A sheaf of documents and ephemera retained by Harold and Mary Wilson at their Westminster flat in Ashley Gardens including notes in the former Prime Minister’s hand about the history of the Labour Party and the state of Britain in the autumn of 1983 - shortly after Margaret Thatcher won her first landslide. Wilson was prompted to make these observations by a request for advice from an old Huddersfield friend living in the town of his birth - Mary Wilson has passed on this information to him in a typed letter on House of Lords notepaper. In his manuscript notes to her letter, Wilson recalls his ‘York/ Colne Valley accent!’ as a child before sketching in a history of the Labour Party in the context of being a party out of office as it was in 1983: ‘Present situation Been thus before when [I had] been Leader L.[abour] P.[arty] out of office 12 years. A year later being the Govt and won 4 out of next 5 elections’ - his status as an electoral winner was always Wilson’s greatest boast and he notes ‘It was then I called Lab Nat[ural] Pty of Govt.’ He finishes with his and the party’s plans for the future, notably ‘readying for next election and prospect of reversing the... divisions of the last few year of Tory Govt’ - probably a reference by Wilson to division in the wider country rather than the Conservative party.
Alongside this fascinating document is a small collection of intimate documents from the Wilsons’ life together. There are two dog pedigrees, including that for ‘Paddy’ his golden labrador retriever that became a feature of his Downing Street years; and a pedigree for an earlier dog together with the prospectus for his book The Governing of Britain, a group of documents from Trinity House c1980 where Wilson had a post-Prime Ministerial role and a Corporation of London 800th Anniversary commemoration from 1989, a photograph from the 1973 Durham Minister’ Gala and a couple of Lord Wilson’s air tickets from the 1980s. Together with additional ephemera from the lives of Harold and Mary Wilson.
PROVENANCE: from the private collection of Harold and Mary Wilson, dispersed at auction following the death of Mary Wilson aged 102 in 2016. These items remained with the couple until their deaths.
