Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (7 page)

On returning to school, Margaret was not greatly impressed with all of the teaching staff: ‘The new games mistress is not as young as we have been used to having. Her name is Miss Dales, and she looks about 30. The history mistress is very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and very dowdy in dress.’ And as for Miss Amor, the geography teacher who had also been her form mistress, she had now, in her new role of vice-head, grown ‘too big for her boots’, so much so that ‘she would not come and take stock cupboard at all on Friday.’ Margaret reserved a specially tart comment for the headmistress, Miss Gillies, about her handling of the exam results: ‘There was no message of congratulation (or sympathy) from the Head, just a blunt “Pass” or “Fail”.’

She set her shoulder to the wheel of work, however, and shared her thoughts about the future with her sister:

When going into VI Lower you need not necessarily decide what career you are going to take up except that it would be helpful in choosing subjects … Daddy does not like the idea of medical at all, but I am taking Biology, Chemistry and Maths main with French subsid. The next idea on the list is to go to University, and take a science degree then sit for a Civil Service exam for posts abroad. A degree is necessary for this for a woman. Of course I shan’t be able to go to University at all unless I get a scholarship.

In the whole letter, there is no direct mention of the war, though at the time Germany was invading Russia and Britain was almost the sole champion of the free world, the United States not having yet entered the conflict. The historical moment in which Margaret was living impinges only indirectly and in small ways – the emphasis on the rare availability of salmon salad, a passing mention of the fact that the evacuated Camden School for Girls was sharing KGGS’s facilities, the increasing age of the teaching staff. The war, which was to play so important a part in forming her beliefs and her idea of her country, was treated by her at the time only as a backdrop against which the life of school was played out.

Already, in her first words that posterity has left us, the fifteen-year-old Margaret Roberts shows herself clear, confident, ambitious, diligent, clever and slightly acidulous.

What was her education, and how did it form her? At her primary school in Huntingtower Road, Margaret did well. The story has often been told, in slightly differing versions, about the prize she won at the age of nine.
*
When the head congratulated her on her luck, Margaret retorted, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ The tale is sometimes taken to indicate big-headedness or arrogance, but more likely it shows the young Margaret’s literal-mindedness.
*
She had not been lucky; she
had
deserved it, so she felt bound to say so. To say anything else would be to cast doubt on the entire judging process.

The first surviving motion picture – a short and jerky cine film – of Margaret Roberts dates from 1935. In that year, Grantham celebrated its centenary as a borough, and she paraded, with her school, to help form the word ‘GRANTHAM’ out of human bodies. In the film, the nine-year-old Margaret Roberts can be discerned preparing to do so: ‘appropriately enough, I was part of the “M”.’
⁴

In the following year, Margaret won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. KGGS, as it is and was always known, was the best school in the area that a girl could attend. Founded in 1910, it was a fee-paying girls’ grammar school, but with about a quarter of the girls attending exempt from fees. Scholarship girls entered after an equivalent of the later universal eleven-plus exam; fee-paying girls could enter from a much younger age. When Margaret arrived in September 1936, there were about 330 girls in the school, including Muriel, who was not a scholarship girl. Because of its high reputation, KGGS drew on families from quite far outside Grantham, as well as from the town itself. The social background of the pupils varied from the prosperous or highly educated (top managers in the engineering firms, the Anglican clergy) to daughters of poor families who had got in on their wits. In the financial scale, the Robertses probably stood slightly below the middle of the school; in the social, because of Alfred’s growing role in the town, rather higher.

Despite her scholarship, Margaret went straight into the B Stream. This did not reflect any academic defect on her part, but simply the fact that an unusually large number of scholarship girls had been admitted in that year, and not all could be accommodated in the A Stream. The effect of this was to foster the slight but definite sense of separation from most of her peers that many felt Margaret showed. It also threw her together with Jean Farmer, the
builder’s daughter from Fulbeck. Jean, too, was a scholarship girl, the only other one in the B Stream, and because of this, she said, ‘we were a pair’
⁵
for the two years before they graduated to the A Stream, and, indeed, until Margaret went to Oxford and Jean to teacher training college in 1943. Jean was an easygoing, popular girl, known, in the parlance of the time, as a ‘scream’,
⁶
and it was she and her family that first gave Margaret the sense that life could be more fun than it was in North Parade. It was in response to Margaret’s demand that she be allowed Sundays as free and jolly as those of the Farmers that Alfred Roberts produced his famous response: ‘Margaret, never do things just because other people do them. Make up
your
own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to go your way.’
⁷
Margaret both kicked against such injunctions and imbibed them respectfully. She resented what her father taught, but generally believed that he was right.

Jean Farmer liked Margaret without reservation. She describes her as ‘a very pleasant, happy, fun-loving girl’, not at all under stress and even ‘happy-go-lucky’. She was a ‘slightly plump’ girl who was ‘polite, hard-working and joined in everything’. The two of them ‘never had a cross word’, and Jean was irritated in later years by the criticisms of Margaret which she felt were unfair, such as not having a sense of humour or being too imperious: ‘I didn’t find her at all bossy … she was exceptionally nice.’ The two spent the odd weekend at one another’s parents’ houses, and the Farmers once took Margaret with them for a weekend in Skegness – a modest outing by modern standards, but quite a thing for the girls at the time. They were also excited by an expedition they made to Stamford Boys School to see
The Barber of Seville
performed in French (‘though we couldn’t understand a thing they said’). Jean did not regard Margaret as a genius, but she did note her ‘marvellous powers of concentration’ and one of her most famous characteristics as prime minister: ‘she didn’t need as much sleep as we did.’
⁸
Jean’s parents were particularly fond of Margaret too, and it was Jean’s father, Jack, who chaired the Conservative Party meeting in Fulbeck in the general election campaign of 1945 at which Margaret did the warm-up for the Tory candidate. This was one of the first public speeches that she had made.
*
The Farmers kept up with Margaret, writing to congratulate her on her public successes. In March 1974, following the Tory defeat in the general election the previous month, Margaret, who had seen Jean again while opening a comprehensive in
Formby where she now lived, wrote back: ‘It was good to see Jean when I opened a school. She looks marvellous. I think we have both “worn” very well!’
*
She went on, ‘It seems a long time since I was “home” in Lincolnshire. In some ways, I think they were happier and fuller days than those I live now. The days in London are and always will be
very busy
– but there is not the warmth and the friendship of the small town and village.’
⁹
In reality, Margaret probably did not like Grantham excessively, and was certainly keen to get away from it, but she admired the values that she learnt there. And there is no doubt that she felt a real affection for the Farmers and the spontaneity of their village life.
^†

Jean Farmer was not alone in thoroughly liking Margaret. Another friend was Shirley Walsh (now Ellis), a pretty girl on whose doorstep in Avenue Road Margaret chose to arrive every morning (‘she was always early’)
¹⁰
so that they could walk to school together across the River Witham. It was Margaret who informed her, on one of these spring mornings in 1940, that invading German forces had parachuted into Holland. And it was Margaret and Shirley, when they were a bit older, who would work together at Toc H, the mission for servicemen, on a Saturday serving in the forces canteen. In Shirley Ellis’s view, Margaret ‘was never disdainful of her schoolfriends or peers’ and showed a good sense of humour – ‘She didn’t instigate, but she joined in’: she had ‘no dislikeable characteristics’. Evidence of humour – the slightly dry wit which Margaret exhibited in later years – can also be found in her correspondence with Muriel. Writing about a bus trip back from a hockey match, she describes how the vehicle was so crowded that the girls had to sit on sacks of potatoes ‘which by the time we arrived at North Witham were just about cooked and mashed’.
¹¹

And although all her contemporaries attest to a seriousness in Margaret which made her different from the others, she took part in all the normal interests and activities of a teenage girl of that period. She enjoyed tennis, and played hockey well enough (at centre half) to be in the school team. More striking, and more apparently at odds with her upbringing, was a strong interest in glamour, both in films and in fashion. Almost every letter to Muriel mentions the latest films to hit Grantham. In the letter in which she mentions going to the
This England
double bill with Jean and Joan, she discusses five other films.
Bittersweet
and
Pimpernel Smith
are coming soon, she says,
*
but she has just been to see
Rebecca
, which she thinks ‘one of the best I have ever seen, with a well-concealed plot’.
¹²
She also went with her mother to
Love on the Dole
, she wrote, a film about unemployed Lancastrian cotton workers between the wars, ‘the spectral army of three million lost men’, unusual in the wartime period for addressing social problems of this kind. It was not to Margaret’s taste: ‘I can’t say I enjoyed it, although it was a good film.’ In the following month, a Deanna Durbin season at Grantham continued: ‘I went to
Nice Girl
with Jean and Joan. I thought it was rotten.’
¹³
Films in Grantham were made more acceptable in the eyes of Margaret’s parents by the fact that one cinema, the Picture House, was owned by the Campbells, customers and respected neighbours of Roberts in nearby, rather grand Welby Gardens. J. A. Campbell was a fellow Rotarian of Alfred Roberts. Their daughter, Judy, who lived there with her parents in the 1930s, was a very beautiful woman, and became a well-known actress and the first to popularize the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’.
^†
Margaret knew Judy a little, and greatly admired her. She also had a partiality for the films of Ginger Rogers, which led Jim Allen, Grantham’s leading local historian of Margaret Thatcher, to ask her in old age if she liked Rogers because of her portrayal of a woman succeeding in a man’s world in
Kitty Foyle
. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ replied Lady Thatcher. ‘I always wished I could have danced like her.’
¹⁴

By Margaret’s own account, the ‘biggest excitement of my early years’ was her only pre-war trip to London, at the age of twelve. She went to stay with Methodist friends of the family, the Revd Mr Skinner and his wife – the minister who was much later to marry her and Denis. The Skinners took her to the obvious London sights, including Parliament and Downing Street, and St Paul’s Cathedral (‘where John Wesley prayed on the morning of his conversion’).
¹⁵
‘But the high point was my first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham where we saw Sigmund Romberg’s famous musical
The Desert Song
. For three hours I lived in another world, swept away as was the heroine by the daring Red Shadow – so much so that I bought the score and played it at home, perhaps too often.’ Rather touchingly, she
writes of the trip that the Skinners’ ‘kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, “
la douceur de la vie
” ’. For all her subsequent fame, she seldom had time throughout her life to savour this indefinable quality, but when she did, she loved it. She also thrived on the excitement of places that mattered. London traffic and crowds ‘seemed to generate a sort of electricity’, even the soot of the buildings lent a ‘dark, imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world’. Except in political allegiance, the centre was always where she wanted to be.

Apart from films, the other way to bring glamour to unexciting Grantham was through clothes. Margaret would never have wanted to be trendy, even if the word had existed at the time, but she constantly sought elegance and quality in what she wore. It was a time, because of the war and later the post-war rationing, as well as her parents’ careful budgeting, when these were not easily attained. Her correspondence with Muriel includes a constant series of requests for bits of material or nylons or buttons and so on, and a detailed discussion of fashion and beauty, of where it is possible to obtain the right things, and at what price. On 30 July 1944, a few days after the abortive Bomb Plot by German officers against Hitler, she writes to Muriel that, going to Lincoln with Jean, she had ‘hoped to do a bit of shopping with odds and bobs thinking that tomorrow was August 1st and we should be able to use the new coupons, but now of course I have discovered that it will only be July 31st, and so I shan’t be able to do much as I have only one coupon left.’ Nevertheless, she went the previous day to Chambers in Grantham ‘and bought two underwear sets that I am very pleased with. I got a white Kayser set and a pink rather dainty set of some other make. I also got pink uplift bras …’ She then chose ‘a Vogue pattern for a frock. I think there will be just sufficient material over to make a small berry [sic: she meant beret] shaped hat of the kind that are in fashion now. If that man can make me a handbag, it should be a nice set when it is finished.’
¹⁶
For her birthday in 1941, her father gave Margaret a pound so that she could buy a powder bowl, ‘telling me to bring back the change’.
¹⁷
She found a nice but plain one for 10 shillings (50p) (‘just ordinary glass with a little gold paint round the top’). ‘There’s one I should very much have liked,’ she goes on. ‘It was green, very large and cut glass. The only objectionable thing about it was its price – 32/6.’
¹⁸