Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

At the dinner at No. 10 held in honour of President Reagan White House Photograph)

Test driving the new Challenger tank (Joel Fink/AP/Press Association Images)

Arriving at Camp David by helicopter (Official White House Photograph)

With Helmut Kohl (NI Syndication)

With Boris Yeltsin (Camera Press, London)

With Nelson Mandela (Camera Press, London)

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly (Courtesy of the United Nations)

Receiving a standing ovation at the Party Conference (NI Syndication/Simon Townsley)

With members of the Cabinet and Denis at the Carlton Club Answering questions in the House of Commons (Press Association Images)

Driving away from Buckingham Palace (Geraint Lewis)

Leaving No. 10 for the last time (Richard Open/Camera Press, London)

EDITOR’S NOTE (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)

The present edition is an abridged version of the original two volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs. The Downing Street Years, describing the author’s time as Prime Minister, was the first to appear, in 1993. The Path to Power, an account of her youth and early political career, was published two years later. The reverse chronological order was a response to the demands of the market and the relative interest of readers. But it had drawbacks.

This single, abridged volume sets them right. It begins at the beginning and ends at the – very dramatic – end. It excludes altogether the last section of The Path to Power, which was a series of essays on issues of the day. Also excluded, for brevity’s sake, are the dedications, acknowledgements, many footnotes and most of the appendices, along with some discursive sections and travelogues that have lost immediate interest. That said, all the key moments, events, issues, exchanges and arguments are here. Arguably, the compression results in a stronger, sharper self-portrait of one of the twentieth century’s towering figures.

ROBIN HARRIS

CHAPTER ONE (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)

A Provincial Childhood (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)

Grantham 1925–1943

MY FIRST DISTINCT MEMORY IS OF TRAFFIC. I was being pushed in a pram through the town to the park on a sunny day, and I must have encountered the bustle of Grantham on the way. The occasion stays in my mind as an exciting mixture of colour, vehicles, people and thunderous noise – yet, perhaps paradoxically, the memory is a pleasant one. I must have liked this first conscious plunge into the outside world.

As for indistinct memories, most of us probably recall our earliest years as a sort of blur. Mine was an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone – my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop – was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet. Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. But I had not been born into a quiet family.

Four generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e. private) schools. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there.

My father had a number of jobs, most of them in the grocery trade, until in 1913 he was offered the post of manager of a grocery store in Grantham. In later years he would say that of the fourteen shillings a week he received, twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging, one shilling he saved, and only then did he spend the remaining shilling. The First World War broke out a year later. My father, a deeply patriotic man, tried to enlist no fewer than six times, but was rejected on each occasion on medical grounds. His younger brother, Edward, did enlist, and died on active service in Salonika in 1917. Few British families escaped such a bereavement, and Remembrance Day after the war was observed throughout the country both strictly and intensely.

Four years after arriving in Grantham my father met my mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, through the local Methodist church. She had her own business as a dressmaker. They were married in that church in May 1917 and my sister, Muriel, was born in 1921.

My mother was quite a saver too, and by 1919 they were able to take out a mortgage to buy their own shop in North Parade. Our home was over this shop. In 1923 my father opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road – opposite the primary school which I would later attend. On 13 October 1925 I was born over the shop at North Parade.

That same year, my father expanded his business further, taking in two adjoining buildings in North Parade. Our shop and house were situated at a busy crossroads and the main railway line – Grantham was an important junction – was just a hundred yards away. We could set our clocks by the ‘Flying Scotsman’ as it thundered through. What I most regretted was that we did not have a garden. Not until the end of the Second World War did my father buy a house with a long garden further along North Parade, on which the family had set our hearts some years previously.

