Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (5 page)

As for Beatrice Roberts, referred to by some as ‘Bee’ and others as ‘Beaty’, only rather distant and external impressions seem to survive. Kenneth Wallace considered that there was ‘more to her than met the eye … she encouraged Margaret to get out and about. She appeared a little hen-bird, but she had quite a lot of steel.’
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But on the whole Grantham regarded Mrs Roberts as shy, retiring, quiet and plain. Born in 1888, Beatrice was nearly four years older than her husband, and by the 1930s had no pretensions to good looks, style or display. ‘She was completely under old Roberts’s thumb,’ said Mary Wallace. ‘She was just there to do things for them. I got the impression that Margaret felt that too.’ Madeline Edwards, who later became joint head girl of KGGS with Margaret Roberts, remembers Mrs Roberts as ‘a small woman. Had a bun. She always looked slightly worrited [sic].’
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Nellie Towers said that Beatrice Roberts was always ‘very prim and proper’; ‘she kept the children beautifully clothed with the little tailored coats, but in her own dress she kept no decorations about her, she was all
very plain.’ Developing the theory of the Robertses’ marital unhappiness, Nellie Towers declared: ‘I see where the fault was. It was Beaty that was cold.’
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Jean Farmer saw Mrs Roberts as ‘anxious to do her best for her girls’ and also emphasized the pains she took in making up their clothes so well, including their school uniform. Like so many, she was struck by the huge amount of effort the Robertses put into everything, and the care they took with the results: ‘Her parents had to work hard for their money and they valued every penny.’
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All surviving impressions of Beatrice Roberts, even those from her daughters, are somehow exterior ones, as if no one really knew her.

The Grantham in which Alfred Roberts became an increasingly important figure was a modestly successful market town which shared the economic hardships of the 1920s and early 1930s and the definite recovery of the mid-1930s. In 1919, there were 19,700 people in the Grantham Municipal Borough; by 1938, there were 20,600. The parliamentary constituency had nearly 50,000 voters and so extended into the surrounding villages. The agricultural interest was still dominant, with factories in the town producing agricultural machinery. The Belvoir Hunt, the foxhound pack of the Duke of Rutland, always met in Grantham on Boxing Day. Roberts would take his daughters along. He was a keen supporter of foxhunting for the unusual reason that without it foxes would steal babies from prams.
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The young Margaret enjoyed her rural walks out of the bowl in which Grantham sits to pick rosehips on Hall’s Hill, and she particularly delighted in visiting friends like Jean Farmer, or the elegant rectory of Canon Harold Goodrich, incumbent of Corby Glen and father of her schoolfriend Margaret, but she and her family were really town mice. Although closely linked to the country, the town was by now large enough to have a distinctly urban character. In an early letter about a game of tennis in Grantham, Margaret disparages her unchosen partner as a ‘yokel’:
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it was always towns, preferably cities, which allured her.

The most powerful local man – and the biggest landowner – was Lord Brownlow, whose Cust family had long been seated at Belton, just outside Grantham. He was so close a friend of the Prince of Wales that he was criticized for his association with him after his abdication as King Edward VIII in 1936. The young Margaret made a good impression on the Custs. According to her sister Muriel, Caroline Cust, Lord Brownlow’s daughter, used to ‘rave’ about Margaret. A photograph reprinted in Lady Thatcher’s memoirs
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shows her at a Baptist Christmas party smiling brightly out beside the young and elegant Lady Brownlow. Although it was often said that the grocer’s daughter was somehow antagonistic to the traditional Tory
aristocracy, this was not really so (although a few of them reacted snobbishly to her). The Brownlows were only the first of several grandees who looked favourably on her and whom she, in turn, admired. When she became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher arranged with the then Lord Brownlow to borrow silver from Belton, by this time owned by the National Trust, to improve the cutlery at Downing Street. She also borrowed a green enamel box, painted with views of Grantham, which had been presented to Lord Brownlow when he had completed his year of office as mayor of the borough.
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It was the approach of war that brought strong economic growth to Grantham. The town benefited from its position on the main road and rail links between London, the north-east and Scotland – the opening sentence of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs is: ‘My first distinct memory is of traffic’
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– and it increased its industrial base. Between 1932 and 1943, rateable value (the basis of the calculation for property taxes) rose by 60 per cent, which was very helpful to Alfred Roberts in his capacity as chairman of the borough’s finance committee. From 1934, new factories were being built in Grantham at the rate of about one a year. There was a good deal of engineering, the firm of Ruston and Hornsby, for example, which built engines. Aveling-Barford made steamrollers and tractors, and in 1938 the munitions company B.M.A.R. Co. opened a factory, run by Denis Kendall at the then astonishing salary of £10,000 per annum. Kendall, a glamorous, not to say flash, figure, drove a motorbike and had liaisons with prominent local women. In 1942, standing as an independent, he won the first wartime parliamentary by-election to turn out the National Government candidate (a Conservative), campaigning as a ‘production man’ critical of the ‘gang’ round Winston Churchill, though not of Churchill himself. During the war, Kendall displaced Lord Brownlow as the leading figure in the town, certainly in terms of local press coverage, and in the 1945 general election he was re-elected to Parliament, defeating the Con
servative candidate by more than 15,000 votes. By 1939, full employment had returned to Grantham. Working shifts had to be staggered to avoid the traffic jams caused by the myriad bicycles.

War also brought the armed services to Grantham in large numbers. There were four RAF bases locally, including the RAF College at Cranwell.
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Margaret’s letters to Muriel about dances in the area during the war always mention the hordes of flight lieutenants eager for a dance. Grantham provided the national headquarters for Bomber Command (Margaret Roberts’s dentist, Mr Wallace, also treated ‘Bomber’ Harris); and from October 1943 there was a large USAAF presence in the town. Denis Kendall exploited the resentments to which the American influx gave rise. US servicemen were paid five times more than British ones, and were accused of immorality with local girls. Kendall complained that they were allowed to rent the Guildhall for entertainment when the same privilege had been refused to British servicemen. In Parliament, he caused a storm by alleging that Americans were accosting girls in the street. The accusation was promptly rejected by Lord Brownlow and by the Chief Constable. But it is certainly the case that the town became a place much fuller of young men and girls seeking one another. According to Terry Bradley, after the war a Labour councillor and opponent of Alfred Roberts, the High Street was known to have a ‘five bob side’, where officers picked up girls, and a ‘half a crown side’ for the other ranks.
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It was in response to the problems of war that Roberts was prepared to unbend his Sabbatarian principles, defying his fellow Methodists by voting in favour of the Sunday opening of cinemas for the troops, because he believed that it was better for them to have entertainment than to have nothing. His daughter cited this as evidence of his pragmatism and independence of mind.
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Alfred Roberts began his career in local politics well before the war. He was first elected in the St Wulfram Ward, where he sat as an Independent Ratepayer from 1927. Although Margaret was always slightly evasive on the point, Muriel was quite definite that their father was originally a Liberal in politics,
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but Roberts was also a strong supporter of the convention dominant at the time that national party allegiance should be kept out of local government, and he maintained this throughout his career, so much so that when he died in 1970 the local press could only speculate on his political affiliations. In the fluid politics of the early 1930s, Roberts became a supporter of the Conservative-dominated National Government – the coalition designed to deal with the slump, headed by the formerly Labour Prime
Minister Ramsay MacDonald – seeing himself as without clear party allegiance. In his address as president of Grantham Rotary Club in July 1936 he described himself as ‘like a good many people, often hopelessly and utterly in the wilderness in the political world, sometimes believing in one party, sometimes in another as others had been doing these last few years. There was a feeling that one could not look to any particular party or creed for the salvation of men and ridding them of fear.’
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When Margaret was chosen as prospective parliamentary candidate for Dartford in 1949, her father broke the habit of a lifetime by speaking at a party political meeting, in her support. In justifying his position, he told the meeting that the Conservative Party now stood for ‘very much the same things as the Liberal Party did in his younger days’ (see
Chapter 5
). Margaret offered her own explanation for his views in her memoirs: ‘Like many other business people he had … been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism.’
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Before and during the war, ideology did not intrude very much into the work of the council. In economic questions, for example, the only significant split occurred in early 1935 when a slum-clearance scheme was proposed which would knock down 106 houses and accommodate 415 people. The council divided over whether or not this should be done by a direct labour force, Alfred Roberts opposing. Roberts quickly attained, and then held for more than twenty years, the chairmanship of the finance and rating committee on the council. The
Grantham Journal
called him ‘Grantham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’.
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He was the efficient and careful guardian of the council’s budget, not an ideologue or a campaigning politician.

But since Labour was the only party which defied the convention about political identification on the council, it is fair to say that, for Roberts, Labour was always his political opponent. The Chamber of Trade, with whose support he was first elected, existed in opposition to the Labour Party, and to the associated Co-operative movement. And in the 1935 general election Roberts decided to throw his growing influence in the town behind the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender,
^†
despite the fact that many of his fellow Methodists had supported the Peace Ballot which ended in that year.
^‡

It was this that gave Margaret her first taste of politics. She helped fold Warrender’s election addresses into envelopes, and on polling day she acted as a runner, taking information about who had voted from the tellers at the polling station to the Conservative Committee Rooms so that they could make sure that their canvass turned out to vote.
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Margaret Thatcher was never quite sure exactly what generated her early and enthusiastic allegiance to the Tories: ‘I don’t know why I was so staunchly Conservative. I think it was the idea of my father that you can get on somehow.’
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But she immediately took to Warrender: ‘I’ll tell you what struck me. He had a presence, a natural presence. He had an overcoat on. It was a good overcoat. Good, not flashy. He was rather a handsome man. When he spoke, you listened.’ She felt pleased ‘to be treated on an equal level by an unequal … He understood that personality attracted votes.’
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As so often in her dealings in later life, she was susceptible to good-looking men, to elegant clothes, to what used to be called an air of breeding.
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In forming his views on the international scene, Alfred Roberts probably gleaned more from Rotary than from any political party. Rotary was, and is, a worldwide movement. It grew in popularity between the wars, having been founded in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Grantham Rotary got its charter in 1931, and Roberts was a founder member. In 1935 he became its annual president. With its motto of ‘Service above Self’, Rotary was a thoroughly worthy organization, composed largely of businessmen and dedicated to social improvement and charitable endeavour. The records of its meetings, as detailed in the
Grantham Journal
, show a slightly comical list of improving subjects chosen for the club’s lectures – ‘modern psychology’, a talk on road rollers (which were locally manufactured) and the history of tithes and rent charges. The organization’s approach to politics was deliberately uncomplicated. It called for people to sink their political differences in the wider public interest, and this applied, too, on the international scene, where a sentiment of reconciliation was much stronger than one of confrontation with Hitler. Margaret Thatcher said that her family first realized that there was
something wrong with Hitler ‘when we heard that he had suppressed Rotary’.
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She saw the wider world through Rotarian eyes.

As the chairman of Grantham Rotary’s international service committee, Alfred Roberts organized visiting speakers. Because of this, and his voracious reading, he was probably as well informed as any other member about world affairs. Both Margaret and Muriel remembered that he was given favourable pamphlets about Hitler by his fellow Rotarian and local GP, a German called Dr Jauch, but that he was unconvinced. Margaret Thatcher remembered Dr Jauch as a ‘very cold man’.
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What is clear, though, is that Roberts’s Rotarianism, and perhaps his Methodism as well, made him sympathetic to appeasement, particularly as embodied by Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister since 1937, and about as perfectly Rotarian a figure as ever reached 10 Downing Street.