From 10, Downing Street to Waterloo Station...


LONDON: As commuters hurried to board the 15.30 Waterloo to Guildford service, none of them gave a second glance to the grey-haired train driver preparing to take the helm. With his sagging trousers and crumpled shirt, he would not have made a lasting impression if they did. Yet he is a man who spent his teenage years in 10, Downing Street, who was once the subject of an IRA kidnap threat and who only last year dined at Chequers as a guest of Tony Blair. He is the Hon. Giles Wilson, the 58-year-old son of the late Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. Although he bears a passing facial resemblance to his father, many of his colleagues at South West Trains are unaware of his extraordinary background, and the reclusive bachelor is happy to keep things that way. He recently gave up his lifelong career as a teacher to fulfill his boyhood ambition of becoming a train driver, and has started by driving trains from Waterloo in central London to Guildford and Dorking in Surrey.

Wilson is so passionate about trains that he has bought and restored at least two disused branch line stations in the West country, including his current weekend home near Exeter.During the week he lives alone in a modest flat in Belsize Park, north London, where he is visited by his mother Mary, 88, and brother Robin, 62. A family friend said: "Everyone was a bit surprised that he should take up driving trains as a career. It was well known he was a rail enthusiast, but not that he was so serious he planned to be a driver full time.
"It is one thing loving the world of railways but quite another to actually work for a rail company. But he has made that decision and seems to be very happy with it. Who knows what his father would think. I’m sure he would not have expected him to end up a train driver." Wilson refused to discuss his decision to change careers, insisting that he has always avoided publicity. "I never give interviews." he said. "I do work on the trains, I have a place in the west country and a flat in London, and that’s all I’m prepared to say."

Wilson was thought to have a difficult relationship with his father, who was prime minister between 1964 and 1970 and 1974 and 1976. When his father died in 1994 he attended his funeral on the Scilly Isles but did not attend a memorial service at Westminster Abbey the following month. Giles and his brother were educated at the public school University College in Hampstead, for which his father was fiercely criticised. After qualifying as a teacher, Wilson worked in a comprehensive school for two years before quitting at the age of 24. At the time friends said he had a "yearning to work with his hands". He later returned to teaching, becoming a maths master at Salisbury Cathedral School, while his elder brother married, had children and became a maths lecturer at the Open University and at Keble College, Oxford. The two brothers and their mother shared Lord Wilson’s £500,000 will, and Giles is thought to have spent his share on restoring his Edwardian station house weekend home on the picturesque Tarka line between Barnstaple and Exmouth. The track runs alongside the River Torridge - the setting for Henry Williamson’s classic novel Tarka The Otter - and is set to be designated a Community Rail Link by the government next year under an EU scheme aimed at protecting unprofitable routes.The platform outside Wilson’s home remains in use and is planted up by villagers each year to produce a stunning floral welcome for passengers. – London Evening Standard