Both men appealed more to Margaret than she did to them. Roger, apparently, ‘found her rather hard work’ and sometimes, after a few drinks, would poke her chest and say, ‘Is it marble, Margaret?’88 It was not. Margaret was smitten with Neil, a fact of which he was half aware. According to Neil, Margaret felt attracted towards people with a greater social presence than her own, and they didn’t always respond. He felt a little sorry for her.89
At the time of Margaret’s crush on Neil, which probably began in late 1946, only little hints emerge in her surviving letters to Muriel. ‘Bumped into Neil only once this term – that was in the Grocer’s,’ she wrote in May 1947,90 but a later letter shows what she had felt. After becoming the candidate for Dartford in early 1949, Margaret moved to lodgings there. From these she wrote to Muriel describing a recent chance meeting: ‘When I went to Canterbury a week last Sunday for the political weekend school, I saw Neil Findlay with his new wife at the station on the way back. I don’t think they saw [me] for Neil is very short-sighted and I didn’t go up to them. His wife is a smart woman but she looked a Jewess.* She was dark with a fair complexion and the typical long nose. I was standing with Doric Bossom (son of A. Bossom† MP for Maidstone): and Ian Harvey, candidate for East Harrow,‡ and was glad that if he saw me, I wasn’t too badly off for male company. I didn’t feel one single twinge when I saw him. Strange how shallow infatuation is.’91
For all its jauntiness, the letter reveals some anxiety on Margaret’s part at being at a disadvantage in relation to Neil Findlay, and at being seen alone when he is with another woman. She spoke the truth when she said that the wound had healed. In the 1950s, the Findlays found themselves living in Swan Court, Chelsea, the same block of flats as the Thatchers, and were on good terms with them.92 But it is clear that at Oxford she was susceptible to men she thought glamorous, and feared being disregarded by them. She saw OUCA as her best way of overcoming any handicap. Writing to Muriel in May 1947 to discuss her sister’s forthcoming visit to Oxford (her last before Margaret went down), she explains their social plans. She has asked Edward Boyle to get them tickets for a Union debate, and there is a possibility, no more, of their being asked to the President’s farewell party afterwards. ‘Edward also asked us to lunch one day – if he remembers,’ she goes on, and she also hopes to ‘wangle a meeting with Roger and/or Neil’. The problem, though, is that ‘OUCA activities for the term finish with a garden party tomorrow and I’m otherwise powerless to ask them round. I’ll just have to rely on their dropping in which they do on very rare occasions.’93 Despite four successful years at the university, she was still in a position of traditional, womanly weakness.
Besides, she was still smarting from the loss of an earlier, more serious love.
It seems highly unlikely that Margaret ever had any boyfriends in Grantham. All those who knew her then, including her sister, believe there was none. There is no doubt, however, that Margaret was a carefully dressed young woman whom many considered attractive, and who noticed and enjoyed the attentions of others. People remember her rosy cheeks and elegant legs. Kenneth Wallace, of Grantham, was pleased with her fluent and intelligent conversation.94 As she started to go to parties in Grantham towards the end of the war men, often servicemen, asked her to dance, and some pressed their suit quite strongly. In August 1944, at the end of her first year in Oxford, she joined the local tennis club in Grantham (she complained that she had ‘schorched [sic]’ her tennis dress with her iron) and went to its dance there. Before long ‘… I had settled down with a Flight-Lieutenant aged about 40!!!! Or rather he had settled down with me.’95 At the turn of the year, she went to a dance in Corby, near Grantham:
To my horror I recognised one of them – the bald one – as the Flight-Lieutenant whom I spent most of the evening with at the tennis dance in the summer. My heart sank when I saw him walking across the floor to ask me for the first dance … Fortunately, one of his friends stuck to me like a limpet. He was a lovely dancer so I didn’t mind terribly. He was, I gather, a rather famous football referee for he had done at any rate one if not more cup finals. He was unfortunately rather difficult to get rid of. He wanted me to go to the pictures with him. I told him instantly that I was going back to Oxford for an electioneering course for a week … He eventually departed having given me his telephone no. name and all further particulars and telling me to ring him up when I got back. I shan’t of course because I don’t want to go around with a man of his age,* and when I vaguely mentioned the fact at home Daddy said, ‘No, of course not!’ in a very final tone.96
Margaret then spent the rest of the evening with a thirty-year-old pilot who had done several operational flights over Germany. What she did not mention when keeping her suitor at arm’s length – though she refers to it elsewhere in the same letter to Muriel – was that she already had a boyfriend.
The only previously known specific evidence of a particular man at this stage in Margaret Roberts’s life comes from Margaret Goodrich’s previously mentioned account (see Chapter 2) of what she believed to be Margaret’s first declaration that she wanted to be an MP. Margaret Goodrich celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a small party in the rectory at Corby Glen on 22 December 1944, and Margaret Roberts went to the party, sharing a bed in the overcrowded house with Sheila Browne, much later to become chief inspector of schools during the Thatcher premiership. Both Margarets have recorded, in rather different versions,* that they sat round in the kitchen discussing their ambitions, and Margaret Roberts publicly recognized her own. According to Margaret Goodrich, her mother asked Margaret, and she said, as if she had thought of it before, ‘I want to become an MP.’97 In fact, as we have seen, she had already indicated her political ambitions to others, but what Margaret Goodrich also remembered was that Margaret had arrived clutching a carnation which ‘seemed very precious to her’ and had, she said, been given her by an Oxford boyfriend. She was concerned for its welfare, so Mrs Goodrich put it in a vase with water and an aspirin.98 The name of the boyfriend was Tony Bray.
Tony was an army cadet, who had arrived in Oxford in October 1944, attached to Brasenose College, but, due to the exigencies of wartime, had been accommodated in the buildings of Christ Church. He was pursuing a special six-month course, devised to combine military training with lectures on the ‘general sciences’. Educated at Brighton College, a minor public school in the south-east, Tony was from a solidly bourgeois background, and before joining up had already been an articled clerk to a solicitor. He was short and not particularly good-looking, but, by his own account sixty years later, ‘not half bad as a dancer’.99 Born in 1926, he was a little younger than Margaret.
The two had met through OUCA, probably at the association’s coffee discussions at the Randolph Hotel, some time that autumn of 1944. Margaret seemed to Tony ‘very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That’s probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects.’ He was also impressed with her enthusiasm for politics – ‘That was something very unusual. Not many girls were like that’ – and, like Tony, she was ‘a genuine, old-fashioned Conservative’. He was also taken with her appearance: ‘She was a plump, attractive girl in a well-built way. That wasn’t ill thought of,’ and she had ‘elegant, dark hair’ (‘I’d have told her I didn’t like blondes if she had become blonde then’). She ‘dressed elegantly, though not in a top stylish way’. He felt also that she had ‘a degree of loneliness’ which was part of ‘the reason we got on’.100
At that time, it was unusual for couples to go around as ‘an item’, and Margaret and Tony did not do so. None of their university friends from that time remembered the one knowing the other. But, at tea in one another’s rooms, where she proved herself a ‘good housekeeper’ with her cooking of crumpets, they quickly became close. He found her serious, and ‘a bit blue-stocking’, but he liked the fact that she read a great deal and loved music. She took him to the Matthew Passion in which, as a member of the Bach Choir, she was performing. Tony r
espected her because ‘she held her thoughts very sincerely’. At roughly the same time as he gave her the carnation – Christmas 1944 – she gave him Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which he kept beside him every day until he lost it in a house move forty years later. It was his impression from the way Margaret kissed that she had had no boyfriend before, but she showed a delight in physical intimacy. They followed the rules of those days, however, and never slept together.
