It related to the character of the headmistress. When Margaret first arrived at KGGS, the headmistress was Miss Gladys Williams, who had held her position from the founding of the school in 1910. Margaret loved Miss Williams: she was always much influenced in her feelings about women (and, indeed, about men) by their manners, appearance and demeanour, and Miss Williams impressed her for these reasons.* Her ‘quiet authority … dominated everything’, she records in her memoirs. ‘I greatly admired the special outfits Miss Williams used to wear on important days … when she appeared in beautiful silk, softly tailored, looking supremely elegant.’ With this elegance, though, she combined another virtue high in Margaret’s pantheon: ‘she was very practical. The advice to us was never to buy a low-quality silk when the same amount of money would purchase a very good-quality cotton … The rule was always to go for quality within your own income.’40 Despite proving to be the most successful career woman in the whole of British history, Mrs Thatcher liked the display of lady-like qualities and traditionally female accomplishments. She notes approvingly that Miss Williams made all girls ‘however academic’ take domestic science for four years,41 and she records without complaint, though she herself studied the subject, that Miss Williams had in her day discouraged maths in the sixth form, because it was considered so difficult for the girls.42 Jean Farmer had similar impressions of Miss Williams as ‘a tiny person, beautifully dressed, looks could quell, not a hair out of place’.43 So did Rita Hind, who found her ‘elegant, stately and white-haired … her expectations were high. She was compassionate but distant.’44
In 1939, Miss Williams retired. Her successor, Miss Dorothy Gillies, was very different. More of a scholar than Miss Williams, she also had much more of a temper. ‘She was a fiery Scot,’ said Rita Hind,45 and she once threw her shoe at someone. Madeline Edwards remembers her hurling books and shouting at the girls, ‘You’re all suet puddings.’ Even the official school history implies some abrasions, saying that Miss Gillies was ‘misunderstood’ and comparing her with Goldsmith’s village schoolmaster: ‘ “If severe in aught, the love he bore to learning was at fault. Yet he was kind …” ’46 It should be remembered, as a huge extenuation of Miss Gillies’s conduct that, unlike Miss Williams, she had to deal with the difficulties of a school in wartime. These included the facts that Camden School for Girls was evacuated to the KGGS premises for five terms until late 1941, forcing all the KGGS classes to take place in the morning only, and that the right staff were scarce. Worse, there was always the prospect of bombing. Grantham suffered twenty-one raids between September 1940 and October 1942, and in that final and most severe attack thirty-two people were killed. No one at the school was hurt in raids, but the tennis courts were all dug up to build air-raid shelters, and the burden of disruption and of responsibility that war put upon the headmistress was heavy indeed.
Perhaps because Miss Gillies was not Miss Williams, she and Margaret did not get on. Margaret considered her ungracious. Miss Gillies thought that Margaret needed taking down a peg. Their main disagreement concerned Margaret’s application for Oxford. By the time of School Certificate, Margaret expected to go to university, though she recognized that she might not be able to afford to do so without a scholarship. With her customary care, she began to make plans, choosing science as her likely university subject because ‘Science was the way of the future.’47 She declared to Muriel that she would drop maths because ‘I couldn’t get on with Grumpy Grin [Miss Grindley, the maths teacher]: her explanations were as clear as mud.’ Again, she consulted Mr Marks, and followed his suggestion of switching to geography. She buckled down also to biology (‘I never dreamt there was so much inside a worm before. One of the toughest jobs is to find the ovary …’) and announced, ‘I have decided to take Latin to help with Biology, and also because you must have it for entrance to most universities.’48
It is not true, then, as some biographers have asserted, that Miss Gillies, who was herself a classicist, forbade Margaret to learn Latin at the school. Her studies continued to go well and in 1942, before she had taken Higher Certificate (the equivalent of the modern A Level), she was offered places at Nottingham University, the nearest university to Grantham, and Bedford College, London. But the idea of Oxford grew in the minds of Margaret and her father, and was resisted by Miss Gillies along with the extra Latin teaching required, allegedly provoking Margaret to say, ‘You’re thwarting my ambition.’49 According to Muriel, Margaret told Miss Gillies that she wanted to go to Oxford and Miss Gillies said: ‘ “I’m afraid you can’t. You haven’t got Latin.” She said, “I’ll get it,” and so she went to the Latin master of the boys’ school* and she got her Latin [meaning her Latin School Certificate] in a year and she got in.’50 Margaret never forgot what she considered to have been Miss Gillies’s obstruction, though she does record that the head lent her Latin textbooks, including one written by her father.51 In later years, she paid fulsome tribute to Miss Williams and none to Miss Gillies. Most KGGS old girls of that era remember the occasion in 1960 when Margaret, returning for the school’s speech day as a newly elected MP and the guest of honour, actually corrected Miss Gillies on the Latin she had used in her introduction. Lorna Smith wrote, ‘The audience was overcome with embarrassment; it was well known that the Head had taught Margaret every Latin word she knew!’52 This was far from the case, but Margaret’s rudeness is still remarkable.
Part of the problem that worried Miss Gillies was haste. Margaret eventually took her Oxford entrance when she was only seventeen, hoping to go up the following autumn, almost exactly on her eighteenth birthday in 1943. This hurry was not solely the result of Margaret’s drive and ambition: there was a special wartime reason for it. All girls not already in further education by the time they were eighteen were liable for call-up to the services, and so most of them, anxious to get on with their education, made sure they got in early. Women did not take part in combat, and, it seems, there was no stigma of draft-dodging against girls in this situation.53 Indeed, the Grantham dentist’s daughter Mary Wallace was proud of the precedent she established by persuading Oxford to take her in the Hilary (summer) term of 1943 solely so that she could avoid call-up.54 The Grantham grocer’s daughter, however, was a little more uneasy. ‘I felt a little bit guilty,’ she recalled, ‘but that’s the way my birthday came up.’55 If, as Miss Gillies had suggested, Margaret had waited for another year, she would probably have been forced to serve.
This is very nearly what happened. Part of the problem about the Latin was the need to mug it up so fast, and there were other weaknesses, too, which Margaret needed to remedy. Although her science was strong, her wider education was considered less assured, and it was for this reason that her father went to Canon Goodrich* and got him to coach her for the Oxford general paper. When she did sit the scholarship for Somerville College, Oxford, she narrowly failed to achieve it. Instead, she was offered an ordinary place for the autumn of 1944, which involved returning to KGGS for an extra year to avoid the call-up that would follow her eighteenth birthday on 13 October 1943. This she did, but still facing the probability that her arrival at Oxford would be further delayed by the call-up, or that her degree would be shortened to two years so that she could do National Service afterwards.
The Michaelmas term at KGGS began that year in August because of the need for a longer break in October to help with the wartime potato harvest. For the first time in its history, the school had two head girls – Madeline Edwards and Margaret Roberts, polar opposites in interests and style, but each having a forceful personality. It is alleged by some of Margaret’s contemporaries that she was given the post through the influence of her father as chairman of the Governors, but this is anachronistic: Alfred Roberts did not become chairman until after the war. Madeline and Margaret were the only obvious candidates. Indeed, they were the only two remaining girls who had taken their Higher Certificates. It is not clear why both were offered the post: perhaps it was considered invidious to appoint one an
d exclude the other.
In any event, Margaret’s first taste of supreme authority did not last long. Three weeks into the school term, a girl who had a Somerville place dropped out and the college offered an immediate place to Margaret. She accepted, and vaulted suddenly into another world.
3
Love and war at Oxford
‘Is it marble, Margaret?’
Margaret was apprehensive about Oxford. She had never been away from home for more than a few days before, and wartime made the separation greater. The gulf between Grantham and Oxford, however, was more one of milieu than of distance. She was the first woman in her family to go to university, and the first of either sex to go to Oxford. The only people she knew there were Mary Wallace and Margaret Goodrich, neither of whom was at her college, and both of whom came from a more educated social background. She consulted them.
Mary Wallace, who remembered that Margaret’s entry to Oxford ‘created quite a stir’ in Grantham, received Margaret in her parents’ house in the High Street in September 1943, where she found her ‘very earnest’. ‘She was very keen to do the right thing,’ and, as so often in her later career, expressed this in an anxiety about ‘what sort of clothes to wear’.1 In Margaret Goodrich’s view, ‘Oxford was a big jump for her, not for us [that is, her sister Joan and herself] because the clergy had a certain status.’ She recorded that when she and her father first visited Margaret in her rooms in Somerville, they found her lonely and disconsolate, toasting a teacake by a fire that was rationed to one scuttle of coal per week.2 Margaret herself admitted that she felt ‘shy and ill-at-ease’.3 She sometimes walked alone round Christ Church Meadows and into Addison’s Walk in Magdalen. In doing so, she felt she was fulfilling C. S. Lewis’s injunction in Christian Behaviour (1944) to set aside time for solitary thought,4 but one may guess that her isolation was not entirely voluntary.
One of Margaret’s problems was money. Without a scholarship, she had to depend on what her father could manage and on what various small college bursaries could provide. In those days, it was possible to have most of your fees paid if you promised, on going down, to become a teacher, but this Margaret refused to do, believing that it was a vocation she did not have.5 While her parents did their best, sending small sums and cakes baked by her mother that made the teas in her room well above average, she was always short. She recalled that it was only after she had taught at a Grantham school during the Long Vacation at the end of her first year that she could afford to buy that most basic tool of Oxford life, a bicycle.6 It would be quite wrong to give the impression that most of the undergraduates were terribly rich, or that Margaret was terribly poor; and besides, the rigours of war reduced the social differences that had prevailed in the 1930s. But lack of funds did contribute to Margaret’s sense of adversity that had to be overcome daily, and also to the impression which she created among her contemporaries. Their memories of her at Oxford often include the idea that her appearance was ‘brown’, both in hair and clothes, and somehow in personality:7 Rachel Willink, one of the only two women before Margaret to become president of OUCA, the Oxford University Conservative Association, and daughter of a wartime Conservative minister, remembered her as ‘quiet, rather mousey’, ‘rather a brown girl’, someone who ‘hadn’t got the style’ to ‘make up’ for her background. In after years, she said, people who had known Margaret at Oxford found it ‘a thing out of nature’ that ‘that rather humourless mouse’ had been so astonishingly successful.8 According to Mary Wallace, who was also an officer of OUCA, Margaret was ‘merely tolerated’ by the grandees of the Tory club as ‘someone who could be relied on to do the donkey work’.9 To them she was a ‘slogger’, without star quality.
No letters from Margaret survive from her first year at Oxford, but in the fairly numerous ones she wrote, almost all to Muriel, in her next three years clothes and the difficulty of affording them provide the main subject. Brownness recurs: ‘the rust-coloured material … will fit in with the brown side of my wardrobe,’ she wrote in an undated letter sent after returning early to Oxford, in order to do fire-watching, before her second year in September 1944. She takes advantage of the journey from Grantham via London to pay her first ever visit to Bond Street, ‘though I didn’t tell Mummy so’, and buys brown court shoes called Debutante Lanette to match her brown handbag at Marshall and Snelgrove. ‘Also I had in mind to get a nigger brown [this was a standard name for a haberdashery colour of the time, not a racist phrase of Margaret’s invention] fairly plain frock’ in order to have ‘a completely brown-fawn rig-out’.
She found one. A problem, however, arose: ‘It looked absolutely stunning and I was thrilled to bits with it. I was just about to say I’d take it when I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t asked the price … after all this was the inexpensive gown floor wasn’t it? Much to my open-mouthed dismay, the assistant said it was £20 …’ Luckily, Margaret was able to find, among woollens, what she described, breathless for lack of punctuation, as ‘a fairly plain little frock with a peter pan colour two little pockets on the bodice and two to match on the skirt’ for £3 16s. Even this price was high for Margaret, but the ‘elderly’ assistant then did a hard sell: ‘she saw that I was a little surprised and said that it was superb value for money [always the way to Margaret’s heart] and it was not necessarily how much you paid for a frock that counted which I could quite believe after trying on the “inexpensive gowns”.’ The bargain-hunter was persuaded, as she excitedly recounts: ‘Well to cut a long story short I bought the frock and I’m sure that it is one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made. I’ll try to smuggle it home next time to show you without Mummy seeing … I shall be well set up for frocks then for any and every occasion.’10
Margaret was self-conscious, too, about her weight. When the present author once asked her what she thought of her own looks as a young woman, she answered, ‘Oh, I never thought I was good-looking. I thought I was slightly overweight.’11 In those days, it was by no means as unfashionable as it is today for a woman to be quite plump, but, in another part of the letter quoted above, Margaret, with scientist’s humour, expresses her anxiety: ‘… I still weigh about 10st 4lbs … The slight decrease in volume doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the mass … Can you recommend … anything from the medical point of view for reduction of the area of the seat and control of the tummy muscles – oh and also reduction and uplift of bust?’12 At one point her weight reached 10 stone 10 pounds, quite a lot for a twenty-year-old girl of 5 foot 5 inches.*
But if Margaret might be disparaged as a slightly podgy, frumpy person, someone beneath notice, by some in Oxford’s grander circles, she faced almost the opposite problem within her own college. According to Betty Spice, who, with Margaret, was one of only three girls in her year in the college reading chemistry, the tables in hall at Somerville were divided into three columns, and these tended, in practice, to represent different groups within the college. The tables nearest the high table seated the ‘more exotic types’, foreigners, Jews, Nina Mabey (the future novelist Nina Bawden) and articulate girls who read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). The tables at the other end were the haunts of the public school girls. Those in the middle belonged to the grammar school products, many from backgrounds similar to Margaret’s own. It was natural to them to accommodate Margaret, therefore, and they did so, but without great enthusiasm on their part or, possibly, on hers.* Her voice was part of the trouble. ‘When she talked, she was not natural,’ Betty Spice remembered.13 She was ‘pretty, in a baby-doll sort of way’, but ‘You couldn’t get close to her. She didn’t want us because we were only grammar school girls. She was interested in making her way with people who would help her.’ Another exact contemporary, Jean Southerst, also noted her speech and appearance: ‘Her voice, elocution-trained, was regarded as affected, and her preoccupation with her appearance caused amusement. She went to the most expensive hairdresser in Oxford (Andreas) and spent days during the vac. combing th
e West End for suitable dresses.’† Margaret’s first elocution lessons had been to improve a mild speech impediment and help her declaim in public. According to Joan Parker, a pupil at KGGS, slightly younger than Margaret, the girls would have whole-class elocution lessons in which Lincolnshire vowels were erased so that the girls no longer said ‘moostard’ or ‘coostard’.14 Amy Wootten, who read maths in the same year and sat at Margaret’s table in hall, denied that Margaret was at all ‘snooty’, but said that she was ‘not outgoing’: she was ‘never in a position where she owed anyone anything’.15 Mary Mallinson, who shared digs in Walton Street with Margaret in her last year, noted her as someone who was always ‘unobtrusively neat and well-groomed’ and not easy to know.16 Pauline Cowan, who shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road, the previous year, 1945–6, says that Margaret was ‘not socially climbing’ but, rather, ‘diffident’: ‘I never felt of her as obviously very happy.’17
In fact, matters were not as bad as this might suggest. Margaret won respect. Even Betty Spice records that she was ‘an honest person’,18 and that she quite enjoyed being teased about possible boyfriends at meals in hall (‘She would blush from the neck upwards’). Pamela Rhodes thought her ‘very mature for her years’,19 and Jean Southerst, a fellow Methodist, recalled that ‘her room in college was always open for pleasant evenings for gossip, poetry reading (I owe her much for that) and partaking of the excellent coffee and cakes etc., which, as a grocer’s daughter, made her a very popular hostess!’20 She impressed as someone who would do what she promised and who ‘had a clear idea of what she wanted to attain’.21 And Margaret happily took part in the jollifications of fellow female students. At the end of her third-year exams, she wrote to Muriel that she had been with friends to see the film Quiet Wedding: ‘It’s an absolute scream. I laughed more than I have for months, I wish you’d seen it. On Tuesday night we went to see Passage to Marseilles, with Humphrey Bogart … It wasn’t a bad film but it wasn’t outstanding either. We enjoyed it because we were celebrating. Did I tell you that seven of the men failed?’22
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