Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The flirtation continued, perhaps a merry diversion for Margaret, perhaps more serious for Willie. Willie kept a diary for the year 1949, mainly a terse, bald record of agricultural doings. His entry for 25 April is typical in tone, but unusually eventful: ‘Carting dung to bottom of lane. Attended Mistley Court with Fred re tractor. Fined £8-15-0 for 9 charges [he had driven his tractor on steel wheels on the public road, and had been arrested]. 6 women hoeing potatoes. Met Margaret at 5.30 B.X. [Plastics]. We went to Flatford, a splendid evening.’ In the following day’s entry, Margaret inserted the time of their next meeting in her own hand. She also inscribed her Colchester address in the front of the diary, with two kisses, and occasionally interpolated her own account of an event in Willie’s pages. On 18 March, she wrote: ‘We went to the Caledonian Ball and had a lovely time. Wore black velvet frock, pearls and long drop earrings. MHR.’ When Willie won the huge sum of £69 7s 6d on two horses called Squanderbug and Scorned at Newmarket (‘SAW PRINCESS ELIZABETH, AND SHE SAW ME!’ Margaret wrote of her first sight of the woman whose eighth prime minister she would eventually become), he took Margaret to lunch in Colchester that weekend to celebrate. They went to Jacklin’s, a well-known local restaurant, before an afternoon together in the cinema watching Bob Hope in Paleface. The whole ‘farming fraternity’ was present in the restaurant: ‘All heads were turned towards us as those facing the door sounded the alarm! There was a stunned silence for a couple of seconds followed by a sudden outburst. They all turned round to look and then chattered about us for the whole of the rest of the meal! One of them – Bill Strang – the biggest tease of the lot, tore up some silver cigarette paper into small pieces and threw it all over William as he (Bill) walked out past our table!’31 When he took her to the cinema to see Bad Lord Byron, two of the farmers and their wives were there, and the same thing happened again: ‘Being Scotch,* of course they had to turn round and see who else was there. They spotted us before we spotted them; they then proceeded to make so many wild signs and so much noise that we soon saw who they were!’32

  Willie persevered, giving Margaret ‘frightfully expensive’ Crêpe de Chine scent and visited her ‘every other day with butter, eggs and grapes etc.’33 when she was ill in May. The record of one of his presents, particularly well suited to the recipient, survives, thanks to the camera. Margaret wrote to Muriel to describe it: ‘…William has given me a very nice black-calf handbag. It’s not an awfully expensive one as my conscience wouldn’t let me do that – but I chose a very nice one at £7-3s. We had my initials put on as well and it looks awfully nice … I quite loftily say it’s not “very expensive” – it’s about twice as much as you or I would pay. But compared to some of the others (£15–£20) it’s quite reasonable. I’ll have to hang on to William for a while longer now!’34 Margaret drew a picture of the bag for Muriel, and one can see exactly how well it suited its owner from a press photograph of the two of them at a Dartford fête. There is an almost humorous heartlessness of youth in all of this, a Margaret who plays with men and enjoys it. In the very same letter, she mentions another date. She was going to the North Kent Rotary Ball, she said, ‘with a chap called Denis Thatcher (34)† who is managing director of the Atlas paint works in Erith … He’s all right – but is most unpopular with his men. He’s far too belligerent in dealing with them and they naturally don’t like it.’35

  Willie Cullen introduced Margaret to his family. In May, she was received for dinner at Foulton Hall, his farm near Harwich where his sister Agnes kept house (‘the perfectly natural hostess’, said Margaret). She enjoyed the dinner, but it made an interesting impression upon her:

  The wives were typical wives – they know of domestic matters and nothing else. I stayed with the men after supper talking about many other things and when William suggested that maybe we ought to ‘join the ladies’ David [Macauley, a local farmer] said in rather contemptuous fashion ‘Why, – they don’t talk politics or anything else in there.’ And that’s how they regard their wives. And indeed when we did join the ladies for half-an-hour or so much later, conversation flagged entirely.36

  What is visible here is not only Margaret’s lifelong preference for male company, but a sort of presentiment of what marriage to Willie Cullen would involve. Socially, she had begun to feel part of a more cosmopolitan sphere. And she knew that, both by temperament and by intellect, she could not be happy as a farmer’s wife. When she next visited Foulton, she reported that ‘the sitting-room looks smaller in daylight.’37 The initial meeting which Margaret had set up must have been successful, however, because Muriel came down again to see Willie and, with Margaret, to meet his mother too. Margaret wrote to explain that old Mrs Cullen was nervous because she was ‘afraid her English isn’t good enough or something’. She therefore gave her sister very particular instructions about what to wear: ‘I expect you’ll have your highwayman coat on, but don’t come too exotic underneath. We must be as nice as possible to make Mrs Cullen feel at her ease. Why she should be apprehensive I don’t know because she is an excellent farmer.’38 Perhaps because the Roberts sisters avoided being ‘exotic underneath’, the meeting seems to have been a success, and Willie liked Muriel more and more, as was intended. Indeed, he seemed to fit in with Margaret’s master-plan slightly more readily than was pleasing to her. ‘I had a shock yesterday,’ she wrote to Muriel from Dartford in July, ‘when I had a letter from William to say that he was travelling up to Glasgow by car to fetch his mother down while the harvest is on and would probably call at Allerton [the house in North Parade which the Robertses bought after the war].’ Muriel, of course, was at home with her parents, and Margaret was not. ‘Hope Mummy is looking reasonably respectable,’ she went on. ‘Do let me know their reactions. I hope to goodness he doesn’t give Daddy the impression of being a prospective son-in-law, it would scare Pop out of his wits at the moment. Anyway, I can’t see it ever coming off.’39

  The visit took place, and was repeated on Willie’s return journey south. Muriel gave her sister a full report. Margaret replied:

  I was most amused to hear the other side of the story of the ‘Bill’* visit. He told me he could have stayed much longer! … Daddy’s only comment to me was ‘He seems a sensible sort of chap … whoever you want to marry it will be all right by me, my dear.’ So I was very glad you gave details of actual comments. I shan’t marry Bill for though very fond of him I am not in love with him and a marriage between us would falter after 2 or 3 months. We have completely different outlooks, and quite different sorts of friends. While I get on all right with his, he would feel out of water with mine.40

  What Margaret was saying, with a rather mature delicacy, was that her ambitions in life were higher than anything that the hard-working plain Scottish farmer could satisfy. She was surely right.* She hurried home to see Muriel, complaining that she was so busy that she would ‘probably arrive looking like the wreck of the Hesperus’.41

  In the course of the autumn and winter of 1949, the relationship between Margaret and Willie Cullen continued to cool and that between him and Muriel warmed. Margaret had earlier told Muriel that her Dartford role meant ‘There is very little time for “private life” down here. And even if there were time one wouldn’t be allowed to be seen around in Dartford with anyone in particular.’42 After the summer, it was widely believed that Attlee, the Prime Minister, would call an election quickly, and Margaret threw herself into the preparations, unhappily convinced that her association was not yet ready for the fight. In the course of her campaigning, however, she met a man who interested her. Scribbling to Muriel in pencil in the early autumn, she said that she was feeling the strain of the campaign without getting any thinner, but she had had a brief respite: ‘I went up to the Southern Hospital for the afternoon and evening with the medical superintendent … He’s a most unusual chap and like a number of his profession still a bachelor. He’s over 40, so he’d do quite nicely for you! He said I was to ’phone whenever I felt fed up with politics, but o
f course I shan’t.’43 ‘William says he hasn’t heard from you yet,’ she chided in the same letter. ‘Do write to him as quickly as possible.’ She added that she had teased Willie, who had her to stay at Foulton Hall just before her twenty-fourth birthday in October, with her new-found friend: ‘I told him that I went up to the Southern Hospital with a doctor who impressed me very much – and he wrote back and said I was giving him a hint to get out.’ And she referred again to Denis Thatcher, reminding her sister that ‘He was the one who drove me back to town on the night of my adoption meeting and whose works I later went round.’ Denis was taking her to dinner and the theatre that night, she added, and had invited her to the Paint Federation Ball at the end of November.44 This letter is notable for referring to three of only four men (Tony Bray being the other) who were ever important in the affairs of Margaret’s heart. There will be more of the bachelor doctor at the Southern Hospital later. Margaret was toying with the idea of choosing between them all. When she finally came to choose, she would do so with the utmost seriousness, but she was not above enjoying the game on the way.

  What exactly happened in the next two months is partially obscure, and the participants interviewed by the present author – the two Roberts sisters – did not want to shed much light on it. But, one way or another, Willie Cullen did ‘take the hint to get out’ or rather, to change partners. The process of being gently dumped by Margaret and pushed towards Muriel instead must have been a complicated one. It seemed to involve a good deal of negotiation, but with no apparent falling out between the sisters. Willie Cullen recorded in his diary what was probably his last meeting with Margaret alone: he took her to see The Third Man in London on 27 October 1949. On 16 December he arrived to stay at the Robertses’ house in Grantham for the weekend and took Muriel out to the Golf Club Dance. Margaret was not present. Early in January 1950, writing from 63 Knole Road, the address of her new Dartford landlords, local Conservatives called Mr and Mrs Ray Woollcott, Margaret kept Muriel fully informed of the course of the break-up: ‘I have written to William in the vein I told you. He wrote a letter to me – much warmer in tone than his others and the two must have crossed in the post … We are meeting in London on Saturday afternoon to talk over the various aspects of “we three” and it will then be broken off between he and I [sic], for good and all.’ It was better for them to meet, she wrote, perhaps anticipating a slight unease on Muriel’s part, because ‘it would be easier, for when we meet again in a different relationship such as we were sketching out over Xmas, if we parted in the flesh – not by letter – as friends. Hope you approve.’45 In fact, the meeting did not take place. In a postscript, Margaret writes that Willie had rung her to cancel the meeting because ‘he has a party on in Colchester’. Instead, they discussed matters over the telephone. ‘I told him from henceforth that I would “in law” only be taking a sisterly interest in future. He seemed quite satisfied and is quite pleased with “future prospects”.’46

  Once ‘we three’ were rearranged, Margaret was keen to get everything settled. Willie Cullen went up to the Robertses in Grantham at the end of January, and Margaret wrote to Muriel beforehand urging her on: ‘I do hope it comes off and I see no reason for the pessimism you showed in a former letter.’47 It did come off. A formal, typed letter, the first such that survives, was sent to Muriel by Margaret from her Conservative Committee Rooms on 2 February 1950, where she was campaigning in the general election which Attlee had called, slightly earlier than he needed to, for 23 February. She detailed where Willie would stay for his visit to Dartford (the Bull) and where Muriel would be billeted (at Knole Road). Behind this was the fact that Willie and Muriel were engaged. On 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, only a week before polling day, Margaret wrote another formal letter, again typed by a secretary, which said, without comment, ‘I saw your engagement in the Telegraph this morning.’ It added instructions for the couple’s visit, ‘You, Daddy and I shall be dining with Lord Dudley Gordon on Tuesday night. Bring something decent to wear. You will be coming to the Count with me on Thursday night, so bring a smart hat.’ In her own hand, however, and presumably written so that no assistant would see it, Margaret added a PS: ‘So glad the announcement is in today’s Telegraph, one feels it gives the stamp of finality to the whole affair. Gather you’re having diamonds in your ring, a plum coloured corduroy suit to go away in and a blue gown for the ceremony … The campaign goes fairly well – we are having packed meetings.’48

  A minor family row ensued about the announcement in the Daily Telegraph. Alfred Roberts had placed the notice and described himself in it as ‘Ald.’, short for Alderman. Muriel was upset by this, and continued to be so more than fifty years later, feeling that it turned her wedding into a municipal announcement.49 Margaret concurred, perhaps for the slightly different reason that local government titles are not grand enough to parade on social occasions. ‘I agree with you that it was quite wrong. I raised my eyebrows at the time.’50 The mistake was not repeated in the invitation to the wedding itself. As soon as the election was out of the way, Margaret, who was to be the only bridesmaid at the wedding in April, threw herself into its every detail. Muriel must have a headdress with a veil ‘otherwise folks won’t know bride from bridesmaid. I’ll just have a little draped cap.’ She made suggestions about flowers, gloves and the importance of not having silver shoes because they would look ‘a bit back-streetish’,51 and drew a sketch of the frock, of her own design, which she proposed to wear. She also instructed Muriel on how to take her fiancé in hand – ‘Was disgusted to read the way he turned up for the weekend. See that he takes the right clothes to Paris [where they went on honeymoon]’ – and told Muriel to buck up: ‘Don’t worry about pre-wedding jitters.’52 On no account, she said, must Muriel allow Willie’s sister, Agnes, to go on living with them after their marriage.* All Margaret’s interventions were well meant, and it is clear that she always had what she considered Muriel’s best interests at heart, but her sister would not have been human if she did not sometimes feel irritated to be told what to do, almost to have had her marriage arranged, by an unmarried woman four years her junior. Unfortunately, none of Muriel’s letters to Margaret survives, but we know that she did sometimes feel some irritation with the orders issuing from Dartford.53 Her marriage to Willie Cullen proved long and successful (he died in 1998), but the way it was plotted was probably slightly galling. As Andrew Cullen, one of Muriel and Willie’s two sons, said: ‘Dad did hold a soft spot for Auntie Margaret.’54 In old age, Muriel described her relationship with her sister with characteristic briskness: ‘She [Margaret] says, “I consider my sister my best friend.” All she means by that is that I told her what I thought.’55 Muriel’s daughter, Jane, believed that the relationship between the two sisters was, on the whole, good, but said: ‘The Robertses are not very good at feelings. They deal with facts and reality.’56

  Although Margaret never really had any intention of marrying Willie Cullen, what probably precipitated the break was the arrival on the scene of the medical superintendent from the Southern Hospital. The doctor in question was called Robert Henderson. Already forty-seven when Margaret first met him (and therefore just over twice her age), he had enjoyed a distinguished medical career. He was a blacksmith’s son from Clatt in Aberdeenshire who left school early and was apprenticed to a local garage. One of his former teachers, however, who noticed his talent, persuaded his father that he could become a doctor, and he entered medical school in Aberdeen. In that city’s hospital in the 1930s, Henderson devised his own version of a tank respirator he had seen in America for the treatment of patients who could not breathe. In 1933, his ‘iron lung’, as the device came to be widely known, saved the life of a ten-year-old boy with polio. During the war, the machine was manufactured and distributed to hospitals throughout Britain and the Empire. It became famous and saved many lives. In 1940, Henderson was appointed medical superintendent of the Southern Hospital in Dartford, which had 1,700 beds and admitted, at the time
of the Blitz, more patients than any other hospital in England. It was in this post that Margaret first met him, some time in the summer of 1949. Because the navy used 500 of the beds there, and Henderson excelled in the treatment of submariners who, in those days, often contracted tuberculosis, he was made a surgeon captain RNVR, entitled to wear the uniform. In 1947, he was given the CBE for his services to medicine. He was greatly admired for his work in this enormous and hard-pressed hospital. A thin, drily amusing man, he loved roses and country life, a good party and especially a good Bloody Mary.57 Physically, he resembled Denis Thatcher, although he was shorter and considered to be better looking. He was also ‘a very good dancer’.58 He was canny with money – ‘£100 would go for ever’59 – and a supporter, though not actively involved, of the Conservatives. He liked women. In 1949, he was still unmarried.

  In Margaret’s letters to Muriel, Robert Henderson is the only boyfriend who is invariably referred to with respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The ‘most unusual chap’ whom she got to know in the summer became a much closer companion as the year waned. In the letter which describes her parting with Willie Cullen, Margaret makes it clear that Robert was, as she most certainly would not have put it, ‘there for her’: ‘In the evening I met Robert on the Dartford station. We had apparently travelled down by the same train. He had to go back for a nurses’ dinner but afterwards he came up to Knole Road and picked me up and we went for a drink. He said he thought I looked flat and miserable and I ought to go out for a little while on my first night back. Wasn’t it sweet of him?’ She was self-mockingly nervous, however, of her chances with him. He had spent Christmas, she said, with a rich family ‘who own half the farms in Essex’ and had ‘five daughters of marriageable age … The prospects don’t look very hopeful do they!?’60 Later in January 1950, she wrote that ‘Robert and I are seeing very little of one another at the moment as there is a little thing called the general election in sight,’ but in the same letter, resumed a bit later, she says that she has been to a ‘wonderful party’ (‘All Scotch’, meaning the people, not the drink) with Robert, given by a friend of his who was ‘consultant epidemiologist to the Royal family’. The couple got back to Dartford at three in the morning on a Saturday. And on the Sunday afternoon he drove her round the Weald of Kent and then gave her dinner at the hospital. ‘I think we are both getting very fond of one another,’ she added, ‘– in fact more than that. I hope so.’61