Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Certainly Edith did not stay in North Parade for long. She arrived some time in April, and by 16 May is writing to Muriel from the house of Madeline Edwards in Welby Gardens. She apologizes for not having replied earlier to Muriel’s letter, but explains that she has already moved house twice before reaching the Edwardses: ‘it seems to me as if I am a gipsy.’ So she probably lived at North Parade for no more than a fortnight. The fact that she writes warmly to Muriel (mentioning Muriel’s sister whom she germanicizes as ‘Margit’) shows that relations were not broken, and her letter states that ‘I often go for a walk to see your dear father Mr Roberts, and ask if there are today any letters for me.’ She was clearly grateful to the Robertses for helping her, and said so again when tracked down by journalists in old age, living in Brazil to which she and her family shortly afterwards escaped. But the experiment did not really work, and she finally came to rest in Grantham in the larger and more sophisticated home of the Wallaces, with whom she stayed for the best part of a year.

  The story of Edith shows Alfred Roberts in an interesting light – a well-intentioned man, determined to live by his principles, genuinely kind, but also stern and forbidding. Perhaps it was easier to admire him than to live with him. Margaret, several years younger than Edith, did not know her well, but she was shocked above all by one feature she related of her life in Vienna: ‘She said that Jewish women were being made to scrub the streets.’91

  2

  Scholarship girl

  ‘You’re thwarting my ambition’

  In Margaret’s earliest known letter,1 of which only one sheet survives, she analysed her exams. She had just sat School Certificate (the rough equivalent of the GCSE), in the summer of 1941, and found the pace intense – ‘As you can imagine this mean’t [sic] a terrific amount of swotting.’ The biggest problem was presented by geography. The first paper, based on work with the Ordnance Survey map, was not too bad, but ‘the other paper on the British Isles and one continent was very disappointing. For one continent we did America and the questions on it were not at all bad, but out of the three on the British Isles there was only one we could touch.’ All of them involved a fairly detailed knowledge of Scotland and Ireland and their towns. ‘Unfortunately we had not touched island [sic] and had had precisely two lessons on Scotland … However we managed to survive it and went home to dinner hoping for a decent biology paper in the afternoon.’ Even at the age of fifteen, the map of her future political sympathies is laid out. England and America understood, Scotland little studied, Ireland terra incognita and Continental Europe not even mentioned.

  Margaret’s sister had just taken her own exams in Birmingham. ‘CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SPLENDID EXAM RESULTS I think everyone in the town knows about them by this time,’ Margaret inserted at the top of the letter. Confident that the subject of her own School Certificate is overwhelmingly fascinating to Muriel, she wrote, ‘I will send you the papers as soon as I can, but first I want Mr Marks to see them.’ Harold Marks was a master at the King’s School, the boys’ grammar school in Grantham, for whom she had great respect. Her father had arranged for Marks to act as Margaret’s occasional private tutor. It is striking that she should immediately have sought validation and advice from outside her school: there were, of course, no men at KGGS.

  In the event, Margaret need not have worried. She got a credit in geography. In her second letter, written to Muriel on 20 September 1941,2 she tabulates her full results. She got distinctions (the top grade) in chemistry, arithmetic and algebra, and credits in all other subjects with the exception of life drawing, in which she managed only a lowly pass. Having charted these, she lists the results of her fellow pupils. Although she does not make the point from the information she sets out, it is clear from the data that none of the other girls mentioned managed three distinctions. Indeed, eleven out of forty failed. This led to a parting of the ways, with some girls staying in a lower form to retake and others, such as Margaret, setting their sights on university.

  With the ready nostalgia of the very young, Margaret laments the changes: ‘Life in 6 Lower is not half as nice as life in form Va. Our crowd have broken up of course and several have left … There is not the form spirit that there used to be … we used to cling together … but now … so many of the old links are missing, there is nothing to hold us together.’ The fall in numbers was astonishing. In V Lower, Margaret recorded, there had been fifty-three girls.3 After Christmas 1941, there would be only four – Margaret, Madeline Edwards, Jean Farmer and Lorna Smith, who was new. Many girls had left due to the plentiful availability of jobs during the war. Margaret’s old companions, Joan Orchard and Pat Maidens, had been held down a year; of her intimates, only Jean Farmer survived in the same class. Margaret and Jean were also the only remaining scientists. Always sensitive to possible condescension, Margaret considered the Sixth Form (the year above her) ‘rather superior’, though expressing pleasure that Margaret Goodrich (see previous chapter) had been made head girl, since ‘she is one of the decent ones.’

  To mark the last jolly time before school began once more, Margaret went to the pictures:

  … Jean came in, and Joan came down [from her parents’ house on a hill outside Grantham], then we all went to the State [one of Grantham’s cinemas] in the afternoon and stayed tea, as a last splash before we started school. We saw This England with Constance Cummings, Emlyn Williams, and John Clements. We enjoyed it, although it was a historical film, for the greater part. With it was Romance of the Rio Grande with Caesar Romero and Patricia Morrison. For tea we had salmon salad. We happened to strike a lucky day for there was also jam and chocolate biscuits.*

  On returning to school, Margaret was not greatly impressed with all of the teaching staff: ‘The new games mistress is not as young as we have been used to having. Her name is Miss Dales, and she looks about 30. The history mistress is very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and very dowdy in dress.’ And as for Miss Amor, the geography teacher who had also been her form mistress, she had now, in her new role of vice-head, grown ‘too big for her boots’, so much so that ‘she would not come and take stock cupboard at all on Friday.’ Margaret reserved a specially tart comment for the headmistress, Miss Gillies, about her handling of the exam results: ‘There was no message of congratulation (or sympathy) from the Head, just a blunt “Pass” or “Fail”.’

  She set her shoulder to the wheel of work, however, and shared her thoughts about the future with her sister:

  When going into VI Lower you need not necessarily decide what career you are going to take up except that it would be helpful in choosing subjects … Daddy does not like the idea of medical at all, but I am taking Biology, Chemistry and Maths main with French subsid. The next idea on the list is to go to University, and take a science degree then sit for a Civil Service exam for posts abroad. A degree is necessary for this for a woman. Of course I shan’t be able to go to University at all unless I get a scholarship.

  In the whole letter, there is no direct mention of the war, though at the time Germany was invading Russia and Britain was almost the sole champion of the free world, the United States not having yet entered the conflict. The historical moment in which Margaret was living impinges only indirectly and in small ways – the emphasis on the rare availability of salmon salad, a passing mention of the fact that the evacuated Camden School for Girls was sharing KGGS’s facilities, the increasing age of the teaching staff. The war, which was to play so important a part in forming her beliefs and her idea of her country, was treated by her at the time only as a backdrop against which the life of school was played out.

  Already, in her first words that posterity has left us, the fifteen-year-old Margaret Roberts shows herself clear, confident, ambitious, diligent, clever and slightly acidulous.

  What was her education, and how did it form her? At her primary school in Huntingtower Road, Margaret did well. The story has often been told, in slightly differing versions, about the prize she won at the age of n
ine.* When the head congratulated her on her luck, Margaret retorted, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ The tale is sometimes taken to indicate big-headedness or arrogance, but more likely it shows the young Margaret’s literal-mindedness.* She had not been lucky; she had deserved it, so she felt bound to say so. To say anything else would be to cast doubt on the entire judging process.

  The first surviving motion picture – a short and jerky cine film – of Margaret Roberts dates from 1935. In that year, Grantham celebrated its centenary as a borough, and she paraded, with her school, to help form the word ‘GRANTHAM’ out of human bodies. In the film, the nine-year-old Margaret Roberts can be discerned preparing to do so: ‘appropriately enough, I was part of the “M”.’4

  In the following year, Margaret won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. KGGS, as it is and was always known, was the best school in the area that a girl could attend. Founded in 1910, it was a fee-paying girls’ grammar school, but with about a quarter of the girls attending exempt from fees. Scholarship girls entered after an equivalent of the later universal eleven-plus exam; fee-paying girls could enter from a much younger age. When Margaret arrived in September 1936, there were about 330 girls in the school, including Muriel, who was not a scholarship girl. Because of its high reputation, KGGS drew on families from quite far outside Grantham, as well as from the town itself. The social background of the pupils varied from the prosperous or highly educated (top managers in the engineering firms, the Anglican clergy) to daughters of poor families who had got in on their wits. In the financial scale, the Robertses probably stood slightly below the middle of the school; in the social, because of Alfred’s growing role in the town, rather higher.

  Despite her scholarship, Margaret went straight into the B Stream. This did not reflect any academic defect on her part, but simply the fact that an unusually large number of scholarship girls had been admitted in that year, and not all could be accommodated in the A Stream. The effect of this was to foster the slight but definite sense of separation from most of her peers that many felt Margaret showed. It also threw her together with Jean Farmer, the builder’s daughter from Fulbeck. Jean, too, was a scholarship girl, the only other one in the B Stream, and because of this, she said, ‘we were a pair’5 for the two years before they graduated to the A Stream, and, indeed, until Margaret went to Oxford and Jean to teacher training college in 1943. Jean was an easygoing, popular girl, known, in the parlance of the time, as a ‘scream’,6 and it was she and her family that first gave Margaret the sense that life could be more fun than it was in North Parade. It was in response to Margaret’s demand that she be allowed Sundays as free and jolly as those of the Farmers that Alfred Roberts produced his famous response: ‘Margaret, never do things just because other people do them. Make up your own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to go your way.’7 Margaret both kicked against such injunctions and imbibed them respectfully. She resented what her father taught, but generally believed that he was right.

  Jean Farmer liked Margaret without reservation. She describes her as ‘a very pleasant, happy, fun-loving girl’, not at all under stress and even ‘happy-go-lucky’. She was a ‘slightly plump’ girl who was ‘polite, hard-working and joined in everything’. The two of them ‘never had a cross word’, and Jean was irritated in later years by the criticisms of Margaret which she felt were unfair, such as not having a sense of humour or being too imperious: ‘I didn’t find her at all bossy … she was exceptionally nice.’ The two spent the odd weekend at one another’s parents’ houses, and the Farmers once took Margaret with them for a weekend in Skegness – a modest outing by modern standards, but quite a thing for the girls at the time. They were also excited by an expedition they made to Stamford Boys School to see The Barber of Seville performed in French (‘though we couldn’t understand a thing they said’). Jean did not regard Margaret as a genius, but she did note her ‘marvellous powers of concentration’ and one of her most famous characteristics as prime minister: ‘she didn’t need as much sleep as we did.’8 Jean’s parents were particularly fond of Margaret too, and it was Jean’s father, Jack, who chaired the Conservative Party meeting in Fulbeck in the general election campaign of 1945 at which Margaret did the warm-up for the Tory candidate. This was one of the first public speeches that she had made.* The Farmers kept up with Margaret, writing to congratulate her on her public successes. In March 1974, following the Tory defeat in the general election the previous month, Margaret, who had seen Jean again while opening a comprehensive in Formby where she now lived, wrote back: ‘It was good to see Jean when I opened a school. She looks marvellous. I think we have both “worn” very well!’* She went on, ‘It seems a long time since I was “home” in Lincolnshire. In some ways, I think they were happier and fuller days than those I live now. The days in London are and always will be very busy – but there is not the warmth and the friendship of the small town and village.’9 In reality, Margaret probably did not like Grantham excessively, and was certainly keen to get away from it, but she admired the values that she learnt there. And there is no doubt that she felt a real affection for the Farmers and the spontaneity of their village life.†

  Jean Farmer was not alone in thoroughly liking Margaret. Another friend was Shirley Walsh (now Ellis), a pretty girl on whose doorstep in Avenue Road Margaret chose to arrive every morning (‘she was always early’)10 so that they could walk to school together across the River Witham. It was Margaret who informed her, on one of these spring mornings in 1940, that invading German forces had parachuted into Holland. And it was Margaret and Shirley, when they were a bit older, who would work together at Toc H, the mission for servicemen, on a Saturday serving in the forces canteen. In Shirley Ellis’s view, Margaret ‘was never disdainful of her schoolfriends or peers’ and showed a good sense of humour – ‘She didn’t instigate, but she joined in’: she had ‘no dislikeable characteristics’. Evidence of humour – the slightly dry wit which Margaret exhibited in later years – can also be found in her correspondence with Muriel. Writing about a bus trip back from a hockey match, she describes how the vehicle was so crowded that the girls had to sit on sacks of potatoes ‘which by the time we arrived at North Witham were just about cooked and mashed’.11

  And although all her contemporaries attest to a seriousness in Margaret which made her different from the others, she took part in all the normal interests and activities of a teenage girl of that period. She enjoyed tennis, and played hockey well enough (at centre half) to be in the school team. More striking, and more apparently at odds with her upbringing, was a strong interest in glamour, both in films and in fashion. Almost every letter to Muriel mentions the latest films to hit Grantham. In the letter in which she mentions going to the This England double bill with Jean and Joan, she discusses five other films. Bittersweet and Pimpernel Smith are coming soon, she says,* but she has just been to see Rebecca, which she thinks ‘one of the best I have ever seen, with a well-concealed plot’.12 She also went with her mother to Love on the Dole, she wrote, a film about unemployed Lancastrian cotton workers between the wars, ‘the spectral army of three million lost men’, unusual in the wartime period for addressing social problems of this kind. It was not to Margaret’s taste: ‘I can’t say I enjoyed it, although it was a good film.’ In the following month, a Deanna Durbin season at Grantham continued: ‘I went to Nice Girl with Jean and Joan. I thought it was rotten.’13 Films in Grantham were made more acceptable in the eyes of Margaret’s parents by the fact that one cinema, the Picture House, was owned by the Campbells, customers and respected neighbours of Roberts in nearby, rather grand Welby Gardens. J. A. Campbell was a fellow Rotarian of Alfred Roberts. Their daughter, Judy, who lived there with her parents in the 1930s, was a very beautiful woman, and became a well-known actress and the first to popularize the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’.† Margaret knew Judy a little, and greatly admired her. She also had a partiality for the films of Ginger Rogers, wh
ich led Jim Allen, Grantham’s leading local historian of Margaret Thatcher, to ask her in old age if she liked Rogers because of her portrayal of a woman succeeding in a man’s world in Kitty Foyle. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ replied Lady Thatcher. ‘I always wished I could have danced like her.’14

  By Margaret’s own account, the ‘biggest excitement of my early years’ was her only pre-war trip to London, at the age of twelve. She went to stay with Methodist friends of the family, the Revd Mr Skinner and his wife – the minister who was much later to marry her and Denis. The Skinners took her to the obvious London sights, including Parliament and Downing Street, and St Paul’s Cathedral (‘where John Wesley prayed on the morning of his conversion’).15 ‘But the high point was my first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham where we saw Sigmund Romberg’s famous musical The Desert Song. For three hours I lived in another world, swept away as was the heroine by the daring Red Shadow – so much so that I bought the score and played it at home, perhaps too often.’ Rather touchingly, she writes of the trip that the Skinners’ ‘kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, “la douceur de la vie” ’. For all her subsequent fame, she seldom had time throughout her life to savour this indefinable quality, but when she did, she loved it. She also thrived on the excitement of places that mattered. London traffic and crowds ‘seemed to generate a sort of electricity’, even the soot of the buildings lent a ‘dark, imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world’. Except in political allegiance, the centre was always where she wanted to be.