Jacqueline Wheldon - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

She was born in Clonmel Road, Fulham, west London, the first child and only daughter of Hugh Clarke (1892-1930), a toolmaker, and Lillie Nunns (1890-1980) the daughter of a railway guard, Harry Nunns, and his wife Elizabeth. Her father, whom she remembered despite his death when she was six years old, told her "with absolute certainty" that she would be a writer.

She was educated at Carlyle School, Chelsea. When the school was evacuated to Windsor at the beginning of World War II she absconded back to London several times, by bicycle, and was eventually expelled. Throughout the war she lived in Ealing with her mother, working first for Hoover and then for the local council. She joined the Labour Party and in 1945 was the East Ealing Labour Party delegate to the party conference. In a letter written shortly before her death she wrote that her life "started with an arrival, inauspicious, at the LSE London School of Economics" (The Times). Actually she had been discovered by Professor Harold Laski when she asked him to talk at the Ealing branch of the Labour League of Youth. Laski invited her to come and work in the Machine Room as a secretary to the Statistics Department at the LSE for two years, and in 1948 she was admitted to the school.

Laski’s successor was Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott had a profound influence on Wheldon’s politics that expressed itself gradually over the years. Her political activism, great in youth, and to be resurgent in later life, was to be subsumed in literary endeavour. While Laski’s desire “to share what is most dignified in human nature” (Abse, 134) was the reason Wheldon had arrived at LSE, one of her own observations once there was that “it is not the case that the elite possess the works, but that the works possess the elite... The elite as I met it at LSE was at my service; there would have been no ‘beauties’ of Plato, Rousseau, *Hobbes for me to have ‘a sight’ of, if generations of individuals whom these writers had come to ‘possess’ had not submitted to serve and to keep these works intact and ever re-creative and re-created.” (Abse, 134).

Now, studying part-time, it was work during the day, lectures in the evening and the Labour Party increasingly on the side. She received high marks for an essay on economic history and was encouraged to expand it and put it in for a State Scholarship for Mature Students, which she received. She became a full time student at the age of 26. Michael Oakeshott undertook the whole course on the history of political thought. She later wrote that "the first book I really read in my life, ignoring all introductions, prefaces, commentaries, was Cornford’s translation of The Republic" (Abse, 143).

Wheldon gained an Upper Second and left the LSE in 1954 to start research at the Nuffield Foundation in Cambridge with Dr Hilde Himmelweit on the book Television and the Child. In Cambridge she made a number of lifelong friends to whom she was introduced by Norman Podhoretz (whom she had met on a holiday in Greece in 1951, and who later became editor of the American intellectual monthly Commentary), including novelist Dan Jacobson and chemist Aaron Klug (who won the Nobel Prize in 1982). F. R. Leavis still held court at Downing College, and the students of English were in his thrall. Through them Wheldon was introduced to The Novel. She “read enormously... came alive in a curious kind of way” (Bookseller).

During the course of 1955, Wheldon applied successfully for a post in the Cabinet Office, and was at the same time asked to become an officer in the Joint Intelligence Bureau at the Ministry of Defence. She turned down both these positions, probably because she had accepted a proposal of marriage from the broadcaster Huw Wheldon. He was not keen that she should work; it may also be that she was keen to write. They were married at St John’s Church, Fulham, on 2 April 1956. It was to be a marriage of intense mutual dependence and uninterrupted loving kindness.

In June 1957 she resumed a PhD on 19th century political thought back at the LSE, but it was never finished and perhaps hardly truly begun, for by July she was pregnant with her first child.