Loyal Pamela was always Enoch's rose
Enoch Powell's wife Pamela has died at the age of 91.
She had been unwell for a lengthy period of time and died in her London home on Saturday.
She is survived by two daughters, Susan and Jennifer.
On leaving school in 1942, she set out two ambitions. She wanted to marry 'an interesting man', and she was determined to 'get into the war'.
She succeeded in both objectives, but in marrying Enoch Powell, she also joined that unique cadre of political wives who devoted everything to sustaining their husbands not just out of love, but also as a patriotic obligation.
She used to say that she felt physically sick whenever her husband planned to make another speech on immigration, and she never relished the controversy which ensued.
However, the thought that anything should take precedence over her husband’s duty in speaking out on an issue which both regarded as of supreme national importance never crossed her mind.
A soldier's daughter, Margaret Pamela Wilson was born in Liverpool on January 28 1926. She spent time in India and moved to Watford and then London.
She could have gone to university but persuaded her mother to allow her to leave school and in 1943 she trained to be a secretary at Mrs Hoster’s Secretarial College.
In May 1944 she joined the typing pool of the War Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence, receiving dictation from, among other people, Field Marshall Smuts.
By May 1945, she had been promoted to Mountbatten’s Rear Link, South East Asia, and she was one of those who strongly disapproved of the general election being held while the country was still at war with Japan.
Winston Churchill was one of her heroes. She managed to be in an office just behind the balcony from which Churchill addressed the crowds on VE Day, and after the war on at least one occasion she took dictation from him at his house in Hyde Park Gate on the subject of the 1950 Conservative Manifesto.
She often recounted the story of treasuring a mackintosh, and refusing to dispose of it, because it had once been held by the great man.
In June 1947 she joined the Conservative Parliamentary Secretariat as a secretary working for Brigadier Powell.
Love blossomed between the two during the 1951 election campaign in Wolverhampton when she travelled to his constituency to offer assistance.
She married Enoch Powell on January 2 1952, and first lived at his 'pretty spartan flat' in Earls Court Square where he promised Pam 'grinding poverty and a life on the back benches'.
Their first daughter, Susan, was born in 1954 and their second daughter, Jennifer, in 1956.
At that time, Pamela said that all her thoughts and energies were on the children, and managing their two homes in London and Wolverhampton.
As the children grew older, Mr Powell’s political career became ever more conspicuous and controversial.
But however much her husband was criticised, she was always liked and admired by everyone who knew her in politics, on both sides of the divide.
It was after her husband’s notorious 'Rivers of Blood' immigration speech of 1968 that her stoicism and loyalty to him were put to the test.
After it he was considered dangerous company for any ambitious politician to keep, which dramatically changed Pamela’s life in politics.
She never disagreed with her husband’s opposition to further immigration.
When asked whether she thought it was unfair for her husband to put the family through such controversy, she replied: “I didn’t feel it unfair, but I wished to God sometimes that it wasn’t happening.”
In private Pamela was never afraid to express her opinion to her husband.
In public, she remained fiercely loyal, even when Mr Powell stood down from his Conservative seat and urged the country to vote Labour in February 1974.
He saw this as the only way of getting the country out of the Common Market, membership of which Labour was then opposing.
But his departure from the Conservative Party was something which she found very hard to accept.
And Mr Powell’s mother-in-law gave him a very hard time for immersing her daughter in the politics of Northern Ireland, after he became a Unionist MP in 1974.
At home she made sure that her husband and children enjoyed a happy family life.
Every year on their wedding anniversary Mr Powell wrote his wife a poem and gave her a bunch of roses, adding an extra rose to the bunch for each year of their marriage.
Pamela Powell was born January 28, 1926. She died November 11, 2017.
