1

Grantham

‘Mahogany and child’

Phoebe Stephenson took her granddaughter Muriel Roberts upstairs. Through the bedroom door came the cry of a newborn baby. ‘Can you hear something?’ Phoebe asked the four-year-old Muriel. ‘I said “no”,’ Muriel recalled more than seventy years later. ‘I could hear something but I wouldn’t say so.’ ¹ With this lack of fanfare, on 13 October 1925, the future Margaret Thatcher came into the world.

She was born Margaret Hilda Roberts, in the house of her parents Alfred Roberts and his wife Beatrice Stephenson – 1 North Parade, Grantham, Lincolnshire. They lived above the shop, a grocery that Alfred Roberts had bought in 1919. Muriel was Margaret’s only sister. The Robertses had no sons.

The son of a bootmaker from Ringstead in Northamptonshire, Alfred Roberts had left school at the age of thirteen because of the need to make a living, but he longed for education, and acquired it by voracious reading and study. He had risen through the retail trade, having, early in life, been an assistant in the tuck shop at Oundle School. He was a local preacher (what Anglicans would call a lay preacher) in the Methodist Church, and a few notes for his sermons survive. In these, the only trace of his lack of formal education is the occasional misspelling – ‘attemp’, ‘waisting your time’, ‘beleif’, ‘desease’. ² The hand is elegant and the expression clear and fluent.

On one page of an old schoolbook, in notes for a sermon delivered after the Second World War, ³ Alfred Roberts reflects on ‘The neglected length of mahogany counter’ and what might be made of it: ‘what a thing of beauty it became when the craftsman contributed all his skill of polishing. But the beauty was there, just waiting to be revealed.’ On the same page, Roberts offers another example:

When Alfred Roberts’s younger child had made her ‘full contribution’ to her country, she re-read these notes, in preparation for her memoirs, and linked the two stories. On a yellow Post-it note stuck to the page, she wrote ‘Mahogany and child’.

The mahogany counter with which Margaret grew up and across which she sometimes served customers was always beautifully polished. ‘If you get it from Roberts’s…you get – THE BEST’ boasted an advertisement in the Grantham Almanack in 1925, and those who remembered the grocer’s shop said that the boast was justified. Although North Parade is beyond the end of Grantham High Street, better-off families from the centre of town would make the extra journey for the extra quality. Mary Wallace, for example, whose father was the leading dentist in the town, and who was almost the only other Grantham girl of Margaret’s generation to go to Oxford, remembered her mother doing so. ⁴ Margaret herself lovingly recalled: ‘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…In a cool back room…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.’ ⁵ Mary Robinson, who worked as an assistant in the shop, remembered that it had ‘better biscuits’ – a key quality indicator at that time – than Roberts’s commercial and political rival, the Co-op. ⁶

The shop stood on a corner between the richer and poorer districts of the town, and served both of them. As well as being a high-class provision merchant, Roberts’s was also a post office, and therefore served the clients of the early welfare state. Poverty and bourgeois comfort lived close to one another, and Margaret used to walk past the labour exchange on her way to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, although by the time she entered KGGS in 1936 unemployment in Grantham had halved from its peak of 2,300 in 1933. Seventy years later, she remembered a widow in black entering the shop with two small children: ‘She asked if she could have three small oranges for the price of two because she had to be so careful.’ ⁷ She explained, ‘Life was not something we did not know about. We were right in it.’ ⁸

The Robertses saw it as their duty to help in a small and discreet way where they found distress. Every Thursday afternoon, which was early closing day for the shop, Beatrice Roberts would have a ‘big bake’. Two or three of the loaves would go out to ‘people we knew’ who were on hard times. The act of charity had to be obscured before it could be accepted: Margaret would hand over a loaf saying, ‘Mother’s had a big bake and she wondered whether you would like this. It is home-made, and it’s better than bought…You had to be very careful. People…are very proud.’ ^{9 ,} * ¹ According to Muriel, fellow Methodists regarded Roberts as almost a soft touch: ‘If they wanted money, “Oh, Alf will give us some.” We hadn’t got it but we gave it.’ ¹⁰ But, like the man in the song, Alfred Roberts did well by doing good. The shop prospered. He added the premises of 2, 3 and 4 North Parade to those of No. 1 with which he had started, and not long before Margaret’s birth he opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road, about a mile away towards the station. It was opposite this that Margaret attended her first school, Huntingtower Road County Elementary School. Roberts never became rich, and when he died in 1970 he left little more than his modest house and a few pieces of furniture: of the chattels, his famous daughter took only two chairs. ¹¹ But he established a secure and respected business, which gave him the base from which to serve the town as a councillor, a Rotarian and a Methodist.

