PM Harold Wilson and the Isles of Scilly

After his first visit to the islands in 1952, Ernest Kay recalls in Pragmatic Premier   that Harold Wilson decided ‘he would build a holiday home of his own on St.Mary’s.  As soon as he went back to London he would ask the Duchy of Cornwall if they could find him a plot of land.  “We’ll have a bungalow – a Cornish prefab”, he said excitedly.  “We’ll call it Hugo’s Home”’, he said, presumably a play on Hugh Town. It took some years for the plan to come to fruition and the bungalow was given a different and arguably more suitable name.    At the suggestion of Harold Wilson’s sister Marjorie, it was called Lowenva, an old Cornish name meaning House of Happiness. In 1958 the Wilsons bought a small plot of land on the edge of Hugh Town for £200 from the Duchy. There they built a three-bedroom bungalow.    In his authorised biography, Philip Ziegler notes, ‘The rooms were poky, the architecture unambitious, but it was exactly what they wanted.’ ...

Recently BBC4 featured a documentary on the long rivalry between Harold Wilson and Edward Heath.   One of the points made was that Harold Wilson used his visits to the Scillies to reinforce his image of ‘ordinariness’, being photographed in sandals and shorts with a shopping bag outside the Co-op.    But it wasn’t  just a subterfuge: in many ways, despite his intellectual brilliance, Wilson was an ordinary man from a lower middle class background who liked unpretentious food and the simple pleasures that the islands offered. However, once he became prime minister issues of security assumed a new importance.   When Wilson visited the islands in the summer of 1964 he realised that when he returned at Christmas it would be as prime minister.     As Ernest Kay recalls, ‘He even considered where his “hot” telephone line should be installed; where his personal bodyguard would live when he was asleep in his bungalow (there was obviously no ro...

In Easter 1978 I was staying at my parents’ home near Penzance and took my future wife for her first visit to the Scillies.   We had a reasonably smooth crossing on the Scillonian both ways.  Coming back the boat was not that busy as it was a week or so after the Easter holiday.   I was therefore quite puzzled when there was a delay getting off at Penzance.   When I got to the top of the stairs the reason became apparent.    Harold Wilson was there, accompanied by his golden labrador dog   Paddy.    He was shaking the hand of every passenger as they got off.    This was about two years after he had stopped being prime minister. What I should have noticed was that the Scillonian would have been flying the flag of Trinity House.   Wilson had been made an Honorary Elder Brother in 1967 and always flew the flag outside his bungalow when he was on St.Mary’s. Whether or not they agreed with his politics (and most...

I recently went to see the revival of Yes, Prime Minister in London and that reminded me that you should never be surprised by anything that you find in the prime ministerial files in the National Archives.   Even so, I was surprised when trawling through Harold Wilson’s files to look for anything related to the Isles of Scilly to find a memorandum from a civil servant headed ‘Paddy’, the name of Mr Wilson’s labrador.   The memorandum assured the prime minister that the Isles of Scilly Council had no intention of banning his dog from the islands.    The Clerk of the Council wrote to the prime minister in January 1976 referring ‘to a lot of stupidity hinging round your poor unfortunate dog, and Tregarthen Mumford has rung me this morning to say you are furious about it all’.    The prime minister was assured that there was no intention of controlling residents dogs ‘in which category you would, of course, come.’ Following an incident in which a...

I am going to use this blog to reproduce a few stories I wrote about prim minister Harold Wilson and his love of the Isles of Scilly.   They were originally written for the now defunct Scilly Now and Then and possibly used as scripts for the former Radio Scilly.