Thatcher

 

CLARE BECKETT

 

 

 

 

HAUS PUBLISHING • LONDON

 

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

Haus Publishing Limited

70 Cadogan Place

London SW1X 9AH

www.hauspublishing.co.uk

 

Copyright © Clare Beckett, 2006, 2013

 

The moral right of the author has been asserted

 

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

 

ebook ISBN 978-1-907822-84-1

 

Front cover: John Holder

 

All rights reserved.

Part One: THE LIFE

Chapter 1: Mr Roberts' Daughter

Chapter 2: Transitions

Chapter 3: Taking on the Party

Chapter 4: Thatcher Emerging

 

Part Two: THE LEADERSHIP

Chapter 5: Thatcherism at Home

Chapter 6: Thatcher Abroad

 

Part Three: THE LEGACY

Chapter 7: After Thatcher

 

Notes

Chronology

Further Reading

Part One

 

It was an ordinary day in Grantham. On 13 October 1925, very little of note happened there, except that Margaret Hilda Roberts was born. She describes her first memories as 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
.
¹
For she was born above her father's grocery shop.

The family were already established in business when Margaret Roberts arrived. Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a grey-haired and pious Alderman of the town. He was a self-made man, the son of a shoemaker who had left school at 13. He went into the grocery trade, at first working in the ‘tuck shop' at Oundle School, and later managing a grocery store in Grantham. He had made many attempts to enlist in the army during the First World War, but had been turned down on medical grounds. His younger brother Edward did serve, and died at Salonika in 1917.

That year, Alfred Roberts married Beatrice Ethel Stephenson. They met through the local Methodist community, and were married in the church – the same one that Margaret Roberts attended regularly throughout her childhood. Beatrice Stephenson was a successful dressmaker. She was as frugal and practical as her husband, and they set out to save and prosper. In 1919, they took out a mortgage on a shop in North Parade. It was well placed, on a crossroads, near to the railway line: Margaret Roberts must have been able to set her watch by the sound of the trains. Pictures show a large Edwardian building. Nowadays, some of these big, comfortable houses have become guesthouses. Margaret Roberts regretted that there was no garden, though.

By 1921, when Margaret's sister Muriel was born, the family were comfortably settled. This was not sufficient for Alfred Roberts. He was a careful and prudent man, with ambition that his family should never suffer as he did in his own impoverished childhood. He was determined to build a solid and, if possible, wealthy base for his family, where his daughters could grow to live a full and useful life. In 1923, he opened a second shop in Huntingdon Road. In 1925 he expanded his business into two adjoining properties in North Parade.

Prosperity did not lead to unnecessary expenditure, however. Margaret Roberts was born into a
home that was practical, serious and intensely religious
.
²
In the mid-1930s, 75 per cent of all families were officially designated working class but the Roberts, with two shops, were among the 20 per cent who could be considered middle class. Despite this the daughters had few possessions. There were no bicycles and not many toys, and trips to the theatre or cinema were rare. Their lives revolved around Methodism. The family went to Sunday morning service at 11.00, after Sunday school. There was Sunday school again in the afternoon, and the adults at least would attend service again in the evening.

Nonetheless, these early years were happy ones for Margaret Roberts. The shops were quality grocers, selling food more often found in delicatessens nowadays. Margaret helped behind the counter when she was old enough, and took a full part in measuring and packing sugar, coffee or tea for sale: these arrived in big bags, and had to be decanted into 1lb. weights. The family had some standing in the town, and Mr Roberts' younger daughter would have seen friendly faces and been made welcome wherever she went. She was part of the work upstairs, too – the unremitting work of making good and mending, washing and polishing, that kept a household respectable in the days before domestic appliances. She knew how to iron fine linen, and to heat a flat iron without scorching the linen. There is some triumph in running a comfortable, clean, and economic household that becomes a reward in itself. Thriftiness becomes competitive. Margaret Roberts describes finding out that another family saved and re-used their tacking cotton while dressmaking: from that point on she and her mother did the same.

Grantham, then as now, was a quiet, self-contained backwater. A small town rather than a city, it was neither flourishing nor depressed. But in the inter-war years the spectre of poverty was never very far away. Even people like Alfred Roberts, who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and acquired a nest-egg, lived in fear that some accident or disaster would hit his family. These were the years before the welfare state, where even calling in the doctor was an expensive decision, so small provincial towns developed their own networks of support. The Roberts' shops made up to 150 parcels for the old and sick, bought by the local Rotarian Society. The Roberts' daughters attended and helped at town functions, and raised money for needy children. As grocers, the family knew something of the circumstances of their customers and community. Help was given to those who helped themselves. Later, Margaret Roberts described passing the long queue outside the dole office during the Great Depression. None of their close friends lost their jobs, but they knew people among the unemployed. She was later to write:
And I have never forgotten – how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns. It meant that they never dropped out of the community and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together
.
³
My parents lived through these years in East London, and their lasting memories are less positive. Children were hungry, adults were hopeless, and homelessness was a constant threat. It is easy to see how Margaret Roberts' early view of poverty and the poor informed her attitude to welfare later on in her life.

Forced to give up his own formal education at 13, Alfred Roberts took a keen interest in his daughters' schooling. Margaret went to Huntingtower Road Primary School, close to home but with a good reputation. She had learned to read at home, as many of her generation had, and tells about an incident at the age of five when she was asked to pronounce ‘w-r-a-p'. She got it right, but was aware that she was always asked the ‘hard ones'. She describes herself as being mystified by proverbs – her literal mind had real difficulty with such ideas as ‘look before you leap' – why not look before you cross, a much more understandable idea, given the busy roads outside the school? And how can you have both that proverb, and ‘he who hesitates is lost'?

Both girls attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. This was small, only 350 pupils, in a different part of town. It was a grant-aided grammar school. Parents would normally have paid part of the fees, but Margaret secured a county scholarship. The trip to school and back, home for lunch, and back in the afternoon meant that young Margaret was walking up to four miles a day: public transport, or staying for lunch, would have been unacceptable expenses. The school had a good reputation, and was already sending a few girls each year to Oxford. The ‘girls in blue' were a familiar sight in the streets of Grantham. The intake came from a wide area, and Margaret's best friend lived some distance away in a more rural area. Margaret Roberts would stay overnight on visits there, and walk in the country. During the war, the Camden Girls' School was evacuated to Grantham, and their ‘girls in green' shared classrooms. This meant altering the times of the school day, and the sisters would sometimes have to attend in the afternoons or mornings, or at weekends. Regardless, homework must always be completed even if that meant working on a Sunday. Her school reports show hard work and commitment and constant slight improvement but not brilliance. Outside the classroom, she was a competent hockey player, but her favoured sports were solitary. She enjoyed swimming, and particularly walking.

The thrift learned at home continued at school. All girls, however well-off or academic, had to take domestic science for four years. Miss Williams was a quiet and dignified head teacher. On special occasions, like prize-giving, she wore soft and well-tailored silk but her message was a familiar one – never buy a cheap fur coat when a good wool coat is a better buy. Go for the best you can afford, but do not live outside your means. The message was a part of my childhood too, and will be familiar to many girls of this generation. Buy to last and to keep up appearances, but beware the cheap and ostentatious. There were other unmarried women earning a living among Margaret Roberts' school teachers. This was a generation who would have to leave the profession if they married. Miss Harding, the history teacher, offered a passionate introduction to the subject. Years later, Margaret could recall her account of the Dardanelles campaign as she visited Gallipoli. Miss Kay, who taught chemistry, opened a new world of logic to the young Margaret, based on the new scientific discoveries of that time.

Alfred Roberts was already a school governor, and became chairman while his daughters attended the school. This was not the only area in which he supported their learning, sometimes in surprisingly liberal ways. Finding that Margaret had not read Walt Whitman at school, he immediately found her some of his work, an author and poet with a modern, and sometimes risqué, style. He was responsible for bringing home two library books each week for his daughter, as well as books for her mother and sister. Reading included classic authors like Jane Austen and Dickens, but also political works. She struggled, with his assistance, with the
Hibbert Journal
, a philosophical periodical. He expected her to discuss her reading and learning with him, and to adopt a critical stance. He took her to ‘Extension Lectures' given by the University of Nottingham, and supported her in contributing to discussion. Even as a young girl, she was used to stating her opinion and asking questions in an adult forum, and to arguing with the Alderman as a basis for learning. Perhaps it was these influences that lead to the one area where Margaret Roberts shone at school, as a member of the debating society. She was an unselfconscious star of debate, not brilliant, but logical and determined. Contemporaries remember her as hard to beat. Visiting speakers could always be sure of a question from her, slow and well-phrased with a Lincolnshire accent, delivered in a ringing and absolutely audible voice.

There was one major event during this quiet and hard-working childhood. Margaret's much-loved grandmother died when she was ten. Grandmother Stevenson was a formidable woman. Dressed in black sateen, she upheld Methodist values and was the first to condemn frivolity in any form. She was also a warm presence in the children's lives, telling bedtime stories and stories of life during her childhood. She had a spine-chilling line in ghost stories, told in the bedroom at night. She was a fund of old cautionary tales, like the ability of earwigs to crawl under your skin and form carbuncles. She had time for the girls as other members of the family had not, and often took part in the lighter tasks given to the children. Measuring spices, packing butter and light cleaning will all have been the kind of jobs assigned to the young and the old and shared by the two daughters and grandmother. When she died, Margaret and Muriel Roberts were sent to relatives until after the funeral and after Grandmother's things had been put away. This was the custom at that time, to shield children from death and disruption. After her death, the girls in the family began to attend the theatre and music halls occasionally.

This childhood was lived out against the rising shadow of economic slump and preparation for war. It would have been difficult for any intelligent and active child to ignore the changes around her, and impossible for the favoured daughter of a man who regarded public service as the rationale of life. Alfred was a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, Alderman and between 1945 and 1946 Mayor of Grantham. He was Alderman again in 1952, when he lost the position to a Labour candidate. Margaret Roberts' life was punctuated by elections and local events. 1935 stood out as an example, for this was the year of King George V's Jubilee and of Grantham's centenary as a borough. There were brass bands and decorations – Margaret says in her autobiography that the poorest part of town, Vere Street, was one of the best decorated. The boys' school and the girls' school combined for a big open-air display of marching and precision events, including forming the letters of Grantham. Margaret Roberts was part of the M.