Thatcher (2 page)

To be part of local politics was only partly to be concerned with party politics. To Alfred, party politics had limits. He stood for the council as a ratepayer's candidate, believed in individual responsibility and sound financial management, and read John Stuart Mill. He described himself as a staunch Conservative. Labour councillors might argue with him in the council chamber, but they came to the shop without partisan bitterness. Margaret learned a lot of town business in the shop. General elections were a different matter. In 1935, the celebrations in the town were almost overshadowed by the first election in which Margaret was an active campaigner. She folded bright red leaflets for the Conservative candidate, sitting with much older companions. On election day, she was given responsibility for running between the office and the polling station with news about who had voted, and who still needed gathering in. This was a hard-fought election, and the member's majority was cut from 16,000 to 6,000. This election was fought in the inter-war period where most people wanted to avoid another war. The Roberts family read a wide variety of newspapers, and had a radio – they were probably better informed than most. The battle, though, was over the potential for and speed of disarmament. The Roberts family was not in favour of the policy of appeasement of Hitler. It is not surprising that a fierce nationalism underpinned Alfred's Methodist politics of good husbandry and individual responsibility. For Margaret Roberts there was an added incentive. As a ten-year-old child, she says in her memoirs that she saw the monarchy as the glue that held society together and gave the poor the incentive to work hard and keep up appearances. While she seems to have had a worked-out view of poverty, learned from watching the customers in her fathers' shop, it is likely that her view of the Commonwealth reflected the Methodist values around her. Like many other families, the Roberts were fiercely proud of the Empire. Methodist ministry had been a foundation of colonisation, and the young Margaret Roberts listened to returning ministers with wonder. She would have liked to join the Indian civil service. She thought that the rule of law, good administration and order that the British had given to the colonies were great gifts.

In this period, Right and Left took on significant importance on the international stage. It was easy for right-wing people to be led into supporting fascism as a real alternative to communism. While the Roberts family hated communism, equally they did not find the strutting of the Blackshirts attractive. To them, surrounded by
the gentle self-regulation of our own civil life
,
⁴
only a free society was a possible alternative to both. They were not sanguine about another war. They saw the pictures of the First World War, and commemorated fallen servicemen, including Alfred's brother. The Remembrance Day parades were a constant reminder. They did not support appeasement, however. To them, Hitler was a significant and real threat who would not go away. He had crushed the Rotarians in Germany, and Alfred Roberts believed passionately in the power of Rotarian groups, their internationalism and their charity, as a force for good. With a rare flash of humour, Alfred felt that being destroyed by Hitler was the greatest compliment Rotary organisations could be paid. The local doctor was German, and received news that he passed to Alfred, who discussed it with Margaret. Muriel had a pen-friend in Austria, and after the
Anchluss
in 1938, the pen friend's father contacted the Roberts to see if they could take her in. Alfred arranged for the Grantham Rotarians to support her, and she stayed with each family in turn until she could go to relatives in South Africa. She brought first-hand experience of being Jewish under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing stuck in the young Margaret Roberts' mind – Jews were being made to scrub the streets. She was passionately anti-Hitler, unlike most of her neighbours at the time. She recounts standing in a chip-shop queue where the common opinion was that Hitler had at least brought some coherence to German policy and self-confidence to the German people. She argued against this opinion, although the queue was made up of adults.

To the Roberts' family, Hitler's wickedness must be ended, but the country was woefully unprepared. Margaret Roberts was nearly 14 on 3 September 1939, when war was finally declared. It was the only Sunday during her childhood that she did not go to church. It is typical of her approach in adulthood that in her autobiography she now turns to the social and political causes of war, rather than the privations that the war caused. Indeed, Grantham was not heavily bombed during the war. There were 21 air-raids on the town, and 78 people were killed. The greatest risk for the family was their closeness to the railway line, a few hundred yards from the house. Alfred was often out in the evenings on air-raid duty, while Margaret and her mother took shelter under the kitchen table. Muriel was already working at the orthopaedic hospital in Birmingham, where the bombing was much heavier. The Roberts family threw themselves into voluntary and civic work for the war effort, and were even busier than in peacetime.

Political life in Grantham did not stand still, however. In 1942, the town was the first to return a non-government candidate during the war. The Conservative, Sir Arthur Longmore, lost his seat by 367 votes. Margaret Roberts was not involved in this campaign, and did not realise the lessons for the 1945 general election and the Labour landslide victory. She was preparing for entry to Oxford. She was taking the specific entry exam for Somerville College. She had earned her chance by hard work, not brilliance, and there is no sign in her memoirs that she was expecting or was expected to do this. Her entry may have been a result of wartime conditions, where more places were available to women. Certainly she was not a star pupil, and her entry had not been planned for. Although her school was sending a handful of girls to Oxford each year, Latin was required and she had not studied it before. It was not taught at the girls' grammar school, so she had to be ‘crammed' by staff from the boys' school. She gave up learning the piano to keep up with the work. The scholarship mattered. The family would not be able, or possibly willing, to support her into higher education without it – there were no higher education grants for girls in the 1940s. Margaret had never been in any doubt that she would have to earn her own living as an adult. If she could not go to Oxford in 1943 she would have to study a two-year wartime degree, before being called up into service. At 17, and without Latin, the scholarship was a long shot and she failed. This was perhaps the first real and significant disappointment in her charmed and hard-working childhood. There was nothing for it but to enter the third-year sixth form, slightly cheered by becoming Joint Head of School. Then luck stepped in. Another candidate had dropped out – Margaret Roberts received a telegram offering her a place to be taken up immediately.

This was the end of Margaret Roberts' life in Grantham, the popular and favoured daughter of a well-known man. Her life was characterised by industry, thrift and civic duty. There were few frivolities, and no self-indulgent expenses. Alfred refused to have his house plumbed for hot water between the wars, judging it to be an unnecessary indulgence. His daughters carried water and bathed in hip tubs. Her world revolved around three friendly hubs – the family, the school and the church. Alfred's expectation was that she would work hard, and lead a useful and industrious life. The training he had given her in politics and argument stayed with her. Asked about her father, she would say
he gave me integrity
. His views were the core of the young Margaret Roberts' determination. This was not slavish orthodoxy, however. Alfred could, and did, bend with the wind without compromising his own principles. As a Methodist, he believed in keeping Sunday as a day of rest, but as a grocer, he worked. He voted for opening cinemas on Sunday, because the people attending bothered no-one but themselves, but he opposed opening parks on Sundays because games would create disturbance for others. He approved of the rhyme young Margaret Roberts learned at 11 from Bibby's Almanac:

 

‘One ship drives east, and another drives west,

By the self same gale that blows;

‘Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,

That determines the way that she goes'

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
⁵

 

He provided her with reading that covered classic and modern works and he shared her love of Kipling and of disciplined prose. He believed in the family as the foundation stone of a well-functioning society. He and his wife provided a stable and well-run home for his daughters.

It would be a mistake to think, however, that this was the only influence on her. Margaret Thatcher rarely spoke about her mother, but it was she who ran the home and set the routines. The backdrop to Margaret Roberts' life was a beautiful and well-kept home, surrounded by goods that were of the best quality the family could manage, and were cared for accordingly. Beatrice faded into the background of political and civic life, but was the source of the good clothes and disciplined behaviour that the family showed in public. She would take the girls on holiday to Skegness each year, and after her mother's death would also visit the theatre or cinema with her daughters. She will not have spent as much time in the company of her girls as many mothers – she helped run a thriving business and lived above the shop. She will have been available to the children when Alfred was busy, and will have been the power that made civic duties and entertaining possible.

Margaret Roberts herself shows a romantic, dreamy side to her character not connected to Alfred Roberts when she describes her childhood. She talks about her fascination with far-off countries, and her liking for the passionate and out-of-the-way insights in Kipling's poetry. She loved the theatre and music – even owning that one major attraction of Methodism was the music. She talks about a single trip to London with friends, where she fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, rode the Underground and visited the Zoo. At Kings Cross, she saw people from foreign countries, some in traditional dress, for the first time. The buildings, covered in soot, reminded this provincial child that she was at the centre of the world. But the high point of the trip – more than Downing Street or the Houses of Parliament, though they did not disappoint – was her first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham to see
The Desert Song
. Margaret Roberts had little free time as a child, but what time she had was spent walking through the countryside alone, or reading poetry. At the age of ten, she won a prize at the Grantham Eisteddfod for reading John Drinkwater's
Moonlight Apples
and Walter de la Mare's
The Travellers
. Congratulated on her luck, she pointed out that she had worked very hard on the event. She and her mother played piano, and she sang in the choir. She looked forward to carol services, and sang in complicated productions like Mendelssohn's ‘Elijah'. Altogether, growing up was hard work and discipline, but also liberal and joyous.

Margaret Roberts herself sums up the lessons she took with her to Oxford, and into her future life.
The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler's sway, civilisation could never be taken for granted and had to be constantly nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent principles, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. One can never do without straightforward common sense in matters great as well as small. And finally I have to admit that I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do
.
⁶

Oxford in wartime was not a place of dreaming spires. There were few people there from ordinary schools, or from small provincial towns like Grantham. Colleges were closed or merged, and many people who would expect to be undergraduates were either in the armed forces or dead. The average age of Margaret Roberts' contemporaries was 17½. The science facilities were dominated by war work – busy, but top secret and not available to a new undergraduate. At first, Margaret Roberts was dependent on her father's money, not on a scholarship, and was not used to being a small fish in a big pond. She was homesick and lonely. She was also, for the first time in her life, away from the backdrop of the Methodist church and civic duties. In modern times, this could be a recipe for disaster – disaffected students failing in their first year at university are commonplace. In wartime Oxford, the fear of being sent down was ever-present.

Margaret Roberts's first refuge was her work. She was not a brilliant chemist, and relied on hard work. Professor Dorothy Hodgkin, who taught her, says ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well read essay.'
¹
Good enough, at any rate, to choose Margaret Roberts as her research assistant during her fourth year at Oxford. Chemistry, like any discipline, forms the mind that studies it, and perhaps Chemistry, with its learning and logic leading to new conclusions was the perfect discipline for a Methodist given to flights of fancy. As Dorothy Hodgkin says of the study of chemistry and the human mind: ‘I think it should interest you in the problems of finding out as much as you can about the way we work, the way matter is put together. And it should give you an interest in using the results.'
²