2

Scholarship girl

‘You’re thwarting my ambition’

In Margaret’s earliest known letter, ¹ of which only one sheet survives, she analysed her exams. She had just sat School Certificate (the rough equivalent of the GCSE), in the summer of 1941, and found the pace intense – ‘As you can imagine this mean’t [sic] a terrific amount of swotting.’ The biggest problem was presented by geography. The first paper, based on work with the Ordnance Survey map, was not too bad, but ‘the other paper on the British Isles and one continent was very disappointing. For one continent we did America and the questions on it were not at all bad, but out of the three on the British Isles there was only one we could touch.’ All of them involved a fairly detailed knowledge of Scotland and Ireland and their towns. ‘Unfortunately we had not touched island [sic] and had had precisely two lessons on Scotland…However we managed to survive it and went home to dinner hoping for a decent biology paper in the afternoon.’ Even at the age of fifteen, the map of her future political sympathies is laid out. England and America understood, Scotland little studied, Ireland terra incognita and Continental Europe not even mentioned.

Margaret’s sister had just taken her own exams in Birmingham. ‘CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR SPLENDID EXAM RESULTS I think everyone in the town knows about them by this time,’ Margaret inserted at the top of the letter. Confident that the subject of her own School Certificate is overwhelmingly fascinating to Muriel, she wrote, ‘I will send you the papers as soon as I can, but first I want Mr Marks to see them.’ Harold Marks was a master at the King’s School, the boys’ grammar school in Grantham, for whom she had great respect. Her father had arranged for Marks to act as Margaret’s occasional private tutor. It is striking that she should immediately have sought validation and advice from outside her school: there were, of course, no men at KGGS.

In the event, Margaret need not have worried. She got a credit in geography. In her second letter, written to Muriel on 20 September 1941, ² she tabulates her full results. She got distinctions (the top grade) in chemistry, arithmetic and algebra, and credits in all other subjects with the exception of life drawing, in which she managed only a lowly pass. Having charted these, she lists the results of her fellow pupils. Although she does not make the point from the information she sets out, it is clear from the data that none of the other girls mentioned managed three distinctions. Indeed, eleven out of forty failed. This led to a parting of the ways, with some girls staying in a lower form to retake and others, such as Margaret, setting their sights on university.

With the ready nostalgia of the very young, Margaret laments the changes: ‘Life in 6 Lower is not half as nice as life in form Va. Our crowd have broken up of course and several have left…There is not the form spirit that there used to be…we used to cling together…but now…so many of the old links are missing, there is nothing to hold us together.’ The fall in numbers was astonishing. In V Lower, Margaret recorded, there had been fifty-three girls. ³ After Christmas 1941, there would be only four – Margaret, Madeline Edwards, Jean Farmer and Lorna Smith, who was new. Many girls had left due to the plentiful availability of jobs during the war. Margaret’s old companions, Joan Orchard and Pat Maidens, had been held down a year; of her intimates, only Jean Farmer survived in the same class. Margaret and Jean were also the only remaining scientists. Always sensitive to possible condescension, Margaret considered the Sixth Form (the year above her) ‘rather superior’, though expressing pleasure that Margaret Goodrich (see previous chapter) had been made head girl, since ‘she is one of the decent ones.’

To mark the last jolly time before school began once more, Margaret went to the pictures:

On returning to school, Margaret was not greatly impressed with all of the teaching staff: ‘The new games mistress is not as young as we have been used to having. Her name is Miss Dales, and she looks about 30. The history mistress is very disappointing. She is quite middle-aged and very dowdy in dress.’ And as for Miss Amor, the geography teacher who had also been her form mistress, she had now, in her new role of vice-head, grown ‘too big for her boots’, so much so that ‘she would not come and take stock cupboard at all on Friday.’ Margaret reserved a specially tart comment for the headmistress, Miss Gillies, about her handling of the exam results: ‘There was no message of congratulation (or sympathy) from the Head, just a blunt “Pass” or “Fail”.’

