Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (13 page)

In January 1947, Margaret wrote to Muriel explaining that she was attending an OUCA dinner for L. S. Amery, the leading Churchillian, and another for Lord Woolton, the Chairman of the Conservative Party: ‘This in addition to the annual dinner’.
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‘My black velvet frock looks positively opulent! The skirt is cut on the cross so it hangs beautifully.’ The rush of dinners leads her to ask Muriel for the loan of her black and gold evening dress. It is clear, too, that OUCA produces more informal pleasures. ‘Neil and Roger’, she writes, ‘have been round to tea etc. several times. Two evenings we have been out “on the razzle” and have had the most hilarious time.’

‘Roger’ was Roger Gray, from the Queen’s College, a handsome war veteran who had just become president of the Oxford Union and, as such, was probably the best-known undergraduate in the university. Margaret mentions that, because of his ‘arduous duties’, she will probably see less of him this term. ‘Neil’ was Neil Findlay, from Worcester College, unpolitical, but a great friend and wartime comrade of Roger Gray and, like him, fond of parties and drinking.
^†

Both men appealed more to Margaret than she did to them. Roger, appar
ently, ‘found her rather hard work’ and sometimes, after a few drinks, would poke her chest and say, ‘Is it marble, Margaret?’
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It was not. Margaret was smitten with Neil, a fact of which he was half aware. According to Neil, Margaret felt attracted towards people with a greater social presence than her own, and they didn’t always respond. He felt a little sorry for her.
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At the time of Margaret’s crush on Neil, which probably began in late 1946, only little hints emerge in her surviving letters to Muriel. ‘Bumped into Neil only once this term – that was in the Grocer’s,’ she wrote in May 1947,
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but a later letter shows what she had felt. After becoming the candidate for Dartford in early 1949, Margaret moved to lodgings there. From these she wrote to Muriel describing a recent chance meeting: ‘When I went to Canterbury a week last Sunday for the political weekend school, I saw Neil Findlay with his new wife at the station on the way back. I don’t think they saw [me] for Neil is very short-sighted and I didn’t go up to them. His wife is a smart woman but she looked a Jewess.
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She was dark with a fair complexion and the typical long nose. I was standing with Doric Bossom (son of A. Bossom
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MP for Maidstone): and Ian Harvey, candidate for East Harrow,
^‡
and was glad that if he saw me, I wasn’t too badly off for male company. I didn’t feel one single twinge when I saw him. Strange how shallow infatuation is.’
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For all its jauntiness, the letter reveals some anxiety on Margaret’s part at being at a disadvantage in relation to Neil Findlay, and at being seen alone when he is with another woman. She spoke the truth when she said that the wound had healed. In the 1950s, the Findlays found themselves living in Swan Court, Chelsea, the same block of flats as the Thatchers, and were on good terms with them.
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But it is clear that at Oxford she was susceptible to men she thought glamorous, and feared being disregarded by them. She saw OUCA as her best way of overcoming any handicap. Writing to Muriel in May 1947 to discuss her sister’s forthcoming visit to Oxford (her last before Margaret went down), she explains their social plans. She has asked Edward Boyle to get them tickets for a Union debate,
and there is a possibility, no more, of their being asked to the President’s farewell party afterwards. ‘Edward also asked us to lunch one day – if he remembers,’ she goes on, and she also hopes to ‘wangle a meeting with Roger and/or Neil’. The problem, though, is that ‘OUCA activities for the term finish with a garden party tomorrow and I’m otherwise powerless to ask them round. I’ll just have to rely on their dropping in which they do on very rare occasions.’
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Despite four successful years at the university, she was still in a position of traditional, womanly weakness.

Besides, she was still smarting from the loss of an earlier, more serious love.

It seems highly unlikely that Margaret ever had any boyfriends in Grantham. All those who knew her then, including her sister, believe there was none. There is no doubt, however, that Margaret was a carefully dressed young woman whom many considered attractive, and who noticed and enjoyed the attentions of others. People remember her rosy cheeks and elegant legs. Kenneth Wallace, of Grantham, was pleased with her fluent and intelligent conversation.
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As she started to go to parties in Grantham towards the end of the war men, often servicemen, asked her to dance, and some pressed their suit quite strongly. In August 1944, at the end of her first year in Oxford, she joined the local tennis club in Grantham (she complained that she had ‘schorched [sic]’ her tennis dress with her iron) and went to its dance there. Before long ‘… I had settled down with a Flight-Lieutenant aged about 40!!!! Or rather he had settled down with me.’
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At the turn of the year, she went to a dance in Corby, near Grantham:

To my horror I recognised one of them – the bald one – as the Flight-Lieutenant whom I spent most of the evening with at the tennis dance in the summer. My heart sank when I saw him walking across the floor to ask me for the first dance … Fortunately, one of his friends stuck to me like a limpet. He was a lovely dancer so I didn’t mind terribly. He was, I gather, a rather famous football referee for he had done at any rate one if not more cup finals. He was unfortunately rather difficult to get rid of. He wanted me to go to the pictures with him. I told him instantly that I was going back to Oxford for an electioneering course for a week … He eventually departed having given me his telephone no. name and all further particulars and telling me to ring him up when I got back. I shan’t of course because I don’t want to go around with a man of his age,
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and when I vaguely mentioned the fact at home Daddy said, ‘No, of course not!’ in a very final tone.
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Margaret then spent the rest of the evening with a thirty-year-old pilot who had done several operational flights over Germany. What she did not mention when keeping her suitor at arm’s length – though she refers to it elsewhere in the same letter to Muriel – was that she already had a boyfriend.

The only previously known specific evidence of a particular man at this stage in Margaret Roberts’s life comes from Margaret Goodrich’s previously mentioned account (see
Chapter 2
) of what she believed to be Margaret’s first declaration that she wanted to be an MP. Margaret Goodrich celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a small party in the rectory at Corby Glen on 22 December 1944, and Margaret Roberts went to the party, sharing a bed in the overcrowded house with Sheila Browne, much later to become chief inspector of schools during the Thatcher premiership. Both Margarets have recorded, in rather different versions,
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that they sat round in the kitchen discussing their ambitions, and Margaret Roberts publicly recognized her own. According to Margaret Goodrich, her mother asked Margaret, and she said, as if she had thought of it before, ‘I want to become an MP.’
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In fact, as we have seen, she had already indicated her political ambitions to others, but what Margaret Goodrich also remembered was that Margaret had arrived clutching a carnation which ‘seemed very precious to her’ and had, she said, been given her by an Oxford boyfriend. She was concerned for its welfare, so Mrs Goodrich put it in a vase with water and an aspirin.
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The name of the boyfriend was Tony Bray.

Tony was an army cadet, who had arrived in Oxford in October 1944, attached to Brasenose College, but, due to the exigencies of wartime, had been accommodated in the buildings of Christ Church. He was pursuing a special six-month course, devised to combine military training with lectures on the ‘general sciences’. Educated at Brighton College, a minor public school in the south-east, Tony was from a solidly bourgeois background, and before joining up had already been an articled clerk to a solicitor. He was short and not particularly good-looking, but, by his own account sixty years later, ‘not half bad as a dancer’.
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Born in 1926, he was a little younger than Margaret.

The two had met through OUCA, probably at the association’s coffee discussions at the Randolph Hotel, some time that autumn of 1944. Margaret seemed to Tony ‘very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That’s probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects.’ He
was also impressed with her enthusiasm for politics – ‘That was something very unusual. Not many girls were like that’ – and, like Tony, she was ‘a genuine, old-fashioned Conservative’. He was also taken with her appearance: ‘She was a plump, attractive girl in a well-built way. That wasn’t ill thought of,’ and she had ‘elegant, dark hair’ (‘I’d have told her I didn’t like blondes if she had become blonde then’). She ‘dressed elegantly, though not in a top stylish way’. He felt also that she had ‘a degree of loneliness’ which was part of ‘the reason we got on’.
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At that time, it was unusual for couples to go around as ‘an item’, and Margaret and Tony did not do so. None of their university friends from that time remembered the one knowing the other. But, at tea in one another’s rooms, where she proved herself a ‘good housekeeper’ with her cooking of crumpets, they quickly became close. He found her serious, and ‘a bit blue-stocking’, but he liked the fact that she read a great deal and loved music. She took him to the Matthew Passion in which, as a member of the Bach Choir, she was performing. Tony respected her because ‘she held her thoughts very sincerely’. At roughly the same time as he gave her the carnation – Christmas 1944 – she gave him Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
which he kept beside him every day until he lost it in a house move forty years later. It was his impression from the way Margaret kissed that she had had no boyfriend before, but she showed a delight in physical intimacy. They followed the rules of those days, however, and never slept together.

As he got to know Margaret better, Tony, whose parents were quite well off, noticed the ‘great strain it was to finance her time at university’; she was ‘not ashamed of her background’ but exhibited ‘a degree of reticence’ about it. He detected that she was ‘very determined to make good’, but, with pleasure and surprise, he also noticed something else: ‘She was a person who, though not apparently sociable, enjoyed socializing … she astonished herself how much she could relax and be relaxed.’ They had fun together.
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This pleasure, and the heightened sense of life’s possibilities that comes through first love, can be found in Margaret’s letters to Muriel. Her descriptions, normally rather tart or matter of fact, take on a different tone. On 25 March 1945, back in Grantham for the Easter vacation, Margaret wrote with details of every dance she had been to. Wartime had stopped the traditional full-scale Commem balls in the summer, but the approach of victory permitted a rash of college and other dances in March. Margaret went to five. The first, and best, was the Randolph Ball at the Randolph Hotel: ‘We had a marvellous time … Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country Inn “Crown and Thistle”. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [sic] the blue frock perfectly.’ Tony
presented her with a spray of eight carnations ‘sent for me from London so with the front part of my hair piled up on top Jean and Mary said I looked simply smashing. I felt absolutely on top of the world as we walked through the lounge at the Crown and Thistle and everyone looked up and stared.’ In the manner of the wartime deprived, Margaret went on to describe, in detail, what they ate and drank: ‘We went into the bar and had gin and grapefruit and then to the dining room for dinner. We had some lovely thick creamy soup followed by pidgeon [sic] and then a chocolate sweet. With it we had Moussec to drink. Moussec in case you don’t know is a sparkling champagne.’
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When they reached the Randolph at a quarter to nine, ‘Things were in full swing … The ballroom was marvellously decorated and all the lighting was done with huge coloured lamps operating from the balcony. The floor was simply packed so from the point of view of dancing it wasn’t terrifically marvellous. The Duchess of Marlborough arrived soon after we did and seemed very nice. The refreshments were lovely. Altogether it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.’
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Asked about it sixty years later, Tony remembered buying the carnations from Moyses Stevens. When reminded of Margaret’s blue dress, he suddenly broke down in tears and said: ‘It was a very special evening.’
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The next day was Somerville’s dance, for which Margaret wore the same thing (‘The flowers were still fresh’): ‘There were two other Conservative couples there … so we teamed up and had a thoroughly gay evening.’ The following week, there was Worcester College – ‘We had a thoroughly hilarious time’; then Wadham – ‘a bit of a bear-fight’; and finally, Merton, for which Margaret wore ‘my green crepe frock’.
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Once term had ended, Tony whisked her off for a day in London which included coffee at Fullers in Regent Street, lunch at the Dorchester (‘It is not the acme of hotels it is reported to be’), a matinée performance of Strauss’s
A Night in Venice
at the Cambridge Theatre and finally a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel before Margaret got the train to Grantham and Tony returned to Oxford. For her, who had seen so little of the pleasures of the world, it was heady stuff.

It also, in her mind, betokened something quite serious, although Margaret seldom directly described her feelings to her sister. In the same letter to Muriel, she writes: ‘Preparations are going ahead fast and furiously for next weekend. I do hope everything will be all right.’
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Tony was coming to stay with her parents above the shop. This would not have happened if she had seen her relationship with Tony as some passing fancy; and her
parents, themselves serious-minded, unused to guests and protective of their daughters where men were concerned, would have regarded this as a potentially very significant occasion.