Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  She also studied her father’s speaking technique. ‘Have something to say. Say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style,’ he wrote in his sermon notes,24 quoting Matthew Arnold, and she never diverged from this view. She watched him reworking the ideas of the Gospel: ‘he always found a new way of putting the message … There aren’t any new messages. There aren’t any new sins. But you have to find a way of putting it which is in keeping with the times.’25 She admired his methods, but also observed with a critical eye. Speaking of him in the present tense thirty years after his death, she said: ‘He’s not very demonstrative. He’s very thoughtful … Sometimes I’d say, “Pa, that was your sermon voice, your sermonizing voice” and then it would be a bit lighter. If you’re giving a message from the Old or New Testament you’re conscious of a responsibility … If you’re giving a message which is your beliefs you are also conscious of a responsibility but you’re not necessarily interpreting your Maker but doing yourself.’26

  Margaret was always very restrained in any criticism of her upbringing. She permitted herself only a few guarded remarks. She said that the family’s religious life set them ‘a little bit apart … from one’s fellows’ and that church ‘can be slightly overdone’. ‘You must never be like the parable of the Pharisees [Luke 18:9–14] … because you just really know how you fall short of the ideal.’27 She indicated how much she enjoyed visiting her schoolfriend Jean Farmer, whose father was a builder at Fulbeck, 10 miles outside Grantham, where the atmosphere was freer and more joyful. When staying there, she told one biographer, ‘they all went to tennis together. They all went to dances together. They would all do far more of those things – out with other people where there was laughter and fun!’28 Jean Farmer in turn remembered a serious atmosphere in the Roberts household, with Alfred Roberts as ‘one who didn’t unbend’. She was ‘a bit in awe of him’.29

  Margaret’s elder sister, Muriel, however, was harsher about the girls’ religious upbringing. ‘It was all church, church, church,’ she said. ‘We had an uncle every Christmas who sent us religious books. Oh God how we hated it. You weren’t allowed to play games. That really is bigoted, isn’t it?’30 Roberts’s grocery stood immediately opposite the Roman Catholic church of the town and Alfred Roberts had friendly relations with Father Leo Arendzen, the popular parish priest. But when Father Arendzen one day invited him over to see the pictures in the church, Roberts refused, saying, ‘No, no, no. I’ll never put my foot inside a Catholic church.’31 Later, when Margaret was the young candidate in Dartford, her parents worried that one of her friends was a Catholic, and that she might fall under her influence, though in fact the woman in question was a ‘slave to Margaret’ and not the other way round.32* Such attitudes were not at all uncommon at that time, and there is other evidence that Alfred Roberts was quite broad-minded about religious affiliation. Margaret’s schoolfriend Margaret Goodrich, for example, recalled that his friendship with her father, an Anglican clergyman, was notable for its interdenominational warmth.33 But it seems fair to say that the Robertses, being serious about all such things, made their daughters feel them more than would have been the case in most families. When Margaret came to have children of her own, Beatrice Roberts protested when she learnt that they were taken to the Church of England rather than to Methodist services.34† In the minds of the Roberts girls, the blame for restriction and narrowness fell on their mother, not their father. It has been written that Margaret was Daddy’s girl, and that Muriel was closer to her mother. According to Muriel, this was not so, or rather the closeness to the father was true of both girls, not only of Margaret. Throughout his later years, particularly as a widower, Alfred Roberts kept up a closer correspondence with Muriel than with Margaret (this was partly a matter of time, because of Margaret’s busy career, but then matters of time are often matters of something else as well): ‘I think, if anything, I was closer to him than she was. It was always to me, even in later life if there was any trouble, that he came.’35 In fact, Roberts’s surviving letters (which are all post-war) show love for both his daughters, though sprinkled with small reproaches to Margaret for not paying him quite enough attention. And it is certain that in everything he did he tried to advance his girls. In the middle of the war, he went to Canon Goodrich, seeking help to prepare Margaret for the general paper in her university entrance. ‘My great wish’, he told Goodrich, ‘is to get Margaret into Oxford. I wonder if you could coach her.’36 This was not the action of a paterfamilias who wished to keep his daughter tied to hearth and home. ‘He wanted me to have what he hadn’t had,’ his daughter recalled.37

  In Muriel’s view, Beatrice Roberts was ‘a bigoted Methodist … Margaret and I weren’t close to her … We just didn’t click with her.’ As a result, Muriel believed, Margaret grew apart from her mother as quickly as she could: ‘Mother didn’t exist in Margaret’s mind.’ Margaret always expressed herself more charitably and tactfully on the subject, but without much enthusiasm. Famously describing herself in Who’s Who as ‘d of late Alfred Roberts’, with no mention of her mother, she tended to speak of Beatrice, if at all, in a subsidiary role. Asked by Miriam Stoppard, ‘What example did your mother set you, as opposed to your father?’ Margaret Thatcher replied: ‘Oh Mummy backed up Daddy in everything as far as you do what is right.’ She explained her role by recourse to the Bible, or rather, the Bible as reworked by her beloved Rudyard Kipling in his poem which Mrs Thatcher referred to as ‘The Mary and the Martha’ (its actual title is ‘The Sons of Martha’): ‘Mary was the one who listened at the feet of Jesus and always was interested in what was going on and Martha was the one who always went, “Now is there enough to eat?” “Do you want fresh clothes?” “Would you like to lie down?” This was my mother … I still retain it.’38

  It is telling that Margaret retained the Kipling version, because it is highly complimentary to the Sons of Martha (it is a pity that he had nothing to say about the Daughters of Martha). The Sons of Martha are the people in life who make sure that God’s work is actually done:

  They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose.

  They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop their job when they dam’-well choose.

  Rather do they see things through to the end without pretension:

  Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,

  But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

  There is nothing that Margaret Thatcher admired more than ‘simple service simply given’, and she believed that that was what her mother contributed.

  But she did not like it much at the time. The letters she wrote to Muriel in the 1940s mention their mother often, but almost always in passing and usually in connection with some prohibition. In the summer of 1944, she asked Muriel: ‘Do you think the person who makes the handbags could make me one in maroon leather like your blue one. I have decided that maroon would be the best colour for my wardrobe as I am having that pinky dress made up … I haven’t told Mummy or Daddy about this as I am sure that Mummy at any rate would think it very extravagant.’39 In the same year, during the long vacation after her first summer at Oxford, she indicates a sense that she has become intellectually more sophisticated than her mother. She went with Beatrice to see Now, Voyager: ‘I have never liked Bette Davis but nevertheless I thought she was simply marvellous in that film.’ Mrs Roberts, though, did not like it so much: ‘I think she would have preferred it to end happily ever after sort of style.’40 Perhaps it is not surprising that Beatrice Roberts had her reservations, since the film concerns a daughter’s defiance which so shocks her overbearing mother that she dies of a heart attack. ‘I loved her dearly, but after I was fifteen we had nothing more to say to each other.’ Before the age of twenty, Margaret was leaving her mother behind.

  It would be a mistake, though, to think that the mother’s influence was ever expunged from her daughter’s character. Jean Farmer,
the closest friend of her youth, thinks that ‘Margaret probably absorbed more from her mother than she realizes – she was a hard worker, ran her house really well and helped in the shop.’41 Margaret Thatcher was herself always more a Martha than a Mary: she loved domestic labour, finding it therapeutic to cook, to sew, to decorate her house and to clean. She was an enthusiastic home-maker. It was sad and touching, in her old age, for staff to find her, lost for something proper to do, clearing out and relining drawers which were already spotlessly tidy.42

  Beatrice Stephenson, the daughter of a cloakroom attendant at Grantham station, had been a professional seamstress before she met Alfred Roberts through the Methodist Church and married him in 1917, and she taught her daughters the finer points of sewing and how to adapt existing material for new uses. Margaret followed closely her mother’s precept, ‘Never leave the house looking untidy,’43 and when Margaret Thatcher was bringing up her own children in the 1950s she did not forget her practical lessons. One contemporary at the Bar remembered Mark and Carol wearing duffel coats lined with their old nursery curtains.44 In the more than 150 letters from her to Muriel that survive, clothes (quite often illustrated by rough drawings) are a far more common subject of discussion than politics, and in her eighth decade Margaret could still remember minute details about what she had worn as a child. Thus she described the dress that her mother had made her for the Christmas party of the League of Pity (now the NSPCC): ‘It was of soft pink satin: eight or nine rows of smocking in pale blue and below, pink and blue ribbons, with a flat bow at the back … ’* Nor did Margaret forget the more general example behind these domestic accomplishments. Throughout her life, including at the zenith of her power, she liked to remember human need – for food, or comfort, or praise, or consolation, though not, unless heavily prompted, for sleep. The unanimous testimony of Margaret Thatcher’s personal staff is that she noticed their small needs and took personal pleasure in satisfying them. Indeed, her fussing round people was her favoured way of showing affection and concern: she loved to be practical, to feel that she had helped in a tangible way. She might leave her husband each morning to go and run the country, but not before she had cooked his breakfast. All this was the legacy of Beatrice Roberts.