She set her shoulder to the wheel of work, however, and shared her thoughts about the future with her sister:

In the whole letter, there is no direct mention of the war, though at the time Germany was invading Russia and Britain was almost the sole champion of the free world, the United States not having yet entered the conflict. The historical moment in which Margaret was living impinges only indirectly and in small ways – the emphasis on the rare availability of salmon salad, a passing mention of the fact that the evacuated Camden School for Girls was sharing KGGS’s facilities, the increasing age of the teaching staff. The war, which was to play so important a part in forming her beliefs and her idea of her country, was treated by her at the time only as a backdrop against which the life of school was played out.

Already, in her first words that posterity has left us, the fifteen-year-old Margaret Roberts shows herself clear, confident, ambitious, diligent, clever and slightly acidulous.

What was her education, and how did it form her? At her primary school in Huntingtower Road, Margaret did well. The story has often been told, in slightly differing versions, about the prize she won at the age of nine. * ² When the head congratulated her on her luck, Margaret retorted, ‘I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.’ The tale is sometimes taken to indicate big-headedness or arrogance, but more likely it shows the young Margaret’s literal-mindedness. * ³ She had not been lucky; she had deserved it, so she felt bound to say so. To say anything else would be to cast doubt on the entire judging process.

The first surviving motion picture – a short and jerky cine film – of Margaret Roberts dates from 1935. In that year, Grantham celebrated its centenary as a borough, and she paraded, with her school, to help form the word ‘GRANTHAM’ out of human bodies. In the film, the nine-year-old Margaret Roberts can be discerned preparing to do so: ‘appropriately enough, I was part of the “M”.’ ⁴

In the following year, Margaret won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. KGGS, as it is and was always known, was the best school in the area that a girl could attend. Founded in 1910, it was a fee-paying girls’ grammar school, but with about a quarter of the girls attending exempt from fees. Scholarship girls entered after an equivalent of the later universal eleven-plus exam; fee-paying girls could enter from a much younger age. When Margaret arrived in September 1936, there were about 330 girls in the school, including Muriel, who was not a scholarship girl. Because of its high reputation, KGGS drew on families from quite far outside Grantham, as well as from the town itself. The social background of the pupils varied from the prosperous or highly educated (top managers in the engineering firms, the Anglican clergy) to daughters of poor families who had got in on their wits. In the financial scale, the Robertses probably stood slightly below the middle of the school; in the social, because of Alfred’s growing role in the town, rather higher.

Despite her scholarship, Margaret went straight into the B Stream. This did not reflect any academic defect on her part, but simply the fact that an unusually large number of scholarship girls had been admitted in that year, and not all could be accommodated in the A Stream. The effect of this was to foster the slight but definite sense of separation from most of her peers that many felt Margaret showed. It also threw her together with Jean Farmer, the builder’s daughter from Fulbeck. Jean, too, was a scholarship girl, the only other one in the B Stream, and because of this, she said, ‘we were a pair’ ⁵ for the two years before they graduated to the A Stream, and, indeed, until Margaret went to Oxford and Jean to teacher training college in 1943. Jean was an easygoing, popular girl, known, in the parlance of the time, as a ‘scream’, ⁶ and it was she and her family that first gave Margaret the sense that life could be more fun than it was in North Parade. It was in response to Margaret’s demand that she be allowed Sundays as free and jolly as those of the Farmers that Alfred Roberts produced his famous response: ‘Margaret, never do things just because other people do them. Make up your own mind what you are going to do and persuade people to go your way.’ ⁷ Margaret both kicked against such injunctions and imbibed them respectfully. She resented what her father taught, but generally believed that he was right.

Jean Farmer liked Margaret without reservation. She describes her as ‘a very pleasant, happy, fun-loving girl’, not at all under stress and even ‘happy-go-lucky’. She was a ‘slightly plump’ girl who was ‘polite, hardworking and joined in everything’. The two of them ‘never had a cross word’, and Jean was irritated in later years by the criticisms of Margaret which she felt were unfair, such as not having a sense of humour or being too imperious: ‘I didn’t find her at all bossy…she was exceptionally nice.’ The two spent the odd weekend at one another’s parents’ houses, and the Farmers once took Margaret with them for a weekend in Skegness – a modest outing by modern standards, but quite a thing for the girls at the time. They were also excited by an expedition they made to Stamford Boys School to see The Barber of Seville performed in French (‘though we couldn’t understand a thing they said’). Jean did not regard Margaret as a genius, but she did note her ‘marvellous powers of concentration’ and one of her most famous characteristics as prime minister: ‘she didn’t need as much sleep as we did.’ ⁸ Jean’s parents were particularly fond of Margaret too, and it was Jean’s father, Jack, who chaired the Conservative Party meeting in Fulbeck in the general election campaign of 1945 at which Margaret did the warm-up for the Tory candidate. This was one of the first public speeches that she had made. * ⁴ The Farmers kept up with Margaret, writing to congratulate her on her public successes. In March 1974, following the Tory defeat in the general election the previous month, Margaret, who had seen Jean again while opening a comprehensive in Formby where she now lived, wrote back: ‘It was good to see Jean when I opened a school. She looks marvellous. I think we have both “worn” very well!’ * ⁵ She went on, ‘It seems a long time since I was “home” in Lincolnshire. In some ways, I think they were happier and fuller days than those I live now. The days in London are and always will be very busy – but there is not the warmth and the friendship of the small town and village.’ ⁹ In reality, Margaret probably did not like Grantham excessively, and was certainly keen to get away from it, but she admired the values that she learnt there. And there is no doubt that she felt a real affection for the Farmers and the spontaneity of their village life. * ⁶

Jean Farmer was not alone in thoroughly liking Margaret. Another friend was Shirley Walsh (now Ellis), a pretty girl on whose doorstep in Avenue Road Margaret chose to arrive every morning (‘she was always early’) ¹⁰ so that they could walk to school together across the River Witham. It was Margaret who informed her, on one of these spring mornings in 1940, that invading German forces had parachuted into Holland. And it was Margaret and Shirley, when they were a bit older, who would work together at Toc H, the mission for servicemen, on a Saturday serving in the forces canteen. In Shirley Ellis’s view, Margaret ‘was never disdainful of her schoolfriends or peers’ and showed a good sense of humour – ‘She didn’t instigate, but she joined in’: she had ‘no dislikeable characteristics’. Evidence of humour – the slightly dry wit which Margaret exhibited in later years – can also be found in her correspondence with Muriel. Writing about a bus trip back from a hockey match, she describes how the vehicle was so crowded that the girls had to sit on sacks of potatoes ‘which by the time we arrived at North Witham were just about cooked and mashed’. ¹¹

And although all her contemporaries attest to a seriousness in Margaret which made her different from the others, she took part in all the normal interests and activities of a teenage girl of that period. She enjoyed tennis, and played hockey well enough (at centre half) to be in the school team. More striking, and more apparently at odds with her upbringing, was a strong interest in glamour, both in films and in fashion. Almost every letter to Muriel mentions the latest films to hit Grantham. In the letter in which she mentions going to the This England double bill with Jean and Joan, she discusses five other films. Bittersweet and Pimpernel Smith are coming soon, she says, * ⁷ but she has just been to see Rebecca , which she thinks ‘one of the best I have ever seen, with a well-concealed plot’. ¹² She also went with her mother to Love on the Dole , she wrote, a film about unemployed Lancastrian cotton workers between the wars, ‘the spectral army of three million lost men’, unusual in the wartime period for addressing social problems of this kind. It was not to Margaret’s taste: ‘I can’t say I enjoyed it, although it was a good film.’ In the following month, a Deanna Durbin season at Grantham continued: ‘I went to Nice Girl with Jean and Joan. I thought it was rotten.’ ¹³ Films in Grantham were made more acceptable in the eyes of Margaret’s parents by the fact that one cinema, the Picture House, was owned by the Campbells, customers and respected neighbours of Roberts in nearby, rather grand Welby Gardens. J. A. Campbell was a fellow Rotarian of Alfred Roberts. Their daughter, Judy, who lived there with her parents in the 1930s, was a very beautiful woman, and became a well-known actress and the first to popularize the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. * ⁸ Margaret knew Judy a little, and greatly admired her. She also had a partiality for the films of Ginger Rogers, which led Jim Allen, Grantham’s leading local historian of Margaret Thatcher, to ask her in old age if she liked Rogers because of her portrayal of a woman succeeding in a man’s world in Kitty Foyle . ‘No, it wasn’t,’ replied Lady Thatcher. ‘I always wished I could have danced like her.’ ¹⁴

