Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (19 page)

Once ‘we three’ were rearranged, Margaret was keen to get everything settled. Willie Cullen went up to the Robertses in Grantham at the end of January, and Margaret wrote to Muriel beforehand urging her on: ‘I do hope it comes off and I see no reason for the pessimism you showed in a former letter.’
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It did come off. A formal, typed letter, the first such that survives, was sent to Muriel by Margaret from her Conservative Committee Rooms on 2 February 1950, where she was campaigning in the general election which Attlee had called, slightly earlier than he needed to, for 23 February. She detailed where Willie would stay for his visit to Dartford (the Bull) and where Muriel would be billeted (at Knole Road). Behind this
was the fact that Willie and Muriel were engaged. On 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, only a week before polling day, Margaret wrote another formal letter, again typed by a secretary, which said, without comment, ‘I saw your engagement in the
Telegraph
this morning.’ It added instructions for the couple’s visit, ‘You, Daddy and I shall be dining with Lord Dudley Gordon on Tuesday night. Bring something decent to wear. You will be coming to the Count with me on Thursday night, so bring a smart hat.’ In her own hand, however, and presumably written so that no assistant would see it, Margaret added a PS: ‘So glad the announcement is in today’s
Telegraph
, one feels it gives the stamp of finality to the whole affair. Gather you’re having diamonds in your ring, a plum coloured corduroy suit to go away in and a blue gown for the ceremony … The campaign goes fairly well – we are having packed meetings.’
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A minor family row ensued about the announcement in the
Daily Telegraph
. Alfred Roberts had placed the notice and described himself in it as ‘Ald.’, short for Alderman. Muriel was upset by this, and continued to be so more than fifty years later, feeling that it turned her wedding into a municipal announcement.
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Margaret concurred, perhaps for the slightly different reason that local government titles are not grand enough to parade on social occasions. ‘I agree with you that it was quite wrong. I raised my eyebrows at the time.’
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The mistake was not repeated in the invitation to the wedding itself. As soon as the election was out of the way, Margaret, who was to be the only bridesmaid at the wedding in April, threw herself into its every detail. Muriel must have a headdress with a veil ‘otherwise folks won’t know bride from bridesmaid. I’ll just have a little draped cap.’ She made suggestions about flowers, gloves and the importance of not having silver shoes because they would look ‘a bit back-streetish’,
⁵¹
and drew a sketch of the frock, of her own design, which she proposed to wear. She also instructed Muriel on how to take her fiancé in hand – ‘Was disgusted to read the way he turned up for the weekend. See that he takes the right clothes to Paris [where they went on honeymoon]’ – and told Muriel to buck up: ‘Don’t worry about pre-wedding jitters.’
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On no account, she said, must Muriel allow Willie’s sister, Agnes, to go on living with them after their marriage.
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All Margaret’s interventions were well meant, and it is clear that she always had what she considered Muriel’s best interests at heart, but her sister would not have been human if she did not sometimes
feel irritated to be told what to do, almost to have had her marriage arranged, by an unmarried woman four years her junior. Unfortunately, none of Muriel’s letters to Margaret survives, but we know that she did sometimes feel some irritation with the orders issuing from Dartford.
⁵³
Her marriage to Willie Cullen proved long and successful (he died in 1998), but the way it was plotted was probably slightly galling. As Andrew Cullen, one of Muriel and Willie’s two sons, said: ‘Dad did hold a soft spot for Auntie Margaret.’
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In old age, Muriel described her relationship with her sister with characteristic briskness: ‘She [Margaret] says, “I consider my sister my best friend.” All she means by that is that I told her what I thought.’
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Muriel’s daughter, Jane, believed that the relationship between the two sisters was, on the whole, good, but said: ‘The Robertses are not very good at feelings. They deal with facts and reality.’
⁵⁶

Although Margaret never really had any intention of marrying Willie Cullen, what probably precipitated the break was the arrival on the scene of the medical superintendent from the Southern Hospital. The doctor in question was called Robert Henderson. Already forty-seven when Margaret first met him (and therefore just over twice her age), he had enjoyed a distinguished medical career. He was a blacksmith’s son from Clatt in Aberdeenshire who left school early and was apprenticed to a local garage. One of his former teachers, however, who noticed his talent, persuaded his father that he could become a doctor, and he entered medical school in Aberdeen. In that city’s hospital in the 1930s, Henderson devised his own version of a tank respirator he had seen in America for the treatment of patients who could not breathe. In 1933, his ‘iron lung’, as the device came to be widely known, saved the life of a ten-year-old boy with polio. During the war, the machine was manufactured and distributed to hospitals throughout Britain and the Empire. It became famous and saved many lives. In 1940, Henderson was appointed medical superintendent of the Southern Hospital in Dartford, which had 1,700 beds and admitted, at the time of the Blitz, more patients than any other hospital in England. It was in this post that Margaret first met him, some time in the summer of 1949. Because the navy used 500 of the beds there, and Henderson excelled in the treatment of submariners who, in those days, often contracted tuberculosis, he was made a surgeon captain RNVR, entitled to wear the uniform. In 1947, he was given the CBE for his services to medicine. He was greatly admired for his work in this enormous and hard-pressed hospital. A thin, drily amusing man, he loved roses and country life, a good party and especially a good Bloody Mary.
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Physically, he resembled Denis Thatcher, although he was shorter and considered to be better looking. He was also ‘a very good dancer’.
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He was canny with money – ‘£100 would go for ever’
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–
and a supporter, though not actively involved, of the Conservatives. He liked women. In 1949, he was still unmarried.

In Margaret’s letters to Muriel, Robert Henderson is the only boyfriend who is invariably referred to with respect, sometimes even with tenderness. The ‘most unusual chap’ whom she got to know in the summer became a much closer companion as the year waned. In the letter which describes her parting with Willie Cullen, Margaret makes it clear that Robert was, as she most certainly would not have put it, ‘there for her’: ‘In the evening I met Robert on the Dartford station. We had apparently travelled down by the same train. He had to go back for a nurses’ dinner but afterwards he came up to Knole Road and picked me up and we went for a drink. He said he thought I looked flat and miserable and I ought to go out for a little while on my first night back. Wasn’t it sweet of him?’ She was self-mockingly nervous, however, of her chances with him. He had spent Christmas, she said, with a rich family ‘who own half the farms in Essex’ and had ‘
five
daughters of marriageable age … The prospects don’t look very hopeful do they!?’
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Later in January 1950, she wrote that ‘Robert and I are seeing very little of one another at the moment as there is a little thing called the general election in sight,’ but in the same letter, resumed a bit later, she says that she has been to a ‘wonderful party’ (‘All Scotch’, meaning the people, not the drink) with Robert, given by a friend of his who was ‘consultant epidemiologist to the Royal family’. The couple got back to Dartford at three in the morning on a Saturday. And on the Sunday afternoon he drove her round the Weald of Kent and then gave her dinner at the hospital. ‘I think we are both getting very fond of one another,’ she added, ‘– in fact more than that. I hope so.’
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The entertainments became more glamorous and more intimate. In the postscript she wrote to Muriel on the typed letter about her sister’s engagement, Margaret added,

By the way after Polling day Robert and I are dining and dancing at the Berkeley … My new white frock is simply lovely and I’ve every intention of wearing it on that night in spite of the fact that it was mean’t [sic] for the Divisional Ball. Hope you won’t mind my going out then. On Saturday I’m going down to Eastbourne for the weekend. Robert is coming to join me on the Sunday staying overnight and he will drive me back on the Monday. Needless to say I’m looking forward to it tremendously.
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This was perhaps as near as Margaret ever came to enjoying a naughty weekend.

It is notable that no one surviving from Conservative politics in Dartford at that time has any memory of any connection between Margaret and Dr Robert Henderson. True to her intense dislike of other people knowing
about her private life, she mentioned him to no one in Dartford, although she is remembered visiting the Southern Hospital with him to speak to the staff there.
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Yet their relationship deepened, and was to continue almost until she left Dartford for good.

In her election address for the general election of 23 February 1950, Margaret Roberts spoke in her own distinctive voice. The ‘first task’ of a new Conservative government, she said, would be ‘setting the finances of the nation in order’, and she grounded her thoughts in the commonsense terms of the practical woman. Of nationalization, she wrote, ‘To the housewife it conjures up a picture of a grate full of dust, ash and clinker that won’t burn.’ She praised the ‘small shopkeepers’ – ‘I believe firmly that such men and women are part of the strength and backbone of England’ – reaffirmed her support for Imperial Preference and declared that ‘A separate house for every family is our aim.’ And she made a promise about herself, which, more than most politicians’ promises, was to prove true: if elected, ‘I should carry out my task to the utmost of my ability, allowing myself no rest until the duties which fell to my lot were complete.’
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In a newspaper article the previous week, Margaret was even more explicit in offering her own vision of Britain and the crisis it faced under socialism. She set out four main themes – ‘Britain amongst the Nations’, ‘Britain’s Economic Independence’, ‘Nationalisation or Private Enterprise’ and ‘Frustration or Freedom’. She argued that Britain’s reputation in the world had fallen low under Labour from its great height in 1945, that it had failed to join in resisting Communism and that ‘The world needs her.’ Discussing the American Lend–Lease programme which kept the nation afloat during the war, Margaret compared the United States with a friendly neighbour helping the man next door who had fallen on hard times and now dismayed by his failure to recover. Socialist profligacy was the problem. Far from paying off his debt, the neighbour ‘is having to sell one or two pieces of his wife’s gold jewellery to pay the grocer’s bill’. This, referring to the sale of gold reserves to buy food, was what might be called a pre-echo of Harold Macmillan’s famous attack on Mrs Thatcher over privatization for ‘selling the family silver’. Margaret then challenged the voters: ‘Are YOU going to let this proud island race, who at one time would never accept charity, drift on from crisis to crisis … ? Or do you believe in sound finance … ?’ Quoting ‘a young unknown engineer from one of the Dominions’,
*
who had written to her asking what had happened to the
sturdy British love of freedom, she made her own passionate plea: ‘It was not a Government that built up the skill and craft of this country – the woollen goods, the beautiful china, and the precision engineering, which have made their way into the markets of the world. It was private individuals who patiently persevered, building up their businesses bit by bit.’ The British spirit had to be rediscovered: ‘Do you want it to perish for a soul-less Socialist system, or to live to recreate a glorious Britain? YOU WILL DECIDE.’
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In the whole of her career, Margaret Thatcher was to diverge very little from the substance and the tone of this article. It is, perhaps, the first clear text of Thatcherism. As with Thatcherism when fully formed, the emotional force behind the piece is not a doctrine about economic liberty – strong though that is – but a romantic belief in the greatness, and a sad lament at the decline, of her country.

With such powerful beliefs, and a precocious confidence in her powers of expressing them, Margaret Roberts fought the campaign with gusto. And she was happy to put herself and her background centre-stage. She had heard, she told a public meeting on 7 February, that some people thought ‘she came from a moneyed family; that was not so. She had to work for her living as a food chemist and had been in the habit of leaving Dartford on the 7.15am train and returning at 7pm to do her political work.’
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Nor did she think her extreme youth a problem: ‘William Pitt was Prime Minister of England [sic] when he was 24. Mr Anthony Eden went into Parliament at my age and has represented the same division ever since.’
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Believing that the candidate should be immediately identifiable by the way she looked, she invested in a hat from Bourne and Hollingsworth with a black and white ribbon, to which she added a ‘bit of blue inside the bow’ and alternated two suits.
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She threw herself into the campaign, speaking outside factory gates to the all-male workers in defiance of trade union officials, and addressing huge public meetings night after night – ‘heckling suited me a treat’. She went everywhere in the constituency except for pubs, believing that it ‘wouldn’t do’ for a woman.
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The campaign went extremely well, but Margaret gave it almost more than she had. Speaking more than forty years later, she said, ‘I have never felt so tired in any election since.’
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The result declared, late at night on 23 February 1950, was: