Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (7 page)

Alfred Roberts’ role in his daughter’s education expanded further when it looked as though wartime pressures at KGGS were having an adverse effect on Margaret’s academic performance. In her lower sixth year of 1940–41 her average marks slipped below 70 per cent for the first time. In her favourite subjects of chemistry, biology, zoology and geography she continued to achieve the highest grades. But her weakest subjects of French and English dragged her down, as she scored only F grades (‘fair to weak’) in them.

Her father took a keen interest in these results. Extra hours of tuition at home were deemed necessary, partly to improve Margaret’s low marks, and partly because KGGS became overcrowded when the Camden School for Girls was evacuated from London in 1939 to share its buildings for five terms. This resulted in ‘Operation Double Shift’, which meant that KGGS used the school in the mornings and Camden in the afternoons. Both sets of pupils spent fewer hours in the classroom.
¹⁶

Alfred rose to the challenge of home-schooling Margaret in the afternoons and at weekends. He was out of his depth in science, but this did not matter as KGGS had an outstanding chemistry teacher in Miss Kay, who Margaret found inspirational. But on other subjects, his self-educated mind was better stocked than several of the KGGS staff. Alfred was certainly an improvement on Miss Ophelia Harding, the history mistress. ‘Very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and dowdy in dress,’ was Margaret’s tart comment. Another bad review came from Muriel’s friend Betty Morley, who described the history teacher as ‘a bit of a dud … She was always going off into long silences and trances.’
¹⁷

Silences and trances were not a feature of Margaret Roberts’ upbringing. She liked to argue, often with the fervour of moral certainty she absorbed from her father’s teachings and from the Methodist Church. These arguments were often conducted with older people, particularly with her father and his Sunday night supper group.

To most of her contemporaries at school she was not a particularly memorable or congenial figure. She sang in the choir, looked rather plump and was thought of as a swot. She had a minor speech defect, an inability to pronounce her Rs. Another course of elocution lessons eliminated the problem. They may also have given her the famously precise and slightly precious diction that grated on the ears of her political critics some forty years later. At the time, this made her seem out of the ordinary.

‘The best description of Margaret is that she was always ladylike, sensible and serious,’ said her classmate Gladys Foster. ‘She worked very hard, and spent a lot of time reading and studying at home.’
¹⁸

The perception that Margaret Roberts was an industrious but unmemorable pupil at KGGS changed during her last two years. Her carefully polished questions (she invariably asked the first one) to visiting school speakers continued to irritate one or two of her contemporaries. But what really brought her to the attention of her teachers were the blazing rows she had with the headmistress of KGGS, Miss Dorothy Gillies. The issue at stake was that Margaret Roberts was determined to get her own way.

GETTING HER OWN WAY

There were two remarkable headmistresses of KGGS during Margaret Roberts’ time there. She revered one and despised the other. The difference had to do with a clash of wills provoked by Margaret’s dislike of being patronised, a feature of her personality which lasted long into her political career.

When Margaret entered KGGS in 1936, the headmistress was Miss Gladys Williams, a petite, energetic Mancunian who had been in her post ever since the school opened its doors in 1910. Her vision, spelt out in a speech-day address in the 1920s and often quoted to subsequent generations of her girls, was: ‘It is not our business to turn out teachers or typists, or even housewives, but to try to send out girls capable and desirous of doing some part of the world’s work well.’
¹⁹

This was a purpose that would have appealed to Alfred Roberts, who became a governor of the school in 1941, and also to his ambitious younger daughter. Margaret was inspired by the scholarship, the infectious enthusiasm and the sermons of Gladys Williams; one of which she quoted some forty-seven years after it was preached.

Coming out of a Sunday service in Kent in 1976 with Margaret Thatcher, she remarked to me that the vicar’s sermon, which had featured a Roman centurion, was ‘very ordinary’.
^†
She then continued, ‘Very ordinary indeed – at least when I think of the greatest sermon I ever heard.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘It was the sermon preached at the service to mark the retirement of my old headmistress,’ declared the Leader of the Opposition, ‘and it was about a centurion, too. My headmistress took as her text the words: “For I also am a man under authority.”
²⁰
She explained in the most inspired terms how the centurion who said that was absolutely confident of his own authority, but he also had absolute trust in his higher authority.’
²¹

A few months after hearing this sermon, Margaret Roberts was in angry conflict with the senior authority of KGGS, her new headmistress, Miss Dorothy Gillies.