Life ‘over the shop’ is much more than a phrase. It is something which those who have lived it know to be quite distinctive. For one thing, you are always on duty. People would knock on the door at almost any hour of the night or weekend if they ran out of bacon, sugar, butter or eggs. Everyone knew that we lived by serving the customer; it was pointless to complain – and so nobody did. These orders were, of course, on top of the regular ones. My father or his staff – we had three at North Parade and someone else at Huntingtower – would generally go out and collect these. But sometimes my mother would do so, and then she might take Muriel and me along too. My sister and I knew a lot of people in the town as a result.

There was, of course, no question of closing down the shop for long family holidays. We used to go to the local seaside resort, Skegness. But my father and mother had to take their holidays at different times, with my father taking a week off every year to play his favourite game, competing in the bowls tournament at Skegness. Living over the shop, children see far more of their parents than in most other walks of life. I saw my father at breakfast, lunch, high tea and supper. We had much more time to talk than some other families, for which I have always been grateful.

My father was a specialist grocer. He always aimed to supply the best-quality produce, and the shop itself suggested this. Behind the counter there were three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles, and on top of these stood large, black, lacquered tea canisters. One of the tasks I sometimes shared was the weighing out of tea, sugar and biscuits from the sacks and boxes in which they arrived into 1lb and 2lb bags. In a cool back room we called ‘the old bake house’ hung sides of bacon which had to be boned and cut up for slicing. Wonderful aromas of spices, coffee and smoked hams would waft through the house.

I was born into a home which was practical, serious and intensely religious. My father and mother were both staunch Methodists; indeed, my father was much in demand as a lay preacher in and around Grantham. He was a powerful preacher whose sermons contained a good deal of intellectual substance. But he was taken aback when I asked him why he put on a ‘sermon voice’ on these occasions. I don’t think he realized that he did this. It was an unconscious homage to the biblical message, and quite different from the more prosaic tones in which he dispatched council business and current affairs.

Our lives revolved around Methodism. The family went to Sunday Morning Service at 11 o’clock, but before that I would have gone to morning Sunday School. There was Sunday School again in the afternoon; later, from about the age of twelve, I played the piano for the smaller children to sing the hymns. Then my parents would usually go out again to Sunday Evening Service.

On a few occasions I remember trying to get out of going. But when I said to my father that my friends were able to go out for a walk instead and I would like to join them, he would reply: ‘Never do things just because other people do them.’ This was one of his favourite expressions – used when I wanted to learn dancing, or sometimes when I wanted to go to the cinema. Whatever I felt at the time, the sentiment stood me in good stead, as it did my father.

My father’s sense of duty, however, always had its gentler side. This was not true of everyone. Life for poor people in the years before the Second World War was very difficult; and it was not much easier for those who had worked hard, accumulated a nest egg, and achieved a precarious respectability. They lived on a knife-edge and feared that if some accident hit them, or if they relaxed their standards of thrift and diligence, they might be plunged into debt and poverty. This precariousness often made otherwise good people hard and unforgiving. I remember a discussion between my father and a church-goer about the ‘prodigal son’ of a friend who, after running through his parents’ savings, had turned up penniless and with a young family on their doorstep. The church-goer was clear: the boy was no good, would never be any good, and should be shown the door. My father’s reply is vivid in my mind. No, he said. A son remained a son, and he must be greeted with all the love and warmth of his family when he turned to them. Whatever happens, you must always be able to come home.

As this suggests, my father was a man of firm principles – ‘Your father always sticks to his principles,’ my mother would say – but he did not believe in applying these principles in a way which made life wretched for everyone else. He showed this in his dealings as a local councillor and later alderman with the vexed question of what could be done on the Sabbath. In those days in Grantham and in most places cinemas were closed on Sundays, but during the war – adopting a utilitarian rather than a dogmatic approach – he supported Sunday opening because it gave the servicemen stationed near the town somewhere to go, without disturbing others who wanted a quieter, more contemplative Sabbath. At the same time he strongly (though in the end unsuccessfully) opposed the opening of the parks for the playing of games, which he felt would ruin other people’s peace and quiet. He wanted to keep Sunday a special day, but he was flexible about how it should be done. For my own part, I was unpersuaded, even as a girl, of the need for these restrictions: but I can now appreciate how much this highly principled man was prepared to bend on the matter when circumstances made it sensible.

These upright qualities, which entailed a refusal to alter your convictions just because others disagreed or because you became unpopular, were instilled into me from the earliest days. In 1936, when I was eleven, I was given a special edition of Bibby’s Annual. Joseph Bibby was a Liverpool food manufacturer who used part of his considerable self-made fortune to edit a religious magazine which was an odd combination of character building, homespun philosophy and religion; it also contained beautiful reproductions of great pictures. I was too young to know that the underlying approach was Theosophist* (#ulink_287b8c34-9929-5c61-a5a0-d3ca0c24b855) but the Annual was one of my most treasured possessions. Above all, it taught me some verses which I still use in off-the-cuff speeches because they came to embody for me so much of what I was brought up to feel.

One ship drives East, and another drives West,

By the self-same gale that blows;

’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,

That determines the way she goes.

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

Or again:

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Whether it was that early exposure to Bibby’s Annual or just a natural bent, I was soon fascinated by poetry. Aged ten, I was the proud winner of a prize at the Grantham Eisteddfod for reciting poetry. (I read John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Travellers’.) One day soon afterwards, when I called at a door to collect an order for groceries, I was given an edition of Milton by someone who knew how much poetry meant to me: I have treasured the book ever since. In the first years of the war I would go out as part of a concert party to the surrounding villages and recite from my Oxford Book of English Verse – another book which even now is never far from reach. Methodism itself, of course, has, in the form of the Wesley hymns, some really fine religious poetry.

Religious life in Grantham was very active and, in the days before Christian ecumenism, competitive. There were three Methodist chapels, St Wulfram’s Anglican church – the sixth-highest steeple in England, according to local legend – and a Roman Catholic church just opposite our house. From a child’s standpoint, the Catholics seemed to have the most light-hearted time of all. I used to envy the young Catholic girls making their first communion, dressed in white, ribboned party dresses, and carrying baskets of flowers. The Methodist style was much plainer, and if you wore a ribboned dress an older chapel-goer would shake his head and warn against ‘the first step to Rome’.

Even without ribbons, however, Methodism was far from dour. It placed great emphasis on the social side of religion and on music, both of which gave me plenty of opportunities to enjoy life, even if it was in what might seem a rather solemn way. Our friends from church would often come in to cold supper on Sunday evenings, or we would go to them. I always enjoyed the adults’ conversation, which ranged far wider than religion or happenings in Grantham to include national and international politics. And one of the unintended consequences of the temperance side of Methodism was that Methodists tended to devote more time and attention to eating. ‘Keeping a good table’ was a common phrase, and many of the social occasions were built around tea parties and suppers. There was also a constant round of church events.

It was, I confess, the musical side of Methodism which I liked best. We sang special hymns on the occasion of Sunday School anniversaries. The Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School (KGGS) carol service – and the weeks of practice which preceded it – was something I always looked forward to. Our church had an exceptionally good choir. Every other year we would perform an oratorio: Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. We would have professionals from London to sing the more difficult solo parts. But what made an impression on me was the latent richness of musical talent which serious training and practice could develop. My family also belonged to a music society and three or four times a year there would be a chamber music concert.

We were a musical family. From the age of five my parents had me learn the piano: my mother played too. In fact, I turned out to be quite good, and I was fortunate enough to have excellent teachers and won several prizes at local music festivals. The piano on which I was taught was made by my great uncle, John Roberts, in Northampton. He also made church organs. When I was ten I visited him and was thrilled to be allowed to play one of the two he had built in a cavernous barn-like building in his garden. Sadly, at sixteen I found it necessary to stop music lessons when I was cramming for my university entrance, and I still regret that I never took the piano up again. At this time, however, it was I who played the piano at home, while my father (who had a good bass voice) and mother (a contralto) and sometimes friends sang the old favourites of an evening – ‘The Holy City’, ‘The Lost Chord’, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc.