Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The most powerful local man – and the biggest landowner – was Lord Brownlow, whose Cust family had long been seated at Belton, just outside Grantham. He was so close a friend of the Prince of Wales that he was criticized for his association with him after his abdication as King Edward VIII in 1936. The young Margaret made a good impression on the Custs. According to her sister Muriel, Caroline Cust, Lord Brownlow’s daughter, used to ‘rave’ about Margaret. A photograph reprinted in Lady Thatcher’s memoirs62 shows her at a Baptist Christmas party smiling brightly out beside the young and elegant Lady Brownlow. Although it was often said that the grocer’s daughter was somehow antagonistic to the traditional Tory aristocracy, this was not really so (although a few of them reacted snobbishly to her). The Brownlows were only the first of several grandees who looked favourably on her and whom she, in turn, admired. When she became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher arranged with the then Lord Brownlow to borrow silver from Belton, by this time owned by the National Trust, to improve the cutlery at Downing Street. She also borrowed a green enamel box, painted with views of Grantham, which had been presented to Lord Brownlow when he had completed his year of office as mayor of the borough.63*

  It was the approach of war that brought strong economic growth to Grantham. The town benefited from its position on the main road and rail links between London, the north-east and Scotland – the opening sentence of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs is: ‘My first distinct memory is of traffic’64 – and it increased its industrial base. Between 1932 and 1943, rateable value (the basis of the calculation for property taxes) rose by 60 per cent, which was very helpful to Alfred Roberts in his capacity as chairman of the borough’s finance committee. From 1934, new factories were being built in Grantham at the rate of about one a year. There was a good deal of engineering, the firm of Ruston and Hornsby, for example, which built engines. Aveling-Barford made steamrollers and tractors, and in 1938 the munitions company B.M.A.R. Co. opened a factory, run by Denis Kendall at the then astonishing salary of £10,000 per annum. Kendall, a glamorous, not to say flash, figure, drove a motorbike and had liaisons with prominent local women. In 1942, standing as an independent, he won the first wartime parliamentary by-election to turn out the National Government candidate (a Conservative), campaigning as a ‘production man’ critical of the ‘gang’ round Winston Churchill, though not of Churchill himself. During the war, Kendall displaced Lord Brownlow as the leading figure in the town, certainly in terms of local press coverage, and in the 1945 general election he was re-elected to Parliament, defeating the Conservative candidate by more than 15,000 votes. By 1939, full employment had returned to Grantham. Working shifts had to be staggered to avoid the traffic jams caused by the myriad bicycles.

  War also brought the armed services to Grantham in large numbers. There were four RAF bases locally, including the RAF College at Cranwell.* Margaret’s letters to Muriel about dances in the area during the war always mention the hordes of flight lieutenants eager for a dance. Grantham provided the national headquarters for Bomber Command (Margaret Roberts’s dentist, Mr Wallace, also treated ‘Bomber’ Harris); and from October 1943 there was a large USAAF presence in the town. Denis Kendall exploited the resentments to which the American influx gave rise. US servicemen were paid five times more than British ones, and were accused of immorality with local girls. Kendall complained that they were allowed to rent the Guildhall for entertainment when the same privilege had been refused to British servicemen. In Parliament, he caused a storm by alleging that Americans were accosting girls in the street. The accusation was promptly rejected by Lord Brownlow and by the Chief Constable. But it is certainly the case that the town became a place much fuller of young men and girls seeking one another. According to Terry Bradley, after the war a Labour councillor and opponent of Alfred Roberts, the High Street was known to have a ‘five bob side’, where officers picked up girls, and a ‘half a crown side’ for the other ranks.65 It was in response to the problems of war that Roberts was prepared to unbend his Sabbatarian principles, defying his fellow Methodists by voting in favour of the Sunday opening of cinemas for the troops, because he believed that it was better for them to have entertainment than to have nothing. His daughter cited this as evidence of his pragmatism and independence of mind.66

  Alfred Roberts began his career in local politics well before the war. He was first elected in the St Wulfram Ward, where he sat as an Independent Ratepayer from 1927. Although Margaret was always slightly evasive on the point, Muriel was quite definite that their father was originally a Liberal in politics,67 but Roberts was also a strong supporter of the convention dominant at the time that national party allegiance should be kept out of local government, and he maintained this throughout his career, so much so that when he died in 1970 the local press could only speculate on his political affiliations. In the fluid politics of the early 1930s, Roberts became a supporter of the Conservative-dominated National Government – the coalition designed to deal with the slump, headed by the formerly Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – seeing himself as without clear party allegiance. In his address as president of Grantham Rotary Club in July 1936 he described himself as ‘like a good many people, often hopelessly and utterly in the wilderness in the political world, sometimes believing in one party, sometimes in another as others had been doing these last few years. There was a feeling that one could not look to any particular party or creed for the salvation of men and ridding them of fear.’68 When Margaret was chosen as prospective parliamentary candidate for Dartford in 1949, her father broke the habit of a lifetime by speaking at a party political meeting, in her support. In justifying his position, he told the meeting that the Conservative Party now stood for ‘very much the same things as the Liberal Party did in his younger days’ (see Chapter 5). Margaret offered her own explanation for his views in her memoirs: ‘Like many other business people he had … been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism.’69

  Before and during the war, ideology did not intrude very much into the work of the council. In economic questions, for example, the only significant split occurred in early 1935 when a slum-clearance scheme was proposed which would knock down 106 houses and accommodate 415 people. The council divided over whether or not this should be done by a direct labour force, Alfred Roberts opposing. Roberts quickly attained, and then held for more than twenty years, the chairmanship of the finance and rating committee on the council. The Grantham Journal called him ‘Grantham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’.* He was the efficient and careful guardian of the council’s budget, not an ideologue or a campaigning politician.

  But since Labour was the only party which defied the convention about political identification on the council, it is fair to say that, for Roberts, Labour was always his political opponent. The Chamber of Trade, with whose support he was first elected, existed in opposition to the Labour Party, and to the associated Co-operative movement. And in the 1935 general election Roberts decided to throw his growing influence in the town behind the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender,† despite the fact that many of his fellow Methodists had supported the Peace Ballot which ended in that year.‡

  It was this that gave Margaret her first taste of politics. She helped fold Warrender’s election addresses into envelopes, and on polling day she acted as a runner, taking information about who had voted from the tellers at the polling station to the Conservative Committee Rooms so that they could make sure that their canvass turned out to vote.70 Margaret Thatcher was never quite sure exactly what generated her early and enthusiastic allegiance to the Tories: ‘I don’t know why I was so staunchly Conservative. I think it was the idea of my father that you can get on somehow.’71 But she immediately took to Warrender: ‘I’ll tell you what struck me. He had a presence, a natural presence. He had an overcoat on. It was a good overcoat. Good, not flashy. He was rather a handsome man. When he spoke, you listened.’ She felt pleased ‘to be treated on an equal level by an un
equal … He understood that personality attracted votes.’72 As so often in her dealings in later life, she was susceptible to good-looking men, to elegant clothes, to what used to be called an air of breeding.*

  In forming his views on the international scene, Alfred Roberts probably gleaned more from Rotary than from any political party. Rotary was, and is, a worldwide movement. It grew in popularity between the wars, having been founded in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Grantham Rotary got its charter in 1931, and Roberts was a founder member. In 1935 he became its annual president. With its motto of ‘Service above Self’, Rotary was a thoroughly worthy organization, composed largely of businessmen and dedicated to social improvement and charitable endeavour. The records of its meetings, as detailed in the Grantham Journal, show a slightly comical list of improving subjects chosen for the club’s lectures – ‘modern psychology’, a talk on road rollers (which were locally manufactured) and the history of tithes and rent charges. The organization’s approach to politics was deliberately uncomplicated. It called for people to sink their political differences in the wider public interest, and this applied, too, on the international scene, where a sentiment of reconciliation was much stronger than one of confrontation with Hitler. Margaret Thatcher said that her family first realized that there was something wrong with Hitler ‘when we heard that he had suppressed Rotary’.73 She saw the wider world through Rotarian eyes.

  As the chairman of Grantham Rotary’s international service committee, Alfred Roberts organized visiting speakers. Because of this, and his voracious reading, he was probably as well informed as any other member about world affairs. Both Margaret and Muriel remembered that he was given favourable pamphlets about Hitler by his fellow Rotarian and local GP, a German called Dr Jauch, but that he was unconvinced. Margaret Thatcher remembered Dr Jauch as a ‘very cold man’.74 What is clear, though, is that Roberts’s Rotarianism, and perhaps his Methodism as well, made him sympathetic to appeasement, particularly as embodied by Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister since 1937, and about as perfectly Rotarian a figure as ever reached 10 Downing Street.

  As the speaker at the annual dinner of Grantham Rotary on 26 January 1939, Roberts reminded his audience of Rotary’s clear rule of avoiding politics and not recommending ‘forms of government’. ‘They [that is, Rotary] took no sides as to whether there should be a dictatorship, monarchy or republic,’ said the report of his speech. Nor did they enter into controversy about ‘world personalities, either in attack or defence’, but they did have principles of ‘justice, truth and liberty’ which drove them to say that ‘weak nations have sacred rights too, and that they must be respected’. Since Rotarians were animated by these principles, said Roberts, ‘It did not matter to them whether people were strongly armed or whether they were almost unarmed. They had seen, quite recently, what one man could do, armed only with a neatly-rolled umbrella, with his mind made up and his will intent on peace. (Applause.)’75 Roberts was referring to Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler, signed in Munich in October of the previous year and later to became notorious. It is fair to say that, in speaking as he did, Roberts was expressing a sentiment shared by probably three-quarters of the British population. ‘Appeasement’ was not then a dirty word, but one used by the appeasers themselves; they believed that peace could be preserved by talking. Those, like Winston Churchill, who disagreed were attacked as warmongers. Roberts’s views were the conventional ones. At the same dinner, various speakers worried about the banning of Rotary in Germany and Italy, which they attributed to the international character of the organization, but they stuck to the view that Rotary’s concept of ‘fellowship’ offered the best ‘pathway to peace’ in an increasingly threatening climate.76

  Margaret Thatcher, of course, became famous for her dislike of appeasing dictators (she compared Western weakness towards Saddam Hussein in 1990 with that shown to Hitler, for example)77 and for her admiration of Churchill. For this reason, perhaps, she did not like directly to admit that her father had been a supporter of Chamberlain, but approached the subject rather more obliquely. Chamberlain, she later insisted, ‘was a very honourable man … I often thought he knew that in 1938 he must gain time to get us ready. I believe he gained more in that last year than Hitler … it may be that we owe Chamberlain a great debt of gratitude for his judgment for what happened during those years. And it brought Winston forward that much more.’78 She said that honourable men try to find honour in other, foreign governments: ‘perhaps it has been one of the faults of British politicians that we look at other politicians through slightly rose-tinted spectacles thinking they are as we are.’79

  Once war came in September 1939, however, any hesitations were put on one side, and Alfred Roberts became a more and more important figure in Grantham as the town responded to the crisis. He was one of three councillors appointed, when war began, to the emergency committee which exercised the powers of the full council, becoming its vice-chairman in 1942, and he threw himself into numerous war-related activities. He had been involved in the council’s original ARP (Air Raid Precautions) plans in 1938, and during the war he played a leading part in Civil Defence and became chief raid welfare officer, dealing with questions like the rehousing and care of those who had been bombed. In 1940, he set up a British Restaurant – part of a national scheme for places providing basic food where workers could eat without using up their ration allowances – first for munitions workers in Bridge End Road, and later a second restaurant at the school room attached to the Finkin Street Methodist Church where he preached. He was prominent in the National Savings Movement, whose Local Savings Committees encouraged thrift and helped finance the war effort. All this work was not only worthy but genuinely demanding when combined with running his two shops. In 1940, Roberts was offered the mayoralty of Grantham, but had to refuse owing to lack of time. In February 1943, he was made an alderman, a form of unelected councillor now abolished outside the City of London, appointed by the council itself as a mark of respect and local distinction. Roberts, aged fifty at that time, was probably the youngest Grantham man ever to be chosen for the office. The circumstances in which he lost it, more than ten years later, were to make a profound impression upon his daughter. Just after the war ended, Roberts was again offered, and this time accepted, the mayoralty. From the beginning of the war until her departure for Oxford in October 1943, with Muriel absent in Birmingham for her training as a physiotherapy nurse, Margaret was in effect an only child at home. She witnessed at close quarters the endless labour and public spiritedness of her father, a life which, because of war, shrank the sphere of private pleasures even smaller. Duty, work, patriotism – and the sense of an enemy – dominated.

  Even as he drafted his speech about peace and war to Grantham Rotary, Alfred Roberts was preparing to put his Rotarian principles to a practical test. It was the custom at KGGS that many of the girls had foreign penfriends: Margaret had a French girl called Cilette Pasquier* from the Savoie, but Muriel had an Austrian one called Edith Mühlbauer. Edith was Jewish, and at some point her parents, suffering persecution after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in March of the previous year, wrote to Roberts asking if he would take Edith in so that she could escape the Nazis. He agreed, and arranged with fellow Rotarians that she should stay with several families in turn. The correspondence between Roberts and Edith’s parents does not survive, but on 21 January 1939 Edith herself wrote from Vienna to Roberts saying that the permit for the visa to England which followed his invitation had arrived. Typing neatly, in uncertain English, she thanked him for his help – ‘I will never in my whole live forgett it you’ – and went on to ask practical questions about reaching the Roberts family: ‘Have I to take the train from London to Grantham† or the ship?’80 In fact, the bureaucracy of permitted escape took some time, and on 23 March Edith wrote again, saying there was yet more delay, but that she should be allowed out of Austria within a few weeks: ‘First of all let me thank you for you
r kind letter and enclosed photograph. I am ever so glad that you helped me and that there are various other people which want to help me too, and take me into their nice homes. I really hope to be happy there.’81

  Unfortunately, generous though the Robertses were, Edith was not terribly happy with them. Hints of the problem surface in the memories of Margaret and Muriel. ‘We didn’t have a proper bathroom in those days,’ said Margaret; ‘she was used to better things.’82 Muriel said Edith was a ‘nice girl’, but also that ‘she had a wonderful wardrobe … and I think that they were well breeched in Austria.’ As if to protect her from possible threat, Edith’s Jewishness was not mentioned, but it seems also to have contributed to the provincial Robertses’ sense that she was rather apart from them.83 Edith didn’t like the Robertses’ Sunday-afternoon walk into the fields beyond Grantham: ‘She said, “It’ll ruin my shoes.” ’84

  What seems to have happened is that Alfred Roberts was shocked by Edith’s sophistication, her smart appearance and her tendency, at that time thought extremely dangerous in teenage girls, to wear make-up. In the slightly acid words of Madeline Edwards, whose family also accommodated her, Edith was ‘a very grown-up seventeen-year-old’.85 She would sit at the window of her bedroom in North Parade looking out on to the street and making Roberts feel, according to one of her contemporaries, that ‘it was like Amsterdam’.86 Edith told Mary Wallace that she found 1 North Parade a ‘repressive household’.87 She was ‘patently unhappy’ there.88 This produced a major row between Roberts and his fellow Rotarian, Mr Wallace, the dentist. The two men started shouting at one another and Wallace told Roberts: ‘You asked this girl over, and you’re not looking after her properly and she’s very unhappy.’89 This version is implicitly confirmed by Muriel Cullen, who says that ‘Daddy refused to accept responsibility too much and went round to all Rotarians in turn persuading them to have Edith … I sometimes think he regretted having got her over.’90