Like many undergraduates, her wider interests took her to horizons beyond her academic subject. She may have moped during the early stages of her Oxford life, but she soon picked herself up, and developed interests that took her away from her solitude and those long melancholy walks. Music was one antidote to loneliness. She joined the Oxford Bach choir, conducted by Thomas Armstrong.†
As an alto in this choir, she sang in performances of the St Matthew Passion at the Sheldonian Theatre, and also in Prince Igor by Borodin, Rio Grande by Constant Lambert and Hymn of Jesus by Holst.
Religion was important to her. She was much influenced by Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which she first heard in a series of radio talks with the title Christian Behaviour. She was a regular worshipper at the Wesley Memorial Church and an active member of the John Wesley Society. This was an evangelical arm of the Methodist movement. It sent its members out in pairs to preach the gospel in churches and chapels across Oxfordshire. Margaret Roberts was one of those preachers.
Jean Southerst, also a Methodist and Somerville undergraduate, remembers a sermon on the text, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you’,11 being delivered by Margaret Roberts. It was ‘outstanding’, according to Southerst.12 Like father, like daughter. It was interesting that the future prime minister was preaching sermons before she was making political speeches.
STIRRINGS OF ROMANCE
So far as is known, Margaret Roberts had no boyfriends during her growing-up years at Grantham. This changed at Oxford. Although her romantic life began with a painful rejection (heavily influenced by the boyfriend’s mother), she recovered from it and was later well admired, particularly by one serious suitor who she met in Michaelmas term 1944.
In her first year, Margaret was an ingénue about her love life, talking candidly about her feelings for various young men she found attractive. Over dinners in Hall at Somerville, ‘She would blush from the neck upwards’13 when teased by her contemporary, Betty Spice, and others, about possible boyfriends. Another Somerville undergraduate who shared these confidences was Pauline Cowan. ‘We all knew that Margaret had set her cap at a young man with money and a title’, she recalled. ‘It went well for a while until he took her home for the weekend and found his mother couldn’t stand her.’14
Other versions of this romance circulated among several of Margaret Roberts’ Oxford contemporaries. They were summarised by one of her earliest biographers, Penny Junor, who after stating that the men Margaret sought out were in OUCA, continued:
She fell quite soundly for the son of an earl, who went on to become something of a luminary in the Tory Party. She made no secret of her feelings, and talked about him quite gushingly, unaware that by so doing she was laying herself open to more teasing from the other girls in Hall, who by this time were growing increasingly disillusioned by her blatant use of people. They felt that if she caught herself a lord, it would be the last straw. But Margaret failed to net her lord. The relationship came to an end soon after she had met his mother.15
The aristocratic boyfriend whose mother took against Margaret Roberts was Lord Craigmyle. In the summer of 1944, he was a twenty-year-old undergraduate reading Modern History at Corpus Christi College. He knew Margaret quite well because they were both active Conservative students. He makes his appearance, somewhat incongruously, in the first volume of her memoirs, named in a photograph of three young men in dinner jackets, captioned ‘OUCA Party in Oxford’. Besides being a handsome, clean-cut man of the type for whom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher later showed an occasional weakness (such as Cecil Parkinson, Humphrey Atkins, Alan Clark and John Moore), ‘Craigie’ Craigmyle had other qualities she mentioned to the Somerville gossips.
Craigie had inherited his father’s title. He was heir to an enormous ship-owning fortune, which was known to be coming to him from his grandfather, the Earl of Inchcape. He was committed to his Christian faith, keenly interested in the social and political issues of the day. Besides being a great catch, he was regarded as a leading undergraduate character, showing a gregarious warmth of hospitality to his friends. But he could also be an acutely shy young man. He was exceptionally close to his mother, Lord Inchcape’s eldest daughter, who often visited him in his rooms at Corpus. If Lady Craigmyle formed the view that the provincial Miss Roberts was not a suitable girlfriend for her son that would have been an obstacle, if not a veto to their romance. Did Craigie, acting under the influence of his mother, break the young Margaret’s heart?
It seems likely. As her Somerville contemporaries knew, Margaret’s relationship with Craigie was serious enough for him to invite her to stay for the weekend at the family’s London house in the Boltons. But the meeting with Lady Craigmyle was not a success. As another Inchcape grandson, Lord Tanlaw, explained: ‘My Aunt Margaret was a formidable character, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Lady Bracknell. When she met my cousin Craigie’s new Oxford girlfriend, her comment was: “In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!” ’16
Poor Margaret Roberts! But if her hopes of catching a titled husband‡ were dashed by this maternal snobbery, her slimmed down figure, elegant legs and sparkling eyes were soon catching the eye of other admirers. She began to take much more interest in clothes, make-up and feminine colours. From 1944 onwards, her Oxford letters to her sister Muriel are full of reference to frocks, shoes, silk stockings and the problems of affording them. In one of these letters she described her first visit to Bond Street, where she bought brown Debutante Lanette shoes to match her brown Marshall and Snelgrove handbag. ‘Also, I had in mind to get a nigger brown# fairly brown frock in order to have a completely brown-faun rig out.’17
All this effort to buy attractive ‘rig-outs’ was not unconnected with Margaret’s interest in the opposite sex. She had several flirtations in her latter Oxford years, with men who included Roger Gray (later a Queen’s Counsel (QC) and Crown Court Recorder), Neil Findlay and John Stebbings, a handsome swimming Blue from Kent who later became President of the Law Society. However, none of them were serious, at least in comparison to her relationship with Tony Bray, who came up to Oxford in October 1944 as an army cadet on a six-month military training course.
Initially attracted by their shared interest in OUCA politics, Margaret and Tony were going out together on a regular basis by the summer of 1945. They went to several college dances and to one particularly special ball at the Randolph Hotel. Margaret’s ecstatic description of the evening in a letter to Muriel conveys the impression of a young woman falling in love:
I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [sic] the blue frock perfectly … I felt on top of the world … The ballroom was marvellously decorated … The refreshments were lovely. Altogether, it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.18
Tony, who had begun the events by presenting her with a Moyses Stevens spray of carnations, took her up to London for lunch at the Dorchester, a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel and a performance of Strauss’s A Night in Venice at the Cambridge Theatre. Soon afterwards, she invited him to stay the weekend with her parents in Grantham. Although it was a somewhat strained and awkward visit, the fact that it happened was a sure sign that she was seriously interested in him.
However, her seriousness does not seem to have been fully reciprocated, perhaps understandably since Tony was nearly two years younger than she was and not ready to settle down, at the age of eighteen, with such an intense girlfriend.
Charles Moore tracked Tony Bray down in old age, and with the omniscience of an official biographer reached the conclusion that the couple ‘never slept together’, although Margaret ‘showed a delight in physical intimacy’.19 Although they drifted apart when Tony’s short army course ended, they had something of a reunion three years later in 1948, but the old fires were not rekindled. Nevertheless, in that glorious Oxford summer of 1945, against the historical background of the D-Day landings and the
expectation of an Allied victory, nineteen-year-old Margaret Roberts enjoyed her first serious experience of romantic love.
SUCCESS IN OUCA POLITICS
However important Tony Bray may have been to Margaret Roberts, politics were more important. To her Somerville contemporaries, she was seen as a rather boring oddball because of her political enthusiasm for the Conservatives. Pauline Cowan recalled:
She amazed me by her persistence in trying to persuade me to join OUCA, She kept on and on at me, even after I had told her that I wasn’t interested because my loyalties were in the opposite direction. She was quite insensitive, as though it was the only thing that really mattered to her … She wasn’t the confiding or pally type. I often thought of her as a rather unhappy person, who had no close friends in the college. Of course we talked over coffee in our digs every morning, but usually about our work, or our shared dislike of one of our landlady’s frequent breakfast dishes – hot pilchards with mashed potatoes. I don’t think Margaret and I have ever been able to look at a pilchard ever since.20
Pilchards and Conservatives ranked about equal in the popularity stakes at traditionally left-wing Somerville. One college contemporary who tried to dislodge Margaret Roberts from her Tory loyalties was Nina Bawden.** The two undergraduates were doing fire-watching duty together in the summer of 1944. Nina, an active Labour supporter, argued that all the people who joined OUCA ‘were dull as ditch water’. According to Bawden’s account:
Margaret smiled her pretty china doll’s smile. Of course, she admitted, the Labour Club was, just at that moment, more fashionable … but that, in a way, unintentionally suited her purposes. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being ‘noticed’ in the Conservative Club just because some of the members were a bit stodgy.21
Margaret’s passive acceptance of OUCA’s stodginess suggests that, like most Tories of the time, she had little awareness of the coming sea change in British politics. In the mid-1940s, the leading Conservative undergraduates of Oxford tended to be hereditary aristocrats or members of upper-class families with double-barrelled names. M. Roberts (as she was listed on the Association’s term card) came to their attention because she worked so hard at the thankless task of OUCA College Rep for Somerville. She managed to recruit such an impressive number of those extremely reluctant Conservatives in her own college that she was considered for the role of being in charge of all the College Reps in the university, as the General Agent. This was a tedious job, which most undergraduate politicians sought to avoid because it required so much work. On the other hand, the post had status because it was the Association’s fourth highest elected office after the President, Treasurer and Secretary. At the end of her second year at Oxford Margaret Roberts was elected General Agent of OUCA.
Ever since she had helped with committee-room duties in Grantham during the 1935 general election, when she was nine, Margaret had taken an interest in the mechanics of Conservative Party electioneering. She had polished these skills at a wartime by-election in the town in February 1942 when, to the consternation of local Tories, their candidate lost the seat by 367 votes to a colourful local Independent. Although Margaret was little more than a leaflet deliverer, she was shocked by the result and criticised the party’s administrative weaknesses in failing to get its voters to the polls. ‘Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency’, she concluded.22
No such complacency was allowed while Margaret Roberts was General Agent of OUCA. Under her ‘queenly sway’, reported Isis, its membership climbed to over a thousand for the first time since the 1920s.23
In the general election campaign of summer 1945, she recruited a regiment of student canvassers, who helped Oxford’s Conservative Parliamentary Candidate Quintin Hogg†† to hold on to the seat, narrowly defeating the Labour challenger Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford.
Later in the 1945 election, Margaret Roberts went back to Grantham, where she delivered her first political speech to be reported. She made her debut on the hustings supporting the Conservative candidate Squadron Leader G.A. Worth. The Grantham Journal reported that she had inherited ‘her father’s gift for oratory’, and commented that ‘the presence of a young woman of the age of nineteen with such decided convictions has been no small factor in influencing the women’s vote in the division’.24
Her convictions were reported in greater detail in another local newspaper, the Sleaford Gazette. According to its two-column account, the nineteen-year old alderman’s daughter voiced two strands of opinion that came to prominence again four decades later, when she was prime minister. The first, predictable in 1945, was her antagonism towards Germany: ‘Germany had plunged the world into war. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice … just punishment must be meted out.’ Her second and more unexpected theme was her advocacy for developing Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union. She heaped praise on Churchill and Eden for having ‘worked unsparingly for cooperation with Russia’.25
These early views of the nineteen-year old warm-up speaker destined to become Britain’s first woman prime minister were submerged in the great Labour landslide victory of 1945. Margaret attended the Grantham constituency count, which ended in the defeat of Squadron Leader Worth. Then she went to watch the national results in the Grantham Picture House where, like most Tory activists, she was utterly astounded by the outcome. She could not understand how the electorate could have ousted Winston Churchill from No. 10 Downing Street.
Returning to Oxford after the long vacation, Margaret Roberts, as General Agent of OUCA, did not appear to have been subdued by her party’s crushing defeat. One of her first actions was to co-author and chair an OUCA policy report on how to revive Tory fortunes in the university. Her own unmistakable tones are to be found in several passages of the report which, in somewhat hectoring style, told OUCA that it ‘can no longer drift in its present aloofness’ and must become ‘an active proselytising body, and should have an active propaganda policy’.26 The responsibility for implementing these initiatives was given to the General Agent.
Taking charge of proselytising and propaganda did no harm to the student political career of Margaret Roberts. She became Treasurer and then President of OUCA in the elections of March and October 1946. One of the reasons for her success was her increasingly confident speaking ability. It was transformed by Mrs S.M. Gatehouse, who had her own niche in the history of twentieth-century OUCA as its public-speaking tutor.
Stella Gatehouse was an Oxfordshire vicar’s wife who was recruited in the 1930s by Conservative Central Office to give weekly speech-making lessons to undergraduate members of OUCA. She was a formidable character with a touch of Joyce Grenfell in her own diction. Gentle with stumbling novices, but fierce with youthful arrogance, her classes were lively affairs, which knocked several generations of aspiring parliamentarians into better oratorical shape. Between 1938 and 1970 at least twenty future Tory ministers were cajoled and charmed by ‘Mrs G’ into improving their public speaking.
Mrs G was a good talent spotter. In 1961, she was asked to predict which of her former pupils would have most success in politics. She replied, ‘No 1, Michael Heseltine. No 2, Margaret Thatcher.’27 Since the former was not even an MP at that time and the latter was a little-known back-bencher that was quite a forecast.
Once or twice during Margaret Thatcher’s early days as Leader of the Opposition I thought I could hear echoes in her parliamentary speeches of Mrs Gatehouse’s recommended techniques. These included rubrics such as: ‘Summarise your argument with a good strong boom at the end of your last paragraph’; and ‘Have a crescendo, but keep it short and sharp, with no more than six words’. At the end of a 1976 debate in the division lobbies of the House of Commons, I wondered in a conversation with Margaret Thatcher if her speech earlier in the day could have been influenced by Mrs Gatehouse’s lessons. ‘Yes, Mrs G transformed my speaking’ was the response.28‡‡
One of the principal duties of the P
resident of OUCA is to organise ‘the term card’, the published list of visiting speakers. This task requires a great deal of correspondence and persistence. President-elect Margaret Roberts was remarkably prescient in attracting both famous and interesting guests. They included two future prime ministers, Anthony Eden and Alec Douglas-Home; a future Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, who had achieved fame as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials; and a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft.
Wining and dining such guests at the Randolph Hotel before and after the public meetings gave Margaret Roberts new social and networking skills. Her experiences at OUCA focused her thoughts on becoming a Member of Parliament.
There are several versions of how and when the first stirrings of Parliamentary ambition manifested themselves in Margaret’s life story. Her own accounts (retold on different occasions to several interviewers) suggest that an almost Damascene flash of light on the road to Westminster hit her at a Lincolnshire dance, or during a midnight argument with ‘one of the boys’ after a village hop at which young RAF pilots were present. All these conversion experiences are dated post-1945, and involve a surprise declaration of intent followed by a solemn commitment in words such as ‘Suddenly it was crystallised for me. I knew.’29
Perhaps the discrepancies between these various descriptions can be rationalised by the formula used in the Scottish Psalter, ‘Another version of the same’. That said, the most authentic of the versions to judge by its simplicity and its source is given by Margaret Goodrich.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 7