The base was quite austere. The house had no garden, no hot water, and an outside lavatory. After the war, during which Roberts’s reliability and efficiency as a grocer had allowed him to increase his wealth in the era of rationing when these qualities were at a premium, Roberts could afford to buy a separate house, with a garden, at No. 19 in the same street. It was called Allerton, named, as suburban houses of that date often were, after an aristocratic seat, in this case that of the Stourton family in Yorkshire. But, all the time that Margaret was living exclusively at home, home was 1 North Parade. She was proud of the business and intensely proud of her father, but she could early see the limitations of where she lived. In 1985, she told Miriam Stoppard: ‘Home really was very small and we had no mod cons and I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had.’ ¹²

Home was strict as well as small. It was dominated by work, and by religion. The shop was open until 9 p.m. on a Saturday and 8 p.m. on a Friday. Monday was washing day, and Tuesday ironing. ¹³ Because of the demands of the shop, Margaret ‘never went on holiday with Mum and Dad’, ¹⁴ and because of the prevailing atmosphere of constant work, she never daydreamed or was idle. As her daughter Carol put it, ‘She never experienced nothingness.’ ¹⁵ Sunday was a day of almost continuous religious activity. Alfred Roberts’s preaching circuit was centred on Finkin Street Methodist Church, a handsome building in the middle of the town. The family attended Sunday services there, and sometimes at the much closer chapel in Brownlow Street. There was Sunday school at 10 o’clock, morning service at 11 o’clock, afternoon Sunday school after lunch and another church service in the early evening. For almost half the Sundays in the year, her father was out for part of the day preaching in surrounding villages. His role often meant that he brought visiting speakers home, and on more than one occasion these speakers, from far-flung regions where Methodism was spreading, were black, an extreme rarity in Grantham at that time. ¹⁶ It seems to have been meeting Methodist missionaries from India that inspired Margaret with her ambition, curious in someone little more than a child, to join the Indian Civil Service. After listening to them, she remembered, ‘I wanted to be an Indian civil servant, because I thought that India was a remarkable place and I would love to be a part, a cog in the wheel, of this great empire. And I think my father said to me at one stage, “I’m not sure if it’ll be part of the British Empire by that time.” ’ ¹⁷ Margaret appreciated and even enjoyed many aspects of Methodism. She loved the ‘powerful combination’ of the teaching of John Wesley and the hymns of his brother Charles. ¹⁸ She participated fully in the musical life, as did her parents (she was a mezzo-soprano, her mother a contralto and her father a bass; both she and her mother played the piano, and when she was eighteen she learnt the organ). In her memoirs, she notes that she first learnt to play on a piano which was inscribed with the name of the maker John Roberts, her great-uncle, who also made church organs. ^{19 ,} * ² And she also enjoyed the conversation on public questions which tended to take place in the parlour of the shop when Methodists repaired there after the evening service on Sunday. ²⁰ ‘Father taught me to like what he called “discussion”,’ she recalled. ²¹ Although she attended the Church of England in later life, appearing in her last years every Sunday at the services in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, Margaret Thatcher never repudiated the Methodism of her childhood, with its reverence for truth-telling, hard work and putting into practice the teaching of Scripture. Her father’s sermon notes are full of precepts and expressions which one almost can hear her own lips speaking: ‘There is no promise of ease for the faithful servant of the Cross,’ ‘God wants no faint hearts for His ambassadors,’ even ‘We must avoid the principle of a Denominational Closed Shop.’ ²² ‘We were Methodist and Methodist means method,’ Margaret told one biographer. ²³ She always loved method.

She also studied her father’s speaking technique. ‘Have something to say. Say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style,’ he wrote in his sermon notes, ²⁴ quoting Matthew Arnold, and she never diverged from this view. She watched him reworking the ideas of the Gospel: ‘he always found a new way of putting the message…There aren’t any new messages. There aren’t any new sins. But you have to find a way of putting it which is in keeping with the times.’ ²⁵ She admired his methods, but also observed with a critical eye. Speaking of him in the present tense thirty years after his death, she said: ‘He’s not very demonstrative. He’s very thoughtful…Sometimes I’d say, “Pa, that was your sermon voice, your sermonizing voice” and then it would be a bit lighter. If you’re giving a message from the Old or New Testament you’re conscious of a responsibility…If you’re giving a message which is your beliefs you are also conscious of a responsibility but you’re not necessarily interpreting your Maker but doing yourself.’ ²⁶

Margaret was always very restrained in any criticism of her upbringing. She permitted herself only a few guarded remarks. She said that the family’s religious life set them ‘a little bit apart…from one’s fellows’ and that church ‘can be slightly overdone’. ‘You must never be like the parable of the Pharisees [Luke 18:9–14]…because you just really know how you fall short of the ideal.’ ²⁷ She indicated how much she enjoyed visiting her schoolfriend Jean Farmer, whose father was a builder at Fulbeck, 10 miles outside Grantham, where the atmosphere was freer and more joyful. When staying there, she told one biographer, ‘they all went to tennis together. They all went to dances together. They would all do far more of those things – out with other people where there was laughter and fun!’ ²⁸ Jean Farmer in turn remembered a serious atmosphere in the Roberts household, with Alfred Roberts as ‘one who didn’t unbend’. She was ‘a bit in awe of him’. ²⁹

