3

Love and war at Oxford

‘Is it marble, Margaret?’

Margaret was apprehensive about Oxford. She had never been away from home for more than a few days before, and wartime made the separation greater. The gulf between Grantham and Oxford, however, was more one of milieu than of distance. She was the first woman in her family to go to university, and the first of either sex to go to Oxford. The only people she knew there were Mary Wallace and Margaret Goodrich, neither of whom was at her college, and both of whom came from a more educated social background. She consulted them.

Mary Wallace, who remembered that Margaret’s entry to Oxford ‘created quite a stir’ in Grantham, received Margaret in her parents’ house in the High Street in September 1943, where she found her ‘very earnest’. ‘She was very keen to do the right thing,’ and, as so often in her later career, expressed this in an anxiety about ‘what sort of clothes to wear’. ¹ In Margaret Goodrich’s view, ‘Oxford was a big jump for her, not for us [that is, her sister Joan and herself] because the clergy had a certain status.’ She recorded that when she and her father first visited Margaret in her rooms in Somerville, they found her lonely and disconsolate, toasting a teacake by a fire that was rationed to one scuttle of coal per week. ² Margaret herself admitted that she felt ‘shy and ill-at-ease’. ³ She sometimes walked alone round Christ Church Meadows and into Addison’s Walk in Magdalen. In doing so, she felt she was fulfilling C. S. Lewis’s injunction in Christian Behaviour (1944) to set aside time for solitary thought, ⁴ but one may guess that her isolation was not entirely voluntary.

One of Margaret’s problems was money. Without a scholarship, she had to depend on what her father could manage and on what various small college bursaries could provide. In those days, it was possible to have most of your fees paid if you promised, on going down, to become a teacher, but this Margaret refused to do, believing that it was a vocation she did not have. ⁵ While her parents did their best, sending small sums and cakes baked by her mother that made the teas in her room well above average, she was always short. She recalled that it was only after she had taught at a Grantham school during the Long Vacation at the end of her first year that she could afford to buy that most basic tool of Oxford life, a bicycle. ⁶ It would be quite wrong to give the impression that most of the undergraduates were terribly rich, or that Margaret was terribly poor; and besides, the rigours of war reduced the social differences that had prevailed in the 1930s. But lack of funds did contribute to Margaret’s sense of adversity that had to be overcome daily, and also to the impression which she created among her contemporaries. Their memories of her at Oxford often include the idea that her appearance was ‘brown’, both in hair and clothes, and somehow in personality: ⁷ Rachel Willink, the only woman before Margaret to become president of OUCA, the Oxford University Conservative Association, and daughter of a wartime Conservative minister, remembered her as ‘quiet, rather mousey’, ‘rather a brown girl’, someone who ‘hadn’t got the style’ to ‘make up’ for her background. In after years, she said, people who had known Margaret at Oxford found it ‘a thing out of nature’ that ‘that rather humourless mouse’ had been so astonishingly successful. ⁸ According to Mary Wallace, who was also an officer of OUCA, Margaret was ‘merely tolerated’ by the grandees of the Tory club as ‘someone who could be relied on to do the donkey work’. ⁹ To them she was a ‘slogger’, without star quality.

No letters from Margaret survive from her first year at Oxford, but in the fairly numerous ones she wrote, almost all to Muriel, in her next three years clothes and the difficulty of affording them provide the main subject. Brownness recurs: ‘the rust-coloured material…will fit in with the brown side of my wardrobe,’ she wrote in an undated letter sent after returning early to Oxford, in order to do fire-watching, before her second year in September 1944. She takes advantage of the journey from Grantham via London to pay her first ever visit to Bond Street, ‘though I didn’t tell Mummy so’, and buys brown court shoes called Debutante Lanette to match her brown handbag at Marshall and Snelgrove. ‘Also I had in mind to get a nigger brown [this was a standard name for a haberdashery colour of the time, not a racist phrase of Margaret’s invention] fairly plain frock’ in order to have ‘a completely brown-fawn rig-out’.

She found one. A problem, however, arose: ‘It looked absolutely stunning and I was thrilled to bits with it. I was just about to say I’d take it when I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t asked the price…after all this was the inexpensive gown floor wasn’t it? Much to my open-mouthed dismay, the assistant said it was £20…’ Luckily, Margaret was able to find, among woollens, what she described, breathless for lack of punctuation, as ‘a fairly plain little frock with a peter pan colour two little pockets on the bodice and two to match on the skirt’ for £3 16s. Even this price was high for Margaret, but the ‘elderly’ assistant then did a hard sell: ‘she saw that I was a little surprised and said that it was superb value for money [always the way to Margaret’s heart] and it was not necessarily how much you paid for a frock that counted which I could quite believe after trying on the “inexpensive gowns”.’ The bargain-hunter was persuaded, as she excitedly recounts: ‘Well to cut a long story short I bought the frock and I’m sure that it is one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made. I’ll try to smuggle it home next time to show you without Mummy seeing…I shall be well set up for frocks then for any and every occasion.’ ¹⁰

Margaret was self-conscious, too, about her weight. When the present author once asked her what she thought of her own looks as a young woman, she answered, ‘Oh, I never thought I was good-looking. I thought I was slightly overweight.’ ¹¹ In those days, it was by no means as unfashionable as it is today for a woman to be quite plump, but, in another part of the letter quoted above, Margaret, with scientist’s humour, expresses her anxiety: ‘…I still weigh about 10st 4lbs…The slight decrease in volume doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the mass…Can you recommend…anything from the medical point of view for reduction of the area of the seat and control of the tummy muscles – oh and also reduction and uplift of bust?’ ¹² At one point her weight reached 10 stone 10 pounds, quite a lot for a twenty-year-old girl of 5 foot 5 inches. * ¹

But if Margaret might be disparaged as a slightly podgy, frumpy person, someone beneath notice, by some in Oxford’s grander circles, she faced almost the opposite problem within her own college. According to Betty Spice, who, with Margaret, was one of only three girls in her year in the college reading chemistry, the tables in hall at Somerville were divided into three columns, and these tended, in practice, to represent different groups within the college. The tables nearest the high table seated the ‘more exotic types’, foreigners, Jews, Nina Mabey (the future novelist Nina Bawden) and articulate girls who read PPE (philosophy, politics and economics). The tables at the other end were the haunts of the public school girls. Those in the middle belonged to the grammar school products, many from backgrounds similar to Margaret’s own. It was natural to them to accommodate Margaret, therefore, and they did so, but without great enthusiasm on their part or, possibly, on hers. * ² Her voice was part of the trouble. ‘When she talked, she was not natural,’ Betty Spice remembered. ¹³ She was ‘pretty, in a baby-doll sort of way’, but ‘You couldn’t get close to her. She didn’t want us because we were only grammar school girls. She was interested in making her way with people who would help her.’ Another exact contemporary, Jean Southerst, also noted her speech and appearance: ‘Her voice, elocution-trained, was regarded as affected, and her preoccupation with her appearance caused amusement. She went to the most expensive hairdresser in Oxford (Andreas) and spent days during the vac. combing the West End for suitable dresses.’ * ³ Margaret’s first elocution lessons had been to improve a mild speech impediment and help her declaim in public. According to Joan Parker, a pupil at KGGS, slightly younger than Margaret, the girls would have whole-class elocution lessons in which Lincolnshire vowels were erased so that the girls no longer said ‘moostard’ or ‘coostard’. ¹⁴ Amy Wootten, who read maths in the same year and sat at Margaret’s table in hall, denied that Margaret was at all ‘snooty’, but said that she was ‘not outgoing’: she was ‘never in a position where she owed anyone anything’. ¹⁵ Mary Mallinson, who shared digs in Walton Street with Margaret in her last year, noted her as someone who was always ‘unobtrusively neat and well-groomed’ and not easy to know. ¹⁶ Pauline Cowan, who shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road, the previous year, 1945–6, says that Margaret was ‘not socially climbing’ but, rather, ‘diffident’: ‘I never felt of her as obviously very happy.’ ¹⁷

In fact, matters were not as bad as this might suggest. Margaret won respect. Even Betty Spice records that she was ‘an honest person’, ¹⁸ and that she quite enjoyed being teased about possible boyfriends at meals in hall (‘She would blush from the neck upwards’). Pamela Rhodes thought her ‘very mature for her years’, ¹⁹ and Jean Southerst, a fellow Methodist, recalled that ‘her room in college was always open for pleasant evenings for gossip, poetry reading (I owe her much for that) and partaking of the excellent coffee and cakes etc., which, as a grocer’s daughter, made her a very popular hostess!’ ²⁰ She impressed as someone who would do what she promised and who ‘had a clear idea of what she wanted to attain’. ²¹ And Margaret happily took part in the jollifications of fellow female students. At the end of her third-year exams, she wrote to Muriel that she had been with friends to see the film Quiet Wedding : ‘It’s an absolute scream. I laughed more than I have for months, I wish you’d seen it. On Tuesday night we went to see Passage to Marseilles , with Humphrey Bogart…It wasn’t a bad film but it wasn’t outstanding either. We enjoyed it because we were celebrating. Did I tell you that seven of the men failed?’ ²²

The sort of qualities which Margaret displayed were not of the type to endear her to the typical student mind, which values spontaneity over carefulness. Here is Mary Mallinson recalling an incident at the very end of their time at Oxford, the Sunday before Finals in the Walton Street digs with their fellow lodger, Mary Foss. * ⁴

Of the four women’s colleges at Oxford, Somerville was the most austere. There was a joke current at the time about the different reaction of girls at the different colleges to a friend who said she had just met a young man. The woman from Lady Margaret Hall said: ‘Who are his parents?’ The one from St Hilda’s said, ‘What games does he play?’ The one from Somerville said, ‘What is he reading?’ and the woman from St Hugh’s said, ‘Where is he?’ ²⁴

