Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (14 page)

Such thoughts seem to have crossed Tony’s mind, and to have worried him a little. In old age, he recalled that he and Margaret never discussed marriage, and that he, with his legal training, was very wary of doing so because of the threat, still lingering from Victorian times, of an action for breach of promise.
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He thought of their relationship at that time as that of ‘just a boy and girl who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company’, which was hardly surprising, since he was only eighteen, but Margaret, perhaps, thought it meant rather more.

In any event, the visit to Grantham was ‘all right’, but not much better than that. Tony found Alfred Roberts ‘slightly austere’ and ‘totally correct’, a good, chapel-going man; Beatrice was ‘very proper’ and ‘motherly’. The shop struck him as ‘a very modest business establishment’. Tony and the Roberts family all attended the Methodist church together. It was not a riotous weekend.

It also marked a moment of parting. Tony’s six-month course at Oxford had come to an end and his full military training began in April, very shortly before the end of the war in Europe. He went to Bovington Camp in Dorset. As early as 19 April, the day before Hitler’s grim birthday celebrations in the Berlin bunker, Margaret wrote to Muriel
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that a routine has been established in their communication: ‘I usually have a letter on Tuesday morning … He says there are all sorts of weird men there but fortunately the platoon he is in is composed entirely of Oxford cadets.’ Tony, she said, had to work the whole time: ‘On Saturday they are theoretically free from 2 o’clock but in practice there is so much to be done that this could hardly be called free time. Sunday they are again supposedly free but last Sunday Tony was peeling potatoes most of the morning!!’
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The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.

After a month at Bovington, Tony went on to another training camp and continued to move from one establishment to another, including a return to Bovington, until he was posted to Germany in the following year after being commissioned in the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. He sent Margaret a photograph of himself in military uniform, which he inscribed to her. But at some time in the course of the ensuing year Tony’s replies to Margaret’s letters began to peter out and eventually stopped altogether. After writing some letters reproaching Tony for his silence, Margaret became so distressed that she wrote to Tony’s mother, whom she
had never met, to ask what had happened to him.
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The answer was, nothing very much. It was simply, though his mother naturally did not say this, that Tony had decided that the relationship should be allowed to ‘fizzle out’.
¹⁰⁹

To Margaret’s sister Muriel, there was a clear explanation. Tony, she believed, was snobbish, and had decided that Margaret was not from a good enough family for him.
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Tony, not surprisingly, saw things differently. He agreed that Margaret’s background did make him uneasy, but not, he said, because of its relatively modest circumstances. What worried him was its austere seriousness. He wanted fun, and he found it. At his second stay at Bovington, he formed a relationship with a Dorset girl called Prudence whom he describes as ‘vivacious, outgoing and attractive’. Once posted, he found that he ‘was living in a fairly glamorous world in Germany – a cavalry regiment, green trousers, all the rest of it.’ Aged barely twenty, he was not looking for commitment.
¹¹¹

What of Margaret herself? When asked by the present author, she replied with the understandable untruth that she had had no boyfriends before Denis, and when later asked specifically about Tony she acknowledged the circumstances described above but would not be drawn into any detail. As we shall see, there was more to come in the story of Tony Bray. But this occurred only after she had gone down from Oxford. In her last two years at the university, therefore, she had an absent and eventually an ex-boyfriend who was refusing to communicate with her. When Tony faded away, in her final year she formed her unrequited crush on Neil Findlay. She was successful at Oxford, getting a good second-class degree, rising to the top of Conservative politics there and making the contacts that would stand her in good stead in her career. But when she went out into the world of work in the summer of 1947, she was, as she had been when she first arrived at the university, fundamentally alone.

In the late summer of 1947, Margaret began her first job. She worked as a research chemist at BX Plastics in Manningtree, Essex. ‘Plastics’, she recalled, ‘was one of the things of the future,’
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but there is little evidence that she was much interested. She records in her memoirs that she had been expecting to work as personal assistant to the research and development director. When it turned out that she would have to put on her white coat and work in a lab, rather than with people, she was not pleased.
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She saw the job as necessary, no more. It paid her £350 a year (£400 was the rate for the equivalent male employee), which was enough to live on, but not to save from; and it was close enough to London to keep in touch with politics and to contemplate reading for the Bar while she waited for the slow business of submitting the thesis and being interviewed for her BSc at Oxford, a process that was not complete until the winter of 1948. She had no intention of staying in Essex for long.

Settled in digs in Colchester and travelling out to Manningtree in the company bus every morning, Margaret felt that life, compared with Oxford, was rather dull. ‘The wear and tear on clothes of all kinds is terrific in industry,’ she complained to Muriel. ‘By the way, HAVE MY SHOES COME BACK FROM UDALL’s YET? I’ve asked in every blessed letter I’ve written home [where Muriel was now living with their parents] but not a word about them have I received in reply.’ At her lodgings, 168 Maldon Road, the home of a young widow with two children called Enid Macaulay, she tried to look on the bright side: ‘Mercifully one is not too lonely in the evenings as there are other people in the digs too.’ She went occasionally to the ‘flicks’ (her word) with a fellow lodger, Teddy West, but he ‘
doesn’t dance’
,
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and he soon developed a girlfriend who, Margaret reported Mrs Macaulay as saying, was ‘as common as muck – thoroughly tarty, but she’s got hold of him and is trying to rush the affair as soon as possible … Apparently she’s not a fashion artist at all but traces flower designs for scarves etc. from designs drawn by someone else.’
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Margaret’s indignation suggests that she found Teddy West quite attractive.

The lack of money was a constant preoccupation. The rent, which began at two guineas (£2.10) per week, soon went up to £2 10s (£2.50), which Margaret found ‘more than a little worrying’.
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Every small excursion or purchase had to be carefully weighed:

Not going to Oxford this weekend, I decided to buy a really nice undie-set to go under my turquoise chiffon blouse. I got a very nice one, scalloped all round the top and round the pants and with some open broderie anglaise on it. It is a very pale turquoise colour and cost £5-5-0. I’ll not have to spend anything else for the rest of the month! … Oxford will have to wait until next month. Anyway a nice undie-set is essential to go away with.
⁶

Because she could not afford a perm, she changed her hairstyle – ‘am now wearing it in a big doughnut bun at the back – as it doesn’t need any curl worn that way.’
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When she wrote to her father asking for money for a tweed suit, she sent it to the shop in North Parade rather than to her parents’ new house there, so that the request would not be seen by her less indulgent mother.
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But she also wrote to Muriel with financial advice born of her current difficulties:

if you’re trying to scrape together a ‘nest egg’, do you think it’s wise to have a very expensive holiday? I know that sounds a bit like the parents, but I’m getting awfully money minded these days and realising how nice it would be to feel one’s bank balance was somewhere between £30 and £50 if one
needed
to buy anything or go anywhere in particular.
⁹

One victim of Margaret’s shortage of money was her own mother, who almost always appears in the correspondence as a faintly disapproving and embarrassing figure: ‘I shan’t be able to afford a birthday present for Mummy so shall just send a card.’
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In this rather pinched world, it was politics, as in the past, that provided Margaret with acceptance and excitement: ‘If Methodists aren’t very friendly, Conservatives are. Someone learned of my being here in Colchester and the word has gone round like wildfire. Every meeting I step into I’m greeted with “It’s Miss Roberts isn’t it?” ’
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A little later, she wrote: ‘I still don’t like the work very much but the politics and social life are beginning to go with a swing which compensates for a lot.’
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One of the first people she met through the Conservatives was Brian Harrison, a Cambridge graduate ‘with a small estate of 1500 acres’
¹³
in Essex and further family lands in Australia. Harrison, whom she had first encountered at a Conservative graduates’ conference earlier in the year, was a veteran of the
war in the Far East and a leading light in the 39–45 Group, an organization of Essex Tories with war experience. With her taste for older, soldierly men, Margaret warmed to the tall, sporting, kindly Harrison and to his group, and attended their meetings. Harrison, who was to become Conservative MP for Maldon in 1955, remembered Margaret with affection as ‘an attractive girl … very very clued up’, good company and a good dancer. She was ‘ambitious’, he said, ‘but intelligent enough to hide it’.
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He was also chairman of the Colchester Young Conservatives, and into this organization Margaret threw herself. In early October 1947, she took part in their Brains Trust on the economic crisis (‘The Socialists were all of the intellectual type and quite nice’),
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and soon she was one of their regular speakers warming up the soapbox at St Botolph’s Corner, Colchester, every Saturday night for ‘Cub’ Alport,
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the Tory candidate, whom Harrison considered ‘pompous’ and Margaret also disliked.
^†

By the next spring, Margaret had become a leading figure among the Colchester Tories. In April 1948, she told Muriel, ‘I have been doing quite a lot of speaking lately and have begun to talk completely without notes.’
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In a postscript written on 11 May, she describes a weekend political school at Colchester. As is generally the case in her letters when writing about politics, she does not mention what was discussed. Something else engrossed her attention:

the competition for the best dressed woman there being fiercely contested by Jean Murphy and I [sic] … I turned up in my black two-piece and black hat on Saturday – she wasn’t wearing a hat that day – but on Sunday she turned out in a floral dress, fox fur and straw boater with strands of veiling tied under the chin – I didn’t like the hat myself and definitely thought it too much with a fur. I was wearing my blue frock and hat and wine coat and accessories. I think I won the day both days.
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It has often been said that Margaret Roberts was much too serious a young woman to consider the social aspects of life among the Conservatives. Nothing could be further from the truth, serious though she was: she saw
the Tories as her social theatre. She went to the Derby with them (‘don’t tell parents!’) and to the Boat Race, performed for them and dressed up for them. When she wore her black two-piece for the first time in Colchester, she wrote that ‘The only chance I get to wear my best black clothes these days is at Conservative meetings of some sort!’ The two-piece ‘caused quite a stir in the digs and complimentary comments came from all sides except Mr West, who said not a word, to my annoyance!’
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In April 1948, Margaret went to a grand dinner in the House of Commons given by Alan Lennox-Boyd, later to become colonial secretary.
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As the only woman present, she sat next to the host: ‘I wore my pale blue frock and hat, wine shoes, handbag and gloves and short new musquash jacket. The ensemble looked very nice indeed.’ After ‘a marvellous dinner with all the appropriate wines’, she went for drinks at Edward Boyle’s flat, with a couple of other guests, until two in the morning. The next day she paid her first ever visit to Knightsbridge, inspected the new Roosevelt memorial and saw a film about the life of Roosevelt.
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Back in Colchester, she addressed a discussion group on the British Empire. The audience was ‘very interested and didn’t fidget from start to finish and I was speaking about an hour.’ She gave a talk to the Young Conservatives on ‘Science in the Modern World’ and she also took part in a Brains Trust of several rising Conservatives including ‘Brig. Powell (the Conservative Central Office authority on housing)’, her first recorded encounter with Enoch Powell,
^†
the man who, many believe, cleared the intellectual path for what came to be called Thatcherism.
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Life was opening up. ‘I shall be awfully sorry when the time comes to leave Colchester,’ she wrote.
²¹

There was another reason for Margaret’s improved self-esteem. On 17 February 1948, she wrote to Muriel to describe ‘the most marvellous weekend in Oxford’, which included a sherry party at the Union, a visit to old crystallography colleagues, an OUCA dinner and drinks at Lord Tweedsmuir’s manor house
^‡
out of town. But the real purport of the letter was kept to the end:

Nor is that all. When I opened one of the letters that Daddy had forwarded to me, the one with the typewritten envelope [to avoid identification by the Robertses?] and postmark ‘Oxford’ in it was contained a letter from Tony Bray!!!! The letter was very weird and sentimental ‘For three years I have not been able to write to you due to circumstances beyond my control …’ and so on in that strain. He has apparently just been demobbed and returned to Oxford last week. It’s as well I didn’t run into him unawares. I shall write back and tell him to let sleeping dogs lie. Don’t tell parents about this. All told it has been quite an eventful weekend! I shall go up again just as soon as I can afford it.
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