  What bothered Margaret in later life, though, was a sense of guilt. She felt that she had been unappreciative of her mother, and, unlike with her father, whom she believed to be the greatest positive influence in her life, found it difficult to light on the right words in public to convey her belated appreciation. In the end, she said simply: ‘I don’t think I thanked my mother enough, because you don’t realize …’45

  What did others think of the Robertses? Alfred Roberts made a strong impression. He was 6 foot 2 inches tall, with piercing blue eyes and wiry blond hair that turned white quite young. The prevailing view in the town was favourable. To the young Margaret Goodrich, he was ‘a dignified, unusual sort of chap’.46 Rita Hind, another fellow pupil of Margaret Roberts at KGGS, remembered that ‘whenever his name was mentioned, it was mentioned with great reverence.’47 Another schoolfriend, Shirley Walsh, described Roberts as ‘a delightful man’.48 According to Nellie Towers, a fellow Methodist, the town librarian told her that Roberts was ‘the most well-read man in Grantham’.49 Roberts was chairman of the library committee, and one of his daughter’s most often repeated memories is of going with him to the library every Saturday to borrow a serious book for him and a light novel for her mother.50 Mary Robinson, also a fellow Methodist, was employed by Roberts in the shop to help her after her father’s death. This was an act of kindness on his part which he compounded by paying her five shillings per week more than had been agreed.51

  There are opposing views, though they are harder to find. Kenneth Wallace, son of the Roberts’s dentist, was fond of Margaret and used to invite her round to listen to his collection of classical records – Sibelius, Beethoven. He thought her friendly and a ‘good conversationalist’ but he found her background ‘very limited’, and guessed (a surmise which is confirmed in her own correspondence with Muriel) that ‘she enjoyed the company of a more cultured family than her own’. He found Roberts unnecessarily strict about allowing young men into the house (not that he was ever Margaret’s boyfriend) and thought his manner ‘patronizing’.52 His sister, Mary, found Roberts ‘rather forbidding’ and the speeches (which, as a local worthy and governor, he sometimes made at the school) almost unendurable: ‘They said nothing whatsoever – he would just point his finger at us and proclaim “And what I say is true.” ’53 Both of them give countenance to the theory, also supported by Nellie Towers, that Alfred Roberts had an eye for other women. Kenneth Wallace’s wife used to say, ‘I wouldn’t trust that man an inch. If he had half a chance, he’d have his hand up my skirt.’54 And Mary Wallace says he ‘touched women in a way completely uncalled for’.55*

  As for Beatrice Roberts, referred to by some as ‘Bee’ and others as ‘Beaty’, only rather distant and external impressions seem to survive. Kenneth Wallace considered that there was ‘more to her than met the eye … she encouraged Margaret to get out and about. She appeared a little hen-bird, but she had quite a lot of steel.’56 But on the whole Grantham regarded Mrs Roberts as shy, retiring, quiet and plain. Born in 1888, Beatrice was nearly four years older than her husband, and by the 1930s had no pretensions to good looks, style or display. ‘She was completely under old Roberts’s thumb,’ said Mary Wallace. ‘She was just there to do things for them. I got the impression that Margaret felt that too.’ Madeline Edwards, who later became joint head girl of KGGS with Margaret Roberts, remembers Mrs Roberts as ‘a small woman. Had a bun. She always looked slightly worrited [sic].’57 Nellie Towers said that Beatrice Roberts was always ‘very prim and proper’; ‘she kept the children beautifully clothed with the little tailored coats, but in her own dress she kept no decorations about her, she was all very plain.’ Developing the theory of the Robertses’ marital unhappiness, Nellie Towers declared: ‘I see where the fault was. It was Beaty that was cold.’58 Jean Farmer saw Mrs Roberts as ‘anxious to do her best for her girls’ and also emphasized the pains she took in making up their clothes so well, including their school uniform. Like so many, she was struck by the huge amount of effort the Robertses put into everything, and the care they took with the results: ‘Her parents had to work hard for their money and they valued every penny.’59 All surviving impressions of Beatrice Roberts, even those from her daughters, are somehow exterior ones, as if no one really knew her.

  The Grantham in which Alfred Roberts became an increasingly important figure was a modestly successful market town which shared the economic hardships of the 1920s and early 1930s and the definite recovery of the mid-1930s. In 1919, there were 19,700 people in the Grantham Municipal Borough; by 1938, there were 20,600. The parliamentary constituency had nearly 50,000 voters and so extended into the surrounding villages. The agricultural interest was still dominant, with factories in the town producing agricultural machinery. The Belvoir Hunt, the foxhound pack of the Duke of Rutland, always met in Grantham on Boxing Day. Roberts would take his daughters along. He was a keen supporter of foxhunting for the unusual reason that without it foxes would steal babies from prams.60 The young Margaret enjoyed her rural walks out of the bowl in which Grantham sits to pick rosehips on Hall’s Hill, and she particularly delighted in visiting friends like Jean Farmer, or the elegant rectory of Canon Harold Goodrich, incumbent of Corby Glen and father of her schoolfriend Margaret, but she and her family were really town mice. Although closely linked to the country, the town was by now large enough to have a distinctly urban character. In an early letter about a game of tennis in Grantham, Margaret disparages her unchosen partner as a ‘yokel’:61 it was always towns, preferably cities, which allured her.