The prevailing expectation among the undergraduates of her college was of work which involved educational or public service. There was little thought of business or money or glamour, or a political career. Life was serious and the privilege of a woman’s education at a great university had to be repaid. Margaret herself believed devoutly in worthiness and public service, but she applied these beliefs during her career in a way which many Somervillians did not like and with a success of which some, perhaps, were jealous. There was some resentment that, of all the girls who went to Somerville, it had to be she who became world famous. She exhibited what many considered a sort of smug perfection. Betty Spice said, ‘We’re not proud of Margaret. We found it a bit galling that she became prime minister, and that she married Denis and got his money and then had the twins in one go.’ ²⁵ At the fiftieth anniversary of Margaret’s year’s matriculation – 1993 – Somerville laid on a dinner, with drinks in the college’s new Margaret Thatcher Suite. Seeing the bust of the ex-Prime Minister there, one of her contemporaries went up and covered it with a windcheater, to widespread amusement. ²⁶ Something similar applies to many of Somerville’s dons, particularly those under the influence of Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville from 1945, and one of those progressives who regard being a Conservative as a sort of mental defect. ‘She stood out,’ she told a pair of biographers. ‘Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about then…she was so set as steel as a Conservative…We used to entertain a good deal at weekends, but she didn’t get invited. She had nothing to contribute, you see.’ ²⁷ Pauline Cowan remembers dining at Somerville high table shortly after Margaret became prime minister in 1979. ‘We’re all wearing black,’ the dons told her. ²⁸ It could be argued that Margaret’s career exemplified the tradition of radicalism which Janet Vaughan invoked: her youthful Conservatism certainly showed a determination not to conform. The truth is that most of her Somerville contemporaries did not know her terribly well, and were not strongly attracted by what they did know.

For her part, Mrs Thatcher always spoke warmly of Somerville, even including Janet Vaughan – ‘a remarkable person’, ²⁹ whose subsequent scientific work she followed with interest. If she noticed any hostility, she did not mention it, let alone reciprocate. She maintained her admiration for the college system – ‘A college is a college, thank goodness’ ³⁰ – and although she was deeply hurt by Oxford University’s vote to refuse her an honorary degree when she was prime minister, she never directed any of the same feeling towards her college. Partly because of her warm respect for Daphne Park, Principal of Somerville from 1980 to 1989, * ⁵ she maintained an interest in the place throughout her years as prime minister. But it is also true that she kept no close friends from Somerville days.

In a letter to Muriel of 19 April 1945 (less than two weeks before the death of Hitler, but the war is not mentioned), Margaret describes returning to the college slightly earlier than her fellows (probably to take part in a short electioneering course organized by OUCA). She went into dinner after arriving and ‘to my dismay’ found herself:

After dinner, she couldn’t find a porter, so she hauled her own trunk to the bottom of her staircase, but finding it too heavy, unpacked it in the quad and ‘carried my things up in armfulls [sic]’. ‘I then began to unpack the contents of my room to alleviate its bareness a little,’ but by half-past eleven she was exhausted and went to bed. ³¹ This is not the letter of someone who hates her college, nor yet the letter of someone who is wholly happy there.

Part of Margaret’s relative isolation at Somerville derives from the fact that she was a scientist. As a chemist, she was one of only five women in her year in the entire university. Long hours in the labs, and at lectures which, unlike those in the arts, were more or less compulsory, kept her away from much of the society of her fellow Somervillians. Although she worked hard, Margaret did not particularly enjoy life in the lab: ‘I was much more interested in the theory than in the practical work.’ ³² She was fortunate, though, that, in Dorothy Hodgkin, Somerville had one of the most distinguished chemists in the world. Mrs Hodgkin, who later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, was famous for her crystallographic analysis of the structure of molecules, and later discovered important information about the structure of penicillin. Penicillin, the first antibiotic, had been discovered in 1928, but its pioneering trials had taken place much later, in Oxford, two years before Margaret went up: it was what would now be called the cutting edge of science at that time. According to Margaret’s fellow chemist Betty Spice, Dorothy Hodgkin was a ‘brilliant chemist, but an awful tutor’, whose tutorials used to trickle away into complete silence, ³³ and Pauline Cowan, while not going so far, agreed that she was bad at teaching first-year students. ³⁴ Margaret, however, felt an enormous respect for Mrs Hodgkin. Perhaps because of this, she elected, for Part II chemistry, to work with Mrs Hodgkin in person. Most Oxford undergraduate courses were and are three years long. It was possible for chemists to obtain an unclassified degree after their exams at the end of three years, but the full, classified BSc with honours was awarded only to those who stayed on a further year for research, culminating in a thesis which was ‘viva-ed’ (discussed at interview