always expected to be the wife of an Oxford don, rather than, as it turned out, having to endure the media spotlight as the spouse of a prime minister, and sometimes a highly unpopular one too. Still, the Mary Baldwin who married Harold Wilson in 1940 has certainly had a long life, much of it given selflessly to public service. Wife of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson turning 100 years-old We can only assume that it was not all bad, though her studied silence and low profile ensured her own views on politics, her marriage and husband remained firmly private.

She confined herself to the publication of two volumes of poetry (admired by her friend, Sir John Betjeman, who wrote a touching poem about a visit they planned to her birthplace, Diss in Norfolk). As PM, Wilson had a difficult time holding country and party together in times that were, in many ways, much harder than today. He was little thanked at the time, and his reputation has yet to recover. Yet David Cameron is about to pull off exactly the same trick with a renegotiation on membership of Europe, and subsequent referendum, as Wilson did in 1975. Later in life Mrs Wilson looked after an increasingly frail husband, his once prodigious memory diminished. The Wilsons, in sharp contrast to some of their successors, profited little from their time in Downing Street, and lived relatively modestly throughout their lives. So we wish her a happy birthday, and thank her for her quietly dignified contribution to our national life.

More about: Scilly, where Harold Wilson, the first PM to show his knees, found peace | Ian Jack | Opinion | The Guardian Scilly, where Harold Wilson, the first PM to show his knees, found peace The ordinary bungalow where the Labour leader chose to retire recalls a very different political age Harold Wilson with journalists on the island of Samson, 1965. Photograph: Peter King/Getty Images Friday 27 May 2016 13.39 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 08.05 EDT Share on Messenger Close The stopping of the train woke me and I raised the blind. We were in Par at six in the morning, six hours out of Paddington on the Penzance sleeper. A signalman surveyed the train impassively from an open window in his signal box, inside which old-fashioned levers glinted; a real signal box, this, of the kind that had once governed the movement of every train in the country, connected by miles of strong wire to semaphore signals that bobbed up or down to say stop, go or proceed with caution. In Cornwall, they still survive. Many relics do.

As the train continued west in the grey light of an overcast morning, we moved through an untidy landscape of car parks, abandoned sidings and picturesque industrial ruins with chimneys attached. Labour needs to rethink Harold Wilson’s legacy. It still matters | Anne Perkins Read more Harold Wilson often came this way in the 1950s and 1960s, before he took the plane instead. First the night train, then the little ship from Penzance, pitching and rolling on its 40-mile voyage to the Isles of Scilly , where Wilson and his family went every summer. Last week our ship lurched in the Atlantic swell just as giddily as its predecessors. Every seat pocket in the saloon had a stash of sick bags, but a better plan was to lean on the rail outside and watch the islands draw nearer, comforted by the thought of their approaching equilibrium. To find these specks of populated land here, alone in the ocean, seems dreamlike (or nightmarish if, like so many ships and crews over many centuries, you crashed into their rocks by mistake). The Wilsons loved this place.

I interviewed him once, in 1971 when he was out of power and writing his account of Labour’s six years in government, 1964 to 1970, that the Sunday Times rashly paid £260,000 to serialise (a mistake: it did nothing for the circulation). But “interviewed” is the wrong word. I went as a journalist on the Sunday Times to write a little plug piece: how the book was coming along, how the great man approached the business of writing it. From his island base Wilson reinforced the idea of himself as the first demotic prime minister I can’t remember anything he said that afternoon in his Georgian house in Westminster. (In my memory, the most interesting event was his wife Mary coming into the room to announce, “Oh dear, John has fallen off his bicycle.” This was John Betjeman, Mary’s friend and fellow poet, who was by now wheeling his bike into the hall and assuring everyone that he was perfectly all right.) What I do remember was his kindness.

As Roy Jenkins wrote of Wilson in the Dictionary of National Biography, he was “a kind, if not a warm, man who liked being nice to people, important and unimportant”. He was “a very considerable servant of the state,” Jenkins decided, but he lacked the ability to inspire and left “little ideological legacy”. In what Jenkins called Labour’s hymn sheet, he would never rate as many mentions as Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee. And who, 21 years after Wilson’s death, would disagree? Even the interest generated by his resignation has dissipated. When in 1976 he suddenly quit as prime minister during his second period of office, many wondered about his motive. As his colleague Barbara Castle put it later, “What exactly was Harold up to?” But now we know the simple truth. At 60, he was tired and physically frail, and he feared (correctly) that he was losing his memory, which had been formidable, an important tool throughout his political career. In the years left to him, he slowly began to forget where and who he was. Often, he was in the Scillies. He had no ancestral connections to the place.

He and Mary and their two sons first visited the islands in 1952 and liked them so much that in 1958, he paid the Duchy of Cornwall £200 and built a three-bedroom bungalow on the edge of the main settlement, Hugh Town, on the island of St Mary’s. Pinterest ‘He had no ancestral connections to the place. He and Mary and their two sons first visited in 1952 and liked the isles so much that in 1958, he built a three-bedroom bungalow there.’ Photograph: Stuart Heydinger for the Observer The Wilsons called their bungalow Lowenva, an old Cornish word meaning “house of happiness”, and from this island base Wilson reinforced the idea of himself as the first demotic prime minister, happy to show himself off to photographers in shorts and sandals, eating ice cream, strolling on the beach, holding alfresco press conferences in the sand dunes.

He was the first prime minister to reveal his knees in public and the last to smoke a pipe – a bridge of sorts between generations – but the idea grew that his everydayness was a contrivance, that he secretly smoked Havana cigars rather than ready-rubbed Exmoor Hunt, and that he preferred cognac to beer. “Wilson would not have wanted anything that detracted from his image as a plain, ordinary, accessible man,” his biographer Ben Pimlott wrote about the bungalow, but to stand in front of it is to marvel at how plain, ordinary and accessible it actually is. It has no architectural merit or charm of any kind; other bungalows surround it; one of the few metalled roads in the Scillies runs at the bottom of the garden; the chimney of the island’s power station rises starkly a hundred yards or so to the west; the island’s rubbish dump lies in a hollow to the east. And yet Mary Wilson, who turned 100 in January, still owns it and until recently came twice a year – a respected, perhaps even loved, local figure who has vanished from view on the mainland.

Given her loyalty to this plain little house, and given her husband’s well-documented enthusiasms for Meccano, the Boy Scouts and Gilbert & Sullivan – institutions that began to fall from fashion even before the 1960s – the idea that the Wilsons needed to work up their ordinariness as an image is unpersuasive, and what remains of him in the Scillies attests to their modesty. A bench on a headland records his favourite view. A display case obscurely sited in the basement of Hugh Town’s museum holds two of his celebrated Gannex macs, his Labour party tie, a pipe and an inscribed golf ball. You have to be determined and pass a lot of excavated pottery and shipwrecked artefacts to reach them. Wilson is buried in the Scillies. His grave lies among the quadrants of other graves in the churchyard of St Mary’s Old Town church, only a few minutes’ walk down the hill from his bungalow. There were no flowers in the vase when I went. A line of seashells decorates the surface gravel and the headstone has a simple inscription: Tempus Imperator Rerum, time is the ruler of everything.

Looking out to sea from the churchyard – nothing but waves between here and America – I thought of his children. The elder, Robin, is emeritus professor of mathematics at the Open University. The younger, Giles, a railway enthusiast, became a teacher and then a train driver. Fewer children now, perhaps, would take so little advantage of their father’s connections and position. That reticence, like the signal cabin at Par, represents the workings of another age. Harold James Wilson (1916 - 1995) - Genealogy Harold James Wilson Husband of <private> Wilson (Baldwin) Father of <private> Wilson and <private> Wilson Brother of <private> Wilson Prime Minister of the Unite Kingdom Managed by: James Herbert Wilson, Ethel Wilson (born Seddon) Sister: Gladys Mary Wilson (born Baldwin) Children: James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British Labour Member of Parliament, Leader of the Labour Party.

Twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the February 1974 General Election resulted in a hung parliament. He is the most recent British Prime Minister to have served non-consecutive terms. Harold Wilson first served as Prime Minister in the 1960s, during a period of low unemployment and relative economic prosperity (though also of significant problems with the UK's external balance of payments). His second term in office began in 1974, when a period of economic crisis was beginning to hit most Western countries. On both occasions, economic concerns were to prove a significant constraint on his governments' ambitions. Wilson's own approach to socialism placed emphasis on efforts to increase opportunity within society, for example through change and expansion within the education system, allied to the technocratic aim of taking better advantage of rapid scientific progress, rather than on the left's traditional goal of promoting wider public ownership of industry. While he did not challenge the Party constitution's stated dedication to nationalisation head-on, he took little action to pursue it.

A member of the Labour Party's "soft left,"[1] Wilson joked about leading a cabinet that was made up mostly of social democrats, comparing himself to a Bolshevik revolutionary presiding over a Tsarist cabinet. in reality, however, there was actually little to divide him from the cabinet majority.[2] Though generally not at the top of Wilson's personal areas of priority, his first period in office was notable for substantial legal changes in a number of social areas, including the liberalisation of censorship, divorce, homosexuality, immigration and abortion (see Social issues, below), as well as the abolition of capital punishment, due in part to the initiatives of backbench MPs who had the support of Roy Jenkins during his time as Home Secretary. Overall, Wilson is seen to have managed a number of difficult political issues with considerable tactical skill, including such potentially divisive issues for his party as the role of public ownership, British membership of the European Community, and the Vietnam War, in which he resisted US pressure to involve Britain and send British troops. Nonetheless, his stated ambition of substantially improving Britain's long-term economic performance remained largely unfulfilled.

Other References Harold Wilson: A Biography | History Today Harold Wilson: A Biography Harold Wilson Lives of former prime ministers have lost, if the biographer is wise, their triumphal quality. Horn's Macmillan tried to keep up its cheerfulness and paid the penalty in credibility. Whoever takes up the grievous history of Margaret Thatcher will have to follow the Hallelujah chorus and 'As we, like Sheep' with 'Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened'! For Britain, heads of government, after the brief efflorescence which the press gives them, have turned into symbols of defeat - emblematic bearers of blame and derision. But the consensual dismissal of Harold Wilson even before the end of his effectual life (pitifully closed by intellectual collapse) means that biography should incline to rescue. Terms like 'revisionist' are being used about Ben Pimlott's full and highly readable piece of scholarship. But a prime minister who outperformed the growth rate of his trumpetted successor, under whom unemployment knocked around the 700,000 mark, who neither sought to, nor succeeded in, 'smashing' anything, and who was a decent human being, deserves revision.

I wish that Ben Pimlott, for all his excellence, was a little rougher. The account of the slandering of Wilson by a clutch of fascist-minded intelligence officers in need of psychiatric help deserves a blazing set piece of high profile contempt rather than the quiet, matter of fact dismissal given here. But even so, Pimlott is a good restorer perhaps precisely because he resists dazzlement. Never seeking to show off or advance Pimlott through Wilson, he is a truer biographer. For an instance, the account of Marcia Williams, though charitable to that wearying woman, is not likely to be bettered. It honestly describes a politically fascinated man's enjoyment of the company of a politically fascinated woman when his sane and wise wife was candidly averse to politics and contemptuous of the glitter circuit. It is also a final rejoinder to oceans of tattle. But the parallel account of a weak man's inability to sack or do without this debilitating scold also measures Wilson - too weak, too nice. To have let her effectively drive out the excellent Derek Mitchell indicates calamitous frailty.

Mary Wilson, sneered at by the poisonous Richard Ingrams circle as 'Gladys', the name she chose not to use, the petty bourgeois joke figure, loved being a don's wife and quite enjoyed the circuit of an MP, but had values which vomitted up the Falscberei of the Whitehall cocktail circuit. She said that the only good thing about the parties there was that the long dresses worn let you use up laddered tights. Mary Wilson would be echoed in the view of her successor, Norma Major, another soldierer-on, that the prime minister and his wife were 'fawned upon by those who would call them "dear little people" if it wasn't for John's job'. These little people were actually as rooted as we English can be. One has heard such scorn among Tory colleagues for the little man's choice of grand-sounding Rievaulx for his title. Pimlott demonstrates here that Rievaulx was the home of Wilson's yeoman line for twenty identifiable generations until his great grandfather, John, moved away. Sir Alec Home's good natured rejoinder about 'the fourteenth Mr Wilson' was actually understated. He was something like the twenty-third Mr Wilson.

Through Harold Wilson, as shown here in fair, friendly hands, ran the highest paper intelligence, ambition without fully focused purpose and a personal solicitude and flinching from hurting people which, in a prime minister, astonishes and delights, he also displayed an underlying lack of nerve. Wilson on the way up was more effective and less attractive. The view of him in 1960 as a swivel-bottomed careerist lining up with a cause, unilateralism, in which he did not believe, was only a half truth. The reality given here, of a Wilson deferring to pressures and nervously watching other jumpers-in like Anthony Greenwood, is even more depressing. Wilson was only opportunistic by defensive reflex. As prime minister, he was so often the kindly minder of other men's failings, not least poor, agitated, gin-triggered, emotionally wound-up George Brown. Though ironically the instincts of Brown on devaluation (from 1965) were right, those of James Callaghan and Wilson himself were wrong. Wrong for several reasons, one of them recollection of the humiliation of 1949 and Conservative exploitation of it.

But reading Pimlott, one thinks of another reader for whom this book should stay always at hand. There is as full an account here as one wants to read of the destructive factionalism of Labour, the little groups of us and them, malign people like Colonel Wigg, happy trouble-stirrers like Crossman and some very high-strung Labour right-wingers who seemed programmed to get Wilson wrong. It would all end in tears six years after Wilson was finally gone with the creation of the SDP. Thoughts here are of those who: fretted the pygmy body to decay And o'er informed the tenement of clay But this account of Wilson's fruitless peacemaking, the necessary process of saying something to one faction and doing the opposite for the other, is a terrible warning to the present, equally gentle-handed tenant of Downing Street. John Major's straddling speech at Brighton in October 1992, all road cones and no knickers, was perfectly Wilsonian in its desire to keep the peace while people who hissingly hate him, snarled on the mountain of conference. Wilson would be damned for a falseness he didn't have and for a fear of leadership which was real.

Mr Major should read Pimlott's superb Harold Wilson and kill somebody. About the Author: Edward Pearce is the author of Election Rides (Faber, 1992).

Question: What was the given name of the wife of Prime Minister Harold Wilson?
Answer: Mary