Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (158 page)

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There was a popular theory in circulation that Margaret Thatcher had Cust blood. The story was that Margaret’s grandmother Phoebe Stephenson had been a maid at Belton (even this fact has never been established). She was seduced, the theory goes on, by Harry Cust, a famous womanizer and, in all probability, the true father of Lady Diana Cooper. Her maiden name was Crust – almost Cust – and her granddaughter supposedly had ‘Cust eyes’. Caroline Cust, now the Hon. Mrs Caroline Partridge, told the present author that she believed in the theory, though in her view Cust was Margaret’s father, not her grandfather. This is impossible, since Harry Cust died eight years before Margaret was born. There is no evidence for the theory and its details don’t add up, as shown by John Campbell in his biography
Margaret Thatcher
(2 vols, Jonathan Cape, 2000, 2003, vol. i:
The Grocer’s Daughter
). It was widely believed, however, in grand Tory circles. When the present biographer put the theory to Margaret Thatcher, she answered, with a certain pride: ‘Blue eyes aren’t the preserve of the aristocracy.’

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The wartime atmosphere at these bases is best captured in Terence Rattigan’s 1942 play
Flare Path
, which is set near one of them.

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Before she became Conservative Party leader, Mrs Thatcher always said that her highest ambition was to be the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer. She regarded any political job to do with money as more ‘real’ than any dealing with what she sometimes called ‘the welfare thing’. She may have derived this view from her father.

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Victor Warrender (1899–1993), educated Eton; Conservative MP for Grantham, 1923–42; government whip, and holder of minor ministerial posts; created Lord Bruntisfield, 1942.

‡
The Peace Ballot, organized in 1935 by the League of Nations Union to seek support for its international peacemaking in the face of rearmament, has been curiously misrepresented by history. It is true that most of those taking part supported peaceful negotiation, but 6.8 million voted that the use of force against aggression was justified, as compared with 2.4 million who said that it was not.

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The two corresponded in warm terms in the 1970s and early 1980s, and when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister, she often stayed at Schloss Freudenberg near Zug in Switzerland, the home of Lady Glover. One man to whom she made a pilgrimage at his family’s home in Gstaad was the by then extremely old Victor Warrender. A witness says that their meeting was emotional and touching: Mrs Thatcher thanked him for being the foundation of her political ambition. (Interview with Richard Bowdler-Raynar.)

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Lady Thatcher mistakenly refers to her as Colette in her memoirs. She was known as Cilette, but her baptismal name was Cécile. Cilette Pasquier was to marry Franck Sérusclat, a Socialist Senator for the Rhône region from 1977 to 1999. She and Margaret never met, and she died in 1982, apparently without knowing that her former penfriend had become the British prime minister.

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Grantham is land-locked.

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To attend both films on the bill was an act of minor defiance against the wishes of Mr and Mrs Roberts. They thought that their girls should go only to those films properly chosen on their merits, rather than watching whatever happened to be on. (See Margaret Thatcher,
The Path to Power
, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 14.)

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Russell Lewis, in his
Margaret Thatcher
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), says the prize was for poetry recital at the local eisteddfod, the festival of Welsh origin which was popular in Grantham at that time. Nellie Towers, in her interview for
Maggie: The First Lady
(Brook Lapping Productions for ITV and PBS, 2003), says she was being congratulated for this and for winning the church music festival piano solo prize. It is possible that the story conflates more than one occasion.

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Literal-mindedness was a quality that Margaret Thatcher observed in herself. In her memoirs, she says, ‘I was perplexed by the metaphorical element of phrases like “Look before you leap”. I thought it would be far better to say “Look before you cross” …’ (Thatcher,
The Path to Power
, p. 17).

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Lady Thatcher told the present author that she spoke in public in the Grantham by-election of 1942, but this does not appear to be the case: it seems unlikely, since she would have been only sixteen.

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Note that Mrs Thatcher praises her own looks as well as Jean’s. She never found it easy to hand out unreserved compliments to other women.

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Jean Farmer herself, though always much less ambitious than Margaret, declared, ‘I wasn’t terribly impressed with Grantham. It didn’t have a lot to offer’ (interview with Mrs Jean Dean).

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In her memoirs, Lady Thatcher says that her ‘views on the French Revolution were gloriously confirmed by Leslie Howard and lovely Merle Oberon in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
’ (Thatcher,
The Path to Power
, p. 14). This may be so, but the film came out in 1934, at a time when Margaret was a little young for it. It seems more likely that she is remembering
Pimpernel Smith
, also starring Leslie Howard, which updates the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel and places it in war-torn Europe.

†
Judy Campbell, who died in 2004, was also the mother of Jane Birkin, equally famous for a very different sort of love-song, ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, in the late 1960s. Jane’s daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, starred in the painfully explicit film
Antichrist
early in the twenty-first century.

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The present author witnessed this.

†
Margaret Goodrich has said, and Mrs Thatcher has confirmed in slightly different form (see Patricia Murray,
Margaret Thatcher
, W. H. Allen, 1980, p. 38), that her first moment of realization that she wanted to be an MP was at Margaret Goodrich’s twenty-first birthday party on 22 December 1944, when she assented to the proposition put to her by another girl that she wanted a political career. In fact, as Lorna Smith’s story indicates, the idea was floating considerably earlier.

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Almost all the former KGGS girls interviewed for this book continued to maintain an active religious life, all of them Christian except for Madeline Hellaby (née Edwards), who converted from Unitarianism to the Bah’ai faith.

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Mrs Wright is unique in referring to Margaret as ‘Maggie’ in her interview. There is no evidence that anyone, apart from President Reagan, who knew her ever called her this at any stage of her life, though it became the name preferred by tabloid headline writers. When asked about her names, Lady Thatcher replied, ‘I don’t like them, especially the Hilda: it has an ugly hard sound. But I would rather be Hilda than “Maggie” ’ (interview with Lady Thatcher).

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Margaret Thatcher only rarely dated her handwritten letters exactly. They most commonly say just the day – for example, ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Sunday evening’ – or nothing at all.

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Most of the young Margaret’s harshest comments are reserved for those who make nothing of their appearance and exhibit sourness or slatternliness. In a letter to Muriel written in December 1941, she describes the school’s hockey-team visit to a match in Melton: ‘Their gym mistress was an awful old irritable thing. She had a spotty complexion, lank, greasy hair – eton-cropped, wore glasses and dowdy clothes. She found fault with everything possible and actually coached her own side while refereeing.’

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It has also been suggested that Margaret was given Latin lessons by Fr Leo Arendzen, the Robertses’ neighbour and the local Roman Catholic parish priest. (Letter from Canon A. P. Dolan.)

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See
Chapter 1
.

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Her anxiety about her weight was to persist. In October 1974, Mrs Thatcher told the BBC’s
Any Questions?
: ‘Oh, I’ve tried to lose weight … If I didn’t, I’d just get enormous. I lose half a stone every year and promptly put it back on … but I do think people should look after their weight. You know, one Labour politician in Parliament said to me, “If politicians can’t have enough self-discipline over what they eat, how can you expect them to have enough self-discipline over their political lives?” ’ (Christopher Collins, ed.,
Complete Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher 1945–90 on CD-ROM
, Oxford University Press, 1998/2000).

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This difficulty in ‘placing’ Margaret recurred when she returned to Somerville for its centenary dinner in 1979. According to Amy Wootten, no one knew with which group of alumnae she would be seated.

†
Betty Spice believed that Margaret’s voice was as it was because ‘Daddy had made her have elocution lessons before she came up.’ This is not the case, as explained in
Chapter 2
.

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Mary Foss converted to Roman Catholicism in rather dramatic circumstances. A Primitive Methodist from Cornwall, she fell in love at Oxford with an undergraduate called David Balhatchet, who was a Catholic. She converted to Catholicism and married him. Mary’s mother had a heart attack as a result of her daughter’s conversion and refused to attend the wedding. (Mrs Balhatchet died some years ago. The author has the above information from Mrs Mary Williamson.) The story of Mary may have contributed to Beatrice Roberts’s fear of Roman Catholic influences on Margaret (see
Chapter 5
).

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Daphne Park (1921–2010), educated Rosa Bassett School and Somerville College, Oxford; leading figure in the Secret Intelligence Service; Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1980–89; created Baroness Park of Monmouth, 1990.

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Dorothy Hodgkin was a member of the anti-nuclear Pugwash group of scientists considered by many to have been extremely credulous in their attitude to the Soviet Union. She used to write to Mrs Thatcher from time to time to put the case against cruise missiles and warn her not to listen too much to Soviet dissidents. Mrs Thatcher remained affectionate towards her, but thought her views naive. Having received her at Chequers in 1983, she said to her fellow guest and at that time Principal of Somerville, Daphne Park, ‘Is it possible to educate Dorothy a bit more on the issue of Russia?’ [interview with Lady Park of Monmouth]

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Even when she was president of OUCA, Margaret could only attend Union debates in the gallery, and then only if she were given guest tickets by a member.

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Mrs Thatcher was often criticized for referring to Churchill thus, as if she were presuming acquaintance with the great man. It seems more likely that she was repeating the usage of fellow Young Conservatives, rather as the equivalents, in her time, would call her ‘Maggie’, without pretending that they knew her.

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Oliver Franks (1905–92), educated Bristol Grammar School and Queen’s College, Oxford; philosopher at Oxford and Glasgow Universities, 1927–45; Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Supply, 1945–6; Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, 1946–8; Ambassador to the United States, 1948–52; chairman, Lloyds Bank, 1954–62; Provost of Worcester College, Oxford, 1962–76; chairman, Falkland Islands Review Committee, 1982; knighted, 1946; created Lord Franks, 1962; Order of Merit, 1977.

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Because of the need to collect votes from servicemen abroad, the result was not declared until 26 July.

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The voting age, at that time, was twenty-one.

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Muriel never did hit the footlights. She married a farmer, Willie Cullen, of whom more later, but one of the pleasant surprises of writing this book has been discovering in Muriel a character perhaps even more formidable than her famous sister.

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Edward Boyle (1923–81), 3rd baronet, educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; President of the Oxford Union, 1948; Conservative MP for Handsworth, 1950–70; resigned as junior minister over Suez, 1956; Minister of Education, 1962–4; Vice-Chancellor, Leeds University, 1970–81; created Lord Boyle of Handsworth, 1970.

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Their rapport was maintained to the end, despite deep political differences. When Edward Boyle was dying of cancer in 1981, he called on Mrs Thatcher at No. 10 to say goodbye. They talked alone.

†
(Walter) John Montagu Douglas Scott, 9th Duke of Buccleuch (1923–2007), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; served RNVR, 1939–45; Conservative MP (as Earl of Dalkeith) for Edinburgh North, 1960–73.

‡
One friend of Dalkeith who remembers being asked for the money says that it was to buy Margaret a bicycle. Lady Thatcher told the present author that she thought this was probably correct. If so, she is possibly mistaken in her memoirs in saying that she bought a bicycle herself in her second year. If Dalkeith was right that she ‘pedalled off’ to Cowley before she received her present, whose bicycle did she ride? It also seems highly unlikely that, in those pre-inflationary days, even the grandest undergraduates could have subscribed £25 each.

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Valerie Hobson: famous actress, and later the wronged wife of John Profumo, Minister of War under Harold Macmillan.

†
Roger Gray, who died in the 1990s, went on to a career at the Bar where he ended up as a recorder of the Crown Court. Friends believed that his undoubted brilliance was dimmed by his heavy drinking. Findlay became an executive in the paper industry. Neil’s son Max became an internet legend in 2011 when film of his dog Fenton chasing deer went viral as ‘Jesus Christ in Richmond Park’.

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This is one of a couple of occasions on which Margaret seems to be expressing the mild, unthinking anti-Semitism which was common at that time. These views did not survive her contact with Finchley.

†
Sir Alfred Bossom Bt (1881–1965), educated Charterhouse and Royal Academy of Arts; Conservative MP for Maidstone, 1931–59; created Baron Bossom, 1960. Sir Alfred was one of Margaret’s earliest patrons. It was from his house in Carlton Gardens that she and Denis went away after their wedding.

‡
Ian Harvey, by 1958 a junior Foreign Office minister, was forced to leave politics after being caught performing a homosexual act with a Guardsman in St James’s Park.