Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Apart from films, the other way to bring glamour to unexciting Grantham was through clothes. Margaret would never have wanted to be trendy, even if the word had existed at the time, but she constantly sought elegance and quality in what she wore. It was a time, because of the war and later the post-war rationing, as well as her parents’ careful budgeting, when these were not easily attained. Her correspondence with Muriel includes a constant series of requests for bits of material or nylons or buttons and so on, and a detailed discussion of fashion and beauty, of where it is possible to obtain the right things, and at what price. On 30 July 1944, a few days after the abortive Bomb Plot by German officers against Hitler, she writes to Muriel that, going to Lincoln with Jean, she had ‘hoped to do a bit of shopping with odds and bobs thinking that tomorrow was August 1st and we should be able to use the new coupons, but now of course I have discovered that it will only be July 31st, and so I shan’t be able to do much as I have only one coupon left.’ Nevertheless, she went the previous day to Chambers in Grantham ‘and bought two underwear sets that I am very pleased with. I got a white Kayser set and a pink rather dainty set of some other make. I also got pink uplift bras …’ She then chose ‘a Vogue pattern for a frock. I think there will be just sufficient material over to make a small berry [sic: she meant beret] shaped hat of the kind that are in fashion now. If that man can make me a handbag, it should be a nice set when it is finished.’16 For her birthday in 1941, her father gave Margaret a pound so that she could buy a powder bowl, ‘telling me to bring back the change’.17 She found a nice but plain one for 10 shillings (50p) (‘just ordinary glass with a little gold paint round the top’). ‘There’s one I should very much have liked,’ she goes on. ‘It was green, very large and cut glass. The only objectionable thing about it was its price – 32/6.’18

  Margaret always exhibited a practical approach to things, whether to price or to friendship. Lorna Smith, who came into the school in September 1941, remembered her as ‘quiet, hard-working, poised, calm and self-confident. Some people found her slightly irritating, and even rather conceited, but I fear there was an element of envy there! For myself, I found her pleasant and helpful, for which, as a new girl at the school, I was immensely grateful.’ To Lorna, Margaret displayed the rather brisk, mothering sort of kindness which, in later life, she always showed to those who worked closely with her: ‘one bitterly cold winter’s morning I had to cycle to Grantham, with no breakfast, to have a nerve removed at the dentist’s. Staggering out of the surgery, some time later, I ran straight into Margaret, who was shopping. She took one look at my ashen face, and steered me to Catlin’s Café for a restorative hot drink. She will not remember her kind deed, but I have never forgotten it.’19 What marked Margaret out, though, was her sense of purpose. As Shirley Ellis put it, ‘She always stood out because teenage girls don’t know where they’re going. She did.’

  And this purposefulness was accompanied by a fondness for simple moral precepts that never left her. It was a custom for schoolgirls in the 1930s to keep autograph books. These were not so much, as in future generations, to obtain the signatures of famous people as to collect the signatures of friends and the little improving remarks or quotations which they might want to inscribe. On 23 March 1937, the eleven-year-old Margaret Roberts wrote in Madeline Edwards’s autograph book:

  Tis easy enough to be pleasant,

  When life goes by with a song.

  But the one worth while

  Is the one that can smile

  When everything goes dead wrong.

  Rita Hind (later Wright), another schoolfriend, kept the inscription of fifteen-year-old Margaret Roberts on 22 June 1941 (the day, as it happens, when the world received the news of Hitler’s invasion of Russia): ‘A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in little things, is a great thing.’ Shirley Ellis’s autograph book did not survive, but she remembered what Margaret wrote in it in 1939: ‘Smile a while and when you smile another smiles and then there’s miles and miles of smiles.’

  Precepts, once learnt, had also to be proclaimed. Margaret’s Methodist upbringing and her father’s example made it natural for someone of her interests to want to speak in public, unusual though this was for a woman at that time. It was many years, however, before she started to make speeches of her own. Her first public performances were recitations, and she favoured such poetry – well-known passages of Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman or Kipling – as made its moral meaning plain and expressed it with grandeur and force. It was partly for these exercises that she began the first of several stints of elocution lessons which were to punctuate her career. According to Connie Pitchford, a KGGS contemporary, Margaret suffered from ‘a slight lisp and had trouble pronouncing her Rs’. In 1936, she and Connie had elocution lessons together.20 From these, not from any later, political attempt to improve her social standing, springs the cut-glass voice for which Margaret was later to be criticized. In those days, all elocution teachers tried to enforce a very precise, carefully enunciated version of received pronunciation, and for Margaret, who was already competing in declamation competitions, it would not have been possible to win without eliminating all traces (which seem anyway to have been slight) of a Lincolnshire accent. Later, her carefully modulated tones used to irritate many of her contemporaries at Somerville, Oxford, who considered them ‘artificial’.21 So in a sense they were, but the purpose of the artifice was more purity of diction than climbing up the greasy political or social pole. Margaret herself understood that artificiality was frowned upon: her lessons had taught her the importance of avoiding exaggeration and melodrama: ‘you were taught not to over-express. To over-express is to undermine your meaning because it becomes artificial.’22

  The lessons produced results. In 1937, Margaret won the silver medal at the Grantham eisteddfod for her recitation of John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Walter De La Mare’s ‘The Travellers’. In 1939, Shirley Ellis remembers sharing a prize with her for declaiming Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. And Margaret, though by no means a literary girl, was someone easily stirred to passion by the high sentiments and noble expressions of poetry. ‘I loved language and rhythm,’ she recalled,23 and she appreciated poets, such as John Masefield or Henry Newbolt, who indulged this love. ‘Kipling was our hero, with the breadth of his writing,’ she said,24 and throughout her life she always had some quotation from him – ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent,’ for example – readily retrievable from her memory. One may speculate that Kipling, as well as the Methodist missionaries, excited the idea of India in her imagination. She loved what were then the ‘obvious’ anthologies of English poetry, such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch’s edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. To her first serious boyfriend, she gave a copy of Palgrave. To the man whom, before Denis, she most nearly married, she sent the complete works of Shakespeare. Neither choice shows any originality of literary taste, but her reverence and affection for great writing were genuine. She extended these feelings, above all, to the Authorized Version of the Bible, singling out Isaiah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles: ‘There is no greater English literature.’25 Her choice of Acts is slightly unusual, and worth noting – it is the most important book in the Scriptures about the propagation of a message to the world. And to the end of her life she retained the words of scores of the classic English hymns in her mind. At Denis’s funeral in July 2003, when her anguish and mental confusion were such that she was not sure whether it was her husband’s or her father’s coffin in front of her, she was seen to sing all the hymns, word-perfect, without looking at the service sheet.*

  This is how Lorna Smith, arriving as a shy new girl in September 1941, remembers the Lower Sixth at KGGS:

  Our combined sixth Forms shared a form-room, furnished with a desk and two long tables, at which we sat facing each other. The more senior girls usually sat opposite me, so I was able to contemplate the stars in my new firmament. />
  There was Margaret Goodrich (‘Margie’), clever, kind and attractive, well turned-out, and with her bright burnished red hair tied in a neat bow. She was inclined to be Miss Gillies’ ‘pet’, but it did not spoil her.

  Her younger sister, Joan Goodrich (‘Joanie’) might be at the table, too. She was also clever, but very quiet and hardly ever spoke. She had a very pale complexion, and her hair was black, and sleek as a starling.

  Then there was Madeline Edwards, with her long Titian mane, proud of her Welsh origins, strong of character, a natural leader, and immensely gifted. She excelled in almost everything, especially in the arts and music.

  … and sometimes Margaret Roberts was there, too, when she was not ‘swotting’ in the chemistry lab, where she could usually be found.

  Not as striking, perhaps, as the girls already described, and with rather ‘mousey’ hair (like mine!), she nevertheless had even features, a clear complexion, intelligent grey-blue eyes, a very good figure and legs, and a sharp intellect. She radiated quiet confidence.

  Lorna shared history revision with Margaret, which included a weekly session on ‘Current Events’.

  After one of these classes … we were lolling about in our form-room, gossiping, and thinking about our futures. Margaret said she was going to be a scientist, but she was also interested, like her father, in politics, and would perhaps try for Parliament one day. ‘Imagine – an MP!’ I said, admiringly. ‘Perhaps you could even be Prime Minister!’ She waved away the idea, but she was looking both dreamy and purposeful. Since then I have heard her disclaim all such ambitions, but that is a clear memory.†

  Discussion of politics, though, was a rarity at KGGS. There was plenty of talk, of course, about the progress of the war, but this concerned Britain’s military fortunes, not the conflict’s political rights and wrongs. Reflecting the parents of the girls, the school’s prevailing allegiance was vaguely Conservative, but those girls who enjoyed debate were more likely to centre on religious questions than political ones. ‘I think our faith mattered more,’ said Rita Hind.26* The girls were very idealistic, she said: it was ‘a very moral period’, with no girls known to have boyfriends while at school. ‘There were more important things to do than boys,’ Margaret remembered.27 It was a time of aspiration, and of a love of education. ‘We didn’t see the emptiness that would follow the war,’ said Rita Hind. It was this high-minded atmosphere which Margaret drank in, and cherished: ‘I’m quite sure she wanted to keep alive the spirit of the Thirties or revive it.’28 No one remembered Margaret debating political issues at this time, though all remembered her interest in the subject. Indeed, there is scarcely a single instance, in all her surviving correspondence from the 1940s, of Margaret expressing a political view on any subject. Her political involvement is clear, but all her mentions of it refer to organization, meetings, speeches and so on, not to the substance of policy or ideas.

  In the context of what she calls the school’s ‘strong religious bias, led by our high-principled Head’ (Miss Gillies), Lorna Smith remembered many schoolgirl discussions about faith, not least a surreal conversation with Margaret on an afternoon walk from school into Grantham just before Christmas in 1942. ‘She remarked that, really, she didn’t think she could believe in angels. “Oh, why?” I asked, wondering what Ald. Roberts would think. “Well,” she replied, “I have worked it out scientifically that in order to fly, an angel would need a six-foot-long breastbone to bear the weight of its wings.” ’ Lorna added, perhaps superfluously, ‘… Margaret could be very earnest at times.’29

  There was something else that Margaret worked out scientifically, with alarming results. In the spring of 1943, the post-exam celebrations resulted in ink being spilt on the ‘precious parquet floor of our form-room’.30 For Lorna Smith, this was a second offence.

  Knowing that soap-and-water was useless, what was to be done? Surely, this time we would be expelled. Then someone thought of our star scientist – Margaret Roberts would know what would remove the now-spreading black stain. Her remedy was that it should be sprinkled with bleaching-powder and then have hydrochloric acid poured on (stolen from the lab.). I scrubbed away furiously, and sure enough, the boards began to recover. But the next moment I was almost overcome by the fumes and had to rush out-of-doors, quite blue in the face – no one knew that the lethal mixture would give off chlorine gas. Our violent coughing and splutterings alerted the staff, who were too genuinely concerned about us to be angry at the mess. Indeed, the next day, there was surprisingly little retribution; I suspect that Margaret had quietly been to Miss Gillies and owned up to her near-fatal advice. (My lungs have not been the same since.)

  As well as being religious, the school was competitive, at least in its higher academic echelons, and no one more so than Margaret. Rita Hind remembered that she, Margaret and Madeline Edwards used to vie for the top places, and that, in doing so, Margaret displayed more determination than she did natural talent: ‘Most things with Maggie were learnt or contrived.’31* Even the good-natured Lorna Smith found Margaret’s pride in her academic attainments rather tiresome: ‘I recall [in July 1942] being slightly “miffed” when Margaret told me afterwards, and rather boastfully, that our form-mistress had said that all our geography results were extremely disappointing – except hers.’32 Her faults, in the eyes of her contemporaries, concerned her tendency to come top, to be right and to rub it in. And it is noticeable that the ones who most resented her tended to be those who were themselves stars in the school firmament. Both Madeline Edwards and Margaret Goodrich recalled her irritating tendency to ask the first, well-informed question of any visiting speaker, even when she was a little girl in the fourth form (‘We’d look at one another and say, “She’s at it again,” ’ said Madeline Edwards); and Margaret Goodrich remembers, at her own twenty-first birthday party in December 1944, a friend turning on Margaret Roberts and saying, ‘If you don’t stop bossing us, I shall stamp on your foot.’33 The less competitive girls, such as Lorna, Jean and Shirley, found Margaret less oppressive.

  Once in the sixth form, Margaret became a prefect, and she seems to have taken to her duties with the energy, dedication and slight exasperation at the weaknesses of others which were to mark her later career. In December 1941, she writes to Muriel about the preparations for a charity Fun Fair at the school. The decision was made to run the thing in forms, with each form getting up two competitions. ‘I happen to have form IV Lower A who are rather young,’ writes Margaret, and there was:

  a lot of extra work as posters had to be made to draw people’s attention to the fact that they simply MUST go to room seven … Well, you know I am no artist so I got two of my form to promise to do some posters for Thursday morning. On Thursday they both came to me and said they were sorry but … On Thursday evening I had to sit down and do them myself … The youngsters are very enthusiastic but not very ready to do a lot.

  Her competition raised 30 shillings and her stall £10 – ‘an excellent result’.34*

  Margaret was not considered an intellectual genius, but she was right at the top of the class, and consistently got good reports and good results. As early as Christmas 1936 she is recorded as having ‘worked steadily and well throughout the term. She has definite ability, and her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form. Her behaviour is excellent.’35 Even after promotion to the A Stream, Margaret continued to come top every year except one, in which she came second, and reports commended her for virtues like ‘care and thoroughness’. Words like ‘very satisfactory’, ‘thoughtful and helpful’ and ‘keenly interested’ abound. Her ‘power of sustained interest’ was noted. When Margaret applied to Oxford, Miss Gillies, who, as we shall see, had a scratchy relationship with her pupil, nevertheless noted, in her reference, that ‘she is a very logical thinker’ and ‘has a very clear mind’.36 Miss Gillies’s final report had a touch of coolness in its praise: ‘Margaret is ambitious and deserves to do well. She has shown herself capable of a very thorough
mastery of facts and is, I consider, now ready for the experience of wider scholarship which a University education can offer.’

  Margaret accepted and admired the ethos of KGGS. Although, as education secretary from 1970 to 1974, she found herself landed with the task of permitting the closure of grammar schools if local authorities demanded it, and thus closed more than anyone in her position before or since, the process made her miserable. She loved grammar schools, which she regarded as the ladder of opportunity for able children from unprivileged families. When she visited KGGS in 1986 to open the Roberts Hall in memory of her father, who had been, for almost forty years, first a governor and then chairman of the Governors, she declared: ‘I would not have been in No. 10 but for this school.’37 And, after an earlier visit, as leader of the Opposition in 1977, she wrote, in her letter of thanks to the then headmistress, ‘For me, the school’s motto has always been particularly true.’38 The motto is Veras hinc ducere voces – ‘To lead true voices from here’ (a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica) – and it is fair to say that, despite all the evasions that politics requires, Margaret Thatcher was always exceptionally concerned to tell the truth as she saw it. When she accepted a peerage, she took her title from her school, not from her town, becoming Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Replying to a letter of congratulation from Shirley Ellis, she said: ‘I am glad our KGGS friends like the title.’39

  It is probably the case, however, that Margaret’s relationship with her school, as with Grantham itself, was slightly more ambiguous than she would have allowed. Local feeling that she could have done more to use her fame to promote the school’s interests may perhaps be discounted – she did keep well in touch with the school and she did, after all, have other things to do – but what is more significant is the conflict Margaret encountered as a pupil when she decided to try for Oxford to read chemistry, a subject in which she was particularly strong, and whose teacher, Miss Kay, she greatly respected.