Anne Crossman: widow of the Cabinet minister Richard
Crossman

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4931295.ece

An intensely private person, Anne Crossman found herself
caught up in the maelstrom of Labour politics for more than
20 years.

Already 34 when she married Richard Crossman - then a stormy
petrel on the opposition benches - in June 1954, she went on
to see her husband progress from being a Bevanite rebel to
becoming a linchpin of the first and second Wilson
governments.

If she had no great appetite for political life, she
nevertheless possessed a total dedication to her husband's
career and provided the domestic background of stability and
calm that alone made it possible for him to function as the
heavyweight politician that he became eventually.

Her instincts were also normally shrewd. She was opposed to
his becoming, as he did in 1970, Editor of the New Statesman
at the age of 62 and was much relieved (though also
sympathetic to his hurt feelings) when he was sacked by the
board not even two years later.

She knew how to be tough as well. At least one leading
Bevanite - Geoffrey Bing, later Dr Kwame Nkrumah's
Attorney-General in Ghana - was at her behest banned from
the Crossmans' London home in Vincent Square, Westminster,
and, while she liked and admired Aneurin Bevan, she
displayed ambivalent feelings about Harold Wilson - feelings
that she felt were vindicated when he tried to suppress the
publication of her husband's Cabinet Diaries.

There was more than a touch of romantic Victorian fiction
about the way in which she first set eyes on the man who was
to become her future husband.

As a young don teaching philosophy at New College, Oxford,
Dick Crossman, having been introduced by a friend, would
visit the 16th-century manor house with its accompanying
farm which both then belonged to his future father-in-law,
Patrick McDougall, one of the few anti-Tory Oxfordshire
landowners (he also ran the Banbury cattle market).

As a schoolgirl of 14, Anne found herself smitten by the
glamorous academic whom she would watch as he strode up the
drive to the family residence. Many years later she confided
in a friend that she realised that one day she would marry
him. Twenty years later - and after her future husband had
already been through two marriages (one ending in divorce,
the other in death) - she did.

Although his third marriage was easily his happiest one,
life with Crossman cannot always have been easy. He tended
to ride roughshod over people and thought nothing of
announcing in his wife's hearing: "If you're going to marry,
you want to marry either an alpha girl or a doormat - well,
I married a doormat."

In fact, that was quite unfair to Anne McDougall, who was a
graduate in Phliosophy, Politics and Economics from St Hilda's
College, Oxford, and had even worked during the war at the
top-secret, code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park.
She went on in peacetime to be private secretary to Crossman's
fellow Coventry Labour MP, Maurice Edelman, though she had
given up that job to join a London design firm well before
she and her husband were married.

At that time Prescote Manor and farm were about to be put on
the market, but second thoughts, in the light of his
daughter's marriage, persuaded Anne's father instead to make
over his home and its accompanying land as a post-nuptial
gift to the newly married couple. At first this caused some
tensions. Crossman already had a home of his own convenient
for Parliament in Vincent Square and it was there that he
and his bride had intended to live.

At first they did so, with the ground-floor drawing room and
basement dining room becoming a familiar source of
hospitality for politicians, journalists and writers.

Once, however, first a son and then a daughter had been
born - and Anne's father, meanwhile, had died in 1959 - the
decision was taken to transfer the family home to Prescote.

The only trouble was that, as a busy politician and, indeed,
newspaper columnist, Dick could visit only at weekends.
Nevertheless, with the help of a formidable Evangelical
nanny, the arrangement worked out well and Anne, in her
turn, eventually was able to come up to London once a week.

Both children were sent to Banbury comprehensive, where they
prospered (there was always a slight problem over the
grandeur of their home compared with that of most of their
school fellows). It was, therefore, all the more of a shock
when less than a year after her husband's death in April
1974, Anne Crossman returned from shopping only to find that
Patrick at the age of 17 had hanged himself from a hook in
the kitchen. There was never any explanation for his
suicide, though there was some ill-natured speculation that
he had been upset by all the publicity attending
serialisation of his father's Diaries of a Cabinet Minister
in The Sunday Times.

The tragedy could not have come at a worse moment for Anne
Crossman, since she was now engaged (along with her two
other literary executors, the Cabinet minister Michael Foot
and the publisher Graham C. Greene) in a protracted battle
with the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to see to it
that the Diaries, after the newspaper serialisation, would
emerge in book form.

The Prime Minister was apoplectic at the indiscretions they
contained - and also, no doubt, apprehensive of the
unflattering picture they presented of himself - and,
without ever taking centre stage, bent every muscle to get
the proposed books suppressed.

In the end he lost - Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice,
ruling in favour of Crossman's literary executors and
against the Attorney-General, Sam Silkin, in a celebrated
High Court action.

It says much for the quiet steel behind the diffident
exterior of Anne Crossman that it was a struggle in which
she never wavered.

The first volume of the diaries proved, with all the free
publicity accorded to it by the Wilson Government, an
extraordinary commercial success. It was entirely typical of
Anne Crossman that she should have resolved to put some of
the royalties she got from this phenomenal sale to good use.
At Prescote, in the same stables and in a bakehouse she
established a permanent collection of British arts and
crafts, which for a decade-and-more attracted a stream of
visitors, who also found themselves rewarded by her
delicious home-grown food.

The arts and crafts collection, which opened in May 1977,
survived until the 1990s.

Anne Crossman is survived by her daughter.

Anne Crossman, widow of the Cabinet minister Richard
Crossman, was born on April 15, 1920. She died on October 3,
2008, aged 88