Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (10 page)

No letters from Margaret survive from her first year at Oxford, but in the fairly numerous ones she wrote, almost all to Muriel, in her next three years clothes and the difficulty of affording them provide the main subject. Brownness recurs: ‘the rust-coloured material … will fit in with the brown side of my wardrobe,’ she wrote in an undated letter sent after returning early to Oxford, in order to do fire-watching, before her second year in September 1944. She takes advantage of the journey from Grantham via London to pay her first ever visit to Bond Street, ‘though I didn’t tell Mummy so’, and buys brown court shoes called Debutante Lanette to match her brown handbag at Marshall and Snelgrove. ‘Also I had in mind to get a nigger brown [this was a standard name for a haberdashery colour of the time, not a racist phrase of Margaret’s invention] fairly plain frock’ in order to have ‘a completely brown-fawn rig-out’.

She found one. A problem, however, arose: ‘It looked absolutely stunning and I was thrilled to bits with it. I was just about to say I’d take it when I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t asked the price … after all this was the
inexpensive
gown floor wasn’t it? Much to my open-mouthed dismay, the assistant said it was £20 …’ Luckily, Margaret was able to find, among woollens, what she described, breathless for lack of punctuation, as ‘a fairly plain little frock with a peter pan colour two little
pockets on the bodice and two to match on the skirt’ for £3 16s. Even this price was high for Margaret, but the ‘elderly’ assistant then did a hard sell: ‘she saw that I was a little surprised and said that it was superb value for money [always the way to Margaret’s heart] and it was not necessarily how much you paid for a frock that counted which I could quite believe after trying on the “inexpensive gowns”.’ The bargain-hunter was persuaded, as she excitedly recounts: ‘Well to cut a long story short I bought the frock and I’m sure that it is one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made. I’ll try to smuggle it home next time to show you without Mummy seeing … I shall be well set up for frocks then for any and every occasion.’
¹⁰

Margaret was self-conscious, too, about her weight. When the present author once asked her what she thought of her own looks as a young woman, she answered, ‘Oh, I never thought I was good-looking. I thought I was slightly overweight.’
¹¹
In those days, it was by no means as unfashionable as it is today for a woman to be quite plump, but, in another part of the letter quoted above, Margaret, with scientist’s humour, expresses her anxiety: ‘… I still weigh about 10st 4lbs … The slight decrease in volume doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the mass … Can you recommend … anything from the medical point of view for reduction of the area of the seat and control of the tummy muscles – oh and also reduction and uplift of bust?’
¹²
At one point her weight reached 10 stone 10 pounds, quite a lot for a twenty-year-old girl of 5 foot 5 inches.
*

But if Margaret might be disparaged as a slightly podgy, frumpy person, someone beneath notice, by some in Oxford’s grander circles, she faced almost the opposite problem within her own college. According to Betty Spice, who, with Margaret, was one of only three girls in her year in the college reading chemistry, the tables in hall at Somerville were divided into three columns, and these tended, in practice, to represent different groups within the college. The tables nearest the high table seated the ‘more exotic types’, foreigners, Jews, Nina Mabey (the future novelist Nina Bawden) and articulate girls who read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). The tables at the other end were the haunts of the public school girls. Those in the middle belonged to the grammar school products, many from back
grounds similar to Margaret’s own. It was natural to them to accommodate Margaret, therefore, and they did so, but without great enthusiasm on their part or, possibly, on hers.
*
Her voice was part of the trouble. ‘When she talked, she was not natural,’ Betty Spice remembered.
¹³
She was ‘pretty, in a baby-doll sort of way’, but ‘You couldn’t get close to her. She didn’t want us because we were only grammar school girls. She was interested in making her way with people who would help her.’ Another exact contemporary, Jean Southerst, also noted her speech and appearance: ‘Her voice, elocution-trained, was regarded as affected, and her preoccupation with her appearance caused amusement. She went to the most expensive hairdresser in Oxford (Andreas) and spent days during the vac. combing the West End for suitable dresses.’
^†
Margaret’s first elocution lessons had been to improve a mild speech impediment and help her declaim in public. According to Joan Parker, a pupil at KGGS, slightly younger than Margaret, the girls would have whole-class elocution lessons in which Lincolnshire vowels were erased so that the girls no longer said ‘moostard’ or ‘coostard’.
¹⁴
Amy Wootten, who read maths in the same year and sat at Margaret’s table in hall, denied that Margaret was at all ‘snooty’, but said that she was ‘not outgoing’: she was ‘never in a position where she owed anyone anything’.
¹⁵
Mary Mallinson, who shared digs in Walton Street with Margaret in her last year, noted her as someone who was always ‘unobtrusively neat and well-groomed’ and not easy to know.
¹⁶
Pauline Cowan, who shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road, the previous year, 1945–6, says that Margaret was ‘not socially climbing’ but, rather, ‘diffident’: ‘I never felt of her as obviously very happy.’
¹⁷

In fact, matters were not as bad as this might suggest. Margaret won respect. Even Betty Spice records that she was ‘an honest person’,
¹⁸
and that she quite enjoyed being teased about possible boyfriends at meals in hall (‘She would blush from the neck upwards’). Pamela Rhodes thought her ‘very mature for her years’,
¹⁹
and Jean Southerst, a fellow Methodist, recalled that ‘her room in college was always open for pleasant evenings for gossip, poetry reading (I owe her much for that) and partaking of the excellent coffee and cakes etc., which, as a grocer’s daughter, made her a very popular hostess!’
²⁰
She impressed as someone who would do what she promised and who ‘had a clear idea of what she wanted to attain’.
²¹
And Margaret happily took part in the jollifications of fellow female students. At the end of her third-year exams, she wrote to Muriel that she had been with friends to see the film
Quiet Wedding
: ‘It’s an absolute scream. I laughed more than I have for months, I wish you’d seen it. On Tuesday night we went to see
Passage to Marseilles
, with Humphrey Bogart … It wasn’t a bad film but it wasn’t outstanding either. We enjoyed it because we were celebrating. Did I tell you that seven of the men failed?’
²²

The sort of qualities which Margaret displayed were not of the type to endear her to the typical student mind, which values spontaneity over carefulness. Here is Mary Mallinson recalling an incident at the very end of their time at Oxford, the Sunday before Finals in the Walton Street digs with their fellow lodger, Mary Foss.
*

Margaret was up to her eyes … Mary Foss and I had had an easier year, but Mary was in a panic because she had spent a lot of time in social activities during the year and suddenly realised how much she hadn’t done. We were each in our rooms, Mary downstairs and Margaret and I on the first floor, when there was a loud thump. Margaret and I rushed downstairs and found Mary flat out in a faint on the floor. We did what we could then went back upstairs to get on with our revision. When the same thing had happened for the 4th time, Margaret looked at me and said that we couldn’t spend all day rushing up and downstairs. She realised that it was a form of hysteria. Having agreed that on no occasion had Mary suffered any injury, she suggested that next time we just left her. She wasn’t being unkind. She was being realistic and practical. She had so much work to do and just could not afford the time …
²³

Of the four women’s colleges at Oxford, Somerville was the most austere. There was a joke current at the time about the different reaction of girls at the different colleges to a friend who said she had just met a young man. The woman from Lady Margaret Hall said: ‘Who are his parents?’ The one from St Hilda’s said, ‘What games does he play?’ The one from Somerville said, ‘What is he reading?’ and the woman from St Hugh’s said, ‘Where is he?’
²⁴

The prevailing expectation among the undergraduates of her college
was of work which involved educational or public service. There was little thought of business or money or glamour, or a political career. Life was serious and the privilege of a woman’s education at a great university had to be repaid. Margaret herself believed devoutly in worthiness and public service, but she applied these beliefs during her career in a way which many Somervillians did not like and with a success of which some, perhaps, were jealous. There was some resentment that, of all the girls who went to Somerville, it had to be she who became world famous. She exhibited what many considered a sort of smug perfection. Betty Spice said, ‘We’re not proud of Margaret. We found it a bit galling that she became prime minister, and that she married Denis and got his money and then had the twins in one go.’
²⁵
At the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret’s year’s matriculation – 1993 – Somerville laid on a dinner, with drinks in the college’s new Margaret Thatcher Suite. Seeing the bust of the ex-Prime Minister there, one of her contemporaries went up and covered it with a windcheater, to widespread amusement.
²⁶
Something similar applies to many of Somerville’s dons, particularly those under the influence of Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville from 1945, and one of those progressives who regard being a Conservative as a sort of mental defect. ‘She stood out,’ she told a pair of biographers. ‘Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about then … she was so set as steel as a Conservative … We used to entertain a good deal at weekends, but she didn’t get invited. She had nothing to contribute, you see.’
²⁷
Pauline Cowan remembers dining at Somerville high table shortly after Margaret became prime minister in 1979. ‘We’re all wearing black,’ the dons told her.
²⁸
It could be argued that Margaret’s career exemplified the tradition of radicalism which Janet Vaughan invoked: her youthful Conservatism certainly showed a determination not to conform. The truth is that most of her Somerville contemporaries did not know her terribly well, and were not strongly attracted by what they did know.

For her part, Mrs Thatcher always spoke warmly of Somerville, even including Janet Vaughan – ‘a remarkable person’,
²⁹
whose subsequent scientific work she followed with interest. If she noticed any hostility, she did not mention it, let alone reciprocate. She maintained her admiration for the college system – ‘A college is a college, thank goodness’
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– and although she was deeply hurt by Oxford University’s vote to refuse her an honorary degree when she was prime minister, she never directed any of the same feeling towards her college. Partly because of her warm respect for Daphne Park, Principal of Somerville from 1980 to 1989,
*
she maintained an interest in
the place throughout her years as prime minister. But it is also true that she kept no close friends from Somerville days.

In a letter to Muriel of 19 April 1945 (less than two weeks before the death of Hitler, but the war is not mentioned), Margaret describes returning to the college slightly earlier than her fellows (probably to take part in a short electioneering course organized by OUCA). She went into dinner after arriving and ‘to my dismay’ found herself:

in solitary state, alone in that immense hall except for the maid to wait on me. The dons have dinner in their private dining room during the vac. so there was no question of their company thank goodness. I had a marvellous dinner. First there was some lovely creamy soup and then some very tender lean beef, together with roast potatoes, caulyflower [sic], and white sauce provided the main course. Finally there was some lemon jelly with lemon flavoured meringue on top.

After dinner, she couldn’t find a porter, so she hauled her own trunk to the bottom of her staircase, but finding it too heavy, unpacked it in the quad and ‘carried my things up in armfulls [sic]’. ‘I then began to unpack the contents of my room to alleviate its bareness a little,’ but by half-past eleven she was exhausted and went to bed.
³¹
This is not the letter of someone who hates her college, nor yet the letter of someone who is wholly happy there.

Part of Margaret’s relative isolation at Somerville derives from the fact that she was a scientist. As a chemist, she was one of only five women in her year in the entire university. Long hours in the labs, and at lectures which, unlike those in the arts, were more or less compulsory, kept her away from much of the society of her fellow Somervillians. Although she worked hard, Margaret did not particularly enjoy life in the lab: ‘I was much more interested in the theory than in the practical work.’
³²
She was fortunate, though, that, in Dorothy Hodgkin, Somerville had one of the most distinguished chemists in the world. Mrs Hodgkin, who later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, was famous for her crystallographic analysis of the structure of molecules, and later discovered important information about the structure of penicillin. Penicillin, the first antibiotic, had been discovered in 1928, but its pioneering trials had taken place much later, in Oxford, two years before Margaret went up: it was what would now be called the cutting edge of science at that time. According to Margaret’s fellow chemist Betty
Spice, Dorothy Hodgkin was a ‘brilliant chemist, but an awful tutor’, whose tutorials used to trickle away into complete silence,
³³
and Pauline Cowan, while not going so far, agreed that she was bad at teaching first-year students.
³⁴
Margaret, however, felt an enormous respect for Mrs Hodgkin. Perhaps because of this, she elected, for Part II chemistry, to work with Mrs Hodgkin in person. Most Oxford undergraduate courses were and are three years long. It was possible for chemists to obtain an unclassified degree after their exams at the end of three years, but the full, classified BSc with honours was awarded only to those who stayed on a further year for research, culminating in a thesis which was ‘viva-ed’ (discussed at interview). This is what Margaret chose to do, under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin.