Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Her first law exams took place on 12 and 14 May 1952, and she was called to the Bar on 9 February 1954, but in between came motherhood. Her baby was expected on 29 September 1953, but early in August Mrs Thatcher, who had experienced quite a difficult and exhausting pregnancy, suffered labour pains and went into Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London on 14 August. The next day the doctors told her, which she had not previously suspected, that she was carrying twins, and that they were on their way. They were born by Caesarean section then and there, a girl, Carol Jane,† and a boy, Mark. Each weighed 4 pounds. Denis did not attend the birth (at that time, hospitals did not permit fathers to be present). He did not even know it was happening, since he was watching the England v Australia Test match at the Oval.‡ When he got home from the Oval, he found a message from the hospital telling him to come at once.

  According to Carol, Denis’s reaction to the first sight of his children was to exclaim: ‘My God, they look like rabbits. Put them back.’13 And there is no doubt that he was not immediately attracted by babies. In the 1990s, when staying with friends where the Thatchers were fellow guests, the present author’s wife, also a parent of twins, sought to engage Denis on the subject. What had been his first thought, she asked him, on the discovery that he had two babies? ‘I just wished the little buggers had been drowned at birth,’ was his reply. Although Mrs Thatcher would never have thought, let alone spoken, in such terms, she was not someone who settled to the task of dealing with infants as if this was her vocation in life. She was pleased to have twins, but more because it meant that she need not get pregnant again than because of a wild enthusiasm for motherhood. ‘Neither of my parents’, wrote Carol, ‘could be described as being natural or comfortable with young children.’14* Besides, as we shall see later, Mrs Thatcher had been planning her career on the expectation of one child or, at least, one at a time. Twins altered the case. As she lay in her hospital bed, she worked out how. By her own account, she was almost frightened by the emotional impact of the birth, the miracle of life sharpened by the perils of prematurity – ‘Oddly enough, the very depth of the relief and happiness at having brought Mark and Carol into the world made me uneasy’ – and she realized that she must keep the idea of a career constantly before her eyes: ‘I needed a career because, quite simply, that was the sort of person I was.’15 She decided, despite her new burden, to go ahead and sit her Bar finals on 1 December. She also received a letter from John Hare, the party vice-chairman in charge of candidates, congratulating her on the birth and asking her if, in the circumstances, she wanted her name withdrawn from the candidates’ list.16 Mrs Thatcher confirmed that she did, but not in a way that suggested any permanent turning from the political path: ‘we had no idea there were two of them,’ she wrote on 2 September, ‘until the day they were born … I think I had better not consider a candidature for at least six months. The household needs considerable reorganisation and a reliable nurse must be found before I can feel free to pursue such other activities with the necessary fervour.’17

  At Swan Court, an Austrian nurse, Gerda, was duly engaged for the first few weeks, and she was followed by Barbara, a nanny from Kent who stayed for five years. Nanny Barbara was often quoted as saying that when the Thatchers left the house in the morning for work, ‘He was very good at remembering to wave up to the nursery window [from which the twins were watching] … whereas Mrs Thatcher, whose mind was already on the job, would forget.’ The full context of the quotation, however, makes clear that it was Denis who was detached from the care of the children whereas Margaret was not: ‘Mr Thatcher left parenting to Mrs Thatcher and me.’18 Just after the twins came home for the first time, Denis was briefly away, and there was a gap in domestic help. ‘We have several outstanding bits of entertaining to do,’ Margaret told Muriel, ‘but as I shall be on my own all day and all night doing 3-hourly feeds throughout the 24 hours with 2 bairns that will have to wait. Fortunately I am now very fit.’19 The sixth-floor flat had only three bedrooms and was quite ill-suited to young children. When the twins were three, Denis solved this by renting the flat next door so that ‘I could slam the door on all three of them.’20

  Driven and career-oriented though she was, Mrs Thatcher was definitely a concerned and conscientious mother. Her letters to Muriel, which become more sporadic and brief in the 1950s, show a woman attentive, in a slightly uninquiring and practical way, to the needs of her children. When they were five months old, she wrote a busy, post-Christmas letter, thanking her sister for their romper suits to which she herself had added smart little white collars. Mark, she said, had a ‘tummy bug’ which she dealt with – ‘I slept in the nursery as I should have been about all night and probably have woken Denis, so it seemed to me more sensible to let Nanny have a decent night’s sleep.’ The bug caused a laundry problem because ‘We have always operated with the minimum number of vests (7 between them).’ She also mentioned the problem of Mark’s circumcision, and the fact that Denis’s South African cousins, the Pellatts, were staying. The Thatchers took them out to dinner: ‘my goodness – do they eat! Hors d’oeuvre and soup and entrée and cheese! Denis and I had the usual 3 courses only but in spite of that the Bill was £7-15s! We shan’t take them out again in a hurry!’21 A year later, she congratulated Muriel on the birth of her daughter (‘the fact that it was a girl [Muriel’s first child had been a boy] seemed to make it all worthwhile’). The twins, she said, were ‘in the pink’ and had just had ‘2 little friends round’: ‘Having made all the cakes and scones the night before I left Nannie to get on with it. With three nannies I should only have cramped their style.’ Dealing literally with the small change of life, she tells Muriel that she has just bought a ‘knockabout’ dinner and tea service, Royal Doulton ‘Coppice’, and paid the bill of £16 10s out of sixpences she had saved up in a jar.22

  Although it was not in Mrs Thatcher’s nature to subject her children or indeed the rest of her life to close emotional analysis, the correspondence discloses vignettes of character, small judgments scarcely considered as they are made, yet still significant. ‘Mark and Carol had a bit of set-to,’ she wrote, ‘which resulted in Mark being pierced on his arm by a gardening fork’* and requiring a tetanus injection.23 ‘Mark can ride a fairy cycle and is very anxious to have one,’ she told Muriel in the same month, but the price of £12 was high and ‘we’d have to get two and that would be too much of an item this year’.24 At Christmas 1957, however, her son was satisfied with his Christmas present: ‘Mark liked his particularly because it had bullets in it.’ Later, Carol does piano and dancing lessons, but without much success: ‘I don’t think she has very much music in her – she has no sense of pitch. She can’t sing in tune with the notes at all.’25 ‘Carol’s school’, she wrote on 18 November 1963, ‘is much better run than Mark’s but one usually finds that girls’ schools are more highly organised.’26 Earlier, when Carol began a new school in September 1960, her mother noted, ‘She gets very strung up about new things although she doesn’t say much.’ In the same letter, mentioning the fact that Abbey Evans, Barbara’s replacement as nanny, is away for six weeks helping a former employer move house, Mrs Thatcher, by this time an MP, addresses the problem: ‘It will be very difficult but I shall have to try to get more time off. I don’t want to upset the children by having a new person in for a short time.’27 And when the twins first go to school, together, Mrs Thatcher notes: ‘They seem to be enjoying school but doing a tremendous amount of painting there.’28 The ‘but’ in that sentence is characteristic.

  Busy lives require endless arranging, and a great deal of Mrs Thatcher’s mental energy was consumed in what, in our generation, is called juggling. This was particularly apparent in relation to holidays, a phenomenon which the Thatchers regarded as occasionally necessary, but unpleasant, like going to the dentist. There were searches for hotels at the seaside, and for arrangements which would allow the parents to delegate some of what was seen as the burden of looking after the children all the time.
On one occasion, this provoked something close to a row between Barbara and Mrs Thatcher, as the latter explained to Muriel:

  Her nose is rather out-of-joint again this week because she came back and said that one of the Nannies’ employers had offered to take a house at the seaside for a month for nannie and the two children if she could get another nannie with charges to go half-shares. I said that after my experience last year I certainly wasn’t prepared to take the children away to a hotel while she was away and she could have them for a fortnight while we were away. That didn’t suit her, she said she’d had enough of hotels! She sulked for about 2 days!29

  By Carol’s account, it was Nanny Barbara who took Mark and her on their first ever holiday, to Broadstairs.30 Later, the Thatchers took to visiting Seaview, Isle of Wight, en famille, a holiday which they had to cut short to get back for the election campaign of 1959 which returned Mrs Thatcher to the House of Commons for the first time. When she was prime minister, she was famous for her dislike of taking a break and her readiness to come back to work early on the excuse of a crisis. At work or at leisure, time management dominated. ‘I have forgotten our Easter egg arrangements,’ she wrote to Muriel from the House of Commons early in her career there, ‘– shall I get mine an egg from you and you get yours an egg from me? This is so much simpler than risking their getting smashed in the post.’31

  The truth is that Mrs Thatcher was frightened of boredom and what she called ‘vegetating’. House-proud and fond of her family though she was, she associated the danger of ennui with the life of a housewife. In Carol’s view, ‘She would have hated being a housewife.’32 In an article for the Young Conservatives’ monthly paper Onward, written when the twins were still babies, Margaret was eloquent on the effect of having the twins: ‘As well as being exhausted, however, I felt nothing more than a drudge.’ The way to cure this, in her view, was through careful planning: ‘I quickly found that as well as being a housewife it is possible to put in eight hours’ work a day besides.’ This was actually good for the children, she claimed, because ‘When looking after them without a break, it is sometimes difficult not to get a little impatient and very easy only to give part of one’s attention to their incessant demands.’ ‘Homework’, Carol recalled, ‘was her middle name.’33 The mother’s absence was fine, Margaret argued, because ‘If she has a powerful and dominant personality her personal influence is there the whole time and the children’s upbringing follows the lines which she directs.’34 This is thinly veiled autobiography. Mrs Thatcher was worried, too, that glamour and excitement would slip away. ‘We don’t seem to have any “functions” in the offing,’ she complained to Muriel in the summer before the twins’ second birthday. ‘They seem to get fewer and fewer as time goes by and now I only wear evening dress about four times a year. Not that I am bothered – an evening out is an expensive item.’35 Interviewed on the verge of her first election for Finchley in 1959, she told the Evening News that ‘I should vegetate if I were left at the kitchen sink all day. The twins are at school and in any case I have a full-time nanny … I don’t think the family suffers at all through my political ambitions.’ In old age, she came to recognize that this was a fiction, and she worried that the family had suffered far too much, but the fiction had been a necessary one, for Margaret Thatcher knew perfectly well that she had to have an all-consuming career, come what may.* She did her best to mitigate its damaging side-effects, but she could never contemplate abandoning it. ‘I have no right to complain,’ Carol remembered. ‘But I don’t think our childhood was a very important part of her life, to be honest.’36

  Another effect of Margaret’s marriage to Denis was a growing separation, though never an estrangement, from her sister Muriel and from her parents. This was partly a matter of geography, but more, perhaps, one of class. Denis was a town mouse, a public schoolboy and very comfortably off. Willie Cullen was a Scottish farmer through and through, and though he looked after his money well, he did not have the opportunity or desire to cut a dash with it. In the early days, Denis would occasionally play golf with Willie in Colchester, but the Cullens resented what they took to be his condescending tone: ‘How are things down on the farm then?’ he would ask, to their irritation,37 and this resentment grew in later years, when they came to regard Mark as big-headed through his mother’s success and Denis as ‘moving in circles with people who have more money than he has’.38 Quite often Margaret would visit Foulton unaccompanied by Denis. ‘As kids,’ Carol recalled, ‘we thought that was great’ – the farm was large and ran down to the sea, giving opportunities for adventure.39 The Cullens always excepted Margaret herself from any charge of snobbery and condescension, and were critical only of the fact that she always put her political work before anything else. She kept in reasonably close touch, meeting Muriel monthly for lunch in London, and even writing to her, as late as the early 1960s, when Mrs Thatcher had become a junior minister, to suggest that they jointly visit the Queen’s dietician to lose weight: ‘I need half a stone off and we could therefore go together …’40 She was friendly, honest and trusting, if not effusive, in her letters to her sister, but it is also clear – it was implicit in her decision not to marry Willie Cullen – that she was conscious of a social gulf between herself and her sister’s family, a gulf which, as we shall see later, put her father more on Muriel’s side of the fence than on hers. This tension expressed itself over a trivial matter. When Muriel gave birth to her daughter in January 1955, the Cullens considered naming her Agnes after Willie’s unmarried sister who had been expelled from the house after their marriage. This idea was probably not one that appealed as much to Muriel as it did to Willie anyway; to Margaret it was anathema. She weighed in: ‘You used to like “Penelope” and “Nicola” – have either of those come up for consideration? For heaven’s sake let one of your children have an English name as England is the country of William’s choice as distinct from that of his birth.’41 The truth is that one rarely finds a good word for the Celtic parts of the British Isles in the life of Margaret Thatcher, although two of her boyfriends were Scots. In January 1954, the Thatchers went on what she called ‘the annual pilgrimage to Twickenham’ for the England v Wales game. ‘Personally,’ Margaret told her sister, ‘I never enjoy the Welsh game very much as the Welsh don’t know how to win or how to lose.’42 Luckily for Mrs Thatcher’s feelings, Muriel and Willie settled on plain, English Jane as the name for their daughter.

  But Mrs Thatcher was now moving into a world which was more that of Penelope or Nicola, a combination of professional Chelsea and semi-suburban, highly Conservative Kent. Her life in London, while certainly not grand or fashionable, had some pretensions to elegance. The Thatchers would get good tickets to shows, opera, films – Madame Butterfly, The King and I (‘you realise of course that it is a true story’), Quadrille, Olivier’s Richard III (‘absolutely first-class’) – and buy good-quality furniture and clothes, though always very careful about price. She bought a summer coat from Peter Jones, for example, which, because it had been worn by a mannequin, was reduced from 12 guineas to 79s 6d (£3 97.5 pence).43 They gave plenty of cocktail parties and buffet suppers and, of course, attended Conservative balls (‘Mrs Anthony Eden received us. Really she is a most colourless personality’).44* Occasionally they danced at the Colony Club in Berkeley Square.45 It was more Denis’s world than the one she had been brought up in, and she was very keen to be a part of it. One Saturday, because Denis was refereeing rugby at the military academy at Sandhurst, Margaret joined him, and was much struck with what she saw: ‘I had no idea it was such a wonderful place – the grounds are enormous but what impressed me most was the young chaps who go there. Saturday afternoon was naturally off-duty time but we didn’t see so much as even one person slouching. They held themselves as if in military uniform and went about their business in a most impressive way. They were an intelligent bunch of kids too.’46

  Pursuing their haut-bourgeois dream, and driven out of Chelsea by the Tory government
’s ending of rent control and the needs of the twins for more space, the Thatchers moved, before Christmas 1957, to Farnborough in Kent. The house was called Dormers, and stood in a suburban cul-de-sac. They were nearly gazumped, and had to pay £6,600. Carol and Mark ‘adored’ the place, she describing it as ‘a magical childhood home in a long avenue of detached houses and generous gardens’.47 Immediately after they had bought Dormers, Mrs Thatcher threw herself into ‘the problems of the bathrooms and sanitary arrangements. However, I expect we shall get it spick and span in time.’ The conveyancing and stamp duty cost £245; ‘That’s before we start.’48 When they got there, they did not like it at first. On New Year’s Eve 1957, she wrote to Muriel: ‘It seems a very tight community here. “Foreigners” are definitely not made welcome. So far, the only glimpse of either of our neighbours has been when one of them scowled at us when Denis parked the car for a few seconds opposite the greengrocer’s van when I was asking the delivery man to call! Our next-door neighbour had to slow down his car to get through the gap! We miss Chelsea very much but after 6 years it would be surprising if we settled down in a fortnight.’49 In fact, the house, though convenient for Denis’s work in Dartford, proved awkward for Mrs Thatcher’s commuting to the Inns of Court, let alone for her political life later, but it did give the twins their nearest approximation to a permanent home with which they could fall in love. Margaret herself literally put down roots: she ‘became manic about gardening’ and grew ‘dahlias the size of dinner-plates’, while Denis became a keen mower, declaring daisies ‘public-enemy number one’.50 For Margaret, it was a long way, on the whole a pleasantly long way, from life above the grocer’s shop in Grantham.