Michael Jeremy Wilson's Obituary
Michael Wilson passed away peacefully in Baltimore County on February 19, 2025, at age 86. His life was never dull!
As a young boy in his home village of Gargrave, Yorkshire, Michael spent his early years observing his father manage local landowners’ estates, gradually taking on more outdoor tasks such as forestry work, farm management, assisting with the August grouse shoot, and challenging the occasional poacher.
Michael was a creature of the Yorkshire Dales. That was just as well, because Michael’s secondary school, Giggleswick, had its military cadets slog over hill and dale in all weathers as part of its physical fitness program. Michael came back from one hike with his boot full of blood. Complaining was not part of the program! Even so, Michael often reminisced about the Yorkshire countryside, especially the dramatic Pen-y-Ghent hill on the cross-country training circuit.
As part of the military cadet program at Giggleswick, he trained as a radio operator. A side benefit to accessing the airwaves was enjoying some of the new rock ‘n roll hits bursting onto the scene, such as Elvis’ Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”. Michael sent the new tunes across the airwaves to officer training institutes in far-flung countries., mostly after receiving permission.
Michael’s love of languages took him from Yorkshire to St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, to study the Linguistics of Classical and Modern Language. While at Oxford, Michael met and married his first wife, Judith. He also made a life-long friend, David Morris, with whom Michael was corresponding up to his last days. To help pay for his studies, Michael had side-gigs driving an ice-cream truck, and shimmying up church steeples to clean the stonework.
His first job was teaching at a private school in Sandbach, Cheshire, UK, for two academic years. Their first child, Clare, was born there. From Sandbach he transferred to Boston, Massachusetts under a Harvard scholarship program to study for a doctorate in management and development economics. After completing his Ph.D degree, he traveled to school systems throughout New England under the auspices of a Harvard spin-off, New England Education Data Systems (NEEDS), a company which pioneered software for human resource computing systems. Justin, Michael’s middle child, was born in Boston. Sarah, the youngest, was born the following year.
The next stage of Michael’s career took him to Dakar, Senegal, for a three-year stint with UNESCO to train senior civil servants in administration and planning. Here he developed his French language skills to the point of fluency.
From Dakar, Michael was recruited to the World Bank in Washington DC. Over a career spanning more than thirty years with the Bank, he worked on projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Europe. As well as advancing specific sector projects, Michael worked on country macro-economic plans. In Saudi Arabia, the budgets were so enormous that the team occasionally misplaced a few zero’s (recuperated later, of course!) At a rate of three missions a year, his passport and UN laisser-passer took a beating and needed replacing often.
In the late 1970’s, Michael met and married his second wife, Caroline. His fourth child, Marieke Justine was born as the construction of a round house on a plot of land in Great Falls, Virginia, took shape.
The highlight of Michael’s career with the World Bank, though, was undoubtedly his assignment to Conakry, Guinea, in West Africa , as Resident Representative of the Bank. There he led a coalition of representatives of the donor community to advance Guinea’s development program. His many trips into the interior of the country had to be carefully planned because there were few refueling stops and the roads were roads in name only. Occasionally the planks over a gully had to be re-arranged to allow the passage of his trusty Pajero. Driver Mohamed spirited him through potholes so wide they were called “elephant nests”. Michael was truly in his element during those times.
What did Michael do during his spare time? His latter years were spent drafting a voluminous family history of the Wilsons, entitled “Chronicle of a Yorkshire Family”, brimming with historical reference, illustration, and anecdote. This enterprise took him up to northern Canada several times to visit New Liskeard, where a branch of the Wilson family had settled in the early 1900’s. Drafting the Chronicle engaged Michael’s formidable intellect and energy up to his last moments. There are five printed versions of the 400-page tome that the family is now grappling with!
Another love of Michael’s, outside of work, was taking to the water. In Guinea, he imported a 20’ Zodiac inflatable dinghy and outboard so that the family could navigate the Gulf of Guinea to spend the day on an island with a sandy beach. There were some breathtaking near spills over those years – each trip was an adventure. In Washington DC, post-retirement, Michael bought a 38’ Chris Craft Catalina motorboat, which saw a lot of action around the Chesapeake Bay. Returning to port was always fraught because Michael learned mostly on the job and one wrong maneuver could take out a whole line of sailboats. That isn’t to say it happened but … it was close.
Another hobby of Michael’s was manual work. After he’d finished laying wood flooring in a basement room in the Great Falls house, a visitor asked who’d done the work – the floor had a decidedly wavy aspect to it. Michael explained the work had been done by a “local carpenter”. Over the years he built from scratch a small cabin in Lost River, West Virginia, and an octagonal deck on the grounds of his house, to name but two of his projects.
Throughout all this, Michael read voraciously, devouring novels and news magazines in short order. He was a political and international affairs news “junkie”, engaging in spirited, sometimes overly spirited (?) discussions with family and friends. Debating Michael was a challenge because of his encyclopedic knowledge!
Michael is survived by his sister Jane, first wife Judy, Caroline, his second (current) wife, three children, five grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. His youngest daughter, Marieke Justine, died tragically in 2021.
Michael lived life “to the lees”. He brought his experience, intellect, and boundless energy to the important work he carried out in developing countries, impacting many people’s lives. The historic details and exploits of his precursors going back to the 1600’s will serve as an enduring legacy of the Yorkshire family of which Michael was a part.
He now steps into the pages of the Chronicle and takes his place in its ongoing story.
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