Shirley Williams: The Biography

By Mark Peel

For fifty years Shirley Williams has been one of Britain's best-known and best-loved politicians, admired for her warmth, sincerity, integrity and compassion. Hailing from an impeccable intellectual background, the young Shirley seemed destined for great things as she rose effortlessly up the political ladder. Yet for all the talk of her becoming the country's first female Prime Minister that accolade passed her by, her feisty independence earning her a career that has been anything but perpetual sunshine. In this first-ever biography, Mark Peel explores the dilemma that has faced Williams throughout the highs and lows of her political life: how to tread the line between firmly held principles and party solidarity. Drawing on his unfettered access to the family archive and conversations with Williams's colleagues, Peel skilfully teases out the contradictions at the heart of this remarkable character. Shirley Williams: The Biography reveals the surprisingly vulnerable figure behind the reassuring public façade. It uncovers the expectations placed on Williams by her highly ambitious parents, her guilt about her privileged background, and her often tumultuous personal relationships. The result is a touching, intimate portrait of one of the most complex and popular politicians of our time, a woman who through good times and bad has retained her essential humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781849546478

Book preview

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Destined for Politics

2. American Odyssey

3. Turbulent Youth

4. ‘The Red Queen’

5. The Young Campaigner

6. Into Parliament

7. Into Government

8. Private Lives

9. The Battle for Europe

10. The Housewives’ Champion

11. The Great Debate

12. Against the Tide

13. Jumping Ship

14. Breaking the Mould

15. The Wilderness Years

16. Transatlantic Emissary

17. Restless Pilgrim

18. Poacher Turned Gamekeeper

Shirley Williams

Permissions

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It was back in October 2000 that I first met Shirley Williams when interviewing her for my biography of Donald Soper. Before that meeting I had tentatively inquired whether she would be at all interested in my writing her biography and, much to my delight, she consented.

Over the course of the next decade she welcomed me into her home, answered my numerous questions and gave me access to all her papers. I am most grateful for all her efforts on my behalf and while I certainly don’t expect her to agree with every word I have written I hope she feels my book is a fair account of her life and work.

I’m also very grateful to Shirley’s daughter Rebecca and her late husband, Christopher Honey, for all their hospitality and help with this assignment.

Many people were kind enough to give up valuable time on my behalf in order to share their memories of Shirley Williams and I fully acknowledge the help of the following:

Lesley Abdela, Professor Graham Allison, Lord Alton, Lord Ashdown, Val Arnold-Forster, Gillian Ayres, Jennifer, Lady Balfour of Burleigh, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Professor Alan Bishop, Mark Bostridge, Frank Bracewell, Shirley Bracewell, Carol Bracken, the late Sir John Burgh, Jim Caldwell, the late Lord Callaghan, John Campbell, Sir Menzies Campbell, John Cartwright, Professor Malcolm Chalmers, the late Ann Chesney, Michael Cockerell, Professor Ivor Crewe, Lord Dholakia, Owen Dudley Edwards, Andrew Duff, Kathy Eckroad, Father John Feighery, Julian Filochowski, Edward Flood, Lord Goodhart, Helen Green, Brian Hall, Lord Hannay, the Right Reverend Lord Harries, Doreen Harris, Dru Haydon, Lord Healey, Lord Hennessy, Anthony Hill, Professor Stanley Hoffmann, Ben Hooberman, Enid Howard, Dr Anne Howat, Philip Hunter, Baroness Jay, Stephen Jones, Baroness Kennedy, Professor Anthony King, Hilda Lawrence, Richard C. Leone, Lord Lester, Frank Lindsay, Margot Lindsay, Lord Luce, Lord McGivan, Lord Maclennan, Lord McNally, Lucy Mann, Robert Mann, Professor David Marquand, Barbara Metcalfe, Peter Metcalfe, Baroness Neuberger, Lord Newby, Lord Owen, Samuel Passow, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, Lord Radice, the late Lord Rees-Mogg, Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, Rosemary Roughton, Helge Rubinstein, the late Hilary Rubinstein, Professor Michael Sandel, the late Patrick Shovelton, Lord Skidelsky, Jon Snow, Eileen Spencer, Professor John Spencer, Lord Steel, Edith Stokey, Lord Taverne, Baroness Thomas of Winchester, Mike Thomas, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, John Wilkins, David Wilkinson, Sir Ian Wrigglesworth, Dr Dorothy Zinberg.

Among the many libraries and archives which gave freely of their time I owe a special gratitude to Carl Spadoni, Renu Barrett, Kathy Garay and all the staff at the Vera Brittain–George Catlin Archive in the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University Library, Ontario. Working there was always most rewarding.

I would like to express my gratitude to the following archivists and librarians for all their help: Pauline Adams at Somerville College, Oxford; Howard Bailes at St Paul’s Girls’ School, Hammersmith; Colin Harris at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Sandy Macmillen and Nigel Cochrane at the Albert Sloman Library, the University of Essex; Andrew Riley at Churchill College, Cambridge; Darren Treadwell at the Labour Museum of History, Manchester; and Jeff Walden, BBC Written Archives.

I am also indebted to the following institutions for giving me the opportunity to use material: Cambridge Library; Clacton Library; Colchester Library; Crosby Library; Edinburgh Central Library; Hertfordshire County Library; Local Studies Collection, Hull History Centre; Liverpool Central Library; Special Collections and Archives, the University of Liverpool; the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science; the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University; the National Archives, Kew; the National Library of Scotland; Nuffield College, Oxford; the Echo Library, Southampton; Special Collections, Leeds University Library; the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

I also owe a particular debt to Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank for reading a substantial section of the book in draft and to Peter Metcalfe for reading all of it. They put me right on many points and made a number of extremely useful suggestions. Peter Metcalfe was also kind enough to give me access to a number of his papers and photographs.

Alan and Judith Bishop were the soul of hospitality on my many visits to Hamilton, Ontario, and I am indebted to them as I am to my agent, Andrew Lownie, for all his advice. Last, but by no means least, I would like to extend a special thanks to Iain Dale, Sam Carter and all the team at Biteback. They have been much pleasure to work with, not least Olivia Beattie, a great source of patience and good cheer.

INTRODUCTION

With her engaging smile, seductive voice and somewhat flustered demeanour, Shirley Williams, Labour Cabinet minister and co-founder of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), has claimed a unique place in the national consciousness as one of its best-loved politicians. In a distinguished career spanning over sixty years she was for a long time touted as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, then when that particular dream faded, she evolved briefly into the progressive alternative to Margaret Thatcher before her elevation to the House of Lords as a revered elder stateswoman. Now eighty-three years old, and over thirty years since leaving Cabinet, she can still fill a conference hall with ease and send the audience home with a song in its heart.

The daughter of a famous mother, Vera Brittain, Shirley’s mind and personality were very much her own as she became a committed member of the Labour Party from her sixteenth birthday. After winning widespread acclaim for her spirited campaign in the safe Conservative seat of Harwich in February 1954, aged only twenty-three, her potential was finally recognised in October 1964 when she was elected MP for Hitchin as Labour returned to power after a thirteen-year exile. During those halcyon days when youth and modernisation were very much in fashion, Shirley, with her personable husband Bernard, one of the foremost philosophers of his day, seemed to be the perfect embodiment of this new era. An all-consuming public vocation combined with an apparent ability to find time to raise a family helped convince other women that they could do likewise. Her refusal to conform to expected standards of dress, appearance and punctuality might have shocked some, but it did nothing to diminish her appeal to a public attracted to her natural, unassuming style. On returning from an official trip to Hong Kong, she chose not to pull rank when her bags were subjected to a thorough search for contraband. Nor did she complain when, as a junior minister, she was booked into a dingy hotel in Brighton for the Labour Party conference, and years later, by which time a former Cabinet minister, she thought nothing of sharing a sleeping apartment on the Liverpool to London train with a complete stranger. The fact that she has continued to exemplify this plain living is all the more telling in light of the expenses scandal of 2009, which tainted so many of her parliamentary colleagues.

As a speaker she employed her angelic tongue with mesmerising effect to express enlightened sentiments with passionate sincerity. ‘Shirley is someone’, commented Marcia Falkender, Harold Wilson’s long-serving secretary, ‘who, in addition to her other undoubted gifts, is endowed with a quality that few male and even female politicians possess. It is an ability to project an idealized version of herself, a myth in which all those around her believe gladly and whole-heartedly.’¹ Her struggle on behalf of the underprivileged was unending, but although fiercely partisan in the heat of battle she was also a chivalrous warrior across the despatch box and well respected (indeed well liked) by many of her opponents.

In October 1971 she was one of sixty-nine Labour MPs who defied the party whip to vote for the Heath government’s terms of entry to the European Economic Community (EEC). The following year she was put on the spot again when the party, contrary to her wishes, committed itself to a referendum over continued membership. The fact that she didn’t join her fellow pro-Europeans in a mass exodus from the front bench but managed not to attract heavy censure intrigued her colleague Roy Hattersley, whose own refusal to resign won him few friends. ‘For the first time, I realised that Shirley is surrounded by a beatific light that shields her from the harm and criticism which would be heaped on ordinary people,’ he later wrote. ‘It is an enviable attribute.’²

He later had cause to revisit that phenomenon after Shirley’s traumatic defeat at the 1979 election, which left even grown men shedding a quiet tear on her behalf.

During the Queen’s Speech debate which followed the opening of the 1979 Parliament, I spoke immediately after Margaret Thatcher. The new prime minister interrupted me … with an unflattering comment about the recently defeated secretary of state for education. I mumbled a rebuke. The roar of approval from the benches behind me left no doubt that I was about to be carried towards the top of the shadow cabinet poll on the wings of Williams’s reputation.³

As a campaigner Shirley utilised her indomitable energy to the full as she covered many a mile in search of elusive votes. Immediately at ease with strangers, she attracted large crowds of well-wishers keen to meet her, still more to confide in her. Those that registered a concern or grievance found a sympathetic ear and an intensely personal reply free of the usual platitudes. Her genuine friendliness and capacity to relate to all types, so rare in a politician, led people into thinking they knew her. Dick Newby, the former SDP general secretary, recalls her out canvassing with Roy Jenkins in an open-top lorry during the Warrington by-election of July 1981.