As he got to know Margaret better, Tony, whose parents were quite well off, noticed the ‘great strain it was to finance her time at university’; she was ‘not ashamed of her background’ but exhibited ‘a degree of reticence’ about it. He detected that she was ‘very determined to make good’, but, with pleasure and surprise, he also noticed something else: ‘She was a person who, though not apparently sociable, enjoyed socializing … she astonished herself how much she could relax and be relaxed.’ They had fun together.101
This pleasure, and the heightened sense of life’s possibilities that comes through first love, can be found in Margaret’s letters to Muriel. Her descriptions, normally rather tart or matter of fact, take on a different tone. On 25 March 1945, back in Grantham for the Easter vacation, Margaret wrote with details of every dance she had been to. Wartime had stopped the traditional full-scale Commem balls in the summer, but the approach of victory permitted a rash of college and other dances in March. Margaret went to five. The first, and best, was the Randolph Ball at the Randolph Hotel: ‘We had a marvellous time … Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country Inn “Crown and Thistle”. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [sic] the blue frock perfectly.’ Tony presented her with a spray of eight carnations ‘sent for me from London so with the front part of my hair piled up on top Jean and Mary said I looked simply smashing. I felt absolutely on top of the world as we walked through the lounge at the Crown and Thistle and everyone looked up and stared.’ In the manner of the wartime deprived, Margaret went on to describe, in detail, what they ate and drank: ‘We went into the bar and had gin and grapefruit and then to the dining room for dinner. We had some lovely thick creamy soup followed by pidgeon [sic] and then a chocolate sweet. With it we had Moussec to drink. Moussec in case you don’t know is a sparkling champagne.’*
When they reached the Randolph at a quarter to nine, ‘Things were in full swing … The ballroom was marvellously decorated and all the lighting was done with huge coloured lamps operating from the balcony. The floor was simply packed so from the point of view of dancing it wasn’t terrifically marvellous. The Duchess of Marlborough arrived soon after we did and seemed very nice. The refreshments were lovely. Altogether it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.’102 Asked about it sixty years later, Tony remembered buying the carnations from Moyses Stevens. When reminded of Margaret’s blue dress, he suddenly broke down in tears and said: ‘It was a very special evening.’103
The next day was Somerville’s dance, for which Margaret wore the same thing (‘The flowers were still fresh’): ‘There were two other Conservative couples there … so we teamed up and had a thoroughly gay evening.’ The following week, there was Worcester College – ‘We had a thoroughly hilarious time’; then Wadham – ‘a bit of a bear-fight’; and finally, Merton, for which Margaret wore ‘my green crepe frock’.104
Once term had ended, Tony whisked her off for a day in London which included coffee at Fullers in Regent Street, lunch at the Dorchester (‘It is not the acme of hotels it is reported to be’), a matinée performance of Strauss’s A Night in Venice at the Cambridge Theatre and finally a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel before Margaret got the train to Grantham and Tony returned to Oxford. For her, who had seen so little of the pleasures of the world, it was heady stuff.
It also, in her mind, betokened something quite serious, although Margaret seldom directly described her feelings to her sister. In the same letter to Muriel, she writes: ‘Preparations are going ahead fast and furiously for next weekend. I do hope everything will be all right.’105 Tony was coming to stay with her parents above the shop. This would not have happened if she had seen her relationship with Tony as some passing fancy; and her parents, themselves serious-minded, unused to guests and protective of their daughters where men were concerned, would have regarded this as a potentially very significant occasion.
Such thoughts seem to have crossed Tony’s mind, and to have worried him a little. In old age, he recalled that he and Margaret never discussed marriage, and that he, with his legal training, was very wary of doing so because of the threat, still lingering from Victorian times, of an action for breach of promise.106 He thought of their relationship at that time as that of ‘just a boy and girl who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company’, which was hardly surprising, since he was only eighteen, but Margaret, perhaps, thought it meant rather more.
In any event, the visit to Grantham was ‘all right’, but not much better than that. Tony found Alfred Roberts ‘slightly austere’ and ‘totally correct’, a good, chapel-going man; Beatrice was ‘very proper’ and ‘motherly’. The shop struck him as ‘a very modest business establishment’. Tony and the Roberts family all attended the Methodist church together. It was not a riotous weekend.
It also marked a moment of parting. Tony’s six-month course at Oxford had come to an end and his full military training began in April, very shortly before the end of the war in Europe. He went to Bovington Camp in Dorset. As early as 19 April, the day before Hitler’s grim birthday celebrations in the Berlin bunker, Margaret wrote to Muriel* that a routine has been established in their communication: ‘I usually have a letter on Tuesday morning … He says there are all sorts of weird men there but fortunately the platoon he is in is composed entirely of Oxford cadets.’ Tony, she said, had to work the whole time: ‘On Saturday they are theoretically free from 2 o’clock but in practice there is so much to be done that this could hardly be called free time. Sunday they are again supposedly free but last Sunday Tony was peeling potatoes most of the morning!!’107 The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.