By Margaret’s own account, the ‘biggest excitement of my early years’ was her only pre-war trip to London, at the age of twelve. She went to stay with Methodist friends of the family, the Revd Mr Skinner and his wife – the minister who was much later to marry her and Denis. The Skinners took her to the obvious London sights, including Parliament and Downing Street, and St Paul’s Cathedral (‘where John Wesley prayed on the morning of his conversion’). ¹⁵ ‘But the high point was my first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham where we saw Sigmund Romberg’s famous musical The Desert Song . For three hours I lived in another world, swept away as was the heroine by the daring Red Shadow – so much so that I bought the score and played it at home, perhaps too often.’ Rather touchingly, she writes of the trip that the Skinners’ ‘kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, “la douceur de la vie ” ’. For all her subsequent fame, she seldom had time throughout her life to savour this indefinable quality, but when she did, she loved it. She also thrived on the excitement of places that mattered. London traffic and crowds ‘seemed to generate a sort of electricity’, even the soot of the buildings lent a ‘dark, imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world’. Except in political allegiance, the centre was always where she wanted to be.

Apart from films, the other way to bring glamour to unexciting Grantham was through clothes. Margaret would never have wanted to be trendy, even if the word had existed at the time, but she constantly sought elegance and quality in what she wore. It was a time, because of the war and later the post-war rationing, as well as her parents’ careful budgeting, when these were not easily attained. Her correspondence with Muriel includes a constant series of requests for bits of material or nylons or buttons and so on, and a detailed discussion of fashion and beauty, of where it is possible to obtain the right things, and at what price. On 30 July 1944, a few days after the abortive Bomb Plot by German officers against Hitler, she writes to Muriel that, going to Lincoln with Jean, she had ‘hoped to do a bit of shopping with odds and bobs thinking that tomorrow was August 1st and we should be able to use the new coupons, but now of course I have discovered that it will only be July 31st, and so I shan’t be able to do much as I have only one coupon left.’ Nevertheless, she went the previous day to Chambers in Grantham ‘and bought two underwear sets that I am very pleased with. I got a white Kayser set and a pink rather dainty set of some other make. I also got pink uplift bras…’ She then chose ‘a Vogue pattern for a frock. I think there will be just sufficient material over to make a small berry [sic: she meant beret] shaped hat of the kind that are in fashion now. If that man can make me a handbag, it should be a nice set when it is finished.’ ¹⁶ For her birthday in 1941, her father gave Margaret a pound so that she could buy a powder bowl, ‘telling me to bring back the change’. ¹⁷ She found a nice but plain one for 10 shillings (50p) (‘just ordinary glass with a little gold paint round the top’). ‘There’s one I should very much have liked,’ she goes on. ‘It was green, very large and cut glass. The only objectionable thing about it was its price – 32/6.’ ¹⁸

Margaret always exhibited a practical approach to things, whether to price or to friendship. Lorna Smith, who came into the school in September 1941, remembered her as ‘quiet, hard-working, poised, calm and self-confident. Some people found her slightly irritating, and even rather conceited, but I fear there was an element of envy there! For myself, I found her pleasant and helpful, for which, as a new girl at the school, I was immensely grateful.’ To Lorna, Margaret displayed the rather brisk, mothering sort of kindness which, in later life, she always showed to those who worked closely with her: ‘one bitterly cold winter’s morning I had to cycle to Grantham, with no breakfast, to have a nerve removed at the dentist’s. Staggering out of the surgery, some time later, I ran straight into Margaret, who was shopping. She took one look at my ashen face, and steered me to Catlin’s Café for a restorative hot drink. She will not remember her kind deed, but I have never forgotten it.’ ¹⁹ What marked Margaret out, though, was her sense of purpose. As Shirley Ellis put it, ‘She always stood out because teenage girls don’t know where they’re going. She did.’

And this purposefulness was accompanied by a fondness for simple moral precepts that never left her. It was a custom for schoolgirls in the 1930s to keep autograph books. These were not so much, as in future generations, to obtain the signatures of famous people as to collect the signatures of friends and the little improving remarks or quotations which they might want to inscribe. On 23 March 1937, the eleven-year-old Margaret Roberts wrote in Madeline Edwards’s autograph book:

Rita Hind (later Wright), another schoolfriend, kept the inscription of fifteen-year-old Margaret Roberts on 22 June 1941 (the day, as it happens, when the world received the news of Hitler’s invasion of Russia): ‘A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in little things, is a great thing.’ Shirley Ellis’s autograph book did not survive, but she remembered what Margaret wrote in it in 1939: ‘Smile a while and when you smile another smiles and then there’s miles and miles of smiles.’

Precepts, once learnt, had also to be proclaimed. Margaret’s Methodist upbringing and her father’s example made it natural for someone of her interests to want to speak in public, unusual though this was for a woman at that time. It was many years, however, before she started to make speeches of her own. Her first public performances were recitations, and she favoured such poetry – well-known passages of Longfellow, Tennyson, Whitman or Kipling – as made its moral meaning plain and expressed it with grandeur and force. It was partly for these exercises that she began the first of several stints of elocution lessons which were to punctuate her career. According to Connie Pitchford, a KGGS contemporary, Margaret suffered from ‘a slight lisp and had trouble pronouncing her Rs’. In 1936, she and Connie had elocution lessons together. ²⁰ From these, not from any later, political attempt to improve her social standing, springs the cut-glass voice for which Margaret was later to be criticized. In those days, all elocution teachers tried to enforce a very precise, carefully enunciated version of received pronunciation, and for Margaret, who was already competing in declamation competitions, it would not have been possible to win without eliminating all traces (which seem anyway to have been slight) of a Lincolnshire accent. Later, her carefully modulated tones used to irritate many of her contemporaries at Somerville, Oxford, who considered them ‘artificial’. ²¹ So in a sense they were, but the purpose of the artifice was more purity of diction than climbing up the greasy political or social pole. Margaret herself understood that artificiality was frowned upon: her lessons had taught her the importance of avoiding exaggeration and melodrama: ‘you were taught not to over-express. To over-express is to undermine your meaning because it becomes artificial.’ ²²

The lessons produced results. In 1937, Margaret won the silver medal at the Grantham eisteddfod for her recitation of John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Walter De La Mare’s ‘The Travellers’. In 1939, Shirley Ellis remembers sharing a prize with her for declaiming Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. And Margaret, though by no means a literary girl, was someone easily stirred to passion by the high sentiments and noble expressions of poetry. ‘I loved language and rhythm,’ she recalled, ²³ and she appreciated poets, such as John Masefield or Henry Newbolt, who indulged this love. ‘Kipling was our hero, with the breadth of his writing,’ she said, ²⁴ and throughout her life she always had some quotation from him – ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent,’ for example – readily retrievable from her memory (although this quotation is misattributed by her – the lines are by William Blake). One may speculate that Kipling, as well as the Methodist missionaries, excited the idea of India in her imagination. She loved what were then the ‘obvious’ anthologies of English poetry, such as Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and Quiller-Couch’s edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse . To her first serious boyfriend, she gave a copy of Palgrave. To the man whom, before Denis, she most nearly married, she sent the complete works of Shakespeare. Neither choice shows any originality of literary taste, but her reverence and affection for great writing were genuine. She extended these feelings, above all, to the Authorized Version of the Bible, singling out Isaiah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles: ‘There is no greater English literature.’ ²⁵ Her choice of Acts is slightly unusual, and worth noting – it is the most important book in the Scriptures about the propagation of a message to the world. And to the end of her life she retained the words of scores of the classic English hymns in her mind. At Denis’s funeral in July 2003, when her anguish and mental confusion were such that she was not sure whether it was her husband’s or her father’s coffin in front of her, she was seen to sing all the hymns, word-perfect, without looking at the service sheet. * ⁹

This is how Lorna Smith, arriving as a shy new girl in September 1941, remembers the Lower Sixth at KGGS:

Lorna shared history revision with Margaret, which included a weekly session on ‘Current Events’.

Discussion of politics, though, was a rarity at KGGS. There was plenty of talk, of course, about the progress of the war, but this concerned Britain’s military fortunes, not the conflict’s political rights and wrongs. Reflecting the parents of the girls, the school’s prevailing allegiance was vaguely Conservative, but those girls who enjoyed debate were more likely to centre on religious questions than political ones. ‘I think our faith mattered more,’ said Rita Hind. ^{26 ,} * ¹¹ The girls were very idealistic, she said: it was ‘a very moral period’, with no girls known to have boyfriends while at school. ‘There were more important things to do than boys,’ Margaret remembered. ²⁷ It was a time of aspiration, and of a love of education. ‘We didn’t see the emptiness that would follow the war,’ said Rita Hind. It was this high-minded atmosphere which Margaret drank in, and cherished: ‘I’m quite sure she wanted to keep alive the spirit of the Thirties or revive it.’ ²⁸ No one remembered Margaret debating political issues at this time, though all remembered her interest in the subject. Indeed, there is scarcely a single instance, in all her surviving correspondence from the 1940s, of Margaret expressing a political view on any subject. Her political involvement is clear, but all her mentions of it refer to organization, meetings, speeches and so on, not to the substance of policy or ideas.

In the context of what she calls the school’s ‘strong religious bias, led by our high-principled Head’ (Miss Gillies), Lorna Smith remembered many schoolgirl discussions about faith, not least a surreal conversation with Margaret on an afternoon walk from school into Grantham just before Christmas in 1942. ‘She remarked that, really, she didn’t think she could believe in angels. “Oh, why?” I asked, wondering what Ald. Roberts would think. “Well,” she replied, “I have worked it out scientifically that in order to fly, an angel would need a six-foot-long breastbone to bear the weight of its wings.” ’ Lorna added, perhaps superfluously, ‘…Margaret could be very earnest at times.’ ²⁹

There was something else that Margaret worked out scientifically, with alarming results. In the spring of 1943, the post-exam celebrations resulted in ink being spilt on the ‘precious parquet floor of our form-room’. ³⁰ For Lorna Smith, this was a second offence.

As well as being religious, the school was competitive, at least in its higher academic echelons, and no one more so than Margaret. Rita Hind remembered that she, Margaret and Madeline Edwards used to vie for the top places, and that, in doing so, Margaret displayed more determination than she did natural talent: ‘Most things with Maggie were learnt or contrived.’ ^{31 ,} * ¹² Even the good-natured Lorna Smith found Margaret’s pride in her academic attainments rather tiresome: ‘I recall [in July 1942] being slightly “miffed” when Margaret told me afterwards, and rather boastfully, that our form-mistress had said that all our geography results were extremely disappointing – except hers.’ ³² Her faults, in the eyes of her contemporaries, concerned her tendency to come top, to be right and to rub it in. And it is noticeable that the ones who most resented her tended to be those who were themselves stars in the school firmament. Both Madeline Edwards and Margaret Goodrich recalled her irritating tendency to ask the first, well-informed question of any visiting speaker, even when she was a little girl in the fourth form (‘We’d look at one another and say, “She’s at it again,” ’ said Madeline Edwards); and Margaret Goodrich remembers, at her own twenty-first birthday party in December 1944, a friend turning on Margaret Roberts and saying, ‘If you don’t stop bossing us, I shall stamp on your foot.’ ³³ The less competitive girls, such as Lorna, Jean and Shirley, found Margaret less oppressive.

Once in the sixth form, Margaret became a prefect, and she seems to have taken to her duties with the energy, dedication and slight exasperation at the weaknesses of others which were to mark her later career. In December 1941, she writes to Muriel about the preparations for a charity Fun Fair at the school. The decision was made to run the thing in forms, with each form getting up two competitions. ‘I happen to have form IV Lower A who are rather young,’ writes Margaret, and there was:

Her competition raised 30 shillings and her stall £10 – ‘an excellent result’. ^{34 ,} * ¹³

Margaret was not considered an intellectual genius, but she was right at the top of the class, and consistently got good reports and good results. As early as Christmas 1936 she is recorded as having ‘worked steadily and well throughout the term. She has definite ability, and her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form. Her behaviour is excellent.’ ³⁵ Even after promotion to the A Stream, Margaret continued to come top every year except one, in which she came second, and reports commended her for virtues like ‘care and thoroughness’. Words like ‘very satisfactory’, ‘thoughtful and helpful’ and ‘keenly interested’ abound. Her ‘power of sustained interest’ was noted. When Margaret applied to Oxford, Miss Gillies, who, as we shall see, had a scratchy relationship with her pupil, nevertheless noted, in her reference, that ‘she is a very logical thinker’ and ‘has a very clear mind’. ³⁶ Miss Gillies’s final report had a touch of coolness in its praise: ‘Margaret is ambitious and deserves to do well. She has shown herself capable of a very thorough mastery of facts and is, I consider, now ready for the experience of wider scholarship which a University education can offer.’

Margaret accepted and admired the ethos of KGGS. Although, as education secretary from 1970 to 1974, she found herself landed with the task of permitting the closure of grammar schools if local authorities demanded it, and thus closed more than anyone in her position before or since, the process made her miserable. She loved grammar schools, which she regarded as the ladder of opportunity for able children from unprivileged families. When she visited KGGS in 1986 to open the Roberts Hall in memory of her father, who had been, for almost forty years, first a governor and then chairman of the Governors, she declared: ‘I would not have been in No. 10 but for this school.’ ³⁷ And, after an earlier visit, as leader of the Opposition in 1977, she wrote, in her letter of thanks to the then headmistress, ‘For me, the school’s motto has always been particularly true.’ ³⁸ The motto is Veras hinc ducere voces – ‘To lead true voices from here’ (a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica ) – and it is fair to say that, despite all the evasions that politics requires, Margaret Thatcher was always exceptionally concerned to tell the truth as she saw it. When she accepted a peerage, she took her title from her school, not from her town, becoming Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. Replying to a letter of congratulation from Shirley Ellis, she said: ‘I am glad our KGGS friends like the title.’ ³⁹

It is probably the case, however, that Margaret’s relationship with her school, as with Grantham itself, was slightly more ambiguous than she would have allowed. Local feeling that she could have done more to use her fame to promote the school’s interests may perhaps be discounted – she did keep well in touch with the school and she did, after all, have other things to do – but what is more significant is the conflict Margaret encountered as a pupil when she decided to try for Oxford to read chemistry, a subject in which she was particularly strong, and whose teacher, Miss Kay, she greatly respected.

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. * ¹⁴ 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 whitehaired…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 * ¹⁵ 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 * ¹⁶ 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 and 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.