An accomplished poet who brushed off the caricatures attracted by her life as the wife of prime minister Harold Wilson
In the widely recorded history of Harold Wilson’s years in British politics, his wife, Mary, appears as a rather shadowy figure, a fleeting form in the background of the latest crisis at No 10, seemingly intent on hastening back to the domestic obscurity she craved and for which she was mercilessly mocked by the satirists of that era. The reality was quite otherwise. Mary Wilson, who has died aged 102, was indeed a profoundly private person, but she was an independent-minded woman with sufficient personal strength to withstand the cruelty of the caricatures to which she was subjected without ever bothering to correct the inaccuracy of her supposed public portrait.
Her problem was that she married Harold, as she complained, “under false pretences”. She did not sign up to be the wife of an ambitious politician but, rather, the wife of the clever Oxford don she married, a choice that would have given her the quiet, cloistered academic life she sought for herself, as much as for her family. She regretted all her life that she had been unable to go to university because her family could not afford it, and as an aspirant poet she longed for a lifestyle that would allow her to develop her talent in an atmosphere, as she said, imbued with the presence of old buildings and young people. “Oxford was my idea of heaven,” she lamented.
Related: Mary Wilson: Corbyn leads tributes after death of Harold Wilson's widow
Continue reading...