Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  ‡‡ Soon after her election as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was the guest of honour at a private lunch at Belton House. Lord Brownlow, following an approach from Lincolnshire MP Marcus Kimball, loaned her his magnificent collection of table silver for use at No. 10 Downing Street for several years.

  2

  The war, grammar school and fighting her headmistress

  GRANTHAM AT WAR

  The Second World War, and the events in Germany leading up to it, made a seminal impact on the life of the young Margaret Roberts. In this period the seeds of her strongest instincts were sown, which later influenced her decisions and attitudes as Prime Minister. Her passionate patriotism; her admiration for the armed forces; her affection for the Jews; her suspicions of Germany; and her reverence for the Anglo-American alliance are all traceable to her formative experiences as a Grantham teenager.

  Although she was only a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl when war was declared, eighteen months earlier she had come into face to face contact with Hitler’s persecution of the Jews when the Roberts family welcomed into their home a young refugee from Austria. From her conversations with this Viennese student, Edith Mühlbauer, and from the internationalist outlook of her father, Margaret became well informed about the Nazi domination of Europe, and held strong views on it.

  There is a story from a Grantham fish and chip shop on Margaret’s pre-war hostility to Hitler. She was queuing on a Friday evening in 1938 to buy a cod and chips supper for the family, when a discussion started about the German Führer. One of the customers said that at least Hitler had given his country some self-respect. The twelve-year-old Miss Roberts vigorously disagreed. The forcefulness of her argument caused irritation among others in the queue. With tension rising, the manageress defused the situation by saying with a laugh, ‘Oh, she’s always debating.’1

  Margaret was able to debate in a well-informed way because she had been listening to her family’s Jewish guest. Edith Mühlbauer was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Viennese banker. When Hitler annexed Austria on 13 March 1938, and the first of Vienna’s 170,000 Jews were being rounded up by the SS, Edith wrote to her English pen friend, Muriel Roberts, asking if she could come and stay, to escape from the Nazi persecution.

  This was followed by a letter making the same request from Edith’s father to Alfred Roberts, who read it to the next meeting of the Grantham Rotary Club. The Rotarians responded generously.

  They organised a group of Grantham hosts who each agreed to open their doors to the young refugee for a month or so. They also paid for Edith’s travel and provided her with a guinea a week in pocket money. The first English home she stayed in was above the shop at North Parade with the Roberts family.

  Edith’s stay was not an unqualified success. Grantham gossip had it that Alfred Roberts became concerned that his sophisticated Viennese guest, who wore lipstick, smoked cigarettes and flirted with boys, might be exerting a bad influence on his strictly brought up daughters. For her part, the seventeen-year-old Edith found life with the Roberts family somewhat awkward and uncomfortable. ‘We didn’t have a proper bathroom in those days. She was used to better things,’ recalled Margaret.2

  Although Edith Mühlbauer stayed only for a few weeks at North Parade (she moved around eighteen Rotarian families before joining relatives in Brazil in 1940), her plight made a considerable impression on Margaret.3 She heard about the Anschluss, Kristallnacht and other episodes of Jewish persecution, learning that some of Edith’s relatives were made to sweep the streets before being taken away to Auschwitz. One result of these conversations was that Margaret borrowed from the library an important new book, published in June 1938, Insanity Fair by Douglas Reed. It was a powerful indictment of German anti-Semitism.

  As the Edith Mühlbauer episode shows, Alfred Roberts had a compassionate and international outlook. His Methodism and his chairmanship of Grantham’s Rotary’s international service committee gave him knowledgeable insights into the growing menace of Nazi aggression in Europe. However, he was an early supporter of Neville Chamberlain and the 1938 Munich Agreement, a political position he abandoned after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

  The outbreak of war in September 1939 made some immediate effects on Margaret’s life at the age of thirteen. Her school had anti-blast sandbag walls built around its classrooms. Trenches were dug on one side of the playing fields, and daily drills were held to practise evacuation and air raid shelter procedures. The teachers were trained in extinguishing incendiary bombs.4

  Soon the practices became the real thing. Grantham was literally in the firing line, partly because two major munitions factories were located in the town, and partly because so many RAF personnel were billeted there.

  In the first three years of the war Grantham was hit by twenty-one Luftwaffe bombing raids, which destroyed eighty homes and killed seventy people. One of Alfred’s civilian roles was to be Chief Welfare Officer in charge of civil defence, which meant he was the town’s organiser of Air Raid Precautions, or ARP. He found himself doing so much night duty as a warden that he joked the initials stood for Alfred Roberts Purgatory.

  He was not alone in his discomforts. Because the house at North Parade did not have a garden, no underground shelter could be dug there. On evenings when the air raid sirens sounded their alert, Margaret with her mother and father had to huddle under the kitchen table until the sirens gave the all clear. Muriel was away, first in Birmingham and then in Blackpool, working as a physiotherapist.5

  The separation of the two sisters resulted in a considerable correspondence between them during the war years. Their letters, according to Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, Charles Moore, told him ‘much more about her private life than had previously been revealed by all the other sources put together’.6

  The sisterly correspondence did not contain much in the way of revealing insights during the 1939–1943 period while Margaret remained at Grantham as a schoolgirl. Her letters are mainly about the ‘terrific amount of swotting’ she was doing for her School Certificate; the detailed results of that examination (distinctions in chemistry, arithmetic and algebra); and descriptions of her birthday presents and her visits to the Grantham cinema.7 The most surprising omission from these communications to Muriel was the war, which is barely mentioned.

  In fact, the war loomed large in the teenage life of Margaret Roberts. The heavy bombing of the town’s homes and factories; the disruption to the timetables of KGGS; the extra pressures of her father’s work as a councillor; and the military presence of the Royal Air Force in the streets and skies of Grantham all made a considerable impact on her.

  Lincolnshire was known as ‘Bomber County’, because forty-nine RAF airfields were located there with No. 1 and No. 5 Bomber Command groups operating from bases such as RAF Scampton, Coningsby, Cranwell, East Kirkby and Digby. So the young Margaret became familiar with hearing the overhead roar of the Lancaster heavy bombers, and seeing their aircrews in and around the town. Her father had at least one encounter with Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, DSO, DFC, who led the ‘Dam Busters’ raid. She herself caught several glimpses in Grantham of the Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Group Bomber Command, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, in the town. He was a controversial figure to many, but a hero to Margaret Roberts.

  Fifty years after her schoolgirl sightings of the wartime commander, a statue of ‘Bomber’ Harris was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, patron of the Bomber Command Association, outside the Church of St Clement Danes in London, in May 1992. Ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attended. Knowing of this Grantham connection I had asked the RAF to send her an invitation.

  As a newly appointed Defence Minister, I was concerned that more senior figures in the government were unwilling, because of the anticipated protests, to come to the ceremony; so I telephoned Margaret Thatcher.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing him in my Grantham days. He was a most remarkable leader
of Bomber Command. We wouldn’t have won the war without them. I’ll be there.’ And she was.

  The atmosphere and emotions of Grantham in those times left an indelible mark on Margaret Roberts. ‘Our thoughts were at the front,’8 she recalled, speaking in later life of huddling round the family’s wireless set to hear the six o’clock news read by Alvar Lidell, or listening to the wartime broadcasts of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

  The fervent atmosphere of English patriotism in the family was reinforced by the books that Margaret and her father took out from the library and discussed together. Two that made a particular impact on her were Ronald Cartland, Barbara Cartland’s biography of her brother who was killed at Dunkirk, and Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, a classic portrait of the lives and losses of RAF pilots in the early years of the war.

  Later in her teenage years Margaret worked as a WVS* volunteer in Service canteens, where she met young RAF pilots from Bomber Command, many of whom never came back to their Lincolnshire bases. Towards the end of the war, when she returned to Grantham during her Oxford vacations, she found the town full of American servicemen.

  In late 1943, the RAF allocated twelve of its airfields in the Grantham area to the 82nd Troop Carrier Group of the US 9th Air Force, who were preparing to move large numbers of soldiers to France for the liberation of Europe. The reassuring presence of the American military may have contributed to Margaret’s lifelong enthusiasm for good UK–US relations.

  The mosaic of Margaret Roberts’ wartime memories created an influential background to her formative years. Even though her experiences of the conflict were tangential, they played their part in creating her values and shaping her personality. But the foreground of her life was her progress at school towards her dream of winning a scholarship to Oxford.

  KGGS

  The most important part of Margaret Roberts’ schooldays took place at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, locally known as KGGS. The 350 pupils were drawn from all levels of society and were a meritocracy. Their parents were means-tested, and as a result about two-thirds of the pupils were charged fees of three pounds and ten shillings a term. Alfred Roberts had to pay these fees for Margaret, even though she had won a scholarship place. He also paid two guineas a term for her piano lessons.

  KGGS girls were a mixed bunch, socially and economically. They included the daughters of some of the poorest families in the town. There were also girls from farming, business and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

  Margaret Roberts was always something of a loner among her contemporaries. But it was noticed that her closest acquaintances came not from Grantham, but from the higher social strata of families who lived in the Lincolnshire countryside. This may have been the origin of her school nickname, ‘Snobby Roberts’. One of these friends was Margaret Goodrich, whose father, Canon Harold Goodrich, was the incumbent of Corby Glen, a nearby village said to contain the finest vicarage in the county. A second was Betty Morley, whose father created a successful tyre-making company in Great Ponton. A third was Catherine Barford, the daughter of a prominent industrialist who founded the Aveling Barford group of companies. Catherine arrived as a new girl at KGGS on the same day as Margaret Roberts, in September 1936. ‘Margaret became a friend,’ she recalled. ‘The first thing I noticed about her was how hard she worked. The second was her closeness to her father.’9

  Margaret made several visits to the Barford country house for tea. This was a mark of her friendship with Catherine, but the invitations also came because their fathers had business to discuss. The Barford companies were expanding and needed to find council houses for the workers they recruited. Alfred Roberts, a member of the Housing Committee, was helpful. His career in local government was on the rise. One headline in the local paper dubbed him ‘Grantham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’ on account of his chairmanship of the Finance Committee.10

  He was well known for his interest in national and international affairs, and respected for his integrity. His political activities soon rubbed off on his daughter. As a new girl at KGGS, Margaret Roberts came top of her class in her first year. What she was best remembered for was her prominence, and her air of superiority when putting questions to visiting speakers.

  ‘I can first remember her at a lecture we had … The well-known author and lecturer Bernard Newman came to talk about spies,’ recalled Margaret Goodrich.

  At the end, he asked for questions in the usual way and instead of a sixth-former standing up, this young, bright-eyed, fair haired girl from the fourth year stood up and asked him a question. But the thing that rather annoyed her contemporaries was that she asked him these questions in almost parliamentary language: ‘Does the speaker think so and so?’11

  Another contemporary who found herself irritated by the inquisitorial style of Margaret Roberts at lectures was her classmate Madeline Edwards. ‘Margaret could be guaranteed to get up on her hind legs and ask penetrating questions,’ she recalled. ‘The rest of us sort of looked at each other – with our eyes rolling as if to say, “Oh, she’s at it again”.’12

  The questions were well rehearsed. What her classmates did not know was that Alfred Roberts was training his daughter in the art of public speaking. ‘Have something to say. Say it clearly. That is the only secret of style,’ he told her.13 He often took her on Thursday evenings to University of Nottingham Extension Lectures held in Grantham, where he encouraged Margaret to put her points to the lecturers.14

  Another source of her confidence was her participation in the group discussions, usually led by her father, among the community of Methodists who attended the Finkin Street Church. It was a feature of their fellowship that after the Sunday evening service, her father’s friends took it in turns to have supper together. Even though she was the youngest present, Margaret liked to take part in these conversations, which she remembered ‘ranged far wider than religion or happenings in Grantham to include national and international politics’.15

  Alfred Roberts’ role in his daughter’s education expanded further when it looked as though wartime pressures at KGGS were having an adverse effect on Margaret’s academic performance. In her lower sixth year of 1940–41 her average marks slipped below 70 per cent for the first time. In her favourite subjects of chemistry, biology, zoology and geography she continued to achieve the highest grades. But her weakest subjects of French and English dragged her down, as she scored only F grades (‘fair to weak’) in them.

  Her father took a keen interest in these results. Extra hours of tuition at home were deemed necessary, partly to improve Margaret’s low marks, and partly because KGGS became overcrowded when the Camden School for Girls was evacuated from London in 1939 to share its buildings for five terms. This resulted in ‘Operation Double Shift’, which meant that KGGS used the school in the mornings and Camden in the afternoons. Both sets of pupils spent fewer hours in the classroom.16

  Alfred rose to the challenge of home-schooling Margaret in the afternoons and at weekends. He was out of his depth in science, but this did not matter as KGGS had an outstanding chemistry teacher in Miss Kay, who Margaret found inspirational. But on other subjects, his self-educated mind was better stocked than several of the KGGS staff. Alfred was certainly an improvement on Miss Ophelia Harding, the history mistress. ‘Very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and dowdy in dress,’ was Margaret’s tart comment. Another bad review came from Muriel’s friend Betty Morley, who described the history teacher as ‘a bit of a dud … She was always going off into long silences and trances.’17

  Silences and trances were not a feature of Margaret Roberts’ upbringing. She liked to argue, often with the fervour of moral certainty she absorbed from her father’s teachings and from the Methodist Church. These arguments were often conducted with older people, particularly with her father and his Sunday night supper group.

  To most of her contemporaries at school she was not a particularly memorable or congenial figure. She sang in the choir, looked rather plump and w
as thought of as a swot. She had a minor speech defect, an inability to pronounce her Rs. Another course of elocution lessons eliminated the problem. They may also have given her the famously precise and slightly precious diction that grated on the ears of her political critics some forty years later. At the time, this made her seem out of the ordinary.

  ‘The best description of Margaret is that she was always ladylike, sensible and serious,’ said her classmate Gladys Foster. ‘She worked very hard, and spent a lot of time reading and studying at home.’18

  The perception that Margaret Roberts was an industrious but unmemorable pupil at KGGS changed during her last two years. Her carefully polished questions (she invariably asked the first one) to visiting school speakers continued to irritate one or two of her contemporaries. But what really brought her to the attention of her teachers were the blazing rows she had with the headmistress of KGGS, Miss Dorothy Gillies. The issue at stake was that Margaret Roberts was determined to get her own way.

  GETTING HER OWN WAY

  There were two remarkable headmistresses of KGGS during Margaret Roberts’ time there. She revered one and despised the other. The difference had to do with a clash of wills provoked by Margaret’s dislike of being patronised, a feature of her personality which lasted long into her political career.

  When Margaret entered KGGS in 1936, the headmistress was Miss Gladys Williams, a petite, energetic Mancunian who had been in her post ever since the school opened its doors in 1910. Her vision, spelt out in a speech-day address in the 1920s and often quoted to subsequent generations of her girls, was: ‘It is not our business to turn out teachers or typists, or even housewives, but to try to send out girls capable and desirous of doing some part of the world’s work well.’19