David Waddington Memoirs (3 page)

I
do not know why I was so confident I would get in to Oxford that year. Men who had fought in the War were still coming home and were entitled to priority, and my sister Zoe had had a real struggle the previous year before, eventually getting a place to read medicine at Queen’s University, Belfast. But I felt in my bones that everything would turn out all right, and so it did. So at the beginning of October 1947 I caught a train to Oxford and on arriving at Hertford was directed to a gloomy set of rooms in the shadow of the bridge across New College Lane. There I met my roommate, Peter Nicholls, who for a year had, I fear, a lot to put up with from me.

Before long there was a knock on the door and I was recruited to play squash next day; another knock and I was joining OUCA (the Oxford University Conservative Association) and so it went on. It was the beginning of a time in my life when every day seemed to bring new excitements.

Over the years I learned to love north-east Lancashire but in 1947 it was rather shabby, dismal and damp and certainly not very exciting. By contrast, Oxford seemed bright and clean, warm and friendly and bustling with life and interest.

My studies were not demanding. I had to see my tutor once a week, read him an essay and go to one or two lectures, and that left plenty of time for politics and many other delights.

I am not sure whether I went up to Oxford determined to get involved in politics or whether it was something that happened after I arrived. At school I had been interested in public affairs and my house tutor, realising I was a voracious reader, had set me to keeping up to date his edition of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives, an enormous work on world events. But my parents were not over-concerned with politics and, although suitably shocked when the Clitheroe constituency went Labour in 1945, they rather disapproved of the Conservative candidate, mainly because he had absent-mindedly shaken hands with them twice in one afternoon.

I was very shy and terrified at the idea of speaking in public but I persuaded myself that I had to conquer conquer my fears. I went, therefore, to speaking classes and spoke in the Union. Too well as it turned out because my speech based on
The Road to Serfdom
by the relatively unknown Professor Hayek attracted the attention of the President, Sir Edward Boyle Bt, who promptly invited me to be one of the main speakers the following week. The result was a disaster. I cannot now remember the subject of the debate in which I was to take part, but when I told a friend that I had no idea what to say he suggested that we should go punting on the Cherwell and something would come to me. Nothing did and after a dismal performance I then had to endure the shame of dining with the other debaters whose eyes I felt never left me. Most of all, I was deeply ashamed that I had let myself down and, in later years, I often suffered greatly from a realisation that again I had done just that. It was a while before I summoned the courage to have another try in the Union, and when I did, and in similar situations in later life, I made sure that I knew as much about the subject to be discussed as anyone I was likely to encounter.

In those days the Union was a thriving institution and many of those taking part were later to make their mark in public
life – Edward Boyle, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Robin Day, Ludovic Kennedy and many more.

I cannot think why I persevered with public speaking when it made me so miserable, but persevere I did, and eventually I was twice rewarded. I got a career in politics and the law, and I got a wife. In those days OUCA used to send teams of speakers to help Conservative candidates in various parts of the country, and at Christmas 1947 I joined a team bound for Nelson & Colne because the constituency was close to my home. I lived at home but caught the first bus in the morning and joined the others in Nelson. During the day we held street corner meetings and harangued people at works’ gates. For the most part we were treated with good humour and nothing was thrown at us. At 5.30 p.m. we had high tea at the Lord Nelson Hotel and then repaired to one of the many conservative clubs to bore the beer drinkers and snooker players. The club secretary would call for silence and then ask the assembled company to give a hearing to some young gentlemen who had come all the way from Oxford to speak to them. Ninety-nine percent of the congregation was there for the beer and in no mood to be interrupted by the likes of us, and they were no more appreciative of our efforts than the weavers. But at the Brierfield Club I met the Conservative candidate Alan Green and his wife, and years later I met, first, their eldest daughter Hilary and then their second daughter Gill who, after a decent interval, I proceeded to marry. I then myself became the candidate for Nelson & Colne and by 1968 was the Member of Parliament. But more of that later.

