When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher liked to describe her father as ‘a specialist grocer’.6 The words were a gilding of the lily, perhaps derived from the same heightened filial pride that led Ted Heath to call his father ‘a master builder’.7
In fact both Prime Ministerial patriarchs were ordinary tradesmen. The Roberts’ store on North Parade was a basic corner shop selling sweets, cigarettes, bread, pet food, fruit and vegetables. It was also a sub-post office where local residents bought their stamps, collected their pensions and cashed their postal orders. Although Alfred Roberts had a reputation for stocking quality produce that was superior to its nearby rival, the Co-op, his establishment was a general store of a type that was commonplace across small-town provincial England in the 1930s. The tight budgets of its customers were typical too. But the characters of the family who ran the shop and moulded Margaret’s upbringing were far from typical.
FAMILY TENSIONS
Alfred Roberts was a shopkeeper, a lay preacher and a local politician. He had hidden depths of faith and wide reading. His greatest achievement was that he groomed his youngest daughter Margaret for stardom on a stage far greater than Grantham – even though he had no clear idea where that stage might be.
Born in 1892, Alfred was a handsome young man, 6 feet 2 inches tall, with a strong head of blond hair and piercing blue eyes. His weakness was that he was seriously short sighted, a problem that caused him to wear bi-focal spectacles from his early years.
When he volunteered for military service on the outbreak of war in 1914, he was rejected on grounds of defective eyesight. He made five further attempts to join the army. One of them succeeded but only for two days. After 48 hours in uniform in Lincoln barracks he was invalided out following an eye test. For the same reason he failed his medical each time he tried to enlist.8
Frustrated in his attempts to join the colours, Alfred did not follow his Northamptonshire father into shoemaking, but learned the retail trade at various establishments including the Oundle School tuck shop. At the age of twenty-one he was appointed assistant manager of Cliffords’ grocery store in Grantham. He was an omnivorous borrower of books from the town library. Its librarian was so impressed by Alfred’s thirst for knowledge that he described him as ‘the best-read man in Grantham’.9
In May 1917, Alfred married Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, who he met at the Methodist church. Four years older than her bridegroom, she was Grantham born and bred; the daughter of a cloakroom attendant at the railway station and a factory worker. Photographs of her as a young woman make it easy to understand why Alfred felt attracted. For Beatie (as he called her) was something of a beauty. She had high cheekbones, shining dark hair tied back in a bun, sparkling blue eyes, sensual lips and a curvaceous if slightly overweight figure. The firmness of her features hint at firmness in her character.
Some Grantham contemporaries say that Beatie was far stronger than Alfred when it came to imposing parental discipline on the girls. A close friend of Muriel Roberts was Betty Morley who from her visits to the shop during their schooldays remembers Beatrice as ‘especially severe … she was not much fun at all’.10
Beatie’s severity as a mother was complemented by her practicality as a homemaker. She was house proud, almost obsessive about cleaning and tidiness. She had run a small dressmaking business before becoming engaged to Alfred. She was an accomplished seamstress, who made all her daughters’ clothes, including their school uniforms. She was also a good cook and a thrifty saver.
By 1919 the couple had saved enough money with the help of a mortgage to buy the shop at No. 1 North Parade. In the bedroom above the shop Muriel was born in 1921 and Margaret in 1925.
Margaret’s arrival in the world was marked by a notice in the births, marriages and deaths column of the Grantham Journal.11 No such announcement accompanied the birth of Muriel – perhaps a subtle indication that the status of the Roberts family had risen during the four years separating the two daughters.
From an early age it was clear that Margaret was much closer to her father than to her mother. On the maternal side there are indications that the younger daughter had many battles with Beatie. ‘I used to feel, just occasionally, that she rather despised her mother and adored her father,’ recalled Margaret Goodrich, a schoolgirl contemporary of the future Prime Minister.12 This negative impression was reinforced by Muriel in a comment she made to her sister’s official biographer, Charles Moore: ‘Mother didn’t exist in Margaret’s mind.’13
The daughter–mother froideur seems to have prevailed long after Margaret left Grantham for Oxford, marriage and politics. In a number of interviews during her public career Mrs Thatcher seems to have had difficulty in finding the words or the tone to say anything favourable about Beatie aside from praising her domestic skills. ‘She was very much the Martha* rather than the Mary’ was one revealing filial description.14 Another came in 1961, eighteen years before becoming Prime Minister when, as a new Member of Parliament, Mrs Thatcher was asked about her mother by Godfrey Winn of the Daily Express. She answered, ‘I loved my mother dearly, but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other. It wasn’t her fault. She was weighed down by the home, always being in the home’.15
The implication from such comments is that Margaret did not think much of her mother. However, there are suggestions that the real trouble was not indifference but a clash of temperaments between these two strong-willed women. Beatie was not a submissive housewife confined to her cooking and her dressmaking. Some Grantham contemporaries refer to her as ‘a right old battleaxe’ who clearly had a mind and a voice of her own.16 It would hardly be surprising that disagreements took place between such a mother and her opinionated daughter.
Two other family members lived in the home above the shop at North Parade. One was Margaret’s elder sister Muriel, who chose to stay in the shadows of the media attention that can engulf the close relatives of a prime minister. She died in 2004, rarely giving interviews throughout her life. Four years older than her famous sibling, Muriel was an easygoing character with less drive but more likeability. One of her closest friends and later golfing partner, Betty Morley, remembers Muriel as ‘a pleasant and bright girl, but not nearly as serious or studious as Margaret. The four years between them meant they were not particularly close as sisters. But they got on during their childhood, particularly when they were both resisting their mother’s pressures for discipline and strictness’.17
That discipline was in the genes. Some of it came from the fifth member of the household, Beatrice’s mother, Phoebe Stephenson. She was a formidable old lady who wore long black dresses buttoned down to her ankles. She was much given to repeating clichés such as ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ and ‘if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing well’. Margaret described her grandmother as ‘very, very Victorian and very, very strict’.18
FUN (OR LACK OF IT)
Thanks to this strictness there was precious little fun in the childhood of Margaret Roberts. ‘For us, it was rather a sin to enjoy yourself by entertainment,’ she said. ‘Life was not to enjoy yourself. Life was to work and do things.’19
In this prohibitive atmosphere, many innocent pastimes and pleasures were banned. Children’s parties, dancing, cycling, card games, board games (even Snakes and Ladders), walks in the countryside and visits to the theatre were off limits. On Sundays the rules were even stricter. Reading a newspaper, having tea with friends, and even sewing or knitting was forbidden on the Lord’s Day. Some of these restrictions were relaxed after the death of Grandmother Phoebe Stephenson in 1934. Until then the family rarely travelled outside Grantham. Margaret’s longest journey as a child was a fifty-two-mile bus ride to the seaside town of Skegness where she, Muriel and Beatrice had a bucket and spade holiday in a self-catering flat while Alfred stayed at home minding the store.
At Skegness, Margaret saw her first live show of variety music and light-comedy sketches. ‘We would never have gone to the variety whil
e Grandmother Stephenson, who lived with us until I was ten, was still alive,’ she recalled.20
Another prohibition, also lifted after Grandmother’s death, forbade having a wireless set in the house. In the autumn of 1935, to Margaret’s great excitement, a radio was installed in the sitting room above the shop at North Parade. But there were rules about which broadcasts the girls could listen to. Talks and news bulletins were permitted. Musical entertainment programmes were not. In a rare interview given by Muriel Cullen (née Roberts) to author Ernle Money in 1975, she explained that she and her ten-year-old sister Margaret had to wait until their parents went out before they could tune in to dance bands and light orchestras.21
Alfred Roberts was too intelligent to be a wholehearted supporter of such narrow restrictions. He gradually relaxed them once the hard line puritanism of his wife and mother-in-law began to crumble after Phoebe’s death. Away from his public and preaching duties he sometimes displayed a light-hearted side to his nature.
‘Alfred had a sense of humour and could let his hair down,’ recalled a family friend, Betty Morley. ‘I remember how he and my father went to an amusement park after playing bowls. Alfred really enjoyed himself. He even had a modest gamble at one or two of the fairground stalls.’22
Betting would never have been allowed under the eagle eye of Beatie. She ruled the roost on behavioural issues and also kept a tight grip on her side of the family purse strings. ‘Many, many is the time I can remember [my mother] saying, when I said: “Oh my friends have got more”, “Well we are not situated like that!”,’ recalled Margaret.23
Although the financial situation of the Roberts parents, who drew their income from two shops, was not particularly tight, Beatrice turned prudence into parsimony. In an interview when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, she let slip a poignant glimpse of shopping with her mother when she had to suppress her own yearnings for materials that were more colourful but more costly.
‘Or when you went out to buy something and you were going to actually have new covers for the settee. That was … a great expenditure and a great event, so you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on. My mother: “That’s not serviceable!” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable!’24
There were upsides as well as downsides to this frugality. Margaret was always well dressed as a little girl, thanks to Beatrice’s skill in making clothes at home. She grew up with a keen understanding of getting value for money. She respected her mother’s ability to make the housekeeping budget go far. ‘Nothing in our house was wasted, and we always lived within our means,’ she recalled. ‘The worst you could say about another family was that “they lived up to the hilt”.’25
Living up to the hilt just once or twice might have seemed an attractive prospect for Margaret, but it was not permissible under the regime at North Parade. Yet this stringency had its advantages too. For Margaret Roberts soon learned how to make her own entertainment, and how to explore, with her father’s encouragement, the pleasures of reading by borrowing many books from the library.
Music was another outlet for her creative energy. Margaret was a good child pianist, winning prizes at local music festivals. She had a clear alto voice and became a member of the Methodist church choir. She sang in its performances of oratorios, including Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. In her enjoyment of music she was following the example of her father who had been a chorister and was a member of the Grantham Philharmonic Society.
Margaret’s early years were notable for their lack of joie de vivre. Later in life she became rather defensive about such suggestions. Her memoirs have some purple patches about her enthusiasm for watching Hollywood movies in the Grantham cinema. She waxed lyrical to one of her first biographers, Tricia Murray, about her love of big-band music and the compositions of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. These tastes may have been acquired later in her teenage years or they may have a touch of revisionism about them. For the adult Margaret Thatcher never seems to have had much time or inclination for going to the cinema or listening to music.
In youth, relaxation rarely formed part of her routine and the disciplines, which were first set in her childhood, stayed with her throughout her life. ‘In my family we were never idle,’ she recalled. ‘Idleness was a sin.’26
There was, however, one glorious episode of escapism, relaxation and idleness. It was hardly a sin because it took place under the supervision of a Methodist minister, the Reverend Ronald N. Skinner. He invited the eleven-year-old Margaret to come, without her parents, to visit his family in Hampstead. ‘I stayed for a whole week,’ she told Tricia Murray, ‘and was given a life of enjoyment and entertainment I had never seen!’27
For a provincial schoolgirl who had never travelled further from Grantham than the journey to the seaside at Skegness, London was a thrilling eye opener. Margaret saw sights like the Changing of the Guard, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Zoo. ‘We were actually taken to the theatre – to a musical called The Desert Song. We saw the crowd, and the bright lights, and I was so excited.’28
Nearly half a century later, when ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote the first volume of her memoirs, she relived this highlight of her childhood with the same gushing enthusiasm. ‘I could hardly drag myself away from London or from the Skinners, who had been such indulgent hosts. Their kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, ‘la douceur de la vie’ – how sweet life could be.’29
There was a wistful contrast between this enchanting douceur of the London visit and the workaholic froideur of her life in Grantham. The penny-pinching restrictions of her mother’s discipline were beginning to grate. They were not ameliorated by expressions of loving maternal tactility. Hugs, kisses and cuddles for her children were as rare if not alien to Beatrice as they were to be for Margaret herself when she became the mother of twins.† She had a strangely joyless childhood. Yet, all work and no play made Margaret not a dull girl but a different one. The difference was that she became motivated by her education – which came from her Grantham schooling and from her father.
FIRST SCHOOL
On 3 September 1930, six weeks before her fifth birthday, Margaret Roberts enrolled for her first term at Huntingtower Road Council School. It was thought to be the best elementary school in Grantham, with modern classrooms built sixteen years earlier. It was non-denominational, which was one of the main reasons why Alfred Roberts chose it. He had a progressive outlook when planning the education of his daughters.
Margaret made an odd first impression on her form mistress Mrs Grimwood when she refused to use the school lavatories. According to her school contemporary Joan Bridgman, the girls’ ‘office’, as their lavatory block was coyly called, was often smelly and dirty because some of the pupils, coming from homes without water closets, did not know how to pull the chain. Too fastidious to go to these lavatories, Margaret trained herself to control her bladder until the lunch break. Then she walked one mile back to her home, repeating the process again in the afternoon. This meant four miles of walking each day – a considerable distance for a young child, particularly if nature is calling.30
A more elevated example of Margaret’s determination came when Mrs Grimwood told her class about a handwriting competition which was being organised for all the schoolchildren in the town. She emphasised how carefully and neatly the entries had to be submitted. ‘I’ll enter, and I’ll win it,’ said Margaret.31 And she did.
Another memory of Margaret Roberts in her elementary school days is that she was good at reciting poetry with a ‘posh accent’ from which all traces of her early Lincolnshire twang had been eliminated. Private elocution lessons arranged by her father altered her tone of voice. It became more refined than the homespun dialect used by most pupils at this council school.
In one heated mom
ent at Prime Minister’s Question Time some five decades after her first elocution training, she slipped back into an idiom of the broad Granthamese she once spoke. Shouting across the despatch box in April 1983, she accused Denis Healey of being scared of an election. ‘The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election, is he? Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Frit, Frit!’ 32‡
There were few such linguistic lapses as the education of Margaret Roberts progressed. When she was nine years old her clear diction helped her to win first prize in a poetry recital competition at a local festival in 1934. When her headmistress Miss Margaret Glenn congratulated her, saying, ‘You were lucky Margaret,’ Margaret retorted: ‘I wasn’t lucky, I deserved it.’33
The principal target of Margaret Roberts’ efforts to deserve success was winning a scholarship to the local grammar school. She studied for this exam with noticeable intensity. She was always a hard worker. Before she arrived at Huntingtower Road Council School, she could read and write well. During her first term she was moved up into a form for children a year older than herself. From then on she consistently came top or near the top of her class. She was exceptionally diligent at her homework. Her fellow pupils remembered how she used to arrive each day weighed down with a satchel so full of books that she had difficulty in undoing its straps.
Aside from her studies, Margaret Roberts is recorded as having participated in some royal events while at the school.
On 6 May 1935 King George V and Queen Mary celebrated their Silver Jubilee. The school took part in a pageant whose highlight was the display of the word Grantham by the town’s children in Wyndham Park. Half a century later, when Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was sent some commemorative mementos of the celebrations by a Grantham resident Gerald Tuppin. She replied to him from Downing Street, adding in her handwriting: ‘It was a wonderful occasion, quite the most exciting day of my young life. I seem to remember we formed the “M” in Grantham.’34
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 3