Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (17 page)

I went back and had drinks with the people I had been dining with,
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Mr and Mrs Soward. He is a director of a small paint company in the constituency. A co-director of his, a Major Thatcher,
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who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money) was also dining with them and he drove me back to town at midnight. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creature – very reserved but quite nice. He’s not very fond of meeting ‘people’ – he says he doesn’t get on with them awfully well. We arrived back at Liverpool St at about 1 am and packed me into the milk train which left at 3.40. Altogether it was a thrilling evening.
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Before closing, Margaret reverted to lesser subjects, asking, via her sister, for more help from her seamstress mother: ‘if she is going to do the panties I would like them in the style we did the parachute ones – cut on the cross from a small yoke, but don’t bother her if she is very tired.’

The ‘small paint company’ of which Stanley Soward was a director was called the Atlas Preservative Company, and Denis Thatcher was its general manager. Atlas was his family business, making paints, wood preservers, deck cleaners and industrial chemicals at the factory in Erith. After a successful wartime career as a staff officer, Denis had very much wanted to stay on in the army, which he loved, but a promise to his father to come and look after the firm had called him back. As an old boy of a minor public school (Mill Hill), a former officer mentioned in despatches, and the man in charge of his own prosperous firm, Denis was socially a cut above Margaret. He was also quite active in the Dartford Conservative Association. Indeed, he was one of the four local businessmen whom John Miller had approached to be the parliamentary candidate. Denis had refused the offer,
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confident that he did not want a political career. If he had accepted, he would presumably never have met Margaret and there would not have been a prime minister called Mrs Thatcher. Even before he met her, he had made way for her.

According to Denis, his friend and colleague Soward had invited him for the night of the adoption meeting with the words ‘Come to dinner: I want you to meet a very pretty girl,’ without saying who she was. When Denis arrived, he said to himself, ‘Good God, it’s the candidate!’ He thought Margaret was ‘a nice-looking young woman, a bit overweight’.
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His chance to get to know her better came because of the transport arrangements of those days, and because Margaret could neither drive nor afford a car. At that time, there was no Dartford Tunnel under the Thames and, of course, no M25 motorway, so the journey from Dartford to Colchester, today about an hour’s drive, involved either crossing the Thames by ferry or driving right back into central London to get a train (or driving right out again). Because Denis lived in London, reverse-commuting to Dartford, it was easier for him to drive her to Liverpool Street. As her letter to Muriel reveals, Margaret is mistaken in her memoirs when she says that Denis got her to the station at midnight. It was 1 a.m. Did he then stay talking to her for the full two hours forty minutes before the milk train left? If he did (as her phrase ‘packed me into the milk train’ suggests), it would explain how she had formed what was, for her, an unusually full first impression of the man. If not, and he had left her in a waiting room in the cold February small hours, would she have described him as a ‘perfect gentleman’?

Back in Colchester, her romance, if that is the right word, was developing. In the same letter in which she described her Dartford adoption, Margaret told Muriel: ‘My Scottie farmer met me off the train’ and took her to
A Lady from Edinburgh
at the Ipswich rep and then for dinner at the Great White Horse. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, but I’m afraid
he’s got it rather badly.’ She now knew his identity: ‘His name, by the way, is William Cullen, and he lives at Foulton Hall (!) Ramsay near Dovercourt.’
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She invited Muriel to come down to Colchester to meet him. Her motives for doing so were interesting. Four days earlier, she had written to Muriel: ‘Went to the flicks yesterday with my farmer friend and got him all primed up to meet you sometime. I showed him the snapshot of you and I [sic] together – and he said he could scarcely tell the difference so I should think we could easily substitute me for you. When can you come down for a weekend?’
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She seemed at one and the same time to be searching for a husband for herself and for her sister, and to be thinking of the man who was chasing her in the latter role.

Dartford was not what Tories call their natural territory. It was a heavily industrial seat with cement works, engineering companies, defence firms like Vickers Armstrong with big factories, industries connected with river traffic, and a strong trade union presence. There were areas of the constituency, such as Temple Hill, where it was considered inadvisable for a Conservative canvasser to go unaccompanied. Much of Erith was ‘red-hot Red’. One Young Conservative woman of the period remembered canvassing a house where the occupier, a Labour voter, insisted on receiving her while sitting on his outside lavatory.
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Political meetings were liable to heckling and disruption. A substantial minority of Dartford residents commuted to London for clerical and managerial jobs, and on the fringes of the constituency were a few farms and the more prosperous suburbia in which Conservatives traditionally thrive. But this was a Labour place in what, after the electoral victory of 1945, were, both in percentage of the vote and in spirit of the age, the most Labour years of the century. In Dartford, the Labour majority of 20,000 was unassailable.

The young Margaret Roberts, however, set out cheerfully to assail it. Although she was probably genuine in the admiration she professed in later years for moderate socialists in that era (‘They were fighting for the underdog’),
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she was utterly convinced that Labour policies could not work. In this she was closer to the party grass-roots than to the patrician leadership of the party which, after 1945, was in a rather defeatist frame of mind. In particular, she was close to small business and to the aspirations of young lower-middle-class people like herself born with no great advantages. They worried that the tax, controls and nationalization which had been such features of the Labour government would deny them the opportunities which they had hoped would open up with the end of the war. As the general election of 1950 approached, their anxieties were strong. They, and she, were ready for the fight with Labour – always referred to as ‘the Socialists’. There were many such young people in Dartford in 1949, and
Margaret’s arrival as candidate recruited them in ever greater numbers. The membership of the whole association rose from 2,300 shortly after she was first adopted to 3,160 shortly before she left in 1951. Nowadays such high figures would not be found in the safest Conservative seats in the country, but even for the time they were remarkable. Several hundred of the members were Young Conservatives, at that time an enormously strong national organization with good local roots, much more tribal and social than directly political. Many of these Dartford YCs formed lifelong bonds that survived into the twenty-first century, and virtually all of them identified with and admired Margaret. These people – bank clerks and bank managers, solicitors’ secretaries, a man who worked in his family firework-making business, a woman who was PA to a big local builder – saw in their smartly dressed, polite and keen young candidate a slightly grander or idealized version of themselves.

Although they regarded her as ‘upper-class educationally’,
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which they respected, they also considered Margaret their own: ‘She was one of us in a way.’
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‘She got us all going again,’ said one, and all were struck by her ‘perfect manners’ and the fact that she was ‘very grateful for what we did’. This was in contrast to some other Tory candidates, notably Edward Heath, who already sat for the neighbouring seat of Bexley, and who, though himself young and of similar social origins to Margaret, treated the Young Conservatives who worked for him (some of whom would cross the border from Dartford when called) as ‘the lowest of the low: we were kids to him.’
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Margaret was ‘plump, smart, pretty, loved hats, lovely skin’; she ‘always looked right’, and yet had her feet on the ground and ‘always knew the price of everything’, there was ‘no side to her at all’. They also noticed and admired the fight she had in her – ‘I was amazed how brave she was’ – and her obvious sincerity: ‘whatever she said she really meant it.’
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Pat Luker, who worked very closely with Margaret in the second of her two Dartford campaigns in 1951, probably summed up her appeal most eloquently when she said, ‘I think she was really, truly English. Everything was for the good of the country, the English people. We wanted everything English to be good.’
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Note that the word ‘English’ rather than ‘British’ is used. Although always Unionist in theory, Margaret Thatcher saw her country through a very English prism.

Margaret quickly got to grips with the constituency. She found that it was quite badly run, the agent being inefficient. Although, as candidate, she was not responsible for such matters, she brought enough pressure to bear after the 1950 election to make sure that he was replaced.
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The treasurer, she complained to Muriel, ‘hasn’t produced any audited accounts in years’.
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She was luckier in her Labour opponent. The sitting Member,
Norman Dodds, was a man whose politics, in later life at least, she respected – ‘a really sound Labour chap’.
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He believed, she said, in greater social cohesion rather than hard-left socialism.
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At the time, Dodds made the mistake of underestimating her and perhaps patronizing her because of her sex. Their first meeting took place at a dance given by the chairman of Crayford Urban District Council. Margaret described it:

Dodds was very nice to me personally but I am told at one of his meetings he had been flaying me right and left and saying some very harsh things. The introduction itself was most amusing. We were dragged out into the middle of the ballroom and quite a ceremony was made of the whole affair. I wore my black velvet frock with long white gloves, pearls, and long drop pearl ear-rings. Mr Dodds said he was very sorry I was an opponent! He then publicly asked me for the next dance and the M.C. said what did I request. I said a Tango. They said which one. I said ‘Jealousy’! We danced the whole dance – the only couple on the floor – no one else joined us.

The press took pictures and asked for reactions: ‘I said “we were in tune when dancing” and Mr Dodds said “in perfect harmony”. I imagine the report will make front page news next week!’
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It did.
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Earlier in the month, Dodds had engaged Margaret in a long and complicated correspondence in the
Dartford Chronicle
about the Labour government’s Direction of Labour Order in which, as always, she had driven into the argument with a bulldozer of facts. In the course of this, he had unwisely invited her to have a public debate with him, and she seized the opportunity. The debate took place in late November and Margaret distinguished herself by her detailed attacks on the Labour government’s policy of bulk-buying for rationing, for its disastrous groundnuts scheme in West Africa, and for the recent devaluation, in which the currency had moved from a fixed rate of 4 US dollars to the pound to 2 dollars and 40 cents. She called for a new policy by which ‘the pound can look the dollar in the face and not in the bootlaces’.
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Conservatives who attended remembered this meeting as one where she really proved her mettle and her knowledge. At one point, Dodds responded disbelievingly, ‘if you’ve got the figures’. She had.
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The strong tone of Margaret’s adoption speech continued as she started to campaign in the constituency. She emphasized, in relation to the Communist revolution in China, what she called ‘the division of the world into two camps’.
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At home, she called for a recovery of personal responsibility: ‘In wartime there was a slogan “It all depends on me.” People seem to have forgotten that, and they think it depends on the other person.’
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And she offered women what would nowadays be called empowerment – the idea that they knew better than their
masters: ‘Don’t be scared of the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers, but think of politics at our own household level.’
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Women had particular gifts in public affairs, which they should use: ‘Women have a special bent as technicians in human relationships, and we have come to understand the human aspect of our problems.’
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It is equally true, though less noticed, that Margaret seemed to accept the consensus of the day about what later came to be called the welfare state. Speaking to the Conservative Association’s annual general meeting a month after her adoption, she went into great detail about the Beveridge report of 1942 which led to the creation of the National Health Service and modern social security. Misleadingly she credited the Conservative domination of the wartime coalition with these ideas, and did not try to question them. She preferred to point out that ‘They are no use if the country goes bankrupt’ and that they were no substitute for arranging these matters for oneself: ‘Miss Roberts stressed that the security a family could have by saving its own money, buying its own house and investing, was far better than the ordinary security one would get from any national scheme.’
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Neither at the beginning of her career nor when she was prime minister, did Margaret Thatcher ever reject the wartime foundations of the welfare state, whether in health, social policy or education. In this, she was less radical than her critics or some of her admirers supposed. Her concern was to focus more on abuse of the system, on bureaucracy and union militancy, and on the growth of what later came to be called the dependency culture, rather than on the system itself. Similarly, Margaret’s dislike of too many government controls, though real and strong, did not take her, at this time, to the full free-market view that they should all go. ‘There is a whispering – in fact, a shouting campaign in operation,’ she complained, ‘– that if the Tories get back they will take off all the controls, but this is untrue. It was the Tories who introduced the finest food rationing system during the war.’
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In saying this, she was drawing a contrast with post-war rationing, which had actually got more severe, and seemed to be going on for ever. She shared the growing dislike of what Winston Churchill disparaged as ‘Queuetopia’, but her experience as the daughter of a wartime grocer gave her faith in the powers of national emergency organization as well as in the efficacy of markets.