Miss Gillies was a classicist from Edinburgh, described by one former pupil as being ‘rather fierce … with a Morningside accent just like Maggie Smith in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
’.
²²
According to the official history of KGGS Miss Gillies was ‘a perfectionist and a disciplinarian’.
²³
These qualities should have given her a natural rapport with the disciplined perfectionist who was destined to become her most famous pupil. Not so. Their clashes became a school legend.

The problem was that Miss Gillies’ career guidance and Miss Roberts’ career ambition came into headlong collision. Their first disagreement came when Margaret informed her headmistress that she intended to get to the top of a career stream in the British Empire that was notoriously difficult for women to succeed in. ‘She told me that she wanted to enter the Indian Civil Service,’ recalled Dorothy Gillies. ‘I expressed surprise and pointed out that, like almost every other walk of life at that time, it was male-dominated. Margaret replied: “All the better for it. If I succeed, my success will be all the more creditable”.’
²⁴

Entering the Indian Civil Service was a high hurdle for academic as well as gender reasons. The ICS examination was fiercely competitive. Passing out near the top of the list opened a golden road to the glittering prizes of the Raj. It was a first-class ticket to the realm of viceroys, governors, judges, administrators and
district officers on the sub-continent. But Miss Gillies was right to warn that no woman had ever climbed near the top of this imperial ladder. Although Margaret Roberts was to be admired for disregarding the warning of sex discrimination difficulties, she showed little political discernment in her desire to proceed down the Indian Civil Service route. It took the paternal guidance of her father to point out, with the perspective of the 1940s, that India was unlikely to go on being governed by a British civil service. Eventually, after a family argument, Margaret dropped the idea.

The flame of her ambition also burned in the direction of winning a scholarship to Oxford. Only nine KGGS girls had achieved this in the thirty-two-year history of the school, but one candidate in the year above her, Margaret Goodrich, had recently secured a scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall. Margaret Roberts wanted to emulate her friend’s success. But Miss Gillies rather patronisingly thought she would not be up to it. When the headmistress tried to discourage her pupil from making the attempt, a furious row took place: ‘She’s trying to thwart my ambition,’ complained Margaret.
²⁵

The thwarting nevertheless continued. The Somerville examination required Latin as a compulsory paper. The headmistress firmly pointed out that although KGGS taught
First Steps in Latin
(the basic textbook) to its junior forms, advanced lessons in this subject were not part of its sixth-form curriculum. Margaret no less firmly replied that the problem could be overcome by taking private lessons in Latin. These had been organised for Margaret Goodrich. Miss Gillies refused the same arrangements for Margaret Roberts on the grounds that she would be studying advanced Latin over a year too late, so could not possibly achieve the standards required by the Somerville College examiners in two terms. This led to another argument that ended in defeat for Miss Gillies. Margaret was allowed to attempt the impossible, but only if private lessons could be arranged for her outside school hours. Even this concession was said to have been reluctantly granted to the daughter of Alfred Roberts solely because he was about to become Chairman of the Board of Governors of KGGS.
^‡

According to her Grantham contemporary Malcolm Knapp, Margaret herself organised her extra-curricula Latin lessons by knocking on the door of
a neighbour at No. 55 North Parade. He was V.R.W. Waterhouse, a schoolmaster with a big nose, which brought him the nickname of ‘Beaky’ at King’s School in Grantham.

‘Beaky’ Waterhouse was not a classics master, but he knew his Latin. So, when Margaret Roberts asked him, ‘Can you teach me enough Latin to get me into Oxford?’, he responded positively, striking a deal for tuition payments with her father.
²⁶
As a private tutor, ‘Beaky’ did a good job. For after some twenty weeks of his intensive coaching, Margaret was judged to have reached a sufficiently high standard of Latin to be capable of passing an Oxford paper in the subject. One up to Miss Roberts, and one down to Miss Gillies.

The battle of wills between the headmistress and her combative sixth-former gave some interesting signposts to the latter’s personality. They showed that Margaret could be fearless in argument and dedicated in application. These qualities gave her confidence that ‘doing the impossible’ was not necessarily as hard as the conventional wisdom suggested. Yet these positive aspects were balanced by one negative side of her personality. For the episode later revealed that Margaret could bear grudges.

In the Thatcher archives at Churchill College, Cambridge there exists an undated speaking note about her education at KGGS. It consists of bullet points in her adult handwriting under the heading ‘Fortunate School’. The purpose of the bullet points is to draw a comparison between her two headmistresses. The subheading ‘Miss Williams’ is followed by favourable points such as ‘set out to achieve the highest values’. In stark contrast, the name ‘Miss Gillies’ is accompanied by just two words; ‘obstacles overcome’.
²⁷

These back of the envelope jottings may have been used as speech notes for Margaret Thatcher’s return visit, as Prime Minister, to KGGS in 1982. On this occasion she poured praise on the virtues of Miss Williams, but conspicuously failed to make any mention of Miss Gillies. At least this was an improvement on Margaret Thatcher’s behaviour towards her second headmistress when she first came back to the school as a newly elected MP in 1960. In the view of other old girls present, she caused extreme offence by snubbing Miss Gillies and gratuitously correcting her former headmistress’s rendering of the Latin grace.
²⁸
Margaret Goodrich, who also attended the evening, commented on her friend’s rudeness: ‘That very small thing turned the entire dinner party away from her. It was a very silly thing to do.’
²⁹

For her part, Miss Dorothy Gillies bore these demonstrations of resentment with dignity. However, in her retirement she gave a glimpse of her feelings when she told one former pupil: ‘I believe I had an influence on all my girls – but not on Margaret Roberts.’
³⁰

The battles with Miss Gillies may well have acted as a spur to the seventeen-year-old Margaret. She spent the last five months of 1942 studying intensively for the Somerville examination, which she sat in December. The result seemed to her ‘something of a blow’
³¹
because she was not awarded a scholarship. But as a consolation prize she was offered a place at Oxford for the academic year commencing in Michaelmas term, October 1944.

The consolation prize was a huge achievement. However, it had disadvantages in comparison to a scholarship. Fees would have to be paid by her father; her entrance to the university would be postponed for a year; and under wartime regulations she would only be permitted to take a two-year Oxford degree before being called up to do her military service at the age of twenty. These constraints were a disappointment but, as she put it, ‘there was nothing I could do about it’.
³²

Margaret Roberts somewhat reluctantly enrolled for another year at KGGS. She was appointed joint head girl in the third-year sixth form. ‘I hope that she will show wisdom in the allotting of both time and energy to her work during the coming months, in order that she may do herself full justice,’
³³
wrote Miss Gillies in a disparaging comment on a pupil who had just won a place at Oxford.

Luck came to the rescue. Six weeks after the term started, a telegram arrived from Somerville. One of the new entries of arriving undergraduates had dropped out, so an unexpected place at the college was on offer. It was accepted with alacrity. In the first week of October 1943, a few days short of her eighteenth birthday, Margaret Roberts left home in Grantham and headed for Oxford University.

REFLECTION

‘I would not have been in No. 10 but for this school,’
³⁴
declared Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she came back to KGGS in 1986 to open Roberts Hall, named after her father in recognition of his long service as Chairman of the Governors. In 1992, she paid her
alma mater
an even greater tribute when she
took her title, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, from her school rather from her home town and birthplace.

Despite these retrospective compliments, Margaret Roberts did not have a smooth ride throughout her five years as a KGGS pupil. The change of headmistress upset her, so much so that she developed an angry and confronta- tional attitude towards Miss Gillies. The disruption to school classes caused by ‘Operation Double Shift’ reduced Margaret’s access to good teaching. There must have been times when the bleak war news and the bombing raids on Grantham unsettled her.