Margaret’s elder sister, Muriel, however, was harsher about the girls’ religious upbringing. ‘It was all church, church, church,’ she said. ‘We had an uncle every Christmas who sent us religious books. Oh God how we hated it. You weren’t allowed to play games. That really is bigoted, isn’t it?’ ³⁰ Roberts’s grocery stood immediately opposite the Roman Catholic church of the town and Alfred Roberts had friendly relations with Father Leo Arendzen, the popular parish priest. But when Father Arendzen one day invited him over to see the pictures in the church, Roberts refused, saying, ‘No, no, no. I’ll never put my foot inside a Catholic church.’ ³¹ Later, when Margaret was the young candidate in Dartford, her parents worried that one of her friends was a Catholic, and that she might fall under her influence, though in fact the woman in question was a ‘slave to Margaret’ and not the other way round. ^{32 ,} * ³ Such attitudes were not at all uncommon at that time, and there is other evidence that Alfred Roberts was quite broad-minded about religious affiliation. Margaret’s schoolfriend Margaret Goodrich, for example, recalled that his friendship with her father, an Anglican clergyman, was notable for its interdenominational warmth. ³³ But it seems fair to say that the Robertses, being serious about all such things, made their daughters feel them more than would have been the case in most families. When Margaret came to have children of her own, Beatrice Roberts protested when she learnt that they were taken to the Church of England rather than to Methodist services. ^{34 ,} * ⁴ In the minds of the Roberts girls, the blame for restriction and narrowness fell on their mother, not their father. It has been written that Margaret was Daddy’s girl, and that Muriel was closer to her mother. According to Muriel, this was not so, or rather the closeness to the father was true of both girls, not only of Margaret. Throughout his later years, particularly as a widower, Alfred Roberts kept up a closer correspondence with Muriel than with Margaret (this was partly a matter of time, because of Margaret’s busy career, but then matters of time are often matters of something else as well): ‘I think, if anything, I was closer to him than she was. It was always to me, even in later life if there was any trouble, that he came.’ ³⁵ In fact, Roberts’s surviving letters (which are all post-war) show love for both his daughters, though sprinkled with small reproaches to Margaret for not paying him quite enough attention. And it is certain that in everything he did he tried to advance his girls. In the middle of the war, he went to Canon Goodrich, seeking help to prepare Margaret for the general paper in her university entrance. ‘My great wish’, he told Goodrich, ‘is to get Margaret into Oxford. I wonder if you could coach her.’ ³⁶ This was not the action of a paterfamilias who wished to keep his daughter tied to hearth and home. ‘He wanted me to have what he hadn’t had,’ his daughter recalled. ³⁷

In Muriel’s view, Beatrice Roberts was ‘a bigoted Methodist…Margaret and I weren’t close to her…We just didn’t click with her.’ As a result, Muriel believed, Margaret grew apart from her mother as quickly as she could: ‘Mother didn’t exist in Margaret’s mind.’ Margaret always expressed herself more charitably and tactfully on the subject, but without much enthusiasm. Famously describing herself in Who’s Who as ‘d of late Alfred Roberts’, with no mention of her mother, she tended to speak of Beatrice, if at all, in a subsidiary role. Asked by Miriam Stoppard, ‘What example did your mother set you, as opposed to your father?’ Margaret Thatcher replied: ‘Oh Mummy backed up Daddy in everything as far as you do what is right.’ She explained her role by recourse to the Bible, or rather, the Bible as reworked by her beloved Rudyard Kipling in his poem which Mrs Thatcher referred to as ‘The Mary and the Martha’ (its actual title is ‘The Sons of Martha’): ‘Mary was the one who listened at the feet of Jesus and always was interested in what was going on and Martha was the one who always went, “Now is there enough to eat?” “Do you want fresh clothes?” “Would you like to lie down?” This was my mother…I still retain it.’ ³⁸

It is telling that Margaret retained the Kipling version, because it is highly complimentary to the Sons of Martha (it is a pity that he had nothing to say about the Daughters of Martha). The Sons of Martha are the people in life who make sure that God’s work is actually done:

Rather do they see things through to the end without pretension:

There is nothing that Margaret Thatcher admired more than ‘simple service simply given’, and she believed that that was what her mother contributed.

But she did not like it much at the time. The letters she wrote to Muriel in the 1940s mention their mother often, but almost always in passing and usually in connection with some prohibition. In the summer of 1944, she asked Muriel: ‘Do you think the person who makes the handbags could make me one in maroon leather like your blue one. I have decided that maroon would be the best colour for my wardrobe as I am having that pinky dress made up…I haven’t told Mummy or Daddy about this as I am sure that Mummy at any rate would think it very extravagant.’ ³⁹ In the same year, during the long vacation after her first summer at Oxford, she indicates a sense that she has become intellectually more sophisticated than her mother. She went with Beatrice to see Now, Voyager : ‘I have never liked Bette Davis but nevertheless I thought she was simply marvellous in that film.’ Mrs Roberts, though, did not like it so much: ‘I think she would have preferred it to end happily ever after sort of style.’ ⁴⁰ Perhaps it is not surprising that Beatrice Roberts had her reservations, since the film concerns a daughter’s defiance which so shocks her overbearing mother that she dies of a heart attack. ‘I loved her dearly, but after I was fifteen we had nothing more to say to each other.’ Before the age of twenty, Margaret was leaving her mother behind.

It would be a mistake, though, to think that the mother’s influence was ever expunged from her daughter’s character. Jean Farmer, the closest friend of her youth, thinks that ‘Margaret probably absorbed more from her mother than she realizes – she was a hard worker, ran her house really well and helped in the shop.’ ⁴¹ Margaret Thatcher was herself always more a Martha than a Mary: she loved domestic labour, finding it therapeutic to cook, to sew, to decorate her house and to clean. She was an enthusiastic home-maker. It was sad and touching, in her old age, for staff to find her, lost for something proper to do, clearing out and relining drawers which were already spotlessly tidy. ⁴²

Beatrice Stephenson, the daughter of a cloakroom attendant at Grantham station, had been a professional seamstress before she met Alfred Roberts through the Methodist Church and married him in 1917, and she taught her daughters the finer points of sewing and how to adapt existing material for new uses. Margaret followed closely her mother’s precept, ‘Never leave the house looking untidy,’ ⁴³ and when Margaret Thatcher was bringing up her own children in the 1950s she did not forget her practical lessons. One contemporary at the Bar remembered Mark and Carol wearing duffel coats lined with their old nursery curtains. ⁴⁴ In the more than 150 letters from her to Muriel that survive, clothes (quite often illustrated by rough drawings) are a far more common subject of discussion than politics, and in her eighth decade Margaret could still remember minute details about what she had worn as a child. Thus she described the dress that her mother had made her for the Christmas party of the League of Pity (now the NSPCC): ‘It was of soft pink satin: eight or nine rows of smocking in pale blue and below, pink and blue ribbons, with a flat bow at the back…’ * ⁵ Nor did Margaret forget the more general example behind these domestic accomplishments. Throughout her life, including at the zenith of her power, she liked to remember human need – for food, or comfort, or praise, or consolation, though not, unless heavily prompted, for sleep. The unanimous testimony of Margaret Thatcher’s personal staff is that she noticed their small needs and took personal pleasure in satisfying them. Indeed, her fussing round people was her favoured way of showing affection and concern: she loved to be practical, to feel that she had helped in a tangible way. She might leave her husband each morning to go and run the country, but not before she had cooked his breakfast. All this was the legacy of Beatrice Roberts.

What bothered Margaret in later life, though, was a sense of guilt. She felt that she had been unappreciative of her mother, and, unlike with her father, whom she believed to be the greatest positive influence in her life, found it difficult to light on the right words in public to convey her belated appreciation. In the end, she said simply: ‘I don’t think I thanked my mother enough, because you don’t realize…’ ⁴⁵

What did others think of the Robertses? Alfred Roberts made a strong impression. He was 6 foot 2 inches tall, with piercing blue eyes and wiry blond hair that turned white quite young. The prevailing view in the town was favourable. To the young Margaret Goodrich, he was ‘a dignified, unusual sort of chap’. ⁴⁶ Rita Hind, another fellow pupil of Margaret Roberts at KGGS, remembered that ‘whenever his name was mentioned, it was mentioned with great reverence.’ ⁴⁷ Another schoolfriend, Shirley Walsh, described Roberts as ‘a delightful man’. ⁴⁸ According to Nellie Towers, a fellow Methodist, the town librarian told her that Roberts was ‘the most well-read man in Grantham’. ⁴⁹ Roberts was chairman of the library committee, and one of his daughter’s most often repeated memories is of going with him to the library every Saturday to borrow a serious book for him and a light novel for her mother. ⁵⁰ Mary Robinson, also a fellow Methodist, was employed by Roberts in the shop to help her after her father’s death. This was an act of kindness on his part which he compounded by paying her five shillings per week more than had been agreed. ⁵¹

There are opposing views, though they are harder to find. Kenneth Wallace, son of the Roberts’s dentist, was fond of Margaret and used to invite her round to listen to his collection of classical records – Sibelius, Beethoven. He thought her friendly and a ‘good conversationalist’ but he found her background ‘very limited’, and guessed (a surmise which is confirmed in her own correspondence with Muriel) that ‘she enjoyed the company of a more cultured family than her own’. He found Roberts unnecessarily strict about allowing young men into the house (not that he was ever Margaret’s boyfriend) and thought his manner ‘patronizing’. ⁵² His sister, Mary, found Roberts ‘rather forbidding’ and the speeches (which, as a local worthy and governor, he sometimes made at the school) almost unendurable: ‘They said nothing whatsoever – he would just point his finger at us and proclaim “And what I say is true.” ’ ⁵³ Both of them give countenance to the theory, also supported by Nellie Towers, that Alfred Roberts had an eye for other women. Kenneth Wallace’s wife used to say, ‘I wouldn’t trust that man an inch. If he had half a chance, he’d have his hand up my skirt.’ ⁵⁴ And Mary Wallace says he ‘touched women in a way completely uncalled for’. ^{55 ,} * ⁶

As for Beatrice Roberts, referred to by some as ‘Bee’ and others as ‘Beaty’, only rather distant and external impressions seem to survive. Kenneth Wallace considered that there was ‘more to her than met the eye…she encouraged Margaret to get out and about. She appeared a little hen-bird, but she had quite a lot of steel.’ ⁵⁶ But on the whole Grantham regarded Mrs Roberts as shy, retiring, quiet and plain. Born in 1888, Beatrice was nearly four years older than her husband, and by the 1930s had no pretensions to good looks, style or display. ‘She was completely under old Roberts’s thumb,’ said Mary Wallace. ‘She was just there to do things for them. I got the impression that Margaret felt that too.’ Madeline Edwards, who later became joint head girl of KGGS with Margaret Roberts, remembers Mrs Roberts as ‘a small woman. Had a bun. She always looked slightly worrited [sic].’ ⁵⁷ Nellie Towers said that Beatrice Roberts was always ‘very prim and proper’; ‘she kept the children beautifully clothed with the little tailored coats, but in her own dress she kept no decorations about her, she was all very plain.’ Developing the theory of the Robertses’ marital unhappiness, Nellie Towers declared: ‘I see where the fault was. It was Beaty that was cold.’ ⁵⁸ Jean Farmer saw Mrs Roberts as ‘anxious to do her best for her girls’ and also emphasized the pains she took in making up their clothes so well, including their school uniform. Like so many, she was struck by the huge amount of effort the Robertses put into everything, and the care they took with the results: ‘Her parents had to work hard for their money and they valued every penny.’ ⁵⁹ All surviving impressions of Beatrice Roberts, even those from her daughters, are somehow exterior ones, as if no one really knew her.

The Grantham in which Alfred Roberts became an increasingly important figure was a modestly successful market town which shared the economic hardships of the 1920s and early 1930s and the definite recovery of the mid-1930s. In 1919, there were 19,700 people in the Grantham Municipal Borough; by 1938, there were 20,600. The parliamentary constituency had nearly 50,000 voters and so extended into the surrounding villages. The agricultural interest was still dominant, with factories in the town producing agricultural machinery. The Belvoir Hunt, the foxhound pack of the Duke of Rutland, always met in Grantham on Boxing Day. Roberts would take his daughters along. He was a keen supporter of foxhunting for the unusual reason that without it foxes would steal babies from prams. ⁶⁰ The young Margaret enjoyed her rural walks out of the bowl in which Grantham sits to pick rosehips on Hall’s Hill, and she particularly delighted in visiting friends like Jean Farmer, or the elegant rectory of Canon Harold Goodrich, incumbent of Corby Glen and father of her schoolfriend Margaret, but she and her family were really town mice. Although closely linked to the country, the town was by now large enough to have a distinctly urban character. In an early letter about a game of tennis in Grantham, Margaret disparages her unchosen partner as a ‘yokel’: ⁶¹ it was always towns, preferably cities, which allured her.

The most powerful local man – and the biggest landowner – was Lord Brownlow, whose Cust family had long been seated at Belton, just outside Grantham. He was so close a friend of the Prince of Wales that he was criticized for his association with him after his abdication as King Edward VIII in 1936. The young Margaret made a good impression on the Custs. According to her sister Muriel, Caroline Cust, Lord Brownlow’s daughter, used to ‘rave’ about Margaret. A photograph reprinted in Lady Thatcher’s memoirs ⁶² shows her at a Baptist Christmas party smiling brightly out beside the young and elegant Lady Brownlow. Although it was often said that the grocer’s daughter was somehow antagonistic to the traditional Tory aristocracy, this was not really so (although a few of them reacted snobbishly to her). The Brownlows were only the first of several grandees who looked favourably on her and whom she, in turn, admired. When she became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher arranged with the then Lord Brownlow to borrow silver from Belton, by this time owned by the National Trust, to improve the cutlery at Downing Street. She also borrowed a green enamel box, painted with views of Grantham, which had been presented to Lord Brownlow when he had completed his year of office as mayor of the borough. ^{63 ,} * ⁷

It was the approach of war that brought strong economic growth to Grantham. The town benefited from its position on the main road and rail links between London, the north-east and Scotland – the opening sentence of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs is: ‘My first distinct memory is of traffic’ ⁶⁴ – and it increased its industrial base. Between 1932 and 1943, rateable value (the basis of the calculation for property taxes) rose by 60 per cent, which was very helpful to Alfred Roberts in his capacity as chairman of the borough’s finance committee. From 1934, new factories were being built in Grantham at the rate of about one a year. There was a good deal of engineering, the firm of Ruston and Hornsby, for example, which built engines. Aveling-Barford made steamrollers and tractors, and in 1938 the munitions company B.M.A.R. Co. opened a factory, run by Denis Kendall at the then astonishing salary of £10,000 per annum. Kendall, a glamorous, not to say flash, figure, drove a motorbike and had liaisons with prominent local women. In 1942, standing as an independent, he won the first wartime parliamentary by-election to turn out the National Government candidate (a Conservative), campaigning as a ‘production man’ critical of the ‘gang’ round Winston Churchill, though not of Churchill himself. During the war, Kendall displaced Lord Brownlow as the leading figure in the town, certainly in terms of local press coverage, and in the 1945 general election he was re-elected to Parliament, defeating the Conservative candidate by more than 15,000 votes. By 1939, full employment had returned to Grantham. Working shifts had to be staggered to avoid the traffic jams caused by the myriad bicycles.

War also brought the armed services to Grantham in large numbers. There were four RAF bases locally, including the RAF College at Cranwell. * ⁸ Margaret’s letters to Muriel about dances in the area during the war always mention the hordes of flight lieutenants eager for a dance. Grantham provided the national headquarters for Bomber Command (Margaret Roberts’s dentist, Mr Wallace, also treated ‘Bomber’ Harris); and from October 1943 there was a large USAAF presence in the town. Denis Kendall exploited the resentments to which the American influx gave rise. US servicemen were paid five times more than British ones, and were accused of immorality with local girls. Kendall complained that they were allowed to rent the Guildhall for entertainment when the same privilege had been refused to British servicemen. In Parliament, he caused a storm by alleging that Americans were accosting girls in the street. The accusation was promptly rejected by Lord Brownlow and by the Chief Constable. But it is certainly the case that the town became a place much fuller of young men and girls seeking one another. According to Terry Bradley, after the war a Labour councillor and opponent of Alfred Roberts, the High Street was known to have a ‘five bob side’, where officers picked up girls, and a ‘half a crown side’ for the other ranks. ⁶⁵ It was in response to the problems of war that Roberts was prepared to unbend his Sabbatarian principles, defying his fellow Methodists by voting in favour of the Sunday opening of cinemas for the troops, because he believed that it was better for them to have entertainment than to have nothing. His daughter cited this as evidence of his pragmatism and independence of mind. ⁶⁶

Alfred Roberts began his career in local politics well before the war. He was first elected in the St Wulfram Ward, where he sat as an Independent Ratepayer from 1927. Although Margaret was always slightly evasive on the point, Muriel was quite definite that their father was originally a Liberal in politics, ⁶⁷ but Roberts was also a strong supporter of the convention dominant at the time that national party allegiance should be kept out of local government, and he maintained this throughout his career, so much so that when he died in 1970 the local press could only speculate on his political affiliations. In the fluid politics of the early 1930s, Roberts became a supporter of the Conservative-dominated National Government – the coalition designed to deal with the slump, headed by the formerly Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – seeing himself as without clear party allegiance. In his address as president of Grantham Rotary Club in July 1936 he described himself as ‘like a good many people, often hopelessly and utterly in the wilderness in the political world, sometimes believing in one party, sometimes in another as others had been doing these last few years. There was a feeling that one could not look to any particular party or creed for the salvation of men and ridding them of fear.’ ⁶⁸ When Margaret was chosen as prospective parliamentary candidate for Dartford in 1949, her father broke the habit of a lifetime by speaking at a party political meeting, in her support. In justifying his position, he told the meeting that the Conservative Party now stood for ‘very much the same things as the Liberal Party did in his younger days’ (see Chapter 5 ). Margaret offered her own explanation for his views in her memoirs: ‘Like many other business people he had…been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism.’ ⁶⁹

Before and during the war, ideology did not intrude very much into the work of the council. In economic questions, for example, the only significant split occurred in early 1935 when a slum-clearance scheme was proposed which would knock down 106 houses and accommodate 415 people. The council divided over whether or not this should be done by a direct labour force, Alfred Roberts opposing. Roberts quickly attained, and then held for more than twenty years, the chairmanship of the finance and rating committee on the council. The Grantham Journal called him ‘Grantham’s Chancellor of the Exchequer’. * ⁹ He was the efficient and careful guardian of the council’s budget, not an ideologue or a campaigning politician.

But since Labour was the only party which defied the convention about political identification on the council, it is fair to say that, for Roberts, Labour was always his political opponent. The Chamber of Trade, with whose support he was first elected, existed in opposition to the Labour Party, and to the associated Co-operative movement. And in the 1935 general election Roberts decided to throw his growing influence in the town behind the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender, * ¹⁰ despite the fact that many of his fellow Methodists had supported the Peace Ballot which ended in that year. * ¹¹

It was this that gave Margaret her first taste of politics. She helped fold Warrender’s election addresses into envelopes, and on polling day she acted as a runner, taking information about who had voted from the tellers at the polling station to the Conservative Committee Rooms so that they could make sure that their canvass turned out to vote. ⁷⁰ Margaret Thatcher was never quite sure exactly what generated her early and enthusiastic allegiance to the Tories: ‘I don’t know why I was so staunchly Conservative. I think it was the idea of my father that you can get on somehow.’ ⁷¹ But she immediately took to Warrender: ‘I’ll tell you what struck me. He had a presence, a natural presence. He had an overcoat on. It was a good overcoat. Good, not flashy. He was rather a handsome man. When he spoke, you listened.’ She felt pleased ‘to be treated on an equal level by an unequal…He understood that personality attracted votes.’ ⁷² As so often in her dealings in later life, she was susceptible to good-looking men, to elegant clothes, to what used to be called an air of breeding. * ¹²

In forming his views on the international scene, Alfred Roberts probably gleaned more from Rotary than from any political party. Rotary was, and is, a worldwide movement. It grew in popularity between the wars, having been founded in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Grantham Rotary got its charter in 1931, and Roberts was a founder member. In 1935 he became its annual president. With its motto of ‘Service above Self’, Rotary was a thoroughly worthy organization, composed largely of businessmen and dedicated to social improvement and charitable endeavour. The records of its meetings, as detailed in the Grantham Journal , show a slightly comical list of improving subjects chosen for the club’s lectures – ‘modern psychology’, a talk on road rollers (which were locally manufactured) and the history of tithes and rent charges. The organization’s approach to politics was deliberately uncomplicated. It called for people to sink their political differences in the wider public interest, and this applied, too, on the international scene, where a sentiment of reconciliation was much stronger than one of confrontation with Hitler. Margaret Thatcher said that her family first realized that there was something wrong with Hitler ‘when we heard that he had suppressed Rotary’. ⁷³ She saw the wider world through Rotarian eyes.

As the chairman of Grantham Rotary’s international service committee, Alfred Roberts organized visiting speakers. Because of this, and his voracious reading, he was probably as well informed as any other member about world affairs. Both Margaret and Muriel remembered that he was given favourable pamphlets about Hitler by his fellow Rotarian and local GP, Dr Jauch, whom they believed to be a German; * ¹³ but that Roberts had been unconvinced. Despite her respect for Dr Jauch as a doctor, Mrs Thatcher remembered him as a ‘very cold man’. ⁷⁴ What is clear, though, is that Roberts’s Rotarianism, and perhaps his Methodism as well, made him sympathetic to appeasement, particularly as embodied by Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister since 1937, and about as perfectly Rotarian a figure as ever reached 10 Downing Street.

As the speaker at the annual dinner of Grantham Rotary on 26 January 1939, Roberts reminded his audience of Rotary’s clear rule of avoiding politics and not recommending ‘forms of government’. ‘They [that is, Rotary] took no sides as to whether there should be a dictatorship, monarchy or republic,’ said the report of his speech. Nor did they enter into controversy about ‘world personalities, either in attack or defence’, but they did have principles of ‘justice, truth and liberty’ which drove them to say that ‘weak nations have sacred rights too, and that they must be respected’. Since Rotarians were animated by these principles, said Roberts, ‘It did not matter to them whether people were strongly armed or whether they were almost unarmed. They had seen, quite recently, what one man could do, armed only with a neatly-rolled umbrella, with his mind made up and his will intent on peace. (Applause.)’ ⁷⁵ Roberts was referring to Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler, signed in Munich in October of the previous year and later to became notorious. It is fair to say that, in speaking as he did, Roberts was expressing a sentiment shared by probably three-quarters of the British population. ‘Appeasement’ was not then a dirty word, but one used by the appeasers themselves; they believed that peace could be preserved by talking. Those, like Winston Churchill, who disagreed were attacked as warmongers. Roberts’s views were the conventional ones. At the same dinner, various speakers worried about the banning of Rotary in Germany and Italy, which they attributed to the international character of the organization, but they stuck to the view that Rotary’s concept of ‘fellowship’ offered the best ‘pathway to peace’ in an increasingly threatening climate. ⁷⁶

Margaret Thatcher, of course, became famous for her dislike of appeasing dictators (she compared Western weakness towards Saddam Hussein in 1990 with that shown to Hitler, for example) ⁷⁷ and for her admiration of Churchill. For this reason, perhaps, she did not like directly to admit that her father had been a supporter of Chamberlain, but approached the subject rather more obliquely. Chamberlain, she later insisted, ‘was a very honourable man…I often thought he knew that in 1938 he must gain time to get us ready. I believe he gained more in that last year than Hitler…it may be that we owe Chamberlain a great debt of gratitude for his judgment for what happened during those years. And it brought Winston forward that much more.’ ⁷⁸ She said that honourable men try to find honour in other, foreign governments: ‘perhaps it has been one of the faults of British politicians that we look at other politicians through slightly rose-tinted spectacles thinking they are as we are.’ ⁷⁹

Once war came in September 1939, however, any hesitations were put on one side, and Alfred Roberts became a more and more important figure in Grantham as the town responded to the crisis. He was one of three councillors appointed, when war began, to the emergency committee which exercised the powers of the full council, becoming its vice-chairman in 1942, and he threw himself into numerous war-related activities. He had been involved in the council’s original ARP (Air Raid Precautions) plans in 1938, and during the war he played a leading part in Civil Defence and became chief raid welfare officer, dealing with questions like the rehousing and care of those who had been bombed. In 1940, he set up a British Restaurant – part of a national scheme for places providing basic food where workers could eat without using up their ration allowances – first for munitions workers in Bridge End Road, and later a second restaurant at the school room attached to the Finkin Street Methodist Church where he preached. He was prominent in the National Savings Movement, whose Local Savings Committees encouraged thrift and helped finance the war effort. All this work was not only worthy but genuinely demanding when combined with running his two shops. In 1940, Roberts was offered the mayoralty of Grantham, but had to refuse owing to lack of time. In February 1943, he was made an alderman, a form of unelected councillor now abolished outside the City of London, appointed by the council itself as a mark of respect and local distinction. Roberts, aged fifty at that time, was probably the youngest Grantham man ever to be chosen for the office. The circumstances in which he lost it, more than ten years later, were to make a profound impression upon his daughter. Just after the war ended, Roberts was again offered, and this time accepted, the mayoralty. From the beginning of the war until her departure for Oxford in October 1943, with Muriel absent in Birmingham for her training as a physiotherapy nurse, Margaret was in effect an only child at home. She witnessed at close quarters the endless labour and public spiritedness of her father, a life which, because of war, shrank the sphere of private pleasures even smaller. Duty, work, patriotism – and the sense of an enemy – dominated.

Even as he drafted his speech about peace and war to Grantham Rotary, Alfred Roberts was preparing to put his Rotarian principles to a practical test. It was the custom at KGGS that many of the girls had foreign pen-friends: Margaret had a French girl called Cilette Pasquier * ¹⁴ from the Savoie, but Muriel had an Austrian one called Edith Mühlbauer. Edith was Jewish, and at some point her parents, suffering persecution after Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria in March of the previous year, wrote to Roberts asking if he would take Edith in so that she could escape the Nazis. He agreed, and arranged with fellow Rotarians that she should stay with several families in turn. The correspondence between Roberts and Edith’s parents does not survive, but on 21 January 1939 Edith herself wrote from Vienna to Roberts saying that the permit for the visa to England which followed his invitation had arrived. Typing neatly, in uncertain English, she thanked him for his help – ‘I will never in my whole live forgett it you’ – and went on to ask practical questions about reaching the Roberts family: ‘Have I to take the train from London to Grantham * ¹⁵ or the ship?’ ⁸⁰ In fact, the bureaucracy of permitted escape took some time, and on 23 March Edith wrote again, saying there was yet more delay, but that she should be allowed out of Austria within a few weeks: ‘First of all let me thank you for your kind letter and enclosed photograph. I am ever so glad that you helped me and that there are various other people which want to help me too, and take me into their nice homes. I really hope to be happy there.’ ⁸¹

Unfortunately, generous though the Robertses were, Edith was not terribly happy with them. Hints of the problem surface in the memories of Margaret and Muriel. ‘We didn’t have a proper bathroom in those days,’ said Margaret; ‘she was used to better things.’ ⁸² Muriel said Edith was a ‘nice girl’, but also that ‘she had a wonderful wardrobe…and I think that they were well breeched in Austria.’ As if to protect her from possible threat, Edith’s Jewishness was not mentioned, but it seems also to have contributed to the provincial Robertses’ sense that she was rather apart from them. ⁸³ Edith didn’t like the Robertses’ Sunday-afternoon walk into the fields beyond Grantham: ‘She said, “It’ll ruin my shoes.” ’ ⁸⁴

What seems to have happened is that Alfred Roberts was shocked by Edith’s sophistication, her smart appearance and her tendency, at that time thought extremely dangerous in teenage girls, to wear make-up. In the slightly acid words of Madeline Edwards, whose family also accommodated her, Edith was ‘a very grown-up seventeen-year-old’. ⁸⁵ She would sit at the window of her bedroom in North Parade looking out on to the street and making Roberts feel, according to one of her contemporaries, that ‘it was like Amsterdam’. ⁸⁶ Edith told Mary Wallace that she found 1 North Parade a ‘repressive household’. ⁸⁷ She was ‘patently unhappy’ there. ⁸⁸ This produced a major row between Roberts and his fellow Rotarian, Mr Wallace, the dentist. The two men started shouting at one another and Wallace told Roberts: ‘You asked this girl over, and you’re not looking after her properly and she’s very unhappy.’ ⁸⁹ This version is implicitly confirmed by Muriel Cullen, who says that ‘Daddy refused to accept responsibility too much and went round to all Rotarians in turn persuading them to have Edith…I sometimes think he regretted having got her over.’ ⁹⁰

Certainly Edith did not stay in North Parade for long. She arrived some time in April, and by 16 May is writing to Muriel from the house of Madeline Edwards in Welby Gardens. She apologizes for not having replied earlier to Muriel’s letter, but explains that she has already moved house twice before reaching the Edwardses: ‘it seems to me as if I am a gipsy.’ So she probably lived at North Parade for no more than a fortnight. The fact that she writes warmly to Muriel (mentioning Muriel’s sister whom she germanicizes as ‘Margit’) shows that relations were not broken, and her letter states that ‘I often go for a walk to see your dear father Mr Roberts, and ask if there are today any letters for me.’ She was clearly grateful to the Robertses for helping her, and said so again when tracked down by journalists in old age, living in Brazil to which she and her family shortly afterwards escaped. But the experiment did not really work, and she finally came to rest in Grantham in the larger and more sophisticated home of the Wallaces, with whom she stayed for the best part of a year.

The story of Edith shows Alfred Roberts in an interesting light – a well-intentioned man, determined to live by his principles, genuinely kind, but also stern and forbidding. Perhaps it was easier to admire him than to live with him. Margaret, several years younger than Edith, did not know her well, but she was shocked above all by one feature she related of her life in Vienna: ‘She said that Jewish women were being made to scrub the streets.’ ⁹¹