The lack of money was a constant preoccupation. The rent, which began at two guineas (£2.10) per week, soon went up to £2 10s (£2.50), which Margaret found ‘more than a little worrying’.5 Every small excursion or purchase had to be carefully weighed:
Not going to Oxford this weekend, I decided to buy a really nice undie-set to go under my turquoise chiffon blouse. I got a very nice one, scalloped all round the top and round the pants and with some open broderie anglaise on it. It is a very pale turquoise colour and cost £5-5-0. I’ll not have to spend anything else for the rest of the month! … Oxford will have to wait until next month. Anyway a nice undie-set is essential to go away with.6
Because she could not afford a perm, she changed her hairstyle – ‘am now wearing it in a big doughnut bun at the back – as it doesn’t need any curl worn that way.’7 When she wrote to her father asking for money for a tweed suit, she sent it to the shop in North Parade rather than to her parents’ new house there, so that the request would not be seen by her less indulgent mother.8 But she also wrote to Muriel with financial advice born of her current difficulties:
if you’re trying to scrape together a ‘nest egg’, do you think it’s wise to have a very expensive holiday? I know that sounds a bit like the parents, but I’m getting awfully money minded these days and realising how nice it would be to feel one’s bank balance was somewhere between £30 and £50 if one needed to buy anything or go anywhere in particular.9
One victim of Margaret’s shortage of money was her own mother, who almost always appears in the correspondence as a faintly disapproving and embarrassing figure: ‘I shan’t be able to afford a birthday present for Mummy so shall just send a card.’10
In this rather pinched world, it was politics, as in the past, that provided Margaret with acceptance and excitement: ‘If Methodists aren’t very friendly, Conservatives are. Someone learned of my being here in Colchester and the word has gone round like wildfire. Every meeting I step into I’m greeted with “It’s Miss Roberts isn’t it?” ’11 A little later, she wrote: ‘I still don’t like the work very much but the politics and social life are beginning to go with a swing which compensates for a lot.’12 One of the first people she met through the Conservatives was Brian Harrison, a Cambridge graduate ‘with a small estate of 1500 acres’13 in Essex and further family lands in Australia. Harrison, whom she had first encountered at a Conservative graduates’ conference earlier in the year, was a veteran of the war in the Far East and a leading light in the 39–45 Group, an organization of Essex Tories with war experience. With her taste for older, soldierly men, Margaret warmed to the tall, sporting, kindly Harrison and to his group, and attended their meetings. Harrison, who was to become Conservative MP for Maldon in 1955, remembered Margaret with affection as ‘an attractive girl … very very clued up’, good company and a good dancer. She was ‘ambitious’, he said, ‘but intelligent enough to hide it’.14 He was also chairman of the Colchester Young Conservatives, and into this organization Margaret threw herself. In early October 1947, she took part in their Brains Trust on the economic crisis (‘The Socialists were all of the intellectual type and quite nice’),15 and soon she was one of their regular speakers warming up the soapbox at St Botolph’s Corner, Colchester, every Saturday night for ‘Cub’ Alport,* the Tory candidate, whom Harrison considered ‘pompous’ and Margaret also disliked.†
By the next spring, Margaret had become a leading figure among the Colchester Tories. In April 1948, she told Muriel, ‘I have been doing quite a lot of speaking lately and have begun to talk completely without notes.’16 In a postscript written on 11 May, she describes a weekend political school at Colchester. As is generally the case in her letters when writing about politics, she does not mention what was discussed. Something else engrossed her attention:
the competition for the best dressed woman there being fiercely contested by Jean Murphy and I [sic] … I turned up in my black two-piece and black hat on Saturday – she wasn’t wearing a hat that day – but on Sunday she turned out in a floral dress, fox fur and straw boater with strands of veiling tied under the chin – I didn’t like the hat myself and definitely thought it too much with a fur. I was wearing my blue frock and hat and wine coat and accessories. I think I won the day both days.17
It has often been said that Margaret Roberts was much too serious a young woman to consider the social aspects of life among the Conservatives. Nothing could be further from the truth, serious though she was: she saw the Tories as her social theatre. She went to the Derby with them (‘don’t tell parents!’) and to the Boat Race, performed for them and dressed up for them. When she wore her black two-piece for the first time in Colchester, she wrote that ‘The only chance I get to wear my best black clothes these days is at Conservative meetings of some sort!’ The two-piece ‘caused quite a stir in the digs and complimentary comments came from all sides except Mr West, who said not a word, to my annoyance!’18
In April 1948, Margaret went to a grand dinner in the House of Commons given by Alan Lennox-Boyd, later to become colonial secretary.* As the only woman present, she sat next to the host: ‘I wore my pale blue frock and hat, wine shoes, handbag and gloves and short new musquash jacket. The ensemble looked very nice indeed.’ After ‘a marvellous dinner with all the appropriate wines’, she went for drinks at Edward Boyle’s flat, with a couple of other guests, until two in the morning. The next day she paid her first ever visit to Knightsbridge, inspected the new Roosevelt memorial and saw a film about the life of Roosevelt.19 Back in Colchester, she addressed a discussion group on the British Empire. The audience was ‘very interested and didn’t fidget from start to finish and I was speaking about an hour.’ She gave a talk to the Young Conservatives on ‘Science in the Modern World’ and she also took part in a Brains Trust of several rising Conservatives including ‘Brig. Powell (the Conservative Central Office authority on housing)’, her first recorded encounter with Enoch Powell,† the man who, many believe, cleared the intellectual path for what came to be called Thatcherism.20 Life was opening up. ‘I shall be awfully sorry when the time comes to leave Colchester,’ she wrote.21
There was another reason for Margaret’s improved self-esteem. On 17 February 1948, she wrote to Muriel to describe ‘the most marvellous weekend in Oxford’, which included a sherry party at the Union, a visit to old crystallography colleagues, an OUCA dinner and drinks at Lord Tweedsmuir’s manor house‡ out of town. But the real purport of the letter was kept to the end:
Nor is that all. When I opened one of the letters that Daddy had forwarded to me, the one with the typewritten envelope [to avoid identification by the Robertses?] and postmark ‘Oxford’ in it was contained a letter from Tony Bray!!!! The letter was very weird and sentimental ‘For three years I have not been able to write to you due to circumstances beyond my control …’ and so on in that strain. He has apparently just been demobbed and returned to Oxford last week. It’s as well I didn’t run into him unawares. I shall write back and tell him to let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t tell parents about this. All told it has been quite an eventful weekend! I shall go up again just as soon as I can afford it.22
Tony had returned from military service in Germany and was now doing a full honours degree at his old college in Oxford. He had had his fun, and was now missing Margaret. His letter had been, he said fifty-six years later, sincere: ‘I would have meant it. I was serious. I wasn’t just being gallant.’23 Despite what she had written to him about letting sleeping dogs lie, Margaret took up his invitation to meet – which he had renewed in a further letter – though not with unseemly haste. She told Muriel that she would see him in Oxford ‘more to let him see how I’ve changed than to see him!’ On 18 May 1948, she confided in Muriel an account which she had not given in her regular letter to her parents, for rather sly reasons, as she herself explained:
Have written account of Oxford weekend in Ma and Pa’s letter. Bits left out or not made clear are
1. That I was staying with
the Mandelbergs [Oxford Conservative friends]. I thought Pop might think I had a very expensive weekend at a hotel and maybe stump up …
2. That I met Tony Bray again once or twice over the weekend. I went to have a late tea with him at 5 o’clock on Friday evening and we drifted on from there to see School for Scandal at the New Theatre and dinner at the Randolph.* He is more grown up now than formerly although his appearance has changed but little. Strangely enough I found him extremely easy to get on with. There was no embarrassment whatsoever. I was wearing my pale blue frock for theatre – which is rather lovely. We scarcely referred to our past ‘association’ except indirectly by discussing what had happened since we last met. He, I gather, has had a damn good time on the continent – especially in Brussels [where he went on leave]. The only direct reference I had of times past was when he said quite steadily – ‘you only realise what you had when you’ve lost it – and you know what I’m referring to.’ However I ignored the remark and conversation rapidly picked up and flowed on.
Affecting an insouciance that she clearly did not feel, Margaret continues:
For want of something else to do, I went on the river with him in a punt on Saturday afternoon. There I had a full-blooded apology – which I must in all fairness say sounded very sincere, that said he felt when he went in the army he was expecting to go to the far East for 3 years at least [the war had still been on in Japan] and that he couldn’t ‘ask me to hang on’ all that time, but he didn’t want to kill the feeling between us by writing and saying let’s finish. He now realised that his very inaction must have killed anything there was between us and that in any case it was quite apallingly [sic] rude not to have written. He determined to write the moment he came out of the Army but couldn’t explain on paper all he felt. Hence the ‘circumstances beyond my control’. Having said this apology, he in a very poised and mature fashion steered the conversation into lighter vein once again. I did not comment on the apology – he assured me he had not been infatuated with anyone else (I, of course, didn’t mention Prudence). It all sounded to me as if it were partly true and partly false.
There was one more meeting with Tony that weekend:
I lunched with him again on Monday and we parted. No mention was made of any future arrangements for which I was truly thankful – for it just wouldn’t have been ‘on’ for me, although I quite enjoyed seeing him again for a short time – it satisfied my curiosity – but he’s a weird-looking chap to cart around the place!
By the way, he didn’t know I had been President of OUCA – I didn’t tell him until the last lunch when it arose naturally out of the conversation, – and he was immensely impressed. I also told him about the speakers’ competition [a Young Conservatives’ contest which Margaret had won] which impressed him still more.
Altogether I must say I enjoyed the weekend enormously. For two pins I would have said to hell with BX I’m staying up for another week. The weather was glorious from start to finish. Things couldn’t have been more perfect than they were.24
Margaret did not maintain her resolve about making no future ‘arrangements’. She had another letter from Tony in July and followed it up. Once again, she wrote to Muriel explaining that what she had said in her letter to her parents had been untruthful:
In point of fact I was not meeting a ‘crowd of old college cronies’ in London yesterday, but Tony. He had written to say if I was ever in London to let him know – so I thought we might have quite an evening out yesterday – and we did. He came up from Southwick [the Sussex village where his parents lived] specially for the day (!). He met me off the train at King’s X at 2.45 … After I had titivated we went along to Fullers in Regent St to have tea.
The couple went on to see Carissima at the Palace, where they had ‘absolutely dead central seats’ in the stalls.
I was wearing my blue frock and little blue hat, little fur jacket with all wine accessories. And I forgot to mention he presented me with a spray of pink roses! Actually, my outfit looked extremely nice and I saw several people turn to look at it. During the interval we went and had gin and vermouth in the bar … Tony had booked dinner for nine o’clock at Kettner’s – quite a fashionable West End restaurant.
The dinner, after more gin and vermouth, was ‘wonderful’. ‘I really enjoyed the evening very much – though I wouldn’t dream of re-striking up the association with Tony … PPS. I don’t want a job in a sales organisation – they’re awful jobs. If you see any more adverts though let me know.’25
In some form at least, the association continued. In early December 1948, Margaret went to Oxford and told Muriel, ‘I saw Tony twice during the weekend [the weekend in which she finally sat her viva for her BSc] … I did theatre and dinner with him on Saturday evening … and went to tea on Sunday.’26 In January 1949, she wrote, ‘I had a letter from Tony on Saturday asking me how I was etc but suggesting that we spend another day in town together sometime. An offer which I shall probably accept when I get a free Saturday.’27 The next month ‘I had a valentine from Tony! Quite a funny one, with a letter asking when I shall be visiting Oxford again.’28
After that, there are no further surviving mentions of Tony Bray in Margaret’s correspondence. This is not surprising, perhaps, since he had once again shown interest in another woman. According to his account early in the twenty-first century, the relationship with Margaret had, indeed, rekindled in 1948, but late in the winter of 1949 he took a girlfriend skiing in Austria, telling Margaret that he was going for winter sports, but not mentioning the woman. Although he was fond of Margaret, he said, he realized that she was embarking on a serious political career and she was ‘so determined to make her own way’. He believed that ‘A woman should be a woman’ and his idea of a woman did not include a full career. The renewed relationship with Margaret came to an end in 1949, and in June of the following year Tony Bray became engaged to the woman who remained his wife until her death more than fifty years later. He telephoned Margaret to inform her of the event and received ‘polite congratulations: she didn’t wax lyrical.’29 He did not invite her to his wedding – ‘It would have been the kiss of death.’30
For her part, Margaret, probably more excited by Tony than she would explicitly admit, even to Muriel, did not want to be hurt again.* In the winter of 1948, she wrote to Muriel, who by this time had a boyfriend called Ken,† and gave her sister some advice: ‘I should definitely not give Ken anything for Christmas – he can give you something if he likes, that’s different.’ But she also expresses some self-doubt: ‘I don’t know that your “male” problem is the same as mine – you seem infinitely more successful with them than I do with his Colchester counterpart!’31 The ‘Colchester counterpart’ is obviously a generic type of man that Margaret feels she cannot find, but was also, it seems likely, a man called David Papillon, a leading Young Conservative in Colchester, an able young solicitor and businessman, much liked and admired in the town. Margaret records her excitement when Papillon sent her a Christmas card or asked her to a party. He also travelled by train with her to the party conference in Llandudno in 1948 which put her decisively on the way to her political career. Margaret considered him smart, charming and powerful, and was ‘rather cross’ when her fellow lodger, Kay Stokes, turned up to his New Year party in a ‘chiffon blouse exactly the same colour as my turquoise one’.32 He was also unattainable because, unknown to Margaret, he was homosexual.33 Throughout her life she remained innocent about such things. In any event, her letter to Muriel shows her looking for other men while Tony Bray was still on the scene, and feeling a little wistful about not really finding them. As is visible in her frequent references to how other people turned to look at her if she wore something striking, she depended heavily on the approval and attention of others for her self-confidence. This confidence continued to grow as her career prospered, and, as we shall see, 1949 proved to be the year when her success really began, but in the winter of 1948 she still felt a little frail.
There
is one curious footnote to the story of Tony Bray and Margaret Thatcher. In 1973, Tony, who had pursued a career as a stockbroker, was engaged in a detailed study of the housing market. It was his job to forecast the development of house-building to see how the share prices of construction companies might move. In doing so, he formed the view that it would be logical to let sitting tenants buy their council houses, freeing up the receipts to build more housing. He worked up a paper on this and in 1974 sent it to Edward Heath,* by this time, following the Conservative defeat at the election in February, the Leader of the Opposition. He mentioned to Heath that he had known Margaret Thatcher at Oxford and so Heath, who by this time had made her shadow environment spokesman and therefore responsible for this area of policy, suggested that Bray talk to her. Margaret invited him to the Central Lobby of the House of Commons. The two had not met or spoken since 1950. Tony noticed a change in her manner over the quarter of a century: ‘She was more the grande dame, aware of her own presence, a little bit condescending’; she made only the most glancing acknowledgment of their old acquaintance and got straight down to the policy, towards which she was very receptive. A lunch to discuss the policy more fully was planned, to be held at Tony’s stockbroking firm, but when it eventually took place Tony found himself excluded from the occasion of which he was himself the architect. He does not know why, but blames colleagues, not Margaret.34 He never saw her again.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 11
