Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (3 page)

31.
En route to an emergency Cabinet meeting on Nixon’s economic package, August 1971. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

32.
With a portrait of Ted Heath, 1973. (© Paul Delmar/Getty Images)

33.
Mrs, Lord Carrington and Ted Heath at an election press conference, October 1974. (© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

34.
‘My cupboard is not a hoard in any sense of the word.’ ‘Maggie’ the housewife, December 1974. (©
Daily Mail
/Rex Features)

35.
At her hairdresser, Chalmers of Mayfair, January 1975. (© James Gray/ Associated Newspapers/Rex Features)

36.
After the first ballot of the leadership election, February 1975. (© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

37.
With her family after the second ballot, February 1975. (© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix /Alamy.

38.
On
The Jimmy Young Show
, 1975. (© Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

39.
Carrying the torch for Europe: Mrs Thatcher campaigning for the ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 referendum. (© Philippe Achache/Gamma/Camera Press London)

40.
The first meeting between Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, April 1975. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

41.
Family photo with the Cullens, 1975. (By kind permission of Andrew Cullen)

42.
With Peter Morrison, Isle of Islay, August 1978. (By kind permission of Dame Mary Morrison)

43.
At a Conservative local government conference, March 1979. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

44.
Notes for the St Francis of Assisi speech given on the steps of No. 10, 1979. (Copyright © Lady Thatcher. Reproduced with permission from
www.margaretthatcher.org
, the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation)

45.
‘Where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ – Mrs Thatcher enters 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister, May 1979. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

46.
With Norman St John-Stevas, State Opening of Parliament, May 1979. (© AP/Press Association Images)

47.
In the uniform of the UDR, South Armagh, August 1979. (PA 4690057 © PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

48.
‘Not for turning’ – party conference, October 1980. (© CPA Photos/Topfoto)

49.
SAS hostage rescue cartoon, 1980. (Nicholas Garland/
Daily Telegraph
/British Cartoon Archive)

50.
With the Patterson family at home, August 1980. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

51.
The Brixton riots, April 1981. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

52.
Listening to Ted Heath at the Party conference, Blackpool, October 1981. (© Bill Cross/
Daily Mail
/Rex Features)

53.
Leaving the Imperial Hotel, January 1982, while Mark Thatcher was missing in North Africa. (© Press Association Images)

54.
With Denis at Chequers 1980. (© Richard Slade/Camera Press)

55.
‘Rejoice’ – with John Nott after the recapture of South Georgia, April 1982. (© BBC Archives)

56.
Royal Marine commandos ‘yomp’ to victory, spring 1982. (© IWM/Camera Press)

57.
With Admiral Lord Lewin, St Paul’s Cathedral, October 1982. (© PA/PA Archive/Press Association Images)

58.
Touring Strasbourg with Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt, June 1979. (© Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

59.
With President Jimmy Carter, Tokyo, June 1979. (© AP/Press Association Images)

60.
En route to Tokyo, meeting Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, Moscow, June 1979. (© Valery Zufarov/TASS Photo)

61.
With the Queen at Lusaka, October 1979. (© Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)

62.
Dancing with President Kenneth Kaunda, Lusaka, 1979. (© AP/Press Association Images)

63
and
64
. The Thatchers in India, April 1981. (© John Downing/Getty Images)

65.
With Indira Gandhi, Downing Street, 1982. (© Central Press/Getty Images)

66.
Curtseying to the Queen Mother, Clarence House, 1980. (© Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

67.
With Ronald Reagan at the White House, January 1981. (© Rex Features)

68.
With Airey Neave. (© Rex Features)

69.
Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher’s press spokesman. (© Topfoto)

70.
Gordon Reece, Mrs Thatcher’s advertising guru. (© Lionel Cherruault/Camera Press)

71.
Leaving No. 10 with Ian Gow. (© Mike Parrison/T/D/Camera Press)

72.
The ‘Gang of Four’: David Owen, Bill Rodgers, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins, 1981. (© Mike Parrison/T/D/Camera Press)

73.
With Harold Macmillan, 1979 (© Keystone/Getty Images)

74.
Jim Prior. (© Central Press/Getty Images)

75.
With Michael Foot at the Cenotaph, Remembrance Day, November 1981. (©
Daily Mail
/Solo Syndication)

76.
With Geoffrey Howe, 1980 Party Conference. (© Geoff Bruce/Central Press/Getty Images)

77.
Sir Keith Joseph at the Conservative Party Conference, 1980. (© Keystone/Getty Images)

78.
Norman Tebbit, Conservative Party Conference, 1981. (© Topfoto)

79.
With Willie Whitelaw, 1982. (© David Cole/Rex Features)

Phoebe Stephenson took her granddaughter Muriel Roberts upstairs. Through the bedroom door came the cry of a newborn baby. ‘Can you hear something?’ Phoebe asked the four-year-old Muriel. ‘I said “no”,’ Muriel recalled more than seventy years later. ‘I
could
hear something but I wouldn’t say so.’
¹
With this lack of fanfare, on 13 October 1925, the future Margaret Thatcher came into the world.

She was born Margaret Hilda Roberts, in the house of her parents Alfred Roberts and his wife Beatrice Stephenson – 1 North Parade, Grantham, Lincolnshire. They lived above the shop, a grocery that Alfred Roberts had bought in 1919. Muriel was Margaret’s only sister. The Robertses had no sons.

The son of a bootmaker from Ringstead in Northamptonshire, Alfred Roberts had left school at the age of thirteen because of the need to make a living, but he longed for education, and acquired it by voracious reading and study. He had risen through the retail trade, having, early in life, been an assistant in the tuck shop at Oundle School. He was a local preacher (what Anglicans would call a lay preacher) in the Methodist Church, and a few notes for his sermons survive. In these, the only trace of his lack of formal education is the occasional misspelling – ‘attemp’, ‘waisting your time’, ‘beleif’, ‘desease’.
²
The hand is elegant and the expression clear and fluent.

On one page of an old schoolbook, in notes for a sermon delivered after the Second World War,
³
Alfred Roberts reflects on ‘The neglected length of mahogany counter’ and what might be made of it: ‘what a thing of beauty it became when the craftsman contributed all his skill of polishing. But the beauty was there, just waiting to be revealed.’ On the same page, Roberts offers another example:

The neglected child, ragged, dirty, unattractive, removed from the squalor of a home and parents who showed her no love or care, to foster parents who brought love, care and affection into its life. What a transformation.
The child was gloriously beautiful, a most lovable disposition, and infectious cheerfulness. These things were there all the time but only when someone made their full contribution did they become part of human experience.

When Alfred Roberts’s younger child had made her ‘full contribution’ to her country, she re-read these notes, in preparation for her memoirs, and linked the two stories. On a yellow Post-it note stuck to the page, she wrote ‘Mahogany and child’.

The mahogany counter with which Margaret grew up and across which she sometimes served customers was always beautifully polished. ‘If you get it from Roberts’s … you get – THE BEST’ boasted an advertisement in the
Grantham Almanack
in 1925, and those who remembered the grocer’s shop said that the boast was justified. Although North Parade is beyond the end of Grantham High Street, better-off families from the centre of town would make the extra journey for the extra quality. Mary Wallace, for example, whose father was the leading dentist in the town, and who was almost the only other Grantham girl of Margaret’s generation to go to Oxford, remembered her mother doing so.
⁴
Margaret herself lovingly recalled: ‘Behind the counter there were three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles, and on top of these stood large, black, lacquered tea canisters … In a cool back room … hung sides of bacon which had to be boned and cut up for slicing. Wonderful aromas of spices, coffee and smoked hams would waft through the house.’
⁵
Mary Robinson, who worked as an assistant in the shop, remembered that it had ‘better biscuits’ – a key quality indicator at that time – than Roberts’s commercial and political rival, the Co-op.
⁶

The shop stood on a corner between the richer and poorer districts of the town, and served both of them. As well as being a high-class provision merchant, Roberts’s was also a post office, and therefore served the clients of the early welfare state. Poverty and bourgeois comfort lived close to one another, and Margaret used to walk past the labour exchange on her way to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, although by the time she entered KGGS in 1936 unemployment in Grantham had halved from its peak of 2,300 in 1933. Seventy years later, she remembered a widow in black entering the shop with two small children: ‘She asked if she could have three small oranges for the price of two because she had to be so careful.’
⁷
She explained, ‘Life was not something we did not know about. We were right in it.’
⁸

The Robertses saw it as their duty to help in a small and discreet way where they found distress. Every Thursday afternoon, which was early closing day for the shop, Beatrice Roberts would have a ‘big bake’. Two
or three of the loaves would go out to ‘people we knew’ who were on hard times. The act of charity had to be obscured before it could be accepted: Margaret would hand over a loaf saying, ‘Mother’s had a big bake and she wondered whether you would like this. It is home-made, and it’s better than bought … You had to be very careful. People … are very proud.’
⁹
*
According to Muriel, fellow Methodists regarded Roberts as almost a soft touch: ‘If they wanted money, “Oh, Alf will give us some.” We hadn’t got it but we gave it.’
¹⁰
But, like the man in the song, Alfred Roberts did well by doing good. The shop prospered. He added the premises of 2, 3 and 4 North Parade to those of No. 1 with which he had started, and not long before Margaret’s birth he opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road, about a mile away towards the station. It was opposite this that Margaret attended her first school, Huntingtower Road County Elementary School. Roberts never became rich, and when he died in 1970 he left little more than his modest house and a few pieces of furniture: of the chattels, his famous daughter took only two chairs.
¹¹
But he established a secure and respected business, which gave him the base from which to serve the town as a councillor, a Rotarian and a Methodist.

The base was quite austere. The house had no garden, no hot water, and an outside lavatory. After the war, during which Roberts’s reliability and efficiency as a grocer had allowed him to increase his wealth in the era of rationing when these qualities were at a premium, Roberts could afford to buy a separate house, with a garden, at No. 19 in the same street. It was called Allerton, named, as suburban houses of that date often were, after an aristocratic seat, in this case that of the Stourton family in Yorkshire. But, all the time that Margaret was living exclusively at home, home was 1 North Parade. She was proud of the business and intensely proud of her father, but she could early see the limitations of where she lived. In 1985, she told Miriam Stoppard: ‘Home really was very small and we had no mod cons and I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had.’
¹²

Home was strict as well as small. It was dominated by work, and by religion. The shop was open until 9 p.m. on a Saturday and 8 p.m. on a Friday. Monday was washing day, and Tuesday ironing.
¹³
Because of the demands of the shop, Margaret ‘never went on holiday with Mum and Dad’,
¹⁴
and because of the prevailing atmosphere of constant work, she
never daydreamed or was idle. As her daughter Carol put it, ‘She never experienced nothingness.’
¹⁵
Sunday was a day of almost continuous religious activity. Alfred Roberts’s preaching circuit was centred on Finkin Street Methodist Church, a handsome building in the middle of the town. The family attended Sunday services there, and sometimes at the much closer chapel in Brownlow Street. There was Sunday school at 10 o’clock, morning service at 11 o’clock, afternoon Sunday school after lunch and another church service in the early evening. For almost half the Sundays in the year, her father was out for part of the day preaching in surrounding villages. His role often meant that he brought visiting speakers home, and on more than one occasion these speakers, from far-flung regions where Methodism was spreading, were black, an extreme rarity in Grantham at that time.
¹⁶
It seems to have been meeting Methodist missionaries from India that inspired Margaret with her ambition, curious in someone little more than a child, to join the Indian Civil Service. After listening to them, she remembered, ‘I wanted to be an Indian civil servant, because I thought that India was a remarkable place and I would love to be a part, a cog in the wheel, of this great empire. And I think my father said to me at one stage, “I’m not sure if it’ll be part of the British Empire by that time.” ’
¹⁷
Margaret appreciated and even enjoyed many aspects of Methodism. She loved the ‘powerful combination’ of the teaching of John Wesley and the hymns of his brother Charles.
¹⁸
She participated fully in the musical life, as did her parents (she was a mezzo-soprano, her mother a contralto and her father a bass; both she and her mother played the piano, and when she was eighteen she learnt the organ). In her memoirs, she notes that she first learnt to play on a piano which was inscribed with the name of the maker John Roberts, her great-uncle, who also made church organs.
¹⁹
*
And she also enjoyed the conversation on public questions which tended to take place in the parlour of the shop when Methodists repaired there after the evening service on Sunday.
²⁰
‘Father taught me to like what he called “discussion”,’ she recalled.
²¹
Although she attended the Church of England in later life, appearing in her last years every Sunday at the services in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, Margaret Thatcher never repudiated the Methodism of her childhood, with its reverence for truth-telling, hard work and putting into practice the teaching of Scripture. Her father’s sermon notes
are full of precepts and expressions which one almost can hear her own lips speaking: ‘There is no promise of ease for the faithful servant of the Cross,’ ‘God wants no faint hearts for His ambassadors,’ even ‘We must avoid the principle of a Denominational Closed Shop.’
²²
‘We were Methodist and Methodist means method,’ Margaret told one biographer.
²³
She always loved method.