Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (8 page)

Against this background, her achievement in winning a place at Oxford looks all the more outstanding. She had shown a remarkable capacity for hard work and a granite determination to overcome the obstacles put in her way. Her success was well deserved.

There were, however, two lingering doubts that hovered over her grammar school years. One concerned her relationships with other girls. Although the evidence is mixed, there were signs that she found it difficult to develop a good rapport with many of her KGGS contemporaries; to some she seemed dismissive towards them. In later life this characteristic was to cause similar problems with her female contemporaries in politics. In both settings Margaret was a loner with no apparent inclination to become ‘one of the girls’.

A second area of concern was that as a schoolgirl she tried to cram in too much, too fast. This was partly a product of the wartime regulations governing education and the call-up dates for military service. For Margaret Roberts these pressures resulted in her applying to Oxford when she was sixteen. She arrived there as an undergraduate when she was seventeen. This was probably too early, but she was never one to let the grass grow under her feet when it came to seizing the moment.

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Oxford, boyfriends and political ambition

EARLY UNHAPPINESS AT OXFORD

Margaret Roberts had an unhappy start to her life as an Oxford undergraduate. That was surprising. To the majority of its students, the university is a welcoming and exciting place, especially for those who have fought as hard as she did to get there. From the outset she found Oxford ‘cold and strangely forbidding’.
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Her disenchantment did not lift until she was well into her second year.

There was no single reason why she should have felt disillusioned with her early time as an Oxonian. Perhaps she went up too young. She was lonely, homesick and hard up. Also, she had chosen to read chemistry – a subject which did not capture her imagination, and required long hours of isolation in the lab. But the strongest negatives related to the insecurities of her personality. She was overawed by the atmosphere of Oxford. She was patronised by the dons and smarter students at Somerville. She was unlucky in her first love.

These negative sources of her unhappiness were balanced by interesting positives, although they took time to develop. She became a successful student politician, grinding tenaciously through the tedium of college membership administration of the Conservative Party, until in her fourth year she was elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA).

In addition to politics, she participated in extra-curricular activities that ranged from choral singing to Methodist preaching. In her second year she had a serious relationship with one boyfriend, and was admired by others. She went down with a good second into an immediate job. Yet, for all these accomplishments, the impression remains that she was out of sorts with Oxford, and that her personality jarred with it. This was an antipathy that later became mutual when,
in 1985, Oxford refused her an honorary degree. Her relationship with her university was never an easy one.

It did not help her early days at Oxford that the city was lacking in its usual
joie de vivre
because of the dislocations of war. Many young men had deferred their studies to join up. The era of blackouts in the quadrangle and boarded-up stained-glass windows in the college chapels may have made the wartime intake of undergraduates feel more fearful than joyful. But the major problem for Margaret Roberts as an undergraduate was her loneliness.

There was no obvious explanation for why she should have felt lonely. She had a room in Somerville, and took her meals with other students in college hall. But she was slow to make friends, privately troubled by suppressed feelings of insecurity. These came out in a revealing conversation with the one familiar face to her at Oxford, Margaret Goodrich. She recalled Margaret Roberts asking her ‘Don’t you wish you could say you had been to Cheltenham or somewhere, instead of KGGS?’
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Another contemporary and fellow chemist who noticed these insecurities was Pauline Cowan. ‘Margaret and I were known to be among the poorer members of the college. We came from a similar sort of state education background, in my case Glasgow School for Girls, and it was easy to feel patronised by the better off students. I think we both felt the Cheltenham clique looked down a bit on us.’
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Margaret’s insecurities were compounded by a growing sense of isolation. Early in her time at Oxford, the Goodrich parents, visiting their daughter, made an impromptu call on the fellow Grantham girl who a few months earlier had seemed such a gregarious visitor to their home. They found Margaret Roberts alone in her room,
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despondently toasting a crumpet and manifestly unhappy. Late in life she admitted her feelings in this period, telling the author Tricia Murray: ‘I was always rather homesick. I think there would be something very wrong with your home life if you weren’t just a little.’
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The homesickness and the insecurity made her first year fairly miserable. For the first and last time in her life she did a great deal of walking. This was
a solitary activity, taking her on lonely perambulations along the banks of the Cherwell, or around the parks. She later claimed that on these walks she was ‘enjoying my own company and thoughts’.
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This seems improbable, given her lifelong aversion to fresh air and exercise. Also her weight was going up, perhaps another indication of unhappiness. The combination of a sweet tooth and easy access to the confectionery in her father’s shop had made her a noticeably plump schoolgirl. As an undergraduate, she became even plumper. In her second year at Oxford she tipped the scales at 150 lb, which is overweight for a young woman student only 5 feet 5 inches tall.

Another problem was money. Alfred Roberts’ finances were stretched by having to pay the full Oxford fees for his daughter’s tuition, board and lodging. So Margaret had precious little cash to spare for luxuries or student frivolities. When her chemistry tutor, Dorothy Hodgkin, discovered how difficult it was for her pupil to make ends meet, a modest bursary from Somerville was quietly arranged. This was supplemented by further grants from an education trust and by occasional earnings from work in vacations. After a stint as a temporary science teacher in the long vacation of 1944, she saved up enough money to buy her first bicycle – a near necessity for getting to labs and lectures on time in Oxford.

Hard work always came first in the life of Margaret Roberts, but it is not clear how much she enjoyed her studies. She read chemistry with her usual diligence. But her tutor Dorothy Hodgkin detected that ‘she was not absolutely devoted to it’,
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adding: ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.’
⁷

The Principal of Somerville, Dame Janet Vaughan, was more dismissive of Margaret Roberts’ academic abilities. ‘I mean nobody thought anything of her. She was a perfectly good second-class chemist, a beta chemist.’
⁸

Dame Janet’s condescension extended from science to the social and political inadequacies of her college’s most celebrated graduate:

She wasn’t an interesting person, except as a Conservative. I used to entertain the young a great deal, and if I had amusing, interesting people staying with me, I would never have thought really of asking Margaret Roberts because she wasn’t very interesting to talk to, except as a Conservative.
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The damning with faint praise tone of these retrospective assessments, recorded by the BBC forty years after Margaret Roberts left Oxford, were clearly affected by donnish distaste for her politics as a Tory prime minister. She was better and more fairly judged at the time. She worked hard enough to achieve a decent second, even though she was sick with flu during her finals and had to take some of her most important papers in bed rather than in the examination schools. Her academic record qualified her to spend a fourth year at Oxford doing the research that upgraded her BA into a BSc.
¹⁰

Like many undergraduates, her wider interests took her to horizons beyond her academic subject. She may have moped during the early stages of her Oxford life, but she soon picked herself up, and developed interests that took her away from her solitude and those long melancholy walks. Music was one antidote to loneliness. She joined the Oxford Bach choir, conducted by Thomas Armstrong.
^†

As an alto in this choir, she sang in performances of the
St Matthew Passion
at the Sheldonian Theatre, and also in
Prince Igor
by Borodin,
Rio Grande
by Constant Lambert and
Hymn of Jesus
by Holst.

Religion was important to her. She was much influenced by
Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis, which she first heard in a series of radio talks with the title
Christian Behaviour.
She was a regular worshipper at the Wesley Memorial Church and an active member of the John Wesley Society. This was an evangelical arm of the Methodist movement. It sent its members out in pairs to preach the gospel in churches and chapels across Oxfordshire. Margaret Roberts was one of those preachers.

Jean Southerst, also a Methodist and Somerville undergraduate, remembers a sermon on the text, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you’,
¹¹
being delivered by Margaret Roberts. It was ‘outstanding’, according to Southerst.
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Like father, like daughter. It was interesting that the future prime minister was preaching sermons before she was making political speeches.

STIRRINGS OF ROMANCE

So far as is known, Margaret Roberts had no boyfriends during her growing-up years at Grantham. This changed at Oxford. Although her romantic life began with a painful rejection (heavily influenced by the boyfriend’s mother), she recovered from it and was later well admired, particularly by one serious suitor who she met in Michaelmas term 1944.

In her first year, Margaret was an ingénue about her love life, talking candidly about her feelings for various young men she found attractive. Over dinners in Hall at Somerville, ‘She would blush from the neck upwards’
¹³
when teased by her contemporary, Betty Spice, and others, about possible boyfriends. Another Somerville undergraduate who shared these confidences was Pauline Cowan. ‘We all knew that Margaret had set her cap at a young man with money and a title’, she recalled. ‘It went well for a while until he took her home for the weekend and found his mother couldn’t stand her.’
¹⁴

Other versions of this romance circulated among several of Margaret Roberts’ Oxford contemporaries. They were summarised by one of her earliest biographers, Penny Junor, who after stating that the men Margaret sought out were in OUCA, continued:

She fell quite soundly for the son of an earl, who went on to become something of a luminary in the Tory Party. She made no secret of her feelings, and talked about him quite gushingly, unaware that by so doing she was laying herself open to more teasing from the other girls in Hall, who by this time were growing increasingly disillusioned by her blatant use of people. They felt that if she caught herself a lord, it would be the last straw. But Margaret failed to net her lord. The relationship came to an end soon after she had met his mother.
¹⁵

The aristocratic boyfriend whose mother took against Margaret Roberts was Lord Craigmyle. In the summer of 1944, he was a twenty-year-old undergraduate reading Modern History at Corpus Christi College. He knew Margaret quite well because they were both active Conservative students. He makes his appearance, somewhat incongruously, in the first volume of her memoirs, named in a photograph of three young men in dinner jackets, captioned ‘OUCA Party in Oxford’. Besides being a handsome, clean-cut man of the type for whom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher later showed an occasional weakness (such
as Cecil Parkinson, Humphrey Atkins, Alan Clark and John Moore), ‘Craigie’ Craigmyle had other qualities she mentioned to the Somerville gossips.

Craigie had inherited his father’s title. He was heir to an enormous ship-owning fortune, which was known to be coming to him from his grandfather, the Earl of Inchcape. He was committed to his Christian faith, keenly interested in the social and political issues of the day. Besides being a great catch, he was regarded as a leading undergraduate character, showing a gregarious warmth of hospitality to his friends. But he could also be an acutely shy young man. He was exceptionally close to his mother, Lord Inchcape’s eldest daughter, who often visited him in his rooms at Corpus. If Lady Craigmyle formed the view that the provincial Miss Roberts was not a suitable girlfriend for her son that would have been an obstacle, if not a veto to their romance. Did Craigie, acting under the influence of his mother, break the young Margaret’s heart?

It seems likely. As her Somerville contemporaries knew, Margaret’s relationship with Craigie was serious enough for him to invite her to stay for the weekend at the family’s London house in the Boltons. But the meeting with Lady Craigmyle was not a success. As another Inchcape grandson, Lord Tanlaw, explained: ‘My Aunt Margaret was a formidable character, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Lady Bracknell. When she met my cousin Craigie’s new Oxford girlfriend, her comment was: “In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!” ’
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Poor Margaret Roberts! But if her hopes of catching a titled husband
^‡
were dashed by this maternal snobbery, her slimmed down figure, elegant legs and sparkling eyes were soon catching the eye of other admirers. She began to take much more interest in clothes, make-up and feminine colours. From 1944 onwards, her Oxford letters to her sister Muriel are full of reference to frocks, shoes, silk stockings and the problems of affording them. In one of these letters she described her first visit to Bond Street, where she bought brown Debutante Lanette shoes to match her brown Marshall and Snelgrove handbag. ‘Also, I had
in mind to get a nigger brown
^#
fairly brown frock in order to have a completely brown-faun rig out.’
¹⁷

All this effort to buy attractive ‘rig-outs’ was not unconnected with Margaret’s interest in the opposite sex. She had several flirtations in her latter Oxford years, with men who included Roger Gray (later a Queen’s Counsel (QC) and Crown Court Recorder), Neil Findlay and John Stebbings, a handsome swimming Blue from Kent who later became President of the Law Society. However, none of them were serious, at least in comparison to her relationship with Tony Bray, who came up to Oxford in October 1944 as an army cadet on a six-month military training course.

Initially attracted by their shared interest in OUCA politics, Margaret and Tony were going out together on a regular basis by the summer of 1945. They went to several college dances and to one particularly special ball at the Randolph Hotel. Margaret’s ecstatic description of the evening in a letter to Muriel conveys the impression of a young woman falling in love: