Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (18 page)

Perhaps the candidate’s strongest appeal, and it was one made much stronger by her youth and sex, was a stirring call for effort, success and a recovery of national greatness. Writing an article in the local press, she declared that ‘Women are intensely patriotic, and the loss of Britain’s prestige under the present Government weighs heavily on their minds.’
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Perhaps Margaret was simply projecting her own feelings on to the
whole of her sex, but if so, it was a projection to which many responded enthusiastically. In particular, she galvanized the Young Conservatives. When they saw a Conservative government back in power, she told the YCs excitedly, ‘they and all Young Conservatives up and down the country would be able to say with Keats, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” ’
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The true author of those famous lines was in fact Wordsworth, not Keats, and he was speaking about the French Revolution, but the unlikely application of them to the YCs was all Margaret’s.

Margaret’s Dartford candidacy required a rearrangement of her life. She had to get out of Colchester and earn more money. She achieved both by securing a job, with the help of the Tory Party chairman, Lord Woolton, as a research chemist at J. Lyons and Co., the food company, in Hammersmith: ‘hats and nice accessories are the order of the day so I’m told – even for laboratory work,’ she complained to Muriel, thinking of the extra expense.
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As with the job at Manningtree, Margaret showed very little interest in it, and certainly no career ambition. She was concentrating more and more on politics, and thinking of the Bar as a profession. But, as with everything she did, she was conscientious and put her work to use. Before long, she was talking to the Dartford Rotary Ladies Day about food research into dried eggs and the like – ‘Another recent problem concerned sandwiches which were to be eaten at 20,000ft in the air,’ read part of a surreal report in the local paper.
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By July, she was lodging at Galley Hill, Darenth Road, Dartford, the home of Mrs Lilian Edwards, a former mayoress of Dartford. She got up at six to walk to Dartford station, took the 7.10 train to London and returned on the 6.08 to an evening’s political work in the constituency.
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The expense was worrying, and the burden of work would have crushed many a spirit, but for Margaret the whole thing was exhilarating, not least the clothes: ‘Mrs Prole [a milliner in Colchester] has made me a smaller black velvet hat with a white ostrich feather on it and it looks very charming. Not so dressy as the green cock feathers – much more a hat for any occasion.’
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To have dinner with Sir Alfred Bossom, the benign old Member for Maidstone, soon to prove one of Margaret’s kindest patrons, she had to borrow Muriel’s white blouse.
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There remained the matter of ‘Scottie’. Back in Colchester, Willie Cullen took Margaret to the Caledonian Ball at the town hall. Margaret reported to Muriel: ‘I was something of a curiosity as he usually takes his sister! I think I set some tongues wagging. Someone came up to Bill while I was standing with him and said “You’ll be getting married next!” He [Willie Cullen], by the way, is 34.’ He also took her to the ‘flicks’: ‘He is awfully
sweet; I am getting quite fond of him, and a very welcome relaxation. And he brought me a pair of nylons on Saturday that his sister had managed to procure up in Scotland! Also he never takes me out without producing a box of chocolates with some sweets!’
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But Margaret was strengthening her idea of herself as matchmaker, having heard that Muriel had more or less broken with her fading suitor: ‘Glad to hear you are trotting round with persons other than the august Ken. Hope it shakes him up a bit,’ and again urged Muriel to Colchester: ‘You had better come down here some other weekend to meet the current boyfriend. By the way, he will never become your brother-in-law though I have high hopes that he may be mine one day!’
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On 8 April, only a few weeks after the relationship had begun, Margaret had Muriel to stay in Colchester and introduced her to Willie Cullen.

The flirtation continued, perhaps a merry diversion for Margaret, perhaps more serious for Willie. Willie kept a diary for the year 1949, mainly a terse, bald record of agricultural doings. His entry for 25 April is typical in tone, but unusually eventful: ‘Carting dung to bottom of lane. Attended Mistley Court with Fred re tractor. Fined £8-15-0 for 9 charges [he had driven his tractor on steel wheels on the public road, and had been arrested]. 6 women hoeing potatoes. Met Margaret at 5.30 B.X. [Plastics]. We went to Flatford, a splendid evening.’ In the following day’s entry, Margaret inserted the time of their next meeting in her own hand. She also inscribed her Colchester address in the front of the diary, with two kisses, and occasionally interpolated her own account of an event in Willie’s pages. On 18 March, she wrote: ‘We went to the Caledonian Ball and had a lovely time. Wore black velvet frock, pearls and long drop earrings. MHR.’ When Willie won the huge sum of £69 7s 6d on two horses called Squanderbug and Scorned at Newmarket (‘SAW PRINCESS ELIZABETH, AND SHE SAW ME!’ Margaret wrote of her first sight of the woman whose eighth prime minister she would eventually become), he took Margaret to lunch in Colchester that weekend to celebrate. They went to Jacklin’s, a well-known local restaurant, before an afternoon together in the cinema watching Bob Hope in
Paleface
. The whole ‘farming fraternity’ was present in the restaurant: ‘All heads were turned towards us as those facing the door sounded the alarm! There was a stunned silence for a couple of seconds followed by a sudden outburst. They all turned round to look and then chattered about us for the whole of the rest of the meal! One of them – Bill Strang – the biggest tease of the lot, tore up some silver cigarette paper into small pieces and threw it all over William as he (Bill) walked out past our table!’
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When he took her to the cinema to see
Bad Lord Byron
, two of the farmers and their wives were there, and the same thing happened again: ‘Being Scotch,
*
of course they had to turn round and see who else was there. They spotted us before we spotted them; they then proceeded to make so many wild signs and so much noise that we soon saw who they were!’
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Willie persevered, giving Margaret ‘frightfully expensive’ Crêpe de Chine scent and visited her ‘every other day with butter, eggs and grapes etc.’
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when she was ill in May. The record of one of his presents, particularly well suited to the recipient, survives, thanks to the camera. Margaret wrote to Muriel to describe it: ‘…William has given me a very nice black-calf handbag. It’s not an awfully expensive one as my conscience wouldn’t let me do that – but I chose a very nice one at £7-3s. We had my initials put on as well and it looks awfully nice … I quite loftily say it’s not “very expensive” – it’s about twice as much as you or I would pay. But compared to some of the others (£15–£20) it’s quite reasonable. I’ll have to hang on to William for a while longer now!’
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Margaret drew a picture of the bag for Muriel, and one can see exactly how well it suited its owner from a press photograph of the two of them at a Dartford fête. There is an almost humorous heartlessness of youth in all of this, a Margaret who plays with men and enjoys it. In the very same letter, she mentions another date. She was going to the North Kent Rotary Ball, she said, ‘with a chap called Denis Thatcher (34)
^†
who is managing director of the Atlas paint works in Erith … He’s all right – but is most unpopular with his men. He’s far too belligerent in dealing with them and they naturally don’t like it.’
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Willie Cullen introduced Margaret to his family. In May, she was received for dinner at Foulton Hall, his farm near Harwich where his sister Agnes kept house (‘the perfectly natural hostess’, said Margaret). She enjoyed the dinner, but it made an interesting impression upon her:

The wives were typical wives – they know of domestic matters and nothing else. I stayed with the men after supper talking about many other things and when William suggested that maybe we ought to ‘join the ladies’ David [Macauley, a local farmer] said in rather contemptuous fashion ‘Why, – they don’t talk politics or anything else in there.’ And that’s how they regard their wives. And indeed when we did join the ladies for half-an-hour or so much later, conversation flagged entirely.
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What is visible here is not only Margaret’s lifelong preference for male company, but a sort of presentiment of what marriage to Willie Cullen would involve. Socially, she had begun to feel part of a more cosmopolitan sphere. And she knew that, both by temperament and by intellect, she could not be happy as a farmer’s wife. When she next visited Foulton, she reported that ‘the sitting-room looks smaller in daylight.’
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The initial meeting which Margaret had set up must have been successful, however, because Muriel came down again to see Willie and, with Margaret, to meet his mother too. Margaret wrote to explain that old Mrs Cullen was nervous because she was ‘afraid her English isn’t good enough or something’. She therefore gave her sister very particular instructions about what to wear: ‘I expect you’ll have your highwayman coat on, but don’t come too exotic underneath. We must be as nice as possible to make Mrs Cullen feel at her ease. Why she should be apprehensive I don’t know because she is an excellent farmer.’
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Perhaps because the Roberts sisters avoided being ‘exotic underneath’, the meeting seems to have been a success, and Willie liked Muriel more and more, as was intended. Indeed, he seemed to fit in with Margaret’s master-plan slightly more readily than was pleasing to her. ‘I had a shock yesterday,’ she wrote to Muriel from Dartford in July, ‘when I had a letter from William to say that he was travelling up to Glasgow by car to fetch his mother down while the harvest is on and would probably call at Allerton [the house in North Parade which the Robertses bought after the war].’ Muriel, of course, was at home with her parents, and Margaret was not. ‘Hope Mummy is looking reasonably respectable,’ she went on. ‘Do let me know their reactions. I hope to goodness he doesn’t give Daddy the impression of being a prospective son-in-law, it would scare Pop out of his wits at the moment. Anyway, I can’t see it ever coming off.’
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The visit took place, and was repeated on Willie’s return journey south. Muriel gave her sister a full report. Margaret replied:

I was most amused to hear the other side of the story of the ‘Bill’
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visit. He told me he could have stayed much longer! … Daddy’s only comment to me was ‘He seems a sensible sort of chap … whoever you want to marry it will be all right by me, my dear.’ So I was very glad you gave details of actual comments. I shan’t marry Bill for though very fond of him I am not in love with him and a marriage between us would falter after 2 or 3 months. We have completely different outlooks, and quite different sorts of friends. While I get on all right with his, he would feel out of water with mine.
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What Margaret was saying, with a rather mature delicacy, was that her ambitions in life were higher than anything that the hard-working plain Scottish farmer could satisfy. She was surely right.
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She hurried home to see Muriel, complaining that she was so busy that she would ‘probably arrive looking like the wreck of the
Hesperus
’.
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In the course of the autumn and winter of 1949, the relationship between Margaret and Willie Cullen continued to cool and that between him and Muriel warmed. Margaret had earlier told Muriel that her Dartford role meant ‘There is very little time for “private life” down here. And even if there were time one wouldn’t be allowed to be seen around in Dartford with anyone in particular.’
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After the summer, it was widely believed that Attlee, the Prime Minister, would call an election quickly, and Margaret threw herself into the preparations, unhappily convinced that her association was not yet ready for the fight. In the course of her campaigning, however, she met a man who interested her. Scribbling to Muriel in pencil in the early autumn, she said that she was feeling the strain of the campaign without getting any thinner, but she had had a brief respite: ‘I went up to the Southern Hospital for the afternoon and evening with the medical superintendent … He’s a most unusual chap and like a number of his profession still a bachelor. He’s over 40, so he’d do quite nicely for you! He said I was to ’phone whenever I felt fed up with politics, but of course I shan’t.’
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‘William says he hasn’t heard from you yet,’ she chided in the same letter. ‘Do write to him as quickly as possible.’ She added that she had teased Willie, who had her to stay at Foulton Hall just before her twenty-fourth birthday in October, with her new-found friend: ‘I told him that I went up to the Southern Hospital with a doctor who impressed me very much – and he wrote back and said I was giving him a hint to get out.’ And she referred again to Denis Thatcher, reminding her sister that ‘He was the one who drove me back to town on the night of my adoption meeting and whose works I later went round.’ Denis was taking her to dinner and the theatre that night, she added, and had invited her to the Paint Federation Ball at the end of November.
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This letter is notable for referring to three of only four men (Tony Bray being the other) who were ever important in the affairs of Margaret’s heart. There will be more of the bachelor doctor at the Southern Hospital later. Margaret was toying with the idea of choosing between them all. When she finally came to choose,
she would do so with the utmost seriousness, but she was not above enjoying the game on the way.

What exactly happened in the next two months is partially obscure, and the participants interviewed by the present author – the two Roberts sisters – did not want to shed much light on it. But, one way or another, Willie Cullen did ‘take the hint to get out’ or rather, to change partners. The process of being gently dumped by Margaret and pushed towards Muriel instead must have been a complicated one. It seemed to involve a good deal of negotiation, but with no apparent falling out between the sisters. Willie Cullen recorded in his diary what was probably his last meeting with Margaret alone: he took her to see
The Third Man
in London on 27 October 1949. On 16 December he arrived to stay at the Robertses’ house in Grantham for the weekend and took Muriel out to the Golf Club Dance. Margaret was not present. Early in January 1950, writing from 63 Knole Road, the address of her new Dartford landlords, local Conservatives called Mr and Mrs Ray Woollcott, Margaret kept Muriel fully informed of the course of the break-up: ‘I have written to William in the vein I told you. He wrote a letter to me – much warmer in tone than his others and the two must have crossed in the post … We are meeting in London on Saturday afternoon to talk over the various aspects of “we three” and it will then be broken off between he and I [sic], for good and all.’ It was better for them to meet, she wrote, perhaps anticipating a slight unease on Muriel’s part, because ‘it would be easier, for when we meet again in a different relationship such as we were sketching out over Xmas, if we parted in the flesh – not by letter – as friends. Hope you approve.’
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In fact, the meeting did not take place. In a postscript, Margaret writes that Willie had rung her to cancel the meeting because ‘he has a party on in Colchester’. Instead, they discussed matters over the telephone. ‘I told him from henceforth that I would “in law” only be taking a sisterly interest in future. He seemed quite satisfied and is quite pleased with “future prospects”.’
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