Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

My father

My mother

My father’s shop in Grantham
(Express Newspapers)

With my father

With my sister Muriel
(F/T, Camera Press, London)

In the garden at the house of some friends Muriel, father, mother and me

At Somerville College, Oxford
(By courtesy of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College)

At work as a research chemist
(Heute Magazine)

With Denis on our wedding day
(Press Association Images)

My 1951 election address

As MP for Finchley
(NI Syndication)

With Ted Heath at the Conservative Party Conference
(Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Visiting a primary school as Secretary of State for Education

With Denis, Carol and Mark
(NI Syndication/Arthur Steel)

Meeting the press at Conservative Central Office
(Fox Photos)

The State Opening of Parliament
(Getty Images)

Delivering the ‘Iron Lady’ speech in Kensington
(Press Association Images)

On a walkabout in Huddersfield
(Srdja Djukanovic)

On the stairs at Central Office following the 1979 general election victory
(Lionel Chaerruault/Camera Press, London)

With Denis outside No. 10
(NI Syndication/Tony Eyles)

At the funeral of Airey Neave
(Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Presenting deeds in Milton Keynes
(Getty Images)

Addressing the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton
(Press Association Images)

Visiting my old school in Grantham
(NI Syndication/Arthur Edwards)

HMS
Invincible
returning to Portsmouth at the end of the Falklands War
(Telegraph Syndication)

Presenting medals on board HMS
Hermes (Martin Cleaver/Press Association Images)

On the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral
(Press Association Images)

With Cecil Parkinson at Central Office
(Herbie Knott/Rex Features)

At my desk at No. 10
(NI Syndication/John Manning)

The Grand Hotel in Brighton, after the bombing
(Mike Abrahams/Alamy)

Leaving the Grand Hotel with Denis
(Press Association Images)

Photocall at Chequers with the Gorbachevs
(Getty Images)

Meeting Den Xiaoping
(Xinhua, Camera Press, London)

With President Reagan at Camp David
(Official White House Photograph)

Signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement
(Press Association Images)

Greeting the Queen outside No. 10
(NI Syndication/Arthur Edwards)

With President Mitterand in 1986
(NI Syndication/Harry Kerr)

Some of the Commonwealth leaders who attended the Special Commonwealth Conference in London
(Roger Hutchings/OBS, Camera Press, London)

In the kitchen at No. 10
(NI Syndication/Sally Soames)

With Denis in Cornwall
(NI Syndication/Graham Wood)

Launching the 1987 general election manifesto Talking to the media from the Conservative Party ‘battle bus’
(NI Syndication/Graham Wood)

Outside No. 10 with Denis
(NI Syndication/R Bamber)

With Neil Kinnock at the State Opening of Parliament
(NI Syndication)

Walking across a desolate urban landscape near Stockton-on-Tees
(NI Syndication/Chris Harries)

With President Reagan outside No. 10
(NI Syndication/John Rogers)

At the dinner at No. 10 held in honour of President Reagan
White House Photograph)

Test driving the new Challenger tank
(Joel Fink/AP/Press Association Images)

Arriving at Camp David by helicopter
(Official White House Photograph)

With Helmut Kohl
(NI Syndication)

With Boris Yeltsin
(Camera Press, London)

With Nelson Mandela
(Camera Press, London)

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly
(Courtesy of the United Nations)

Receiving a standing ovation at the Party Conference
(NI Syndication/Simon Townsley)

With members of the Cabinet and Denis at the Carlton Club Answering questions in the House of Commons
(Press Association Images)

Driving away from Buckingham Palace
(Geraint Lewis)

Leaving No. 10 for the last time
(Richard Open/Camera Press, London)

The present edition is an abridged version of the original two volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs.
The Downing Street Years
, describing the author’s time as Prime Minister, was the first to appear, in 1993.
The Path to Power
, an account of her youth and early political career, was published two years later. The reverse chronological order was a response to the demands of the market and the relative interest of readers. But it had drawbacks.

This single, abridged volume sets them right. It begins at the beginning and ends at the – very dramatic – end. It excludes altogether the last section of
The Path to Power
, which was a series of essays on issues of the day. Also excluded, for brevity’s sake, are the dedications, acknowledgements, many footnotes and most of the appendices, along with some discursive sections and travelogues that have lost immediate interest. That said, all the key moments, events, issues, exchanges and arguments are here. Arguably, the compression results in a stronger, sharper self-portrait of one of the twentieth century’s towering figures.

R
OBIN
H
ARRIS

Grantham 1925–1943

M
Y FIRST DISTINCT MEMORY IS OF TRAFFIC.
I was being pushed in a pram through the town to the park on a sunny day, and I must have encountered the bustle of Grantham on the way. The occasion stays in my mind as an exciting mixture of colour, vehicles, people and thunderous noise – yet, perhaps paradoxically, the memory is a pleasant one. I must have liked this first conscious plunge into the outside world.

As for indistinct memories, most of us probably recall our earliest years as a sort of blur. Mine was an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone – my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop – was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet. Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. But I had not been born into a quiet family.

Four generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e. private) schools. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there.

My father had a number of jobs, most of them in the grocery trade, until in 1913 he was offered the post of manager of a grocery store in
Grantham. In later years he would say that of the fourteen shillings a week he received, twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging, one shilling he saved, and only then did he spend the remaining shilling. The First World War broke out a year later. My father, a deeply patriotic man, tried to enlist no fewer than six times, but was rejected on each occasion on medical grounds. His younger brother, Edward, did enlist, and died on active service in Salonika in 1917. Few British families escaped such a bereavement, and Remembrance Day after the war was observed throughout the country both strictly and intensely.

Four years after arriving in Grantham my father met my mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, through the local Methodist church. She had her own business as a dressmaker. They were married in that church in May 1917 and my sister, Muriel, was born in 1921.

My mother was quite a saver too, and by 1919 they were able to take out a mortgage to buy their own shop in North Parade. Our home was over this shop. In 1923 my father opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road – opposite the primary school which I would later attend. On 13 October 1925 I was born over the shop at North Parade.

That same year, my father expanded his business further, taking in two adjoining buildings in North Parade. Our shop and house were situated at a busy crossroads and the main railway line – Grantham was an important junction – was just a hundred yards away. We could set our clocks by the ‘Flying Scotsman’ as it thundered through. What I most regretted was that we did not have a garden. Not until the end of the Second World War did my father buy a house with a long garden further along North Parade, on which the family had set our hearts some years previously.