Mary Wilson, Baroness Wilson of Rievaulx


Gladys Mary Wilson, Baroness Wilson of Rievaulx was an English poet and the wife of Harold Wilson, who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The first prime ministerial spouse to become a centenarian, she died at the age of.

Biography

She was born in Diss, Norfolk, the daughter of the Reverend Daniel Baldwin, who was a Congregationalist minister. She attended boarding school at Milton Mount College near Crawley, leaving aged 16 to attend a secretarial course for two years. She was employed as a stenographer at Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight before marrying Harold Wilson on New Year's Day 1940. She and Wilson had two sons, Robin and Giles.
In 1970 her volume of poetry Selected Poems was published and, in 1976, Wilson was one of three judges of the Man Booker Prize, the other judges being Walter Allen and Francis King. According to the Dictionary of National Biography entry for Harold Wilson, written by Roy Jenkins, Mary was not satisfied with life in politics. It was this detachment which gave the Private Eye spoof "Mrs Wilson's Diary", the supposed diary of Wilson, written in the style of the BBC's daily radio serial Mrs Dale's Diary, a spurious look of authenticity.
Politically she opposed her husband in the 1975 European Communities membership referendum, by voting against continued membership, and in her support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Mary was widowed on 24 May 1995 when her husband died of colorectal cancer and Alzheimer's disease after ten years of illness. They were married for 55 years. She continued to live in Westminster, a short distance from Downing Street. She retained the couple's holiday home in the Isles of Scilly.
In 2013, aged 97, she attended the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.
Wilson died on 6 June 2018, of a stroke, at St Thomas' Hospital aged 102. The longest-lived spouse of a British prime minister, she was the first to live beyond the age of 100 years. A private service followed by cremation took place on the mainland of Britain, and her ashes were buried with her husband at Old Town Churchyard, St Mary's, Isles of Scilly.

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