Jeremy Corbyn and Gordon Brown have led tributes to Mary Wilson, a poet and wife of the former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, who has died aged 102.
Wilson published three volumes of verse and was once touted as a possible poet laureate. In a tweet Corbyn praised her poetry and support for Labour’s election victories in the 60s and 70s.
Brown said she was “a role model – as a writer, a mother and as a woman who carried out her public role with determination and dignity, always offering support”.
His wife, Sarah Brown, a campaigner and writer, said Mary Wilson was “full of wit wisdom about life” at No 10.
Like some in her husband’s cabinet, Mary Wilson disagreed with the prime minister on a number of key political issues. As a member of CND she backed nuclear disarmament and voted against Britain’s membership of the then common market.
She rarely intervened in politics after Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, but she described herself as old Labour during the New Labour years.
Mary Wilson was known as private person who disliked the role of political wife, preferring instead to focus on poetry. She was friends with the poet John Betjeman, who wrote a work for her about a planned trip to her birthplace, the Norfolk town of Diss.
It ended: “The train slows down into a crawl/ And stops in silence … Where is this? Dear Mary Wilson, this is Diss.”
The Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh praised the way she cared for the former prime minister after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
In '97 I escorted Mary Wilson to open Merton @mencap_charity 1st dementia centre. She had cared for Harold for years & was a great fighter for carers everywhere. #RIP https://t.co/y9mbDUlCZU
— Siobhain McDonagh MP (@Siobhain_MP) June 7, 2018
The couple had homes in London and the Isles of Scilly. She died in St Thomas’ hospital in south-east London.
She was born Gladys Mary Baldwin and worked as a shorthand typist in a factory in Wirral before meeting Harold Wilson, who became prime minister 24 years later.
When she attended the funeral of the former Labour leader Michael Foot in 2010, a Guardian editorial praised the then 94-year-old.
It portrayed her as a woman who “always preferred poetry to the political life”, who would often seek refuge from Downing Street by staying with friends, but also as someone who remained a “lady of firm convictions”.
Gladys Mary Wilson, Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, poet, was born 12 January 1916 and died 6 June 2018.
