Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (4 page)

Betting would never have been allowed under the eagle eye of Beatie. She ruled the roost on behavioural issues and also kept a tight grip on her side of the family purse strings. ‘Many, many is the time I can remember [my mother] saying, when I said: “Oh my friends have got more”, “Well we are not situated like that!”,’ recalled Margaret.
²³

Although the financial situation of the Roberts parents, who drew their income from two shops, was not particularly tight, Beatrice turned prudence into parsimony. In an interview when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, she let slip a poignant glimpse of shopping with her mother when she had to suppress her own yearnings for materials that were more colourful but more costly.

‘Or when you went out to buy something and you were going to actually have new covers for the settee. That was … a great expenditure and a great event, so you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on. My mother: “That’s not serviceable!” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable!’
²⁴

There were upsides as well as downsides to this frugality. Margaret was always well dressed as a little girl, thanks to Beatrice’s skill in making clothes at home. She grew up with a keen understanding of getting value for money. She respected her mother’s ability to make the housekeeping budget go far. ‘Nothing in our house was wasted, and we always lived within our means,’ she recalled. ‘The worst you could say about another family was that “they lived up to the hilt”.’
²⁵

Living up to the hilt just once or twice might have seemed an attractive prospect for Margaret, but it was not permissible under the regime at North Parade. Yet this stringency had its advantages too. For Margaret Roberts soon learned how to make her own entertainment, and how to explore, with her father’s encouragement, the pleasures of reading by borrowing many books from the library.

Music was another outlet for her creative energy. Margaret was a good child pianist, winning prizes at local music festivals. She had a clear alto voice and became a member of the Methodist church choir. She sang in its performances of oratorios, including Handel’s
Messiah
, Haydn’s
Creation
and Mendelssohn’s
Elijah
. In her enjoyment of music she was following the example of her father who had been a chorister and was a member of the Grantham Philharmonic Society.

Margaret’s early years were notable for their lack of
joie de vivre
. Later in life she became rather defensive about such suggestions. Her memoirs have some purple patches about her enthusiasm for watching Hollywood movies in the Grantham cinema. She waxed lyrical to one of her first biographers, Tricia Murray, about her love of big-band music and the compositions of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. These tastes may have been acquired later in her teenage years or they may have a touch of revisionism about them. For the adult Margaret Thatcher never seems to have had much time or inclination for going to the cinema or listening to music.

In youth, relaxation rarely formed part of her routine and the disciplines, which were first set in her childhood, stayed with her throughout her life. ‘In my family we were never idle,’ she recalled. ‘Idleness was a sin.’
²⁶

There was, however, one glorious episode of escapism, relaxation and idleness. It was hardly a sin because it took place under the supervision of a Methodist minister, the Reverend Ronald N. Skinner. He invited the eleven-year-old Margaret to come, without her parents, to visit his family in Hampstead. ‘I stayed for a whole week,’ she told Tricia Murray, ‘and was given a life of enjoyment and entertainment I had never seen!’
²⁷

For a provincial schoolgirl who had never travelled further from Grantham than the journey to the seaside at Skegness, London was a thrilling eye opener. Margaret saw sights like the Changing of the Guard, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Zoo. ‘We were actually taken to the theatre – to a musical called
The Desert Song
. We saw the crowd, and the bright lights, and I was so excited.’
²⁸

Nearly half a century later, when ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote the first volume of her memoirs, she relived this highlight of her childhood with the same gushing enthusiasm. ‘I could hardly drag myself away from London or from the Skinners, who had been such indulgent hosts. Their kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, ‘
la douceur de la vie
’ – how sweet life could be.’
²⁹

There was a wistful contrast between this enchanting
douceur
of the London visit and the workaholic
froideur
of her life in Grantham. The penny-pinching
restrictions of her mother’s discipline were beginning to grate. They were not ameliorated by expressions of loving maternal tactility. Hugs, kisses and cuddles for her children were as rare if not alien to Beatrice as they were to be for Margaret herself when she became the mother of twins.
^†
She had a strangely joyless childhood. Yet, all work and no play made Margaret not a dull girl but a different one. The difference was that she became motivated by her education – which came from her Grantham schooling and from her father.

FIRST SCHOOL

On 3 September 1930, six weeks before her fifth birthday, Margaret Roberts enrolled for her first term at Huntingtower Road Council School. It was thought to be the best elementary school in Grantham, with modern classrooms built sixteen years earlier. It was non-denominational, which was one of the main reasons why Alfred Roberts chose it. He had a progressive outlook when planning the education of his daughters.

Margaret made an odd first impression on her form mistress Mrs Grimwood when she refused to use the school lavatories. According to her school contemporary Joan Bridgman, the girls’ ‘office’, as their lavatory block was coyly called, was often smelly and dirty because some of the pupils, coming from homes without water closets, did not know how to pull the chain. Too fastidious to go to these lavatories, Margaret trained herself to control her bladder until the lunch break. Then she walked one mile back to her home, repeating the process again in the afternoon. This meant four miles of walking each day – a considerable distance for a young child, particularly if nature is calling.
³⁰

A more elevated example of Margaret’s determination came when Mrs Grimwood told her class about a handwriting competition which was being organised for all the schoolchildren in the town. She emphasised how carefully and neatly the entries had to be submitted. ‘I’ll enter, and I’ll win it,’ said Margaret.
³¹
And she did.

Another memory of Margaret Roberts in her elementary school days is that she was good at reciting poetry with a ‘posh accent’ from which all traces of
her early Lincolnshire twang had been eliminated. Private elocution lessons arranged by her father altered her tone of voice. It became more refined than the homespun dialect used by most pupils at this council school.

In one heated moment at Prime Minister’s Question Time some five decades after her first elocution training, she slipped back into an idiom of the broad Granthamese she once spoke. Shouting across the despatch box in April 1983, she accused Denis Healey of being scared of an election. ‘The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Frit, Frit!’
^32
‡

There were few such linguistic lapses as the education of Margaret Roberts progressed. When she was nine years old her clear diction helped her to win first prize in a poetry recital competition at a local festival in 1934. When her headmistress Miss Margaret Glenn congratulated her, saying, ‘You were lucky Margaret,’ Margaret retorted: ‘I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it.’
³³

The principal target of Margaret Roberts’ efforts to deserve success was winning a scholarship to the local grammar school. She studied for this exam with noticeable intensity. She was always a hard worker. Before she arrived at Huntingtower Road Council School, she could read and write well. During her first term she was moved up into a form for children a year older than herself. From then on she consistently came top or near the top of her class. She was exceptionally diligent at her homework. Her fellow pupils remembered how she used to arrive each day weighed down with a satchel so full of books that she had difficulty in undoing its straps.

Aside from her studies, Margaret Roberts is recorded as having participated in some royal events while at the school.

On 6 May 1935 King George V and Queen Mary celebrated their Silver Jubilee. The school took part in a pageant whose highlight was the display of the word Grantham by the town’s children in Wyndham Park. Half a century later, when Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was sent some commemorative mementos of the celebrations by a Grantham resident Gerald Tuppin. She replied to him from Downing Street, adding in her handwriting: ‘It was a wonderful
occasion, quite the most exciting day of my young life. I seem to remember we formed the “M” in Grantham.’
³⁴

A more solemn occasion was the announcement to the school of the death of King George V on 21 January 1936. The following day Margaret was one of a group of pupils who went down to the Guildhall to hear the proclamation of the new King, Edward VIII.

The school Log Book also provides a portrait of the local events that affected the lives of its 291 children in Margaret Roberts’ last year. Epidemics of flu, measles and whooping cough disrupted school attendances, which at one stage fell to eighty-two. An accident on the railway killed the father of two of her contemporaries. Her class performed an Empire Day play for the whole school ‘and patriotic songs were sung’.
³⁵
A second-hand wireless set was brought for £2 and adjustments were made to its volume so that all pupils could listen to it.

School milk became available for sale in one third of a pint sealed bottles. The cost was a halfpenny per bottle. On Monday mornings pupils were asked to bring ‘tuppence ha’penny’ to pay for their week’s supply of milk. This was a memory that resonated with Margaret when as Secretary of State for Education she became embroiled in the ‘Milk Snatcher Thatcher’ furore after cancelling free milk for schoolchildren.
^#

The most important event in the life of the young Margaret came on 13 July 1936. On that day, the school Log Book recorded: ‘A scholarship has been granted to Margaret Roberts, as although she is very young (10 years 6 months) her work was exceptionally good.’
³⁶

It meant that she could go to the best grammar school in the town, Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School (KGGS). Her achievement was expected, but when the results came through she recalled feeling ‘pretty elated’.
³⁷

This success was the turning point in the early life of Margaret Roberts.

FATHERLY INSPIRATION

When she entered No. 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher paused on the doorstep to respond to a reporter’s question about her father Alfred Roberts. ‘Well, of course, I just owe almost everything
to my own father,’ she said, ‘I really do. He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe and they’re just the values on which I’ve fought the election …’
³⁸

In a moment of supreme elation, this filial piety was as touching as it was justified. For any study of Margaret Roberts’ early years confirms that her relationship with her father was the force that shaped her character and inspired her ambition. There were at least four areas where his example made a profound impact – on her education at home; on her spiritual values learned at the Methodist Church; on her first experiences of politics; and on the development of her personality that was greatly influenced by his principles.

Alfred Roberts started life wanting to be a teacher. This career was denied him by financial difficulties in his family. He had to leave school at thirteen in order to earn a living. But he made up for the education he missed by forming a lifelong habit of wide reading.

One of the passions of Alfred’s life was to make sure that his daughters were better educated than himself. In this endeavour Margaret became the proverbial apple of her father’s eye. Maybe she filled the place of the son he was thought to have longed for. Or perhaps her bookish, argumentative temperament appealed to Alfred’s own penchant for reading and politics. Having been denied his vocation to be a teacher, he found it in his tutoring of Margaret.

A shared love of poetry was an important ingredient in their father–daughter relationship. Alfred had a well-tuned ear for the rhythms and cadences of the English language. He venerated the
Oxford Book of English Verse
. Margaret was made to learn many of its poems by heart. When she won first prize at a local festival in 1934 it was for declaiming Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’, after much paternal coaching. Her father also taught her to recite many lines from Victorian poets, which conveyed a moral message.

Two stanzas Margaret learned in childhood and often quoted in adulthood were:

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

(Christina Georgina Rossetti, ‘Up-Hill’)

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upwards through the night.

(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Ladder of St. Augustine’)

There was plenty of ‘toiling upwards through the night’ in Margaret’s childhood, which at times seemed hard, even to her. She was not allowed to go out and play with other children. Her nose was kept to the grindstone of extra studying, reading or poetry learning. On one occasion she wanted to go for a walk with friends. Her father refused his permission, telling her ‘Never do things just because other people do them’.
³⁹