Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (6 page)

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The war, grammar school and fighting her headmistress

GRANTHAM AT WAR

The Second World War, and the events in Germany leading up to it, made a seminal impact on the life of the young Margaret Roberts. In this period the seeds of her strongest instincts were sown, which later influenced her decisions and attitudes as Prime Minister. Her passionate patriotism; her admiration for the armed forces; her affection for the Jews; her suspicions of Germany; and her reverence for the Anglo-American alliance are all traceable to her formative experiences as a Grantham teenager.

Although she was only a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl when war was declared, eighteen months earlier she had come into face to face contact with Hitler’s persecution of the Jews when the Roberts family welcomed into their home a young refugee from Austria. From her conversations with this Viennese student, Edith Mühlbauer, and from the internationalist outlook of her father, Margaret became well informed about the Nazi domination of Europe, and held strong views on it.

There is a story from a Grantham fish and chip shop on Margaret’s pre-war hostility to Hitler. She was queuing on a Friday evening in 1938 to buy a cod and chips supper for the family, when a discussion started about the German Führer. One of the customers said that at least Hitler had given his country some self-respect. The twelve-year-old Miss Roberts vigorously disagreed. The forcefulness of her argument caused irritation among others in the queue. With tension rising, the manageress defused the situation by saying with a laugh, ‘Oh, she’s always debating.’
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Margaret was able to debate in a well-informed way because she had been listening to her family’s Jewish guest. Edith Mühlbauer was the seventeen-year-old
daughter of a Viennese banker. When Hitler annexed Austria on 13 March 1938, and the first of Vienna’s 170,000 Jews were being rounded up by the SS, Edith wrote to her English pen friend, Muriel Roberts, asking if she could come and stay, to escape from the Nazi persecution.

This was followed by a letter making the same request from Edith’s father to Alfred Roberts, who read it to the next meeting of the Grantham Rotary Club. The Rotarians responded generously.

They organised a group of Grantham hosts who each agreed to open their doors to the young refugee for a month or so. They also paid for Edith’s travel and provided her with a guinea a week in pocket money. The first English home she stayed in was above the shop at North Parade with the Roberts family.

Edith’s stay was not an unqualified success. Grantham gossip had it that Alfred Roberts became concerned that his sophisticated Viennese guest, who wore lipstick, smoked cigarettes and flirted with boys, might be exerting a bad influence on his strictly brought up daughters. For her part, the seventeen-year-old Edith found life with the Roberts family somewhat awkward and uncomfortable. ‘We didn’t have a proper bathroom in those days. She was used to better things,’ recalled Margaret.
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Although Edith Mühlbauer stayed only for a few weeks at North Parade (she moved around eighteen Rotarian families before joining relatives in Brazil in 1940), her plight made a considerable impression on Margaret.
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She heard about the
Anschluss
,
Kristallnacht
and other episodes of Jewish persecution, learning that some of Edith’s relatives were made to sweep the streets before being taken away to Auschwitz. One result of these conversations was that Margaret borrowed from the library an important new book, published in June 1938,
Insanity Fair
by Douglas Reed. It was a powerful indictment of German anti-Semitism.

As the Edith Mühlbauer episode shows, Alfred Roberts had a compassionate and international outlook. His Methodism and his chairmanship of Grantham’s Rotary’s international service committee gave him knowledgeable insights into the growing menace of Nazi aggression in Europe. However, he was an early supporter of Neville Chamberlain and the 1938 Munich Agreement, a political position he abandoned after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 made some immediate effects on Margaret’s life at the age of thirteen. Her school had anti-blast sandbag walls built around its classrooms. Trenches were dug on one side of the playing fields,
and daily drills were held to practise evacuation and air raid shelter procedures. The teachers were trained in extinguishing incendiary bombs.
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Soon the practices became the real thing. Grantham was literally in the firing line, partly because two major munitions factories were located in the town, and partly because so many RAF personnel were billeted there.

In the first three years of the war Grantham was hit by twenty-one Luftwaffe bombing raids, which destroyed eighty homes and killed seventy people. One of Alfred’s civilian roles was to be Chief Welfare Officer in charge of civil defence, which meant he was the town’s organiser of Air Raid Precautions, or ARP. He found himself doing so much night duty as a warden that he joked the initials stood for Alfred Roberts Purgatory.

He was not alone in his discomforts. Because the house at North Parade did not have a garden, no underground shelter could be dug there. On evenings when the air raid sirens sounded their alert, Margaret with her mother and father had to huddle under the kitchen table until the sirens gave the all clear. Muriel was away, first in Birmingham and then in Blackpool, working as a physiotherapist.
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The separation of the two sisters resulted in a considerable correspondence between them during the war years. Their letters, according to Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, Charles Moore, told him ‘much more about her private life than had previously been revealed by all the other sources put together’.
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The sisterly correspondence did not contain much in the way of revealing insights during the 1939–1943 period while Margaret remained at Grantham as a schoolgirl. Her letters are mainly about the ‘terrific amount of swotting’ she was doing for her School Certificate; the detailed results of that examination (distinctions in chemistry, arithmetic and algebra); and descriptions of her birthday presents and her visits to the Grantham cinema.
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The most surprising omission from these communications to Muriel was the war, which is barely mentioned.

In fact, the war loomed large in the teenage life of Margaret Roberts. The heavy bombing of the town’s homes and factories; the disruption to the timetables of KGGS; the extra pressures of her father’s work as a councillor; and the military presence of the Royal Air Force in the streets and skies of Grantham all made a considerable impact on her.

Lincolnshire was known as ‘Bomber County’, because forty-nine RAF airfields were located there with No. 1 and No. 5 Bomber Command groups operating
from bases such as RAF Scampton, Coningsby, Cranwell, East Kirkby and Digby. So the young Margaret became familiar with hearing the overhead roar of the Lancaster heavy bombers, and seeing their aircrews in and around the town. Her father had at least one encounter with Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, DSO, DFC, who led the ‘Dam Busters’ raid. She herself caught several glimpses in Grantham of the Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Group Bomber Command, Air Vice-Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, in the town. He was a controversial figure to many, but a hero to Margaret Roberts.

Fifty years after her schoolgirl sightings of the wartime commander, a statue of ‘Bomber’ Harris was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, patron of the Bomber Command Association, outside the Church of St Clement Danes in London, in May 1992. Ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attended. Knowing of this Grantham connection I had asked the RAF to send her an invitation.

As a newly appointed Defence Minister, I was concerned that more senior figures in the government were unwilling, because of the anticipated protests, to come to the ceremony; so I telephoned Margaret Thatcher.

‘Of course I’ll come,’ she said. ‘I remember seeing him in my Grantham days. He was a most remarkable leader of Bomber Command. We wouldn’t have won the war without them. I’ll be there.’ And she was.

The atmosphere and emotions of Grantham in those times left an indelible mark on Margaret Roberts. ‘Our thoughts were at the front,’
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she recalled, speaking in later life of huddling round the family’s wireless set to hear the six o’clock news read by Alvar Lidell, or listening to the wartime broadcasts of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The fervent atmosphere of English patriotism in the family was reinforced by the books that Margaret and her father took out from the library and discussed together. Two that made a particular impact on her were
Ronald Cartland
, Barbara Cartland’s biography of her brother who was killed at Dunkirk, and Richard Hillary’s
The Last Enemy
, a classic portrait of the lives and losses of RAF pilots in the early years of the war.

Later in her teenage years Margaret worked as a WVS
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volunteer in Service canteens, where she met young RAF pilots from Bomber Command, many of whom never came back to their Lincolnshire bases. Towards the end of the war,
when she returned to Grantham during her Oxford vacations, she found the town full of American servicemen.

In late 1943, the RAF allocated twelve of its airfields in the Grantham area to the 82nd Troop Carrier Group of the US 9th Air Force, who were preparing to move large numbers of soldiers to France for the liberation of Europe. The reassuring presence of the American military may have contributed to Margaret’s lifelong enthusiasm for good UK–US relations.

The mosaic of Margaret Roberts’ wartime memories created an influential background to her formative years. Even though her experiences of the conflict were tangential, they played their part in creating her values and shaping her personality. But the foreground of her life was her progress at school towards her dream of winning a scholarship to Oxford.

KGGS

The most important part of Margaret Roberts’ schooldays took place at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, locally known as KGGS. The 350 pupils were drawn from all levels of society and were a meritocracy. Their parents were means-tested, and as a result about two-thirds of the pupils were charged fees of three pounds and ten shillings a term. Alfred Roberts had to pay these fees for Margaret, even though she had won a scholarship place. He also paid two guineas a term for her piano lessons.

KGGS girls were a mixed bunch, socially and economically. They included the daughters of some of the poorest families in the town. There were also girls from farming, business and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

Margaret Roberts was always something of a loner among her contemporaries. But it was noticed that her closest acquaintances came not from Grantham, but from the higher social strata of families who lived in the Lincolnshire countryside. This may have been the origin of her school nickname, ‘Snobby Roberts’. One of these friends was Margaret Goodrich, whose father, Canon Harold Goodrich, was the incumbent of Corby Glen, a nearby village said to contain the finest vicarage in the county. A second was Betty Morley, whose father created a successful tyre-making company in Great Ponton. A third was Catherine Barford, the daughter of a prominent industrialist who founded the Aveling Barford group of companies. Catherine arrived as a new girl at KGGS
on the same day as Margaret Roberts, in September 1936. ‘Margaret became a friend,’ she recalled. ‘The first thing I noticed about her was how hard she worked. The second was her closeness to her father.’
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Margaret made several visits to the Barford country house for tea. This was a mark of her friendship with Catherine, but the invitations also came because their fathers had business to discuss. The Barford companies were expanding and needed to find council houses for the workers they recruited. Alfred Roberts, a member of the Housing Committee, was helpful. His career in local government was on the rise. One headline in the local paper dubbed him ‘Grantham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’ on account of his chairmanship of the Finance Committee.
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He was well known for his interest in national and international affairs, and respected for his integrity. His political activities soon rubbed off on his daughter. As a new girl at KGGS, Margaret Roberts came top of her class in her first year. What she was best remembered for was her prominence, and her air of superiority when putting questions to visiting speakers.

‘I can first remember her at a lecture we had … The well-known author and lecturer Bernard Newman came to talk about spies,’ recalled Margaret Goodrich.

At the end, he asked for questions in the usual way and instead of a sixth-former standing up, this young, bright-eyed, fair haired girl from the fourth year stood up and asked him a question. But the thing that rather annoyed her contemporaries was that she asked him these questions in almost parliamentary language: ‘Does the speaker think so and so?’
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Another contemporary who found herself irritated by the inquisitorial style of Margaret Roberts at lectures was her classmate Madeline Edwards. ‘Margaret could be guaranteed to get up on her hind legs and ask penetrating questions,’ she recalled. ‘The rest of us sort of looked at each other – with our eyes rolling as if to say, “Oh, she’s at it again”.’
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The questions were well rehearsed. What her classmates did not know was that Alfred Roberts was training his daughter in the art of public speaking. ‘Have something to say. Say it clearly. That is the only secret of style,’ he told her.
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He often took her on Thursday evenings to University of Nottingham Extension Lectures held in Grantham, where he encouraged Margaret to put her points to the lecturers.
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Another source of her confidence was her participation in the group discussions, usually led by her father, among the community of Methodists who attended the Finkin Street Church. It was a feature of their fellowship that after the Sunday evening service, her father’s friends took it in turns to have supper together. Even though she was the youngest present, Margaret liked to take part in these conversations, which she remembered ‘ranged far wider than religion or happenings in Grantham to include national and international politics’.
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