Thatcher

by Clare Beckett

  Political life in Grantham did not stand still, however. In 1942, the town was the first to return a non-government candidate during the war. The Conservative, Sir Arthur Longmore, lost his seat by 367 votes. Margaret Roberts was not involved in this campaign, and did not realise the lessons for the 1945 general election and the Labour landslide victory. She was preparing for entry to Oxford. She was taking the specific entry exam for Somerville College. She had earned her chance by hard work, not brilliance, and there is no sign in her memoirs that she was expecting or was expected to do this. Her entry may have been a result of wartime conditions, where more places were available to women. Certainly she was not a star pupil, and her entry had not been planned for. Although her school was sending a handful of girls to Oxford each year, Latin was required and she had not studied it before. It was not taught at the girls’ grammar school, so she had to be ‘crammed’ by staff from the boys’ school. She gave up learning the piano to keep up with the work. The scholarship mattered. The family would not be able, or possibly willing, to support her into higher education without it – there were no higher education grants for girls in the 1940s. Margaret had never been in any doubt that she would have to earn her own living as an adult. If she could not go to Oxford in 1943 she would have to study a two-year wartime degree, before being called up into service. At 17, and without Latin, the scholarship was a long shot and she failed. This was perhaps the first real and significant disappointment in her charmed and hard-working childhood. There was nothing for it but to enter the third-year sixth form, slightly cheered by becoming Joint Head of School. Then luck stepped in. Another candidate had dropped out – Margaret Roberts received a telegram offering her a place to be taken up immediately.

  This was the end of Margaret Roberts’ life in Grantham, the popular and favoured daughter of a well-known man. Her life was characterised by industry, thrift and civic duty. There were few frivolities, and no self-indulgent expenses. Alfred refused to have his house plumbed for hot water between the wars, judging it to be an unnecessary indulgence. His daughters carried water and bathed in hip tubs. Her world revolved around three friendly hubs – the family, the school and the church. Alfred’s expectation was that she would work hard, and lead a useful and industrious life. The training he had given her in politics and argument stayed with her. Asked about her father, she would say he gave me integrity. His views were the core of the young Margaret Roberts’ determination. This was not slavish orthodoxy, however. Alfred could, and did, bend with the wind without compromising his own principles. As a Methodist, he believed in keeping Sunday as a day of rest, but as a grocer, he worked. He voted for opening cinemas on Sunday, because the people attending bothered no-one but themselves, but he opposed opening parks on Sundays because games would create disturbance for others. He approved of the rhyme young Margaret Roberts learned at 11 from Bibby’s Almanac:

  ‘One ship drives east, and another drives west,

  By the self same gale that blows;

  ‘Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,

  That determines the way that she goes’

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox5

  He provided her with reading that covered classic and modern works and he shared her love of Kipling and of disciplined prose. He believed in the family as the foundation stone of a well-functioning society. He and his wife provided a stable and well-run home for his daughters.

  It would be a mistake to think, however, that this was the only influence on her. Margaret Thatcher rarely spoke about her mother, but it was she who ran the home and set the routines. The backdrop to Margaret Roberts’ life was a beautiful and well-kept home, surrounded by goods that were of the best quality the family could manage, and were cared for accordingly. Beatrice faded into the background of political and civic life, but was the source of the good clothes and disciplined behaviour that the family showed in public. She would take the girls on holiday to Skegness each year, and after her mother’s death would also visit the theatre or cinema with her daughters. She will not have spent as much time in the company of her girls as many mothers – she helped run a thriving business and lived above the shop. She will have been available to the children when Alfred was busy, and will have been the power that made civic duties and entertaining possible.

  I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

  --THATCHER

  Margaret Roberts herself shows a romantic, dreamy side to her character not connected to Alfred Roberts when she describes her childhood. She talks about her fascination with far-off countries, and her liking for the passionate and out-of-the-way insights in Kipling’s poetry. She loved the theatre and music – even owning that one major attraction of Methodism was the music. She talks about a single trip to London with friends, where she fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, rode the Underground and visited the Zoo. At Kings Cross, she saw people from foreign countries, some in traditional dress, for the first time. The buildings, covered in soot, reminded this provincial child that she was at the centre of the world. But the high point of the trip – more than Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament, though they did not disappoint – was her first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham to see The Desert Song. Margaret Roberts had little free time as a child, but what time she had was spent walking through the countryside alone, or reading poetry. At the age of ten, she won a prize at the Grantham Eisteddfod for reading John Drinkwater’s Moonlight Apples and Walter de la Mare’s The Travellers. Congratulated on her luck, she pointed out that she had worked very hard on the event. She and her mother played piano, and she sang in the choir. She looked forward to carol services, and sang in complicated productions like Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’. Altogether, growing up was hard work and discipline, but also liberal and joyous.

  Margaret Roberts herself sums up the lessons she took with her to Oxford, and into her future life. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilisation could never be taken for granted and had to be constantly nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent principles, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. One can never do without straightforward common sense in matters great as well as small. And finally I have to admit that I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.6

  Chapter 2: Transitions

  Oxford in wartime was not a place of dreaming spires. There were few people there from ordinary schools, or from small provincial towns like Grantham. Colleges were closed or merged, and many people who would expect to be undergraduates were either in the armed forces or dead. The average age of Margaret Roberts’ contemporaries was 17½. The science facilities were dominated by war work – busy, but top secret and not available to a new undergraduate. At first, Margaret Roberts was dependent on her father’s money, not on a scholarship, and was not used to being a small fish in a big pond. She was homesick and lonely. She was also, for the first time in her life, away from the backdrop of the Methodist church and civic duties. In modern times, this could be a recipe for disaster – disaffected students failing in their first year at university are commonplace. In wartime Oxford, the fear of being sent down was ever-present.

  Margaret Roberts’s first refuge was her work. She was not a brilliant chemist, and relied on hard work. Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, who taught
her, says ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well read essay.’1 Good enough, at any rate, to choose Margaret Roberts as her research assistant during her fourth year at Oxford. Chemistry, like any discipline, forms the mind that studies it, and perhaps Chemistry, with its learning and logic leading to new conclusions was the perfect discipline for a Methodist given to flights of fancy. As Dorothy Hodgkin says of the study of chemistry and the human mind: ‘I think it should interest you in the problems of finding out as much as you can about the way we work, the way matter is put together. And it should give you an interest in using the results.’2

  The subject did offer Margaret Roberts genuine satisfaction. She particularly enjoyed the cutting edge of the discipline, and was excited by the advances in science driven by the war. This genuine interest led her to look for work in the science after 1947. She left Oxford with a Second Class degree in Chemistry, and approached the Oxford University Appointments Committee for a job. She had several unsuccessful interviews, and was finally taken on by BX Plastics, to work in their research and development section just outside Colchester. She had expected to be working as personal assistant to the research director, but that did not materialise. Instead, she donned her white lab coat as an active researcher. The section was new, and settled down around Margaret Roberts. She lived in Colchester, and travelled to work on the employer’s bus. But the work was not satisfying, and Colchester, while pleasant, was scarcely less provincial than Grantham.

  Side by side with her studies, Margaret Roberts became involved in student politics. For the first two years of her time at Oxford, the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) was her club and second refuge. She worked, she took solitary walks round the town and country, and she socialised through the Conservative club. It is possible that at any other time in history a provincial tradesman’s daughter would have found herself frozen out by sons and daughters of landowners bound together by public school. In 1943, Churchill’s National Government was instrumental rather than -ideological. The drivers of policy were the practical ones of munitions and soldiers, not the traditional ones of values and power. Conduct of the war dominated debate. Members of the Conservative Association were constrained in their social expectations and war work, and a young and civic-minded member could find friends and jobs that used her talents usefully. She could not join the Oxford Union, as membership was still denied to women. She could listen to the debates there, but the brittle and brilliant repartee of Union political debate was not for her. The Conservative Association offered a safer, quieter environment.

  She made friends and contacts there that reappeared throughout her life. It was here that she met Edward Boyle, son of a wealthy Liberal MP, and William Rees-Mogg, future editor of The Times. The future broadcaster Robin Day was a leading light of the Oxford Union. Tony Benn – then the Honourable Anthony Wedgewood Benn – disagreed with Margaret Roberts on everything political. But she was welcome at the celebration when he became President of the Union, which, true to Methodist principle, was teetotal. Religion featured large in this period of her life. Methodism provided her with an anchor of stability reinforced by comforts brought from home – cakes and groceries to supplement rations and college fare, and a favourite armchair. She attended Sunday evening service at the Wesley Memorial Church, and went to the discussion suppers and social gatherings after that. She would attend the University Church of St Mary the Virgin for particular sermons, or the College Chapel if Helen Darbishire, College principal and Milton and Wordsworth scholar, was speaking. She did not attend Anglican churches, but she did read C S Lewis, the High Anglican and mystical writer. Again, this was a surprising path for a Methodist to take. However, Lewis does show that mix of idealism and practicality so liked by Margaret Roberts: ‘Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear changing when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars.’3 (This comment made more sense in the days when gear changes in cars required a complicated double use of the clutch.)

  ‘If you don’t give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution.’

  --QUINTIN HOGG

  This quiet period was leading to the end of the war. Margaret Roberts spent two evenings of her week serving in the forces canteen at Carfax, giving her an awareness of service life. Elsewhere, preparations were beginning for the D-Day landings. In the Conservative Party, MPs who had last stood for election in 1935 were horrified by the extent to which the state now had control of industry. To them, it was vital to return to laissez-faire industry and free-market principles as soon as the war was over. On the other hand, young people were being demobilised from the forces, and looking towards a new Britain. Among these, Quintin Hogg was gathering support for reform of the party: ‘If you don’t give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution.’4 He led a faction of modernists in the Conservative parliamentary party towards a platform of social reform previously unknown. The watershed in Margaret Roberts’s quiet Oxford interlude came in 1945. Forced into an election against his wishes, Churchill stood as the victorious war leader against Clement Attlee, who had been part of the War Cabinet and now stood on a platform of welfare reform. Attlee was attractive to Margaret Roberts, who saw him as a careful and hard-working man. But his mandate was socialist and collectivist, and absolutely against her principles and beliefs. This election was a landslide victory for Attlee. For young members of the Conservative Party like Margaret Roberts, this was the first experience of defeat on a national scale, and was a major wake-up call for the future. There had been other unsuccessful by-elections, like the one in Grantham, but the party had not heeded the warning these had given of the change in public opinion.

  Margaret Roberts did not concede victory easily. In Oxford, she campaigned whole-heartedly for Quintin Hogg, although his belief in social reform was worrying. In Grantham, she was a ‘warm-up’ speaker for Conservative candidates in village meetings. She had received lessons in public speaking from Central Office – Mrs Stella Gatehouse emphasised simplicity, clarity of expression and a minimum of jargon. This gave her experience in handling crowds, although a little more long-windedness might have helped when candidates were late. Her views were clear – Germany should be disarmed and brought to justice, Churchill was best placed to continue to manage foreign affairs. There must be co-operation with America and hopefully with the Soviet Union. The British Empire, the most important community of peoples the world had ever known must never be dismembered.5 None of this carried enough weight with the electorate. Decisions in this election were held over to enable serving troops to vote. Three weeks after polling day, Margaret Roberts was in Grantham when the results were announced. Conservative after Conservative fell, including the Grantham candidate. Margaret Roberts simply could not understand how the public could do this to Churchill. Only later did she begin to see it as a signal that change was in the air, rather than an act of disloyalty to a great leader.

  This did, however, crystallise Margaret Roberts’ political interests. In March 1946, she was Treasurer of the Oxford University Conservative Association – by October she was elected President. In the meantime, she attended the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations Conference in London. She spoke for the inclusion of more working-class people in Conservative politics – a speech that was noticed by the national party. She attended her first Conservative Party conference, in Blackpool. Back in Oxford she was organising, and meeting, speakers. Alec Douglas-Home, Anthony Eden, even Lady Davidson, who talked about being the only Conservative woman MP at the time. All of the leading Conservatives who worked the student circuit met Margaret Roberts, and she entertained as her father had entertained the great and the good of Grantham – without frills, and within the Association’s means. She was central to the formation of
a new manifesto for the Oxford Union Conservative Association – a manifesto committed to reform of the party. As a young Conservative – unusual at Somerville – she was invited to the principal’s dinners when eminent guests were expected.

  This was the position Margaret Roberts left when she moved to Colchester, and again became a small fish in a big pond. She did not leave her established base in politics, however. She had discovered what she really wanted to do with her life, and it was not chemistry. In her memoirs, she pinpoints a party at Corby Glen, a village some ten miles from Grantham, as the place where she first voiced her ambition. One of the men suggested that what she really wanted to do was to be an MP. Almost without thinking about it, she agreed – yes, that was what she really wanted to do.

  She wasted no time in joining the local Conservative Association, and particularly the ‘39–45’ discussion group of Conservatives of the war generation. She did not attempt to join the party’s list of approved candidates. Alfred Roberts’ daughter had no independent means, and could not have afforded to become an MP on the salaries offered at that time. Part of her campaign to increase middle-class representation in the party was to increase parliamentary salaries, and her arguments underpinned changes in the next few years. She kept in touch with friends made at University. She went to the Party Conference at Llandudno in 1948, as a representative of the University Graduate Conservative Association. The conference led to one of those accidents of parliamentary careers. A friend from Oxford was also a friend of the Chair of Dartford Conservative Association, who needed a candidate. The association ‘had a look’ at Margaret Roberts and in January 1949 she was selected. This was a mixed blessing – the Labour majority in that constituency was an unassailable 20,000. This may have worked in favour of the unknown female applicant – if there is no chance of winning, than why not give an unknown a chance? It did, however, spell the end of life in Colchester.