John Major: The Autobiography

A brook ran along Green Lane and I used to jump across it to climb the trees on the far side. Once I fell out of one and returned home covered in blood – but I soon recovered. Worcester Park then was less built-up than it is now, and there were open hayfields and hedgerows full of birds’ nests behind Longfellow Road. I brought home eggs that didn’t hatch and ducklings that didn’t survive, and learned that nature was best left to her own devices.

At home we talked of many things, but never politics or religion. I know from my brother and sister that my father was much against the socialists, and Mr Attlee was never forgiven for defeating Mr Churchill in the 1945 general election. My parents were believers, I’m sure, and their values were more Christian than those of many people who call themselves such; but going to church in their Sunday best and looking pious was not for them.

‘She’s got religion,’ Mother would say disapprovingly of a neighbour, as though it were measles; and we kept clear for fear of catching it. So we never went to church on Sunday. Perhaps my parents had got out of the habit when they were travelling the country, though my mother, despite her open heart, had a puritanical side – probably, in part at least, because of my father’s earlier philandering. Yet her God was a forgiving God, and I imbibed her values, although I always had a yen to take church more seriously than my parents did. That yen was largely unfulfilled. The Church appealed to me, but it never reached out to me.

I learned Christian values by example, but in no other way. And though I was baptised into the Church of England I was never confirmed – and had I been in later life, when I had become a public figure, I worried that it would lead to comment about my motives. For my parents the Church was something rather quaint, an honoured but distant institution that other people attended but we did not – except, of course, for fêtes and jumble sales. Chance and circumstance left me a believer at a distance; but a believer nonetheless.

In the 1950s the eleven plus examinations determined whether or not you went to grammar school. The names of the successful candidates were announced by the teacher in class, and as he intoned ‘John’ I felt my back being patted by the boy behind me. But the teacher went on to say ‘John Hunt’. I thought I’d failed, and I remember the huge relief when my name was finally called out. So I left Cheam Common School in 1954 and went to Rutlish, a grammar school about three miles away in Merton. It was our first choice, and I looked forward to going. I liked the uniform, and the school played rugby, which I felt sure I would enjoy. They also played cricket, and set aside one term a year for athletics, which was unusual at the time.

Passing the examination to Rutlish led to furious rows with my parents. My birth certificate records me simply as ‘John Major’, although at the font my godmother, a librarian friend of my mother’s with the unlikely name of Miss Fink, slipped in a ‘Roy’, to my father’s fury. He hated the name, and wasn’t too fond of Miss Fink, an exotic lady who had painted fingernails and who smoked Passing Cloud cigarettes. But my father had used two names in his life. Although he was christened ‘Abraham Thomas Ball’, he used ‘Tom Major’ as his stage name and generally thereafter. My elder brother Terry had been registered with ‘Terry’ and ‘Major’ as his Christian names and ‘Ball’ as his surname. Pat was the only one of us to be both christened and registered as ‘Major-Ball’. Now, as I prepared to go to Rutlish, my parents decided to inflict this hybrid name on me. I bitterly objected. It was not my name, and, even worse, it was bound to cause trouble at school.

My mother and father thought it would put me more in tune with the school. I disagreed. My parents were usually kind and biddable, but on this occasion they were intransigent. In battles like this in the 1950s the adults won. And so – in the only cruel act of theirs I ever knew – I became John Major-Ball.

I have often wondered how much this decision affected my attitude to school. A great deal, I think. I got it all out of proportion. It meant I approached Rutlish with a wary unease. I believed I would have to excel at sport and be prepared to use my fists to earn the respect of my peers. Forty years later that may seem an odd judgement, but it was all too real for an eleven-year-old boy mortally embarrassed at sailing under false colours.

At the time my parents were under great strain. My father’s health was poor and his eyesight was failing. I remember him falling off a stool in the kitchen when I came into the room as he was putting in a lightbulb, and from that day on I watched him deteriorate. Irrationally, but in the way a small boy can, I felt personally responsible for this. My mother’s health was also worsening, with asthma and bronchitis her constant companions.

My father’s garden-ornaments business was in difficulties, too. In 1950 or 1951 he made plans to sell it, pay off his debts and emigrate with us to Canada. His failing eyesight, spotted by a wary doctor at his second medical interview for Canada, put paid to this scheme. In urgent need of capital, he entered into a business deal with a widowed lady. She wanted a job for her sister’s boyfriend and invested £3,000 to install him as my father’s partner. The boyfriend began to learn the business, but disliked it. Soon he began to dislike the widow’s sister too, and they fell out and parted company.

The widow demanded her money back. In his typical my-word-is-my-bond manner, my father hadn’t bothered to legally formalise the deal. Nor did he have the money. He’d spent it. And he was unable to take the matter to court. He was not fit enough, financially or physically, and his case was weak. Why had an experienced man of the world like my father not legalised the deal? He was advised that the episode could be presented as one of a designing businessman out to fleece an innocent widow.

My sister, then only twenty-four, took over, negotiating with the widow and agreeing to repay the money over time, in a vain effort to save our father from having to sell the house. But the debt was many times my sister’s annual salary, and my parents were faced with the loss of all they had. This must have been shattering for them and, I am sure now, explains my parents’ impatience with my protests about changing my name. A few months after I went to Rutlish my father sold our bungalow in Worcester Park for £2,150. My parents seemed to age before my eyes.

We moved to a new home in Brixton in May 1955, when I was twelve. It was a sad comedown, part of the top floor of a four-storey Victorian building in Coldharbour Lane. We had two rooms for the five of us, plus Butch and a pet budgerigar. Dad, Terry and I slept in one room, and Mum and Pat in the other. This second room was used as a dining room and lounge during the day. We shared a cooker on the landing with the other top-floor tenant, a middle-aged bachelor. The lavatory, two floors below, was used by all the tenants. There was no bathroom. We washed at the sink or in a tub.

The house was home over the years to a rich collection of characters. The floor below us was occupied from time to time by three Irish boys who returned home to Ireland whenever taxes were due to be paid. They were huge fun. They played football with me in the street, and one of them, Christie, suggested Pat should run away with him. Another, Michael, actually proposed to her one morning as she left for work, but she wasn’t really listening – a most convenient gift she has always had. Only later did she realise what he had said. It hardly mattered. She was convinced that they would end up with eleven children each. And anyway, she was determined to marry her long-term boyfriend Peter, which she eventually did.

Other tenants included a middle-aged cat-burglar. He was charming and lived with a beautiful girl of about nineteen, who disappeared when he was sent to jail. She used to walk around in her underwear, which was something of a novelty in the 1950s but added pleasurably to my education. The cat-burglar gave me his bets to place on racehorses with a local bookie who operated illegally in the tunnel at Loughborough Junction station. Once he offered me half a crown to see if there were any policemen around before he went out of the house, since he was anxious not to meet any. I agreed to scout for him, but high-mindedly refused to take the money. It probably wasn’t his anyway.

Two other tenants were a Jamaican and his white girlfriend, an unusual liaison for the era, even though there was already heavy West Indian immigration into Brixton by then. He, too, was eventually jailed – for stabbing a policeman.

Life in the flat was very cramped. My father distrusted electricity, and would turn off the radio if there was lightning, or if water was dripping in the room from the ceiling. On wet weekends there was not much to do. I played Subbuteo for hours, running my own imaginary football leagues. Sometimes I would walk down the road to a large bakery and buy bread direct from the ovens. The smell was heaven and the bread warm and tasty.

Very occasionally I would stride up Denmark Hill to Dulwich Village and walk around, looking at smart houses with a warm glow through their curtains. I still remember looking through one window at the comfort inside, and seeing two young children playing board games with their mother. Such a life seemed very different from mine.

One winter evening on such a prowl, when I was thirteen, I was set upon by a gang of boys, and the word ‘Mark’ was cut into my thigh with a razor-blade. I told only my sister, who tended the wound with iodine, and kept my secret. I did not want my parents to know about the incident, and they never did. The branding has long since gone.

I was mystified by our relationship with our landlords. The house was owned by Tom, a man about twenty years younger than my father, and his wife Ann, always known as Nan, a tall, handsome woman with long blonde hair who had three children, Carole, Tom Junior and Nicholas. It was clear that they were not strangers to my parents, and they had offered us a roof when we needed it. When I asked my mother about Tom and Nan she became evasive. It was clear that my questions were unwelcome. She never answered them properly.

Tom was ‘Uncle’ Tom and Nan was ‘Auntie’, a common way for children to address adults those days. They occupied the ground floor and the basement. Their daughter Carole moved out soon after we arrived, and Nicholas was much younger than me, but Tom Junior was my age, and we became firm friends. Later in life he went to work in America, and for years we lost touch, but during the 1992 election he reappeared, unannounced and unexpected, and worked for me throughout the campaign.

Like my parents, Uncle Tom had been on the stage. He was a singer with a magnificent voice and the portly build of the classic tenor. For years he appeared with his sister, Jill Summers, who in her later years achieved fame as Phyllis Pease in Coronation Street. He had toured the halls – sometimes under the stage name of Signor Bassani – and had rarely been short of work.

Tom’s last job in the theatre was to understudy Harry Secombe as Mr Pickwick in the West End. Alas, not for the first time, he drank too much, fell down some stairs and was sacked. He never sang professionally again, although he did sing at home, his voice beautiful and effortlessly wide-ranging. These were unforgettable evenings in Brixton.

It dawned on me that it was not chance that had brought our family to Brixton, but blood ties. Tom’s surname was ‘Moss’, and though that meant nothing to me at the time, I had a hunch about his background. Now I have been able to confirm it. ‘Uncle’ Tom was the baby registered by the musician James Moss and his young wife Mary back in 1901.He was my half-brother. I would have thought it indelicate to put any such suspicion to my parents, and they would certainly have thought the enquiry unpardonable. I was sure I was right, and so were Pat and Terry. The reason we were living there was no longer such a mystery.

My memories of our six years or so at Coldharbour Lane are patchy. Certainly there was never much money in the household. Often the larder was bare until Terry received payment in advance from one of my father’s most regular customers, the marvellous Mr Spiers of Margate, for garden ornaments he had not yet made. And, although I did not know it at the time, Aunt Nan often came to the rescue with loans.

For a while Terry lived in the garage he was working in, because there was so little room at home and he did not wish to spend hard-earned money on lodgings. That stopped as soon as my mother found out. Pat repeatedly put off her marriage to Peter as she and Terry worked to support the family, keep me at school and repay my father’s debts. They were determined that my father should not go bankrupt.

The indignity of our situation affected my parents deeply, although they lived through setback and disaster without ever referring to their distress or ill-health. Not for nothing had they spent years in the theatre. They could act. But my mother was ageing fast, and my father retreated ever more into the past. They were never crabby or miserable, but fought adversity in their own way, laughing joyfully at minor triumphs, apparently certain that things would get better; outwardly optimistic and forever hoping for a future that for them, alas, would never come.

They were stoical in the face of all adversity. As my father became more blind, I became his eyes. I would take his arm when he went to collect his pension. In Coldharbour Lane that meant negotiating several flights of stairs, some steep outside stone steps from the door to the pavement and 150 yards of road to the post office. I learned to watch out for uneven paving stones, unleashed dogs, traffic turning into side roads and all the hazards whose avoidance is routine to the fully-sighted. It was good training for a future Minister for the Disabled.

Too stiff and proud to acknowledge ill-fortune, my father saw his troubles, his health, his blindness, as temporary setbacks from which he would somehow emerge triumphant. My mother, seemingly impervious to every blow, brushed them away as of no consequence, defended and cared for my father and was always unvanquished before a sea of troubles. If I found her with wet eyes often enough, I never found her without hope. If the rain came through the ceiling, as it did – well, the water could be mopped up and the ceiling repaired. If the bills piled up, they’d be paid eventually – no one could doubt that. If their health worsened, it would surely improve. There was always tomorrow, full of wonderful possibilities.

Especially, they thought, for me. I was to achieve what they had not. I was to put right what was wrong. My mother was confident of that. And since I had stayed at Rutlish after we moved to Coldharbour Lane, they were sure I had the best possible start. I knew that this confidence, too, was ill-founded, but I never told them.

Living in Brixton meant I had one and a half hours’ travelling each way six days a week, since Rutlish had Saturday-morning school. I travelled by train from Loughborough Junction, first to Merton South and later, when I moved to the third year, which had different classrooms, to Wimbledon Chase. It was on these journeys that I picked up an addiction to morning newspapers – the Daily Express in those days – which I would not break until halfway through my tenure of Downing Street.

I would turn first to the sports pages – it was the time of Surrey’s great run of seven County Cricket championships in a row, from 1952 to 1958 – and then to the news. I still remember my incredulity at the trial and execution for murder in July 1955 of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. I could not believe her death penalty would not be commuted, and the experience turned me into a lifelong opponent of capital punishment. I remember, too, the dreadful Munich air disaster of February 1958, in which so many wonderful Manchester United footballers died, and the long saga of whether their manager Matt Busby would recover from his injuries. I remember them better than I remember Rutlish.

Our school uniform was expensive and could only be bought from one shop, Ely’s in Wimbledon. My first blazer and cap were new, but as I grew, later uniforms were second-hand. Fortunately Rutlish jumble sales were a source of larger blazers, with the embossed buttons from the outgrown blazer carefully preserved and saved, since they cost two shillings and sixpence each from Ely’s. Whenever my mother bought a jumble-sale blazer she ordered me to stay out of sight – she didn’t want anyone to know for whom it was intended. She always bought them too large for me, in the belief that they would last longer as I grew. She must have thought nobody would notice.

She was wrong. Once, when I had lost two buttons from my sleeve, Mr Winsor, the school secretary, called me to see him, and offered me five shillings from the school fund to replace them. It was a sensitive and kind act, and I thanked him for it. But I couldn’t accept, and my parents would have been horrified had I done so. They would have made me take the money back, which would have been even more shaming. In any event I felt abashed at the well-intended gesture and humiliated at the need for it.

Rutlish and I were not getting on. Some masters, like Bobby Oulton, the deputy head, and Harry Hathaway, who taught maths, remain clear memories, but most have long since been pushed from my mind; although we were not mortal enemies, we were certainly not good friends. I avoided after-school activities because it took too long to travel home. The Combined Cadet Force did not appeal to me – even apart from the cost of the uniform. And the lure of wearing a boater in the upper forms was certainly resistible. It all seemed rather pretentious to me.

My name did lead to squalls at school, though fewer than I had feared. A scrap or two and an early aptitude for rugby soon enabled me to settle well enough among my fellow pupils, and in my first year I was even appointed captain of rugby and told to pick teams for trial games. This was such a welcome task that it took precedence over all academic work. Mr Blenkinsop, the headmaster, was unimpressed when I ignored his valuable Latin tuition to concentrate on rugby trials, but he was too wise to take the responsibility away from me. Anyway, he had probably given up trying to teach me Latin.

Rutlish introduced me to foreign languages and the sciences (all draughty laboratories and odd smells), but the acquaintance was only casual. History and English were more bearable. Such homework as was necessary I did on the train, where an empty carriage provided a better opportunity than two crowded rooms in Brixton.

At school I did as little work as possible. I thought of the place as a penance to be endured. I kept myself to myself and cooperated only so as to keep out of trouble. I just didn’t engage. I never took school interests home or bothered my parents with talk of extra-curricular outings or holidays; I knew they could not afford them.

At about this time, I discovered I was short-sighted. I could read comfortably and play games without difficulty, but – sitting at the back of the class to keep out of harm’s way – I could not easily see the blackboard. In the days of blackboard teaching this was a real problem. No one noticed.

It has been said that I was bullied at school. That is not true: I was too good at sport to be a likely candidate for bullying. I was a member of the cricket and rugby teams for my house, and enjoyed my happiest hours playing those games. It was the best part of school. I even won a certificate from the Evening Standard for taking seven wickets for nine runs against Royal Masonic – including a hat trick. I once won a bet with my team-mate, Tony Weymouth, by hitting a cricket ball through a school window. It wasn’t the window I was aiming for, but it was thought good enough.

Sport was a large part of my out-of-school life as well, and I formed a lasting attachment to Surrey County Cricket Club and Chelsea Football Club. I saw Chelsea play for the first time in 1955, the year they won the championship. They beat Wolves 1–0 with a Peter Sillett penalty, and I was hooked for life. I have spent many happy afternoons at Stamford Bridge, and many frustrating ones as well, as Chelsea demonstrated their legendary unpredictability. I can still smell the cheroot smoke and roasted peanuts of a sunny Easter afternoon in the sixties when they beat Everton 6–2, and Jimmy Greaves scored five goals. Such a result had rarity value, quite apart from the odours of the day. Supporting Chelsea over the years has been a rollercoaster ride, but it has been a great aid in developing a philosophical view of life.

Individual sports have never had the appeal for me of team games – except for athletics. I still remember the wonderful evening Chris Chataway, the great English middle-distance runner, beat Vladimir Kutz, the seemingly invincible Russian champion. ‘Chataway went thataway!’ chanted the delirious crowd, and so he had.

But cricket is my first love. Clement Attlee once referred to cricket as ‘a religion and W.G. [Grace] next to a deity’. He put an old fashioned tickertape machine into Downing Street so he could keep up to date with the cricket scores, and it was still there in my time.

Playing cricket gave me some of the happiest moments of my life – not that I was ever very good, but then many of those who love the game are indifferent performers. I had my moments, though they were pitifully few. My seven for nine at school was my zenith, although seventy-seven not out (against poor bowling and fielding in Nigeria) is another cherished memory.

Our home in Brixton was less than a mile from The Oval, home of Surrey. The great Surrey team of the fifties that won the County Championship for seven successive years was equipped for all conditions. They bowled Lock and Laker if the wicket took spin, Bedser if the ball would swing, and Loader if the wicket was quick. May, and later Barrington and Stewart, scored the runs, with Fletcher, Clark and Constable in support. Their fielding was superb. Lock was like a cheetah sighting prey in the leg trap, and Surridge took amazing catches with his telescopic arms – I used to believe he was the only man alive who could scratch his ankles while standing upright. It was a wonderful team of all the talents, and I never expect to see its equal.

I almost lived at The Oval during the school holidays. Armed with sandwiches and a soft drink I sat on the popular side in perfect contentment. If the weather was fine and the crowd large (as it often was) I would sit on the grass just outside the boundary rope, a delight long since forbidden by nannyish safety regulations. I suppose I was spoilt by the wonderful cricket I saw then, but those early days provided imperishable memories. The mind does play tricks, of course, but what I recall is that Surrey always seemed to win, and that in the early evening The Oval was always bathed in sunshine and shadow.

I was enraptured by the literature of cricket, which has a treasure trove no other game can match. For me Neville Cardus, C.L.R. James and E.W. Swanton stand before all other writers on the game. Cardus was the poet of cricket; his prose had a romance to it that swept the mundane aside. The first piece by Cardus I ever read was a pen-portrait of Denis Compton, in which he wrote of the infamous knee: ‘the gods treated him churlishly. They crippled him almost beyond repair.’ I never saw Compton again without that thought coming to mind.

I did suspect that Cardus stretched the truth a little as he fleshed out his affectionate portraits. Were cricketers really such characters, or was their charm enhanced in the poetic eye of a besotted beholder? Even if it was, it didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Cardus, again on Compton, illustrated the point. He once asked two boys why they were not watching the cricket. ‘Because there are no more Denis Comptons,’ he reports them as saying. It is a marvellous tribute to the unique charm of Compton’s batting, but would a small boy really have said that? I doubt it, but when I read it I loved it. And it may have been true.

C.L.R. James’s masterpiece Beyond a Boundary sets out better than anyone before or since how cricket affects character and illustrates the better virtues; it undermined all my prejudices that such a lyrical love of the game should flow from the pen of a committed Marxist

Jim Swanton is the doyen of modern writers although, for reporting the game, he would give the palm to his good friend John Woodcock. Both men have seen much of the greatest cricket played in the last three-quarters of a century. Jonathan Aitken, a great admirer of Swanton, once gave me a set of all the Swanton books I did not already possess, and they are a prized part of my collection.