After a month at Bovington, Tony went on to another training camp and continued to move from one establishment to another, including a return to Bovington, until he was posted to Germany in the following year after being commissioned in the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. He sent Margaret a photograph of himself in military uniform, which he inscribed to her. But at some time in the course of the ensuing year Tony’s replies to Margaret’s letters began to peter out and eventually stopped altogether. After writing some letters reproaching Tony for his silence, Margaret became so distressed that she wrote to Tony’s mother, whom she had never met, to ask what had happened to him.108 The answer was, nothing very much. It was simply, though his mother naturally did not say this, that Tony had decided that the relationship should be allowed to ‘fizzle out’.109
To Margaret’s sister Muriel, there was a clear explanation. Tony, she believed, was snobbish, and had decided that Margaret was not from a good enough family for him.110 Tony, not surprisingly, saw things differently. He agreed that Margaret’s background did make him uneasy, but not, he said, because of its relatively modest circumstances. What worried him was its austere seriousness. He wanted fun, and he found it. At his second stay at Bovington, he formed a relationship with a Dorset girl called Prudence whom he describes as ‘vivacious, outgoing and attractive’. Once posted, he found that he ‘was living in a fairly glamorous world in Germany – a cavalry regiment, green trousers, all the rest of it.’ Aged barely twenty, he was not looking for commitment.111
What of Margaret herself? When asked by the present author, she replied with the understandable untruth that she had had no boyfriends before Denis, and when later asked specifically about Tony she acknowledged the circumstances described above but would not be drawn into any detail. As we shall see, there was more to come in the story of Tony Bray. But this occurred only after she had gone down from Oxford. In her last two yea
rs at the university, therefore, she had an absent and eventually an ex-boyfriend who was refusing to communicate with her. When Tony faded away, in her final year she formed her unrequited crush on Neil Findlay. She was successful at Oxford, getting a good second-class degree, rising to the top of Conservative politics there and making the contacts that would stand her in good stead in her career. But when she went out into the world of work in the summer of 1947, she was, as she had been when she first arrived at the university, fundamentally alone.
4
Essex girl
‘What a pity such a charming girl should be lost to politics!’
In the late summer of 1947, Margaret began her first job. She worked as a research chemist at BX Plastics in Manningtree, Essex. ‘Plastics’, she recalled, ‘was one of the things of the future,’1 but there is little evidence that she was much interested. She records in her memoirs that she had been expecting to work as personal assistant to the research and development director. When it turned out that she would have to put on her white coat and work in a lab, rather than with people, she was not pleased.2 She saw the job as necessary, no more. It paid her £350 a year (£400 was the rate for the equivalent male employee), which was enough to live on, but not to save from; and it was close enough to London to keep in touch with politics and to contemplate reading for the Bar while she waited for the slow business of submitting the thesis and being interviewed for her BSc at Oxford, a process that was not complete until the winter of 1948. She had no intention of staying in Essex for long.
Settled in digs in Colchester and travelling out to Manningtree in the company bus every morning, Margaret felt that life, compared with Oxford, was rather dull. ‘The wear and tear on clothes of all kinds is terrific in industry,’ she complained to Muriel. ‘By the way, HAVE MY SHOES COME BACK FROM UDALL’s YET? I’ve asked in every blessed letter I’ve written home [where Muriel was now living with their parents] but not a word about them have I received in reply.’ At her lodgings, 168 Maldon Road, the home of a young widow with two children called Enid Macaulay, she tried to look on the bright side: ‘Mercifully one is not too lonely in the evenings as there are other people in the digs too.’ She went occasionally to the ‘flicks’ (her word) with a fellow lodger, Teddy West, but he ‘doesn’t dance’,3 and he soon developed a girlfriend who, Margaret reported Mrs Macaulay as saying, was ‘as common as muck – thoroughly tarty, but she’s got hold of him and is trying to rush the affair as soon as possible … Apparently she’s not a fashion artist at all but traces flower designs for scarves etc. from designs drawn by someone else.’4 Margaret’s indignation suggests that she found Teddy West quite attractive.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 10
