Thatcher Read online

  Thatcher

  CLARE BECKETT

  HAUS PUBLISHING • LONDON

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  Haus Publishing Limited

  70 Cadogan Place

  London SW1X 9AH

  www.hauspublishing.co.uk

  Copyright © Clare Beckett, 2006, 2013

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ebook ISBN 978-1-907822-84-1

  Front cover: John Holder

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  Part One: THE LIFE

  Chapter 1: Mr Roberts’ Daughter

  Chapter 2: Transitions

  Chapter 3: Taking on the Party

  Chapter 4: Thatcher Emerging

  Part Two: THE LEADERSHIP

  Chapter 5: Thatcherism at Home

  Chapter 6: Thatcher Abroad

  Part Three: THE LEGACY

  Chapter 7: After Thatcher

  Notes

  Chronology

  Further Reading

  Part One

  THE LIFE

  Chapter 1: Mr Roberts’ Daughter

  It was an ordinary day in Grantham. On 13 October 1925, very little of note happened there, except that Margaret Hilda Roberts was born. She describes her first memories as an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone – my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop – was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet.1 For she was born above her father’s grocery shop.

  The family were already established in business when Margaret Roberts arrived. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a grey-haired and pious Alderman of the town. He was a self-made man, the son of a shoemaker who had left school at 13. He went into the grocery trade, at first working in the ‘tuck shop’ at Oundle School, and later managing a grocery store in Grantham. He had made many attempts to enlist in the army during the First World War, but had been turned down on medical grounds. His younger brother Edward did serve, and died at Salonika in 1917.

  That year, Alfred Roberts married Beatrice Ethel Stephenson. They met through the local Methodist community, and were married in the church – the same one that Margaret Roberts attended regularly throughout her childhood. Beatrice Stephenson was a successful dressmaker. She was as frugal and practical as her husband, and they set out to save and prosper. In 1919, they took out a mortgage on a shop in North Parade. It was well placed, on a crossroads, near to the railway line: Margaret Roberts must have been able to set her watch by the sound of the trains. Pictures show a large Edwardian building. Nowadays, some of these big, comfortable houses have become guesthouses. Margaret Roberts regretted that there was no garden, though.

  By 1921, when Margaret’s sister Muriel was born, the family were comfortably settled. This was not sufficient for Alfred Roberts. He was a careful and prudent man, with ambition that his family should never suffer as he did in his own impoverished childhood. He was determined to build a solid and, if possible, wealthy base for his family, where his daughters could grow to live a full and useful life. In 1923, he opened a second shop in Huntingdon Road. In 1925 he expanded his business into two adjoining properties in North Parade.

  Prosperity did not lead to unnecessary expenditure, however. Margaret Roberts was born into a home that was practical, serious and intensely religious.2 In the mid-1930s, 75 per cent of all families were officially designated working class but the Roberts, with two shops, were among the 20 per cent who could be considered middle class. Despite this the daughters had few possessions. There were no bicycles and not many toys, and trips to the theatre or cinema were rare. Their lives revolved around Methodism. The family went to Sunday morning service at 11.00, after Sunday school. There was Sunday school again in the afternoon, and the adults at least would attend service again in the evening.

  Nonetheless, these early years were happy ones for Margaret Roberts. The shops were quality grocers, selling food more often found in delicatessens nowadays. Margaret helped behind the counter when she was old enough, and took a full part in measuring and packing sugar, coffee or tea for sale: these arrived in big bags, and had to be decanted into 1lb. weights. The family had some standing in the town, and Mr Roberts’ younger daughter would have seen friendly faces and been made welcome wherever she went. She was part of the work upstairs, too – the unremitting work of making good and mending, washing and polishing, that kept a household respectable in the days before domestic appliances. She knew how to iron fine linen, and to heat a flat iron without scorching the linen. There is some triumph in running a comfortable, clean, and economic household that becomes a reward in itself. Thriftiness becomes competitive. Margaret Roberts describes finding out that another family saved and re-used their tacking cotton while dressmaking: from that point on she and her mother did the same.

  The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns.

  --THATCHER

  Grantham, then as now, was a quiet, self-contained backwater. A small town rather than a city, it was neither flourishing nor depressed. But in the inter-war years the spectre of poverty was never very far away. Even people like Alfred Roberts, who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and acquired a nest-egg, lived in fear that some accident or disaster would hit his family. These were the years before the welfare state, where even calling in the doctor was an expensive decision, so small provincial towns developed their own networks of support. The Roberts’ shops made up to 150 parcels for the old and sick, bought by the local Rotarian Society. The Roberts’ daughters attended and helped at town functions, and raised money for needy children. As grocers, the family knew something of the circumstances of their customers and community. Help was given to those who helped themselves. Later, Margaret Roberts described passing the long queue outside the dole office during the Great Depression. None of their close friends lost their jobs, but they knew people among the unemployed. She was later to write: And I have never forgotten – how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns. It meant that they never dropped out of the community and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together.3 My parents lived through these years in East London, and their lasting memories are less positive. Children were hungry, adults were hopeless, and homelessness was a constant threat. It is easy to see how Margaret Roberts’ early view of poverty and the poor informed her attitude to welfare later on in her life.

  Forced to give up his own formal education at 13, Alfred Roberts took a keen interest in his daughters’ schooling. Margaret went to Huntingtower Road Primary School, close to home but with a good reputation. She had learned to read at home, as many of her generation had, and tells about an incident at the age of five when she was asked to pronounce ‘w-r-a-p’. She got it right, but was aware that she was always asked the ‘hard ones’. She describes herself as being mystified by proverbs – her literal mind had real difficulty with such ideas as ‘look before you leap’ – why not look before you cross, a much more understandable idea, given the busy roads outside the school? And how can you have both that proverb, and ‘he who hesitates is lost’?

  Both girls attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. This was small, only 350 pupils, in a different part of town. It was a grant-aided grammar school. Parents would normally have paid part of the fees, but Margaret secured a county scholarship. The trip to school and back, home for lunch, and ba
ck in the afternoon meant that young Margaret was walking up to four miles a day: public transport, or staying for lunch, would have been unacceptable expenses. The school had a good reputation, and was already sending a few girls each year to Oxford. The ‘girls in blue’ were a familiar sight in the streets of Grantham. The intake came from a wide area, and Margaret’s best friend lived some distance away in a more rural area. Margaret Roberts would stay overnight on visits there, and walk in the country. During the war, the Camden Girls’ School was evacuated to Grantham, and their ‘girls in green’ shared classrooms. This meant altering the times of the school day, and the sisters would sometimes have to attend in the afternoons or mornings, or at weekends. Regardless, homework must always be completed even if that meant working on a Sunday. Her school reports show hard work and commitment and constant slight improvement but not brilliance. Outside the classroom, she was a competent hockey player, but her favoured sports were solitary. She enjoyed swimming, and particularly walking.

  The thrift learned at home continued at school. All girls, however well-off or academic, had to take domestic science for four years. Miss Williams was a quiet and dignified head teacher. On special occasions, like prize-giving, she wore soft and well-tailored silk but her message was a familiar one – never buy a cheap fur coat when a good wool coat is a better buy. Go for the best you can afford, but do not live outside your means. The message was a part of my childhood too, and will be familiar to many girls of this generation. Buy to last and to keep up appearances, but beware the cheap and ostentatious. There were other unmarried women earning a living among Margaret Roberts’ school teachers. This was a generation who would have to leave the profession if they married. Miss Harding, the history teacher, offered a passionate introduction to the subject. Years later, Margaret could recall her account of the Dardanelles campaign as she visited Gallipoli. Miss Kay, who taught chemistry, opened a new world of logic to the young Margaret, based on the new scientific discoveries of that time.

  Alfred Roberts was already a school governor, and became chairman while his daughters attended the school. This was not the only area in which he supported their learning, sometimes in surprisingly liberal ways. Finding that Margaret had not read Walt Whitman at school, he immediately found her some of his work, an author and poet with a modern, and sometimes risqué, style. He was responsible for bringing home two library books each week for his daughter, as well as books for her mother and sister. Reading included classic authors like Jane Austen and Dickens, but also political works. She struggled, with his assistance, with the Hibbert Journal, a philosophical periodical. He expected her to discuss her reading and learning with him, and to adopt a critical stance. He took her to ‘Extension Lectures’ given by the University of Nottingham, and supported her in contributing to discussion. Even as a young girl, she was used to stating her opinion and asking questions in an adult forum, and to arguing with the Alderman as a basis for learning. Perhaps it was these influences that lead to the one area where Margaret Roberts shone at school, as a member of the debating society. She was an unselfconscious star of debate, not brilliant, but logical and determined. Contemporaries remember her as hard to beat. Visiting speakers could always be sure of a question from her, slow and well-phrased with a Lincolnshire accent, delivered in a ringing and absolutely audible voice.

  There was one major event during this quiet and hard-working childhood. Margaret’s much-loved grandmother died when she was ten. Grandmother Stevenson was a formidable woman. Dressed in black sateen, she upheld Methodist values and was the first to condemn frivolity in any form. She was also a warm presence in the children’s lives, telling bedtime stories and stories of life during her childhood. She had a spine-chilling line in ghost stories, told in the bedroom at night. She was a fund of old cautionary tales, like the ability of earwigs to crawl under your skin and form carbuncles. She had time for the girls as other members of the family had not, and often took part in the lighter tasks given to the children. Measuring spices, packing butter and light cleaning will all have been the kind of jobs assigned to the young and the old and shared by the two daughters and grandmother. When she died, Margaret and Muriel Roberts were sent to relatives until after the funeral and after Grandmother’s things had been put away. This was the custom at that time, to shield children from death and disruption. After her death, the girls in the family began to attend the theatre and music halls occasionally.

  This childhood was lived out against the rising shadow of economic slump and preparation for war. It would have been difficult for any intelligent and active child to ignore the changes around her, and impossible for the favoured daughter of a man who regarded public service as the rationale of life. Alfred was a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, Alderman and between 1945 and 1946 Mayor of Grantham. He was Alderman again in 1952, when he lost the position to a Labour candidate. Margaret Roberts’ life was punctuated by elections and local events. 1935 stood out as an example, for this was the year of King George V’s Jubilee and of Grantham’s centenary as a borough. There were brass bands and decorations – Margaret says in her autobiography that the poorest part of town, Vere Street, was one of the best decorated. The boys’ school and the girls’ school combined for a big open-air display of marching and precision events, including forming the letters of Grantham. Margaret Roberts was part of the M.

  To be part of local politics was only partly to be concerned with party politics. To Alfred, party politics had limits. He stood for the council as a ratepayer’s candidate, believed in individual responsibility and sound financial management, and read John Stuart Mill. He described himself as a staunch Conservative. Labour councillors might argue with him in the council chamber, but they came to the shop without partisan bitterness. Margaret learned a lot of town business in the shop. General elections were a different matter. In 1935, the celebrations in the town were almost overshadowed by the first election in which Margaret was an active campaigner. She folded bright red leaflets for the Conservative candidate, sitting with much older companions. On election day, she was given responsibility for running between the office and the polling station with news about who had voted, and who still needed gathering in. This was a hard-fought election, and the member’s majority was cut from 16,000 to 6,000. This election was fought in the inter-war period where most people wanted to avoid another war. The Roberts family read a wide variety of newspapers, and had a radio – they were probably better informed than most. The battle, though, was over the potential for and speed of disarmament. The Roberts family was not in favour of the policy of appeasement of Hitler. It is not surprising that a fierce nationalism underpinned Alfred’s Methodist politics of good husbandry and individual responsibility. For Margaret Roberts there was an added incentive. As a ten-year-old child, she says in her memoirs that she saw the monarchy as the glue that held society together and gave the poor the incentive to work hard and keep up appearances. While she seems to have had a worked-out view of poverty, learned from watching the customers in her fathers’ shop, it is likely that her view of the Commonwealth reflected the Methodist values around her. Like many other families, the Roberts were fiercely proud of the Empire. Methodist ministry had been a foundation of colonisation, and the young Margaret Roberts listened to returning ministers with wonder. She would have liked to join the Indian civil service. She thought that the rule of law, good administration and order that the British had given to the colonies were great gifts.

  In this period, Right and Left took on significant importance on the international stage. It was easy for right-wing people to be led into supporting fascism as a real alternative to communism. While the Roberts family hated communism, equally they did not find the strutting of the Blackshirts attractive. To them, surrounded by the gentle self-regulation of our own civil life,4 only a free society was a possible alternative to both. They were not sanguine about another war. They saw the pictures of the First World War, and commemorated fallen se
rvicemen, including Alfred’s brother. The Remembrance Day parades were a constant reminder. They did not support appeasement, however. To them, Hitler was a significant and real threat who would not go away. He had crushed the Rotarians in Germany, and Alfred Roberts believed passionately in the power of Rotarian groups, their internationalism and their charity, as a force for good. With a rare flash of humour, Alfred felt that being destroyed by Hitler was the greatest compliment Rotary organisations could be paid. The local doctor was German, and received news that he passed to Alfred, who discussed it with Margaret. Muriel had a pen-friend in Austria, and after the Anchluss in 1938, the pen friend’s father contacted the Roberts to see if they could take her in. Alfred arranged for the Grantham Rotarians to support her, and she stayed with each family in turn until she could go to relatives in South Africa. She brought first-hand experience of being Jewish under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing stuck in the young Margaret Roberts’ mind – Jews were being made to scrub the streets. She was passionately anti-Hitler, unlike most of her neighbours at the time. She recounts standing in a chip-shop queue where the common opinion was that Hitler had at least brought some coherence to German policy and self-confidence to the German people. She argued against this opinion, although the queue was made up of adults.

  To the Roberts’ family, Hitler’s wickedness must be ended, but the country was woefully unprepared. Margaret Roberts was nearly 14 on 3 September 1939, when war was finally declared. It was the only Sunday during her childhood that she did not go to church. It is typical of her approach in adulthood that in her autobiography she now turns to the social and political causes of war, rather than the privations that the war caused. Indeed, Grantham was not heavily bombed during the war. There were 21 air-raids on the town, and 78 people were killed. The greatest risk for the family was their closeness to the railway line, a few hundred yards from the house. Alfred was often out in the evenings on air-raid duty, while Margaret and her mother took shelter under the kitchen table. Muriel was already working at the orthopaedic hospital in Birmingham, where the bombing was much heavier. The Roberts family threw themselves into voluntary and civic work for the war effort, and were even busier than in peacetime.