Slide 2:
In 1940, in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford, he married (Gladys) Mary Baldwin who remained his wife until his death. Mary Wilson became a published poet. They had two sons, Robin and Giles (named after Giles Alington); Robin became a Professor of Mathematics, and Giles became a teacher. Both his sons went to the same independent school, University College School, in Hampstead. In their twenties, his sons were under a kidnap threat from the IRA. After becoming a teacher at a comprehensive school for two years, Giles later returned to teaching, becoming a Maths master at Salisbury Cathedral School. In November 2006 it was reported that Giles had given up his teaching job and become a train driver for South West Trains. He is a devotee of rail restoration, specifically the Tarka Line.
Slide 3:
Wilson soon proved to be a very effective Shadow Minister. One of his procedural moves caused the loss of the Government’s Finance Bill in 1955, and his speeches as Shadow Chancellor from 1956 were widely praised for their clarity and wit. He coined the term “gnomes of Zurich” to describe Swiss bankers whom he accused of pushing the pound down by speculation. In the meantime, he conducted an inquiry into the Labour Party’s organisation following its defeat in the 1955 general election, which compared the Party organisation to an antiquated “penny farthing” bicycle, and made various recommendations for improvements. Unusually, Wilson combined the job of Chairman of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee with that of Shadow Chancellor from 1959 , holding the chairmanship of the PAC from 1959 to 1963.
Slide 4:
In economic terms, Wilson’s first three years in office were dominated by an ultimately doomed effort to stave off the devaluation of the pound. He inherited an unusually large external deficit on the balance of trade. This partly reflected the preceding government’s expansive fiscal policy in the run-up to the 1964 election, and the incoming Wilson team tightened the fiscal stance in response. Many British economists advocated devaluation, but Wilson resisted, reportedly in part out of concern that Labour, which had previously devalued sterling in 1949, would become tagged as “the party of devaluation”.
Slide 5:
Wilson also deserves credit for grasping the concept of an Open University, to give adults who had missed out on tertiary education a second chance through part-time study and distance learning. His political commitment included assigning implementation responsibility to Baroness Jennie Lee, the widow of Aneurin Bevan, the charismatic leader of Labour’s Left wing whom Wilson had joined in resigning from the Attlee cabinet.
Slide 6:
Wilson regarded himself as a “man of the people” and did much to promote this image, contrasting himself with the stereotypical aristocratic conservatives who had preceded him. Features of this portrayal included his working man’s Gannex raincoat, his pipe (though in private he smoked cigars), his love of simple cooking and overuse of the popular British relish, ‘HP Sauce’, his support for his home town’s football team, Huddersfield, and his working-class Yorkshire accent. Eschewing continental holidays, he returned every summer with his family to the Scilly Isles. His first general election victory relied heavily on associating these down-to-earth attributes with a sense that the UK urgently needed to modernise, after “thirteen years of Tory mis-rule….”