Anne Crossman was a person of considerable interest in her own right, and not merely as the third wife of the Labour cabinet minister Dick Crossman, whose controversial political diaries, published after his dea th in 1974, revealed the inner workings of government. She also served at Bletchley Park, Britain's principal code-breaking establishment, during the Second World War, and later became an accomplished estate manager at Prescote Manor, the farm she inherited in north Oxfordshire.
As a young MP, I lodged with Dick and Anne Crossman in London from 1963 to 1972. One evening in the early 1970s, I returned to 9 Vincent Square after a late vote. Dick said to me, "I've just been told this afternoon that I have irreversible terminal cancer. Therefore, after you have made me coffee, I must get on with the diaries." Incredulous, I asked him, "What does Anne say?" He replied, "'Get a move on with the diaries – you have no time to lose.'"
My judgement is that the diaries, which Whitehall tried to suppress, would not have seen the light of day without her encouragement. The publisher of Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Graham Greene, of Jonathan Cape, told me, "as a literary executor, along with myself and Michael Foot, Anne frankly played a passive part in all the controversies and arguments about the publication of the diaries. But she was always supportive in the background, particularly when I found myself at odds on various aspects of publication with our legal adviser, Arnold Goodman."
Although I lodged with Dick and Anne, I didn't actually know until years after Crossman died – and not from her – that Anne had worked at Bletchley Park in a significant job during the Second World War. While Dick Crossman's occasional howling indiscretions reverberated in the firmament – Harold Wilson called him a "compulsive communicator", to journalists such as Nora Beloff and Anthony Howard – Anne was a model of discretion and good taste.
As Crossman's Parliamentary Private Secretary for six years (at the Ministry of Housing, as Leader of the House of Commons, and as Secretary of State for Social Services) I am in a position to know – and it is an opinion that was shared by Callaghan, at that time Chancellor then Home Secretary, with whom he had uneasy relations – that had it not been for Anne's calming influence, Dick Crossman would have been considered de trop and would not have lasted the full span in the Labour cabinet of 1964-1970.
Anne Crossman was much more than a political wife. She was born Anne McDougall, the only and adored child of Alexander Patrick McDougall CBE, the founding chairman of the company Midland Marts, which played an important part in the agricultural world of Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties. As vice-chairman of the Scottish Farmers Union, and a livestock commissioner, he had been a key adviser to Lloyd George as Prime Minister and to the Ministry of Food from 1917 to 1920. In 1920 he moved from Perthshire to buy Prescote Manor in Cropredy near Banbury, a rich and beautiful farm.
It was here that Anne grew up and progressed to St Hugh's College, Oxford where she read PPE from 1937 to 1940. Lord Briggs, the historian, who was himself at Bletchley during the war, told me that it was the custom of that moment to recruit intelligent young ladies from respectable fam-ilies who could be trusted. Anne McDougall was both local and ideal.
Dick Crossman was a family friend of her father and, settled with his second wife, Zeta, arranged out of non-calculating kindness to get Anne a job as secretary to his friend and fellow Coventry MP, Maurice Edelman. When Zeta suddenly died at Vincent Square, Crossman turned to Anne and they married in 1954. This was a love match, enhanced by the fact that when her father died Anne inherited Prescote Manor, which coincidentally in the Middle Ages had belonged to the Danvers family, relations of Crossman's father, the Chancery judge Sir Stafford Crossman. Along with her friends, particularly Ann Hartree, she instituted a small art gallery there, which was well received in north Oxfordshire.
In the Crossman diaries there are fascinating accounts of the role that Anne played with regard to Warwick University, to Crossman's constituency party in Coventry, and on many state occasions. There is a delicious account of the events of Monday 9 November 1964:
"There were some half-dozen Labour cabinet ministers, the Gunthers, the Crossmans, the Greenwoods, the Cousins, the Castles. In our 10 minutes the Queen talked, as I'm told she always does, about her corgis. (Two fat corgis, roughly the same colour as the carpet, were lying at her feet.) She remarked how often people fell over the dogs. I asked what good they were and she said that they were Welsh dogs used for rounding up cattle by biting their legs. So we talked about whether cattle stepped on them and I said our Suki, a poodle, was much quicker than a corgi at evading the cows. Then the Queen got on to talking about cows and said how terribly pleased she was when she had entered the Dairy Show for the first time and won the championship for Jersey cows."
That night, when I returned after a late-night vote in the House of Commons, Crossman said that Anne had been a far greater success with the Queen than he had. I was not astonished.
Anne Patricia McDougall, estate manager: born Banbury, Oxfordshire 15 April 1920; married 1954 Richard Crossman (died 1974; one daughter, and one son deceased); died Banbury 3 October 2008.
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