As she passed a broken-down car, its grease-stained owner raised his head from beneath the bonnet and found himself within a few feet of Williams. ‘Hello, Shirley,’ he said, grinning broadly as if greeting a long-lost friend. No other contemporary politician could have evoked such a warm, familiar response from a complete stranger. For me, it captured, in an instant, the Williams magic.⁴

That magic has remained constant, but it isn’t quite the whole picture. Apply the finishing touches and one has something more enigmatic. The publication of Shirley’s autobiography in September 2009, which revealed some of the personal vulnerability behind the reassuring public façade, surprised many. In a brilliantly perceptive review in The Spectator, Matthew Parris called it ‘sharper, franker, more self-critical, more vulnerable, and oddly more melancholy, for I think she thinks she’s failed. Millions of us think we know her. We don’t.’⁵ It was a verdict similar to Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, who reckoned Shirley wasn’t by nature given to self-revelation or introspection: ‘mysteries remain, such as her barely explained Catholicism. You know her not much better, but you like her to the end.’⁶

For all her genuine warmth and ease among friends and strangers alike, Shirley Williams is more detached than meets the eye. ‘Many people think they know me when they don’t,’ she recently observed. Her father described her writing as legible at first glance, apparently clear and simple, ‘but when you look close it isn’t. Rather like her fun character, only apparently extrovert.’⁷ Inheriting her paternal grandmother’s intense reserve, her enforced independence as a child in the USA, when separated from her parents for over three years, made her ever more protective of her freedom on her return. If her mother asked her tentatively where she was going when she saw her mounting a bicycle Shirley would simply reply, ‘Out.’ Later, when her parents moved to Whitehall Court, she greatly objected to the uniformed porters in the concierge recording incoming telephone calls and observing her comings and goings. Her friend Mark Bostridge, the co-biographer of her mother, describes her as a deeply private person who can get quite irritated if people pry too much into what she is doing. Even those responsible for organising her schedule can find she suddenly slips their leash with no one any the wiser as to her whereabouts.

This reserve became apparent to the journalist and writer Melanie Phillips in her study on women politicians. Despite Shirley’s apparent insouciance about her image, she had managed to cultivate one that camouflaged part of her character. ‘Interviews with her are rarely able to dwell on personal details of her own life, but are soon removed to the more abstract intellectual plane of her beliefs, principles and ideas.’⁸

It is the same if the conversation turns unduly personal. When pressed by one of her classes at Harvard to tell them more about her life she reluctantly assented, but only on the condition that it was out of class and even then she gave them few scraps to feed on. On being asked to contribute a chapter to the Festschrift of her second husband, Dick Neustadt, she declined, explaining that it was too personal, and when approached by her publishers to reveal more about herself in her autobiography, she went only so far in lifting the veil.

As a proud, resilient woman she was part of that generation who remained stoical in the face of misfortune so that even when her first marriage broke down or she suffered a political setback she never complained or sought self-pity. ‘I have not cried and I am not that bothered,’ she declared after losing her seat in 1979. ‘I deeply believe that in politics you have to take the rough with the smooth. It does not help being too upset by these things.’⁹ Even in private she rarely traduces her colleagues or bemoans her lot. Her autobiography, aside from the odd barb at Tony Benn, David Owen and Tony Blair, is remarkably free of rancour, but while the benevolence which runs through every page is entirely genuine, her reticence masks a greater sensitivity than is sometimes realised. Her friend John Burgh, a former director general of the British Council, recalls how she was bitterly hurt by a couple of unwarranted personal attacks on her by The Times’s leading columnist Bernard Levin and couldn’t understand how he, Burgh, could be so friendly with such a person. Her exit from the Labour Party, for all her distaste for its ideological extremism, could also be partially explained by the personal venom directed at her and her fellow moderates, especially by elements of the National Executive Committee (NEC), while her surprising refusal to support Roy Jenkins for the SDP leadership in 1982 was largely in reaction to a series of hostile briefings against her by some of his immediate circle. Perhaps most telling of all was her acrimonious battle with David Owen over the SDP’s merger with the Liberals, which, though in essence a conflict of principle, was accentuated by her exasperation at his dismissive treatment of her and others over the previous years.

With her privileged background and charismatic personality, Shirley Williams could have enjoyed a carefree, comfortable lifestyle, but that was never her way. Family expectation, personal ambition and a desire to help others drew her into the fickle world of politics. As a free spirit who knew her own mind (she had already cast aside the patronage of Herbert Morrison, one of the leading ministers in the Attlee government), party loyalty for its own sake held little appeal. ‘I would much rather choose something other than politics than be a serf to the party’s dreary, unimaginative and not especially efficient machine,’¹⁰ she intimated to her mother well before she was even elected. Once in Parliament she shunned its bars and restaurants, finding its male, public school culture no place for a young woman, and kept herself free from any faction. According to her former boyfriend Peter Parker, ‘she has pursued her principles so singly it has led her to a lonely eminence’.¹¹

As an able junior minister with the world at her feet, she hovered uneasily between conformity and dissent as the policies pursued by the 1964–70 Wilson government towards Rhodesia, Vietnam and immigration offended her liberal conscience. Twice she wrote out letters of resignation only to relent. Thereafter, Europe became the issue which detached her from the party mainstream, but while veering towards Roy Jenkins she never became part of his inner circle, his grandiose lifestyle directly at odds with her down-to-earth informality. When Jenkins left the government in 1976 to become president of the European Commission, she spurned the chance to inherit his crown as leader of Labour’s centre-right. The politics of patronage, plots and positioning was never her scene. Ideas, principles and debate were what mattered. She would continue vigorously to oppose the left, but it would be very much on her own terms. For all Jenkins’s attempts to enrol her in his putative new party throughout 1980 she resisted his overtures, only joining at the eleventh hour when all other options had failed. Thereafter she continued to hold her own counsel, turning down the opportunity to stand at the Warrington by-election in July 1981, despite the pleas of all and sundry, and to contest the SDP leadership when apparent favourite. This failure to seize the hour and the confession in her autobiography that she suffered from a lack of self-esteem mystified reviewers who saw in other instances a woman of powerful convictions and moral courage. It was but one of the many paradoxes of a person who revered her parents but felt uncomfortable living in their shadow; a firm believer in the sanctity of marriage who craved unfettered independence from her partner, a middle-class liberal who appealed to the tabloids; a rebel on the surface, a conformist at heart; an egalitarian who preferred the statelier ambience of the House of Lords to the intense partisanship of the Commons; a brilliant communicator in public, a less assured one in private, above all, a Labour loyalist who jumped ship to join a centrist party she had always derided.

Out of this maelstrom of paradox one quality stands out, and that is her essential niceness – a double-edged compliment in the political universe, for, as William Hague once brutally remarked, ‘In politics, Mrs Williams, it isn’t enough to be nice.’¹²

Endnotes

1 Marcia Falkender, Downing Street in Perspective , Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1983, p.252

2 Roy Hattersley, Who Goes Home? , Little, Brown, 1995, p.114

3 Daily Telegraph , 21 September 2009

4 Dictionary of Liberal Biography , ed. Duncan Brack et al., Politico’s, 1998, p.381

5 Spectator , 16 September 2009

6 Guardian , 3 October 2009

7 George Catlin (GC) diary, 6 August 1966

8 Melanie Phillips, The Divided House: Women at Westminster , Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980, p.25

9 Daily Telegraph , 5 May 1979

10 SW to Vera Brittain (VB), 16 November 1958

11 Peter Parker, For Starters: The Business of Life , Pan Books, 1989, p.59

12 Oxford University debate quoted in David Walter, The Oxford Union: Playground of Power , Macdonald, 1984, p.199

1

DESTINED FOR POLITICS

Shirley Vivian Brittain-Catlin was born in Chelsea on Sunday 27 July 1930. Her mother was the author Vera Brittain, later to win international eminence with her bestselling autobiography, Testament of Youth, and her father was Professor George Catlin, a distinguished political scientist.

Hailing from the villages bordering the Potteries in north Staffordshire as far back as the sixteenth century, the Brittains were of solid yeoman stock. What propelled them to a life of affluence was the acquisition of a papermaking business at Hanley in 1855 by Shirley’s great-great-grandfather Thomas Brittain, a businessman of single-minded grit and sharp financial acumen. When he died in 1894, aged ninety-one, he left a fortune of over £130,000. His grandson, Arthur Brittain, born in 1864, the eldest of twelve children, lived in his shadow (Arthur’s father died in 1885) and although responsible for developing new factories at Cheddleton, near Leek, when managing director, his ambitions were strictly limited. As a wealthy and debonair businessman of a certain standing, he set his sights on keeping his family to the manner born. In 1891 he had married Edith Bervon, the elegant daughter of John Inglis Bervon, a struggling musician who had been giving him singing lessons. She appears to have had certain reservations about the match, but her father’s death the previous year had helped convince her, the third of his six children, to accept Arthur’s hand as a means of escaping a life of penury. Following the wedding at Southport, the young couple settled in the more exclusive part of Newcastle-under-Lyme, before their move to the silk manufacturing town of Macclesfield in Cheshire. Here they lived in some style with their two children, Vera, born in 1893, and Edward, born in 1895.

Although more drawn to the artistic sensitivities of the Bervons (her mother was a gifted musician and stylish dresser), Vera, with her volatile temperament, couldn’t escape some of the less wholesome features of her father’s vast family. Aside from their tendency to fall out with each other, the Brittains were bedevilled by neuroticism and melancholia. Both Vera’s father and his sister Edith committed suicide, the former in 1935 unable to come to terms with the loss of his only son. In his own fastidious manner Arthur Brittain was a kindly, gentle person capable of showering affection upon his children, but his petulant outbursts combined with his wife’s ingrained fatalism helped account for Vera’s own lifelong diffidence and tendency to fear the worst. Spending large tracts of her early years alone in the nursery with her brother Edward, she looked to literature to discover strong emotions, developing a remarkable facility for writing ‘novels’ herself.

In 1905, as part of their quest for greater social status, the Brittains moved to the fashionable spa town of Buxton in the Derbyshire Peak District. Here they lived the leisured life to the full, participating in the interminable round of tennis tournaments and musical soirées, a rather stultifying atmosphere that didn’t appeal to someone of Vera’s restless ambition, especially the patronising attitudes she encountered towards women. It was thus with some relief that she was sent away, aged fourteen, to St Monica’s, an enlightened Surrey boarding school where her Aunt Florence was co-headmistress and where inspirational teachers fostered her literary talent and feminist convictions.

Leaving school with an enhanced determination to follow a life of independence, Vera spurned the social niceties of provincial Buxton and worked all hours to win an exhibition in English Literature to Somerville College, Oxford. It was an outstanding achievement but one that didn’t fully register with her parents, steeped in values from a different era. The fact that an attractive girl with many an admirer in tow should place academic study above social advancement and marriage baffled them.

Vera duly went up to Oxford in October 1914 in the shadow of war, only to find that her priorities were soon to change. That year she had become close to Roland Leighton, a good friend of her brother’s at Uppingham, a conventional Midlands public school, when he had come to stay. According to Vera’s son John Catlin in his book Family Quartet, Roland combined in himself those attributes which appealed to Vera’s sense of idealism and romanticism. For behind a virile appearance there lurked an acute sensitivity endowed with feminist sympathies and poetic insight.

Although the pair were rarely together, Roland exercised a growing hold over Vera’s imagination, especially with the coming of war, a war in which he, Edward and their friend Victor Richardson eagerly enlisted in the prevailing spirit of King and Country. Slowly but surely their affection turned to something greater as he was posted to France and when he returned home for a brief period of leave in August 1915 they became unofficially engaged. As he departed for the front for the final time he bade her such a tender farewell that the memory of that last encounter on a crowded St Pancras platform lingered in her memory thereafter.

Roland’s travails at the front had led to Vera abandoning her studies at the end of her first year for nursing to show solidarity with him and all those engaged in the war effort. It was while on leave from Camberwell hospital over Christmas 1915 that she received the devastating news of his death at the hands of a sniper’s bullet, a tragedy that was to change her life forever. ‘In the utter blackness of my soul I seem to be touching the very depths of that dull lampless anguish which we call despair,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘And I don’t feel as if I shall ever rise again.’¹

Her despair only deepened in 1917 when the war claimed the lives of Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, a close friend of Edward to whom she had become greatly attached. From now on she invested all her emotions in Edward, the brother she had always revered, not least for his gallantry under fire which won him the Military Cross at the Somme.

In January 1918 he was sent to northern Italy to help stem a last-ditch Austrian offensive on the Asiago Plateau. Aware of the ferocity of the fighting in those parts, Vera rarely had Edward out of her thoughts as her anxieties about his safety grew. Those anxieties were amply vindicated when, on 18 June, she answered the dreaded knock on the front door of the family home to receive a terse telegram informing them of his death.

Crushed by this most crippling loss of all, Vera’s grief and inner turmoil were complete. Having viewed the war at the outset in conventional idealistic terms, her subsequent experiences both at home and on the front line had stripped her of all previous delusions. ‘For me, as for all the world,’ she wrote in Testament of Youth, ‘the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity; a waste of youth and of time.’² ‘I could have married Victor in memory of Roland, and Geoffrey in memory of Edward,’ she was to reminisce years later, ‘but the War took even the second-best; it left nothing. Only ambition held me to life.’³

Returning to Oxford in this fragile state, Vera increasingly came to rely on Winifred Holtby, a tall, golden-haired girl from Yorkshire, some four-and-a-half years her junior. Her outgoing warmth and irrepressible vitality made her a secure haven for Vera’s stormier character, but what really brought them together were their mutual literary ambitions and highly developed social consciences. On leaving Oxford in 1921 they set up home together in London, and while serving their literary apprenticeships they worked avidly for the women’s movement, the League of Nations Union and the Labour Party.

In 1923 Vera published her first novel, The Dark Tide, an indictment of sexism at Oxford, which caused something of a furore, especially at Somerville, her old college – yet equally it had its admirers, not least a certain George Catlin, who equated the feminist traits of the heroine with his own mother.

George Catlin’s roots were Bedfordshire yeomanry. His father, the Rev. George Catlin, born in 1858, was a peppery Congregationalist minister who converted to the Anglican communion in middle age; his mother, Edith Kate Orton, the intelligent daughter of a carpenter from Leamington Spa in Warwickshire who was fifteen years her husband’s junior. Their fractious marriage bedevilled his childhood as the fiercely independent outlook of his mother, not least her support for the suffragettes, antagonised his domineering father. Following a number of furious altercations she walked out on her family in 1915 and moved to London’s East End, where she devoted herself to good causes. Her departure and her death from uraemia, aged only forty-four, in 1917, were an incalculable blow to the young George, especially since his father descended into depression and destitution.

Confronted with these most traumatic circumstances the young George increasingly had to assume responsibility for his father’s emotional and financial state. Repeatedly rejected by the army because of ill health, he eked out a pittance of a living as a junior civil servant. Such were his straitened circumstances that he was forced to eat the bare minimum in order to take home enough food to his ailing father.

After a brief but glittering Oxford career, postponed ’til after the war, it was with some consternation that George narrowly failed to win a fellowship there, especially at All Souls. Whether this had anything to do with his tetchy relationship with his tutors or his recent conversion to Roman Catholicism is unclear, but his failure to gain full recognition for his accomplishments left him with bittersweet memories of Oxford. Desperate to earn his living, he accepted a lectureship in History at Sheffield University, and within a year was given leave of absence to take up a fellowship at Cornell University in New York State. It proved a shrewd move. Having established a great interest in political thought at Oxford, George helped set up the Political Science Department at Cornell and within a year he was offered a professorship. It was here that he began a year’s weighty correspondence with Vera, two-and-a-half years his senior, following the publication of The Dark Tide. By the time they met a mutual curiosity had developed, and following the briefest of courtships, during which George’s handsome features and romantic character proved irresistible, they became engaged in July 1924.

Vera had never regarded marriage as an end in itself and after her wartime experiences she doubted whether she would ever again be able to rekindle that romantic spark necessary for such a commitment. At the same time, recognising the futility of remaining single out of blind loyalty to the dead, and keen to have children, she felt able to enter an agreement with someone whose values seemingly reflected her own. Provided George understood the absolute priority she gave to her work over love and marriage she would be happy to oblige, conditions to which George, desperate to find stability in his life, reluctantly acceded. The fact that following a series of rows he intimated to Vera soon afterwards that she wasn’t the woman he had fallen in love with punctured her confidence and led her to question his motives for marrying her. Such suspicions were to linger, which helps explain much of their underlying tension thereafter, so that amidst the genuine affection, there were the conflicting priorities and mutual recriminations of two highly vulnerable people in search of eminence.

After their marriage in June 1925, the Catlins headed for Ithaca, New York State, where George’s academic career was progressing nicely. For Vera, the stay proved a crushing disappointment. After a year of boredom and unfufilment in a provincial backwater (and later in New York City) playing the part of a professor’s wife, unrecognised for her own talents, she decided that America wasn’t for her. Determined to pursue her literary ambitions she served notice on George that she was returning to London permanently, leaving him back at Cornell that September on a part-time appointment, unaccompanied and unhappy. In letter after letter he gave full vent to his misery, berating her for her selfishness and pleading with her to return to Cornell.

George’s increasingly fraught state threw Vera into emotional turmoil, but despite mollifying him with a brief visit to the US the following spring she refused to countenance a permanent return. Her writing and the birth of their son John in December 1927 saw to that. Consequently, George in time began to compensate for her absence by turning his attention elsewhere, liaisons that did little for his wife’s self-esteem. Returning home each June wasn’t easy as he struggled to gain an equal footing in her affections compared to Winifred and, later, the children. According to John Catlin, the unconventional rules governing his parents’ marriage told very much against his father, forcing him to compromise with his career in the US so that he could spend some time at home with his family. Inevitably all this widened the gulf between him and Vera, exacerbated by the central dilemma of her life: how to combine renown as a writer with her responsibilities as a wife and a mother. She later recalled the strenuous effort required to put her writing to one side to produce Shirley, especially as the excruciatingly painful circumstances of John’s birth in December 1927 were hardly an inducement to have more children.

In April 1930 the Catlins moved to 19 Glebe Place, off the King’s Road in Chelsea, a street much favoured by those of an artistic bent, and it was here, three months later, on 27 July, that Shirley was born. Though the birth was much less harrowing than John’s, nevertheless, it took its toll on Vera, so that even with the help of a nurse she found looking after two energetic young children some undertaking, especially with George away for long periods. ‘This year has been a very heavy burden to me,’ she informed him in January 1931. ‘I wish I could feel you thought the little girl was worth it; personally I think she will be – and to you, perhaps, more than to me.’⁴ Although comparing Shirley unfavourably with John, ‘my masterpiece’, whose looks she considered to be the replica of Edward’s, she soon found much to rhapsodise about, not least her ‘most heavenly’ blue eyes, her golden curls and her affectionate nature. ‘I think you will be charmed with her. Probably she will never be quite as heart-breakingly touching as John, but that’s to her advantage – particularly later in the wider world, where life is always hard for the supersensitive.’⁵

Shirley’s perpetual screaming when cutting teeth and her rage when failing to get what she wanted confirmed Vera in her earlier assessment that she was of feistier disposition than John, ‘though she will be quite as intelligent, tremendously observant and assertive’. While Vera continued to harbour anxieties about John owing to his physical frailty and emotional vulnerability, the latter a reflection of her own character, she was much more upbeat about Shirley, suspecting that her charm and friendliness had much to do with her perfect health. Both in looks and character Vera considered Shirley to be George’s child, even comparing her rages with those of his father. She assured him that if he were willing to exercise patience he would in time derive much warmth and kindness from her, such was her anxiety ‘both to give and take all the affection possible’. Yet for all the leading influence Vera attributed to George over Shirley, her part shouldn’t be underestimated.

A woman of iron self-discipline and ordered routine, Vera put every minute to good use in the pursuit of excellence. Impeccably turned out herself, she insisted on the highest standards of cleanliness and tidiness in her household, as well as ensuring that family arrangements were in good order. A stickler for honesty, it wasn’t unknown for her to inform the Inland Revenue that she was paying too little tax, and when word reached her post-war that her household had been exceeding its legitimate rations she gave strict orders to her staff that any abuses should cease immediately. Her candour extended to her conversation and book reviews. She said what she thought, sometimes too caustically, without a view to the consequences, for popularity, however desirable, wasn’t to be traded for the sake of integrity. At the same time the trouble she took with her core readership, especially young authors requesting help, was typical of an overriding benignity which manifested itself in so many ways. There was her care for her staff, her generosity to family and friends and her unsung work for a host of worthy causes.

Although desperately keen that her own children make the most of their talents, she chose to apply different standards from her own childhood, when self-expression had been frowned upon. Within reason she would give them their heads and encourage them to think and act for themselves, so that they could develop into self-confident individuals as much at ease in adult company as with their peers. Such trust, she reasoned, would hopefully induce a more creative and congenial atmosphere than the one she had experienced at home in Buxton. From these convictions Vera never wavered and years later she was able to derive a certain satisfaction from the writer Storm Jameson’s observation that her greatest achievement had been the way she had prepared her children to cope with their wartime evacuation to the US without undue regret for her absence.

Glebe Place was a tall, unprepossessing late-Victorian house sparsely furnished aside from the top-floor attic overflowing with books. In common with that era, it was an orderly household, each meal at a set time with fairly predictable menus. It was also a highly disciplined one whereby Vera, having read the papers and answered her correspondence, repaired to her study every morning on the strict understanding that interruptions would be countenanced only in an emergency. The fact that she returned for another stint in the afternoon, and was often away lecturing, meant that the children, aside from Winifred, spent much time with their German governess, Fräulein Agnes Bleichenbach, a gentle soul they much liked and respected. Although her family estate and literary royalties left her well endowed, Vera, conscious of supporting a large household that included a housekeeper, butler, parlour maid, secretary and governess, avoided undue extravagance. Meat was never eaten more than three times a week, wine only appeared for a birthday and the children’s pocket money was kept to a minimum. Indeed, for progressive parents, Vera and George were quite conventional in observing the social proprieties of the time. Conversation would be discouraged at breakfast while they read the newspapers, there was to be no sloping off after meals and a 6.30 p.m. bedtime was strictly enforced, although Shirley, emulating the young Vera, would read after lights out and recite endless stories to her brother.

‘From the outset’, Vera wrote in Testament of Experience, her second instalment of autobiography,

Shirley sustained the nursery adage which commends ‘Sunday’s child’, for she put on weight steadily and was the easiest of infants to rear. Her affirmative attitude to life seemed to justify the instinct which had led us to name her after Charlotte Brontë’s ‘gallant little cavalier’ … As she grew out of infancy she became a dynamo of energy; she never walked when she could run, and she climbed everything.⁶

Recognising her to be healthier and happier than her brother, Vera told George that John should be their priority. ‘I rather feel we shall always owe him more than we do her,’⁷ an opinion that found little favour with Shirley, who as a fiercely competitive, outward-going child proved more demanding of her love. She used to tax her mother by asking her a plethora of questions, such as whether she preferred bees to butterflies, persisting until she received a definite reply. Preoccupied with the closing stages of Testament of Youth, her first instalment of autobiography, during 1932, and aware there were limits to her time and attention, Vera decided to send Shirley, aged two, to the Chelsea Babies’ Club, a progressive nursery school close by, figuring that being in John’s company would be preferable to remaining at home alone.

Despite the conundrum of balancing these conflicting demands, Vera’s ambition drove her on as she movingly recollected the litany of personal tragedies that had befallen her. The eloquence and originality of Testament of Youth made it an immediate bestseller on its publication in 1933, bringing her the fame and recognition she had always craved. It also made her a relatively wealthy woman in her own right and the keeper of the family purse, which, given her household’s expensive overheads and her husband’s meagre salary, assumed a certain significance since future comfort was dependent on her continual success. At the same time success didn’t come without a cost, for her new-found fame exposed George’s own predicament, much to his frustration.

Having presided over an influential national study into the workings and ramifications of Prohibition in the United States, the result of which brought about its immediate repeal, George published his doctoral thesis, The Science and Method of Politics, in 1927. Yet despite the high esteem in which he was held at Cornell and the undoubted fulfilment he derived from his work there, academia by itself wasn’t enough to satisfy his ambitions. A committed socialist, albeit one of moderate tendencies, he longed to become an MP. The trouble was that the October 1931 general election was no time to be standing for the Labour Party given the recent failures of the MacDonald government to cope with the Great Depression and mass unemployment. With the party receiving a trouncing it was scarcely surprising that George should be defeated in the west London seat of Brentford & Chiswick.

It was of course much to George’s misfortune that the Labour Party remained so adrift throughout the 1930s, but there were also more personal factors to account for his failure to get elected. There was his work at Cornell which prevented him from devoting the appropriate time and trouble to nursing a new constituency and, in addition to his deficiencies as a speaker, there was his shy, awkward personality which struggled to reach out to the wider electorate with their day-to-day concerns. Even his attempts to cultivate the rich and famous proved counterproductive, for his biggest flaw, according to Vera, was his penchant for pontifical monologues, delivered without consideration for the views of others. It was thus doubly unfortunate that he should sacrifice true renown in academia in search of a career in Parliament for which he wasn’t suited. In 1935 George finally severed his connection with Cornell. It proved to be a fateful decision and one that he came to regret. Within months he was thrust into another general election, this time in an old-fashioned two-seat division in Sunderland, at a time when Labour was still recovering from its drubbing in 1931. Despite the warm response that Vera’s speeches evoked on the stump (she was a much more adept campaigner than her husband), both George and his partner Leah Manning, the far-left educationalist, were defeated in an election that the National Government won comfortably.

Following this electoral setback George threw himself into a mission to help the victims of the Spanish Civil War, but his best-laid plans were frustrated by the obstructionism of the Spanish government. His failure to land a chair in Political Science at Cambridge merely added to his disenchantment. Only his continued success as a source of political thought afforded him some comfort at a time when Vera’s career was in full bloom. By 1939 he was once again heading back across the Atlantic, this time to lecture at the American University in Washington and soon imploring his wife to come and live there, a plea she once again rejected.

Although Shirley departed quite happily for her first day at nursery school in September 1932, her extreme youth led to a rough baptism with her peers. ‘She is very easily roused if anything or anybody annoys her,’ commented her first report. ‘On these occasions she is inclined to become very negative towards everybody and this continues for some considerable time.’⁸ It took the rest of the year for her to find her feet and become fully accepted. By her second year the runes appeared much more favourable. Her growing sociability, her interesting observations on the other children’s behaviour and her artistic creativity were all the subject of favourable comment. ‘One forgets that it is only this term that Shirley has been working with the older group of children. She is well adjusted and happy. She is developing rapidly.’⁹ The only cloud on the horizon was the upset caused by the absence of her parents from home. ‘Has definite phases when she needs attention and approval of an adult. This seems often to correspond to the times when her mother is away’ was the verdict of her report in March 1934.¹⁰

Shirley’s demand for her mother’s attention began to prey on Vera. When taxed about her maternal neglect at the time and later she was sensitive to the charge, especially since she had disapproved of the way her mother’s generation had left their children to other people. She would later recall the heartbreak that the pain of separation from her children had caused her, never more so than during her three months in the US in 1934 when she would cry herself to sleep. Yet aside from ascribing her neglect to her perceived calling to make the world a better place (‘I had gifts, even more standards, to pass on’), Vera claimed, quite justifiably, that her input into her children’s upbringing was quite considerable. Not only did she take them for walks, enlightening them as to the different types of bird and flower, she also read to them after tea, and in John’s case taught him the piano, before putting them to bed. When they were ill she looked after them, employing her nursing experiences to good effect.

If the children continued to harbour regrets that they didn’t see more of their parents, they at least were fortunate in the range of surrogates to help ensure that both of them, especially Shirley, had happy childhoods. Entertainment in those early years often centred on Winifred Holtby, known to the children as Aunty Winifred. Tall, slim with golden hair, and invariably attired in a striking assortment of hats and dresses, she endeared herself to everyone by the radiance of her personality. ‘For my brother and me,’ Shirley later recounted, ‘Winifred was the source of unending pleasure: stories, games, wild fantasies, exotic visitors … Our favourite game was elephants. We would pile cushions high up on Winifred’s back, and issue orders from our rickety howdah as she crawled carefully across the floor.’¹¹

Such boisterous activity proved to be an exhausting business for a woman in brittle health, suffering from Bright’s disease, although the unmitigated pleasure she derived from John and Shirley offered much in the way of consolation. During Vera’s absence in the US in 1934 the children flourished under her watch, leading a more active social life than normal. There was still the occasional tantrum to keep Winifred up to the mark, but with a mixture of firmness and sympathy she coped admirably.

‘I’m afraid your Shirley has a touch of genius,’ she informed Vera after a particularly fraught day.

Three times today she flew into rages, hitting people, and screamed like a lost soul for nothing. I took her up to my room and reasoned with her … But I remember precisely the same rages in my youth. Horses used to drive me wild. I told Shirley so, and that tickled her. ‘Aunty, are you sure it wasn’t a donkey?’ And that broke us both up. We had been very solemn and sanctimonious; but then we roared with laughter, rocking in each other’s arms … Whether it

Reviews for Shirley Williams

[dunkelbaum · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is a disgrace, a completely uncritical paean of praise of a woman who is certainly not universally admired and who is astonishingly self-important and who has contributed to some of the most disastrous decisions in the the recent political life of the nation, including lately the dismantling of the NHS. So you can see that she is a controversial figure but you would never guess it from this badly written, sententious, bland hagiography.