Harold Wilson builds his holiday home

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.’   

Wilson would not have wanted anything that distracted from his image as a plain, ordinary, accessible man.   The Scillies chimed perfectly with a ‘middle England’ image.    Mary Wilson paid off the mortgage with the profits from her first book of poems and she then became the owner.

The Wilsons loved to take walks and visit the beaches.  The eight miles circuit of St.Mary’s was an Easter Saturday ritual.    Harold Wilson played golf on the local course and his game improved over time.

When the bungalow was ready in 1960, Wilson was just a former minister and prominent opposition politician.  The unexpected death of Hugh Gaitskell made him leader of the opposition and in 1964 he became prime minister.

His visits to the Scillies could no longer be as quiet or as uninterrupted.   Even when he was in opposition, the media arrived in force on the islands.   On Good Friday 1963 the press accompanied him in the Springfield to St.Agnes.   He was then able to have a picnic on the beach and take a walk round the island.

The arrangement worked out  with the press when he became prime minister  that he would have hold an informal news conference early in his visit and would then be left alone.   On one famous occasion he held the conference on Samson.