So much was expected

R.W. Johnson

  • Harold Wilson by Ben Pimlott
    HarperCollins, 811 pp, £20.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 00 215189 8
  • Harold Wilson by Austen Morgan
    Pluto, 625 pp, £25.00, May 1992, ISBN 0 7453 0635 7

On 4 July 1934 Harold Wilson, an 18-year-old schoolboy waiting to go up to Oxford, proposed to Gladys Baldwin, the pretty young typist he’d first seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime minister. For these were things he had more or less been promising himself ever since the famous Boy Scout photo was taken of him posing in front of No 10.

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