Back to Oxford, and in January 1948 I was persuaded to take up rowing. Sitting in a boat on the Thames in the freezing cold was not a pleasurable experience but it was good to get some exercise, and I made some great friends outside politics. In the summer term I rowed in Eights Week and at Marlow Regatta and had a fine time.

In the summer of 1948 I went off to France with Nicholas Coleridge. We went by train to Paris and our party (it was a tour organised by the National Union of Students) went to a university refectory to get an evening meal. We were given a coupon which we exchanged for soup and black bread and then took the metro to the Gare de Lyon. The journey south overnight was very
uncomfortable
. The lucky ones were in very old first-class carriages sitting six instead of three a side; the less lucky lay down in the corridor. After a sleepless night we arrived in Marseilles, after which the train travelled along the coast to our destination in heat the like of which I had never before experienced. St-Aygulf was then a small village waiting to be rebuilt after suffering much damage when the Americans landed in the south of France in the summer of 1944. We slept in one of the buildings which had been shelled and were given a hunk of black bread for breakfast in a barn without a roof. A nice girl said that what we needed was ‘onny’, which when
translated
was ‘honey’, and we bought a communal pot which made the bread nearly edible.

In my second year at Oxford I had a room to myself and decided to throw a party. It was a big mistake. When everyone had settled down to drink and have food, I announced that I had to slip round to Oriel to see my friend John Morrison who was also having a party. I returned an hour or two later to find my party was still going strong but the room looked somewhat bare. It took me a moment or two to realise that several large pieces of furniture had been thrown through the window into Catte Street. The next day I was summoned before the Dean, John Armstrong. He had a very soft voice but his dulcet tones did not disguise the message. I would be sent down if I erred again.

At about this time Peter Emery, who had been on the Nelson & Colne tour, asked me if I would like to stand for the OUCA committee. He said that if I was interested he would look after
my campaign. Canvassing was strictly forbidden so I did not see what campaigning needed to be done; but I said, rather weakly, that I was prepared to leave matters in his hands. I was
mortified
when the result was announced: Brown 14, Collins 15, Jones 23, Snooks 4, Taylor 3, Waddington 148. Nowadays it would be called ‘overkill’.

Years later Peter entertained me most generously both in London and in his constituency, Honiton, where I went to speak for him. But I was a bit disappointed with his hospitality in Oxford. He invited me out to lunch and took me to the BR (British Restaurant) in Gloucester Green. The BR, which was located in a Nissen hut, provided meagre meals for less than a shilling, helping people to eke out their rations.

In those days Gloucester Green was a rather seedy part of Oxford and home to the bus station. There was a pub there with a bad reputation which was frequently raided by the proctors. John Addleshaw, head of the Manchester chambers which I was later to join, told me that when he was an undergraduate he was in the pub when one of these raids took place; and the landlord’s wife invited him to hide under her skirts. He accepted the invitation but the experience persuaded him never to marry.

I decided fairly early on in my time at Oxford that I was going to become a barrister, mainly because a career at the Bar could, I thought, be more easily reconciled with being an MP than life as a solicitor. So when my father rang me to say he was giving up his solicitor’s practice in Burnley to become county court registrar and wanted to know whether on the sale of his practice he should make provision for me to become a partner in the firm, I told him he had no need do so.

My father treated his former partners generously and they in their turn were very helpful to me. By a gentleman’s agreement they undertook to provide me and my family with free legal services and
they honoured that promise punctiliously, as have their successors in the practice. I am immensely grateful to them.

At about this time I joined the Pullen Society, named after Josiah Pullen, a particularly undistinguished former principal of Hertford whose only claim to fame was that the Pullen Tree on the outskirts of Oxford had been named after him. The society was open to members who did not blow their own trumpets.

It was the done thing to keep a little drink in one’s room for the entertainment of callers and this was invariably South African sherry which one could buy from the college buttery for five
shillings
a bottle. The food in college was poor but when in training the rowing eight received sumptuous fare. After one boat club dinner we tried to hit golf balls from the front quad at Hertford over the library in to All Souls. We weren’t entirely successful.

A term was wasted because I fell in love. All I could do was sit on my window-sill looking down onto Catte Street hoping for Marigold to go by. My friends called her Poppy. It was rather an involved joke connected with her very beautiful dark complexion. My mother only made one visit to Oxford when I was there, and when I was escorting her across the high street I spotted Marigold about 150 yards away. I could not resist pointing her out to my mother and was very offended when she sniffed and said: ‘It looks to me as if she could do with a good wash.’

Eventually I became President of OUCA and at the end of my Presidential term was responsible for the proper conduct of the
election
of my successor, and of the other officers and committee. The result of the presidential election was surprising. While all the
well-known
candidates had obtained only a modest number of votes, a Mr Christopher Vere Tombs of Oriel College got 220. That would not have mattered greatly had it not transpired that Mr Tombs, proposed by Cranley Onslow and seconded by John Morrison, was the statue in the front quad at Oriel. Cranley later became
chair-man
of the 1922 Committee. John, the second Viscount Dunrossil, was one of my predecessors as Governor of Bermuda.

Looking back on my time in Oxford I can remember sitting up into the middle of the night debating the ills of the world and the shortcomings of the Labour government, which seemed to be making a mess of everything it touched. Countries which had suffered defeat and occupation were already well on the way to economic recovery while we remained enmeshed in a web of controls designed to make life as uncomfortable as it had been in the middle of the War. Those who dared attack the accepted wisdom of the day – that the man in Whitehall knew best – were derided, insulted and referred to as vermin. The patronising arrogance of some of the Labour politicians was beyond belief. When the Minister of Food, Dr Edith Summerskill, was asked in the House of Commons why there was no Stilton in the shops she replied: ‘The function of the Ministry of Food is not to pander to an acquired taste but to ensure that the people who have never had time to acquire these tastes are suitably fed.’ No wonder we laughed when, after she had challenged an undergraduate called Prentice to tell the difference between a piece of margarine and a pat of butter, a special tasting was arranged and Prentice emerged triumphant. No wonder many of that
generation
grew up with an abiding hatred of socialism, with all its bossy advocates, and took a great delight in cutting down to size people like Hugh Dalton who, on a visit to Oxford, was reminded by an impious undergraduate that at Eton he had been known as ‘Crab’ Dalton because he always had to cling to the nearest wall to avoid being kicked in the backside.

About this time Lord Woolton made a broadcast in which he said he wanted the day to return when a chap could buy his girl a box of sweets. When a Labour politician criticised the speech in a Union debate, saying that
his
father had had eight children and their family had never been able to afford a box of sweets, he was
told by another irreverent student that no doubt his father could have afforded sweets if he had not kept his brains in his balls and he could not blame Woolton for that.

I do not know which of the visiting Conservative
politicians-made
the greatest impression on me. I know who made me laugh the most – Lady Astor. In one speech she set out to illustrate the point that all of us are born different with different intelligences; and that equality was, therefore, unachievable. ‘I have two sons,’ she said. ‘Put one down in darkest Africa and he will come out leading the natives. Put the other down in Piccadilly Circus and he can’t find his way home – and I only live round the corner.’

Bob Boothby was one of our favourites. His support for a united Europe which would never again tear itself apart in war gave us an idealistic theme when we were bored of just thumping Labour for its arrogant incompetence. We looked forward to France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy forming a close federation with their industries so intertwined they could not make war against each other – however much they wanted to do so. Britain would help them with their endeavours and would be the bridge between Europe, the Commonwealth and America. We never thought for one moment that Britain should become a member of a united Europe at the cost of abandoning her Commonwealth and
worldwide
commitments. Anyone who had suggested anything of the sort would have been thought to have taken leave of his senses.