The sort of qualities which Margaret displayed were not of the type to endear her to the typical student mind, which values spontaneity over carefulness. Here is Mary Mallinson recalling an incident at the very end of their time at Oxford, the Sunday before Finals in the Walton Street digs with their fellow lodger, Mary Foss.*
Margaret was up to her eyes … Mary Foss and I had had an easier year, but Mary was in a panic because she had spent a lot of time in social activities during the year and suddenly realised how much she hadn’t done. We were each in our rooms, Mary downstairs and Margaret and I on the first floor, when there was a loud thump. Margaret and I rushed downstairs and found Mary flat out in a faint on the floor. We did what we could then went back upstairs to get on with our revision. When the same thing had happened for the 4th time, Margaret looked at me and said that we couldn’t spend all day rushing up and downstairs. She realised that it was a form of hysteria. Having agreed that on no occasion had Mary suffered any injury, she suggested that next time we just left her. She wasn’t being unkind. She was being realistic and practical. She had so much work to do and just could not afford the time …23
Of the four women’s colleges at Oxford, Somerville was the most austere. There was a joke current at the time about the different reaction of girls at the different colleges to a friend who said she had just met a young man. The woman from Lady Margaret Hall said: ‘Who are his parents?’ The one from St Hilda’s said, ‘What games does he play?’ The one from Somerville said, ‘What is he reading?’ and the woman from St Hugh’s said, ‘Where is he?’24
The prevailing expectation among the undergraduates of her college was of work which involved educational or public service. There was little thought of business or money or glamour, or a political career. Life was serious and the privilege of a woman’s education at a great university had to be repaid. Margaret herself believed devoutly in worthiness and public service, but she applied these beliefs during her career in a way which many Somervillians did not like and with a success of which some, perhaps, were jealous. There was some resentment that, of all the girls who went to Somerville, it had to be she who became world famous. She exhibited what many considered a sort of smug perfection. Betty Spice said, ‘We’re not proud of Margaret. We found it a bit galling that she became prime minister, and that she married Denis and got his money and then had the twins in one go.’25 At the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret’s year’s matriculation – 1993 – Somerville laid on a dinner, with drinks in the college’s new Margaret Thatcher Suite. Seeing the bust of the ex-Prime Minister there, one of her contemporaries went up and covered it with a windcheater, to widespread amusement.26 Something similar applies to many of Somerville’s dons, particularly those under the influence of Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville from 1945, and one of those progressives who regard being a Conservative as a sort of mental defect. ‘She stood out,’ she told a pair of biographers. ‘Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about then … she was so set as steel as a Conservative … We used to entertain a good deal at weekends, but she didn’t get invited. She had nothing to contribute, you see.’27 Pauline Cowan remembers dining at Somerville high table shortly after Margaret became prime minister in 1979. ‘We’re all wearing black,’ the dons told her.28 It could be argued that Margaret’s career exemplified the tradition of radicalism which Janet Vaughan invoked: her youthful Conservatism certainly showed a determination not to conform. The truth is that most of her Somerville contemporaries did not know her terribly well, and were not strongly attracted by what they did know.
For her part, Mrs Thatcher always spoke warmly of Somerville, even including Janet Vaughan – ‘a remarkable person’,29 whose subsequent scientific work she followed with interest. If she noticed any hostility, she did not mention it, let alone reciprocate. She maintained her admiration for the college system – ‘A college is a college, thank goodness’30 – and although she was deeply hurt by Oxford University’s vote to refuse her an honorary degree when she was prime minister, she never directed any of the same feeling towards her college. Partly because of her warm respect for Daphne Park, Principal of Somerville from 1980 to 1989,* she maintained an interest in the place throughout her years as prime minister. But it is also true that she kept no close friends from Somerville days.
In a letter to Muriel of 19 April 1945 (less than two weeks before the death of Hitler, but the war is not mentioned), Margaret describes returning to the college slightly earlier than her fellows (probably to take part in a short electioneering course organized by OUCA). She went into dinner after arriving and ‘to my dismay’ found herself:
in solitary state, alone in that immense hall except for the maid to wait on me. The dons have dinner in their private dining room during the vac. so there was no question of their company thank goodness. I had a marvellous dinner. First there was some lovely creamy soup and then some very tender lean beef, together with roast potatoes, caulyflower [sic], and white sauce provided the main course. Finally there was some lemon jelly with lemon flavoured meringue on top.
After dinner, she couldn’t find a porter, so she hauled her own trunk to the bottom of her staircase, but finding it too heavy, unpacked it in the quad and ‘carried my things up in armfulls [sic]’. ‘I then began to unpack the contents of my room to alleviate its bareness a little,’ but by half-past eleven she was exhausted and went to bed.31 This is not the letter of someone who hates her college, nor yet the letter of someone who is wholly happy there.
Part of Margaret’s relative isolation at Somerville derives from the fact that she was a scientist. As a chemist, she was one of only five women in her year in the entire university. Long hours in the labs, and at lectures which, unlike those in the arts, were more or less compulsory, kept her away from much of the society of her fellow Somervillians. Although she worked hard, Margaret did not particularly enjoy life in the lab: ‘I was much more interested in the theory than in the practical work.’32 She was fortunate, though, that, in Dorothy Hodgkin, Somerville had one of the most distinguished chemists in the world. Mrs Hodgkin, who later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, was famous for her crystallographic analysis of the structure of molecules, and later discovered important information about the structure of penicillin. Penicillin, the first antibiotic, had been discovered in 1928, but its pioneering trials had taken place much later, in Oxford, two years before Margaret went up: it was what would now be called the cutting edge of science at that time. According to Margaret’s fellow chemist Betty Spice, Dorothy Hodgkin was a ‘brilliant chemist, but an awful tutor’, whose tutorials used to trickle away into complete silence,33 and Pauline Cowan, while not going so far, agreed that she was bad at teaching first-year students.34 Margaret, however, felt an enormous respect for Mrs Hodgkin. Perhaps because of this, she elected, for Part II chemistry, to work with Mrs Hodgkin in person. Most Oxford undergraduate courses were and are three years long. It was possible for chemists to obtain an unclassified degree after their exams at the end of three years, but the full, classified BSc with honours was awarded only to those who stayed on a further year for research, culminating in a thesis which was ‘viva-ed’ (discussed at interview). This is what Margaret chose to do, under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin.
‘I must say I was very pleased with her for this,’ Professor Hodgkin wrote to a scientific colleague in 1988. ‘I tended to encourage my Somerville chemists to spread their wings if they wanted to go off into other fields … I was sent from America and Moscow several gramicidin, antibacterial peptides, which are still providing difficult problems for X Ray analysis … Gerhard Schmidt [a Jewish refugee scientist] started working on the simplest, gramicidin S from Moscow … Margaret helped him with growing heavy atoms containing crystals but all proved too complex to solve.’ (Indeed, it took over forty years more to solve some of them.) ‘The measurements they did were eventually useful.’35
How good a scientist was she
? She certainly had a serious interest in the subject – one which she would deploy in future years. She liked to point out that she was the first prime minister with a science degree, rather than boasting that she was the first woman prime minister. After going down, she went back to Oxford to call in on old friends in the crystallography department, and she records, in letters to Muriel written during and shortly after Oxford, the pleasure of meeting famous scientists like Linus Pauling and Max Perutz, and of visiting Cambridge to meet fellow crystallographers. She worked hard at it, too, winning two college prizes in her first two years, experiencing many an essay crisis and demonstrating the ability, so famous in later life, to study late into the night. When she took her exams at the end of her third year, she had to sit some of them in the sanatorium. Margaret told friends that she was ill at the time, but there is some evidence that she was suffering more from nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork.36 At the end of her fourth year, she was awarded a respectable second-class degree. Janet Vaughan, a scientist but not a chemist, said disparagingly of Margaret: ‘She was a perfectly adequate chemist. I mean nobody thought anything of her.’37 But her judgment may have been coloured by the strong political antagonism she felt towards Margaret in later years. Professor Hodgkin, who also differed politically from Margaret,* but knew her and liked her better, was fairer: ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.’38
Margaret herself would not have disagreed with her tutor’s view. Speaking in praise of Dorothy Hodgkin in later life, she referred to a conversation with Max Perutz in which, she said, he told her that, in science, ‘reason and maths can get you so far, but you need inspiration on top.’ There is ‘a fascinating link’, she went on, ‘between art and science’.39 Dorothy Hodgkin, she believed, had that inspiration, that artistic, imaginative gift. It is not something she would ever have claimed for herself. Indeed, for all her astonishing self-confidence in some areas, Margaret never boasted of an intellectual mastery that she did not possess: at Oxford, she met many people who were her intellectual superiors, and she had no trouble recognizing this and deferring to them.
It was true, too, as Dorothy Hodgkin also said, that ‘she was not absolutely devoted’ to chemistry,40 that, as Betty Spice put it, ‘her heart wasn’t in it’.41 While at Oxford, she developed a growing interest in the law. In her memoirs, she records that her father, as mayor of Grantham in 1945–6, sat automatically on the magistrates’ bench. She would go along with him, during vacations, to the Quarter Sessions, at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as recorder: ‘On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning … At one point I blurted out: “I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.” ’42 Winning said he had read physics at Cambridge but had then stayed on to do a second degree, in law. She replied that she could not afford to do this, so Winning explained that the other way (‘very hard work’) was to get a job in or near London, join an Inn of Court and study for the Bar in the evenings. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher sets all this in the context of her later life – ‘And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done’43 – but it is important to note that the bent towards law was already so strong at Oxford as to tempt her away from chemistry, and to remember that, in 1945–6, she had no clear prospect of being able to do what Winning suggested. When she started applying for jobs before leaving Oxford, one of the considerations which governed her choice was the possibility of combining the job with legal studies. Writing to Muriel in the early summer of 1947, she describes interviews for a job at ICI’s Billingham plant near Stockton. She likes the idea of the work, but says that it is six hours from London which ‘would be an awful disadvantage for the Bar Exams’.44 Although she began reading for the Bar before her marriage in 1951, the certainty that she could afford to start a legal career came only with the financial security that Denis Thatcher brought her.
In later years, Margaret Thatcher discerned a pattern in her youthful interests: ‘As a Methodist in Grantham, I learnt the laws of God. When I read chemistry at Oxford, I learnt the laws of science, which derive from the laws of God, and when I studied for the Bar, I learnt the laws of man.’45 This was an honest enough résumé of her reverent interest in the splendour of certain types of knowledge. Her belief in the rule of law as the foundation of politics was one of the strongest and most often repeated in her creed. But her account probably underplays the extent to which she saw all her main occupations, the law not the least, as instrumental to her pursuit of a political career. Thus at Oxford she remained an active Methodist, even going on the preaching circuit, where her sermons were reported as ‘most impressive’.46 She was a keen member of the Bach Choir. She was a conscientious and interested chemist, but her obsession, her dream, was politics. ‘I had a passion for history,’ she said fifty years later, ‘and a passion for politics. Politics is living history.’47 She was probably projecting on to the past an interest in history which she did not exhibit much at the time, but it is true that she had already conceived a passion for politics. She joined OUCA as soon as she went up to Oxford, and threw herself into its activities. Hers was not, at this stage, a strong engagement with political ideas and beliefs, nor yet the undergraduate love of politicking. It was simply a determination, entered into without apparent self-examination, to engage in political life, re-energize political organization, and to do it as well as she possibly could.
Although the war provided the subject of constant and consuming interest for undergraduate conversation, it had the curious effect of making Oxford less actively political than at many other periods, notably the 1930s. This was partly because so many men were away in the forces. The Oxford Union, the centre of university political debate, allowed only men to take part in debates.* It was also because the overriding need to win the war produced, if not agreement about post-war politics, at least a determination not to quarrel. As Margaret Thatcher said, when talking fifty years later about the wartime political atmosphere at Somerville, ‘You couldn’t but be patriotic in wartime because so much was at stake.’48 Contemporaries remember that, although the progress of the war was constantly discussed in casual mealtime conversations, controversial issues were not. According to Amy Wootten, typical Somerville table talk would move between war news to its small consequences – ‘They’ve got bananas in a shop in the High’ – to the ordinary gossip of the day. Most undergraduates were quite religious, and, as at KGGS, it was more likely God than Soviet Communism or economic policy that they, including Margaret, could be found debating.49 Political awareness was quite low. Amy Wootten, in fact, was under the misapprehension that Margaret was a Liberal, just because her two fellow chemists were.50
This absence of political controversy characterizes Margaret’s correspondence with her sister throughout her time at Oxford. Admittedly, Muriel was not a highly political person, but it is still striking that Margaret’s letters to her contain scarcely a single expression of political views and next to nothing about current political events. Politics, when it occurs, is presented as an activity requiring a great deal of work but also opening up social opportunities and giving pleasure. It is something to be done, not something to be debated. Only one witness can recall having an actual political argument with Margaret at Oxford. Pauline Cowan remembered that Margaret was the very first person she met at Somerville and that Margaret’s first act had been to try to recruit her for OUCA which, considering herself a Communist, she refused. Pauline shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road in 1945–6, and recalled the ‘rather unpleasant breakfasts’ cooked by the landlady consisting of dishes like hot pilchards with mashed potato. She and Margaret had at least one argument over breakfast about the structure of post-war society and how egalitarian it should be. She cannot remember much of what was said, but she collected the sense t
hat ‘Margaret disapproved as well as disagreed.’51 This argument was exceptional, though. Even Mary Wallace, who knew Margaret from Grantham and was active in OUCA, has no memory of her ever expressing any political views.52
Conservatism at Oxford towards the end of the war, although it had a surprisingly large number of recruits, was not spoiling for a fight. It did not, for instance, warn of the dangers of too uncritical an association with Stalin or cry out in protest at the growth of the welfare state. When working on her memoirs in the 1990s, Margaret struggled to recall her views at the time. On Anglo-Soviet friendship, she said, ‘We never felt right about it. This unbelievably cruel man got to be called “Uncle Joe” because of wartime propaganda.’53 She also recalled reading Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which was published in 1944.54 But there is a sense that these memories are dredged up rather than strongly felt, and Margaret herself admitted that ‘I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at the time.’55 ‘The times were political,’ she declared of her Oxford period in 1994; ‘how on earth had war happened again?’,56 but there is no evidence that this was the subject which she and her fellow youthful Tories discussed much. Indeed, there is a curious, cosy feeling about student political discussion at that time, as if people believed, somehow or other, that everything was going to be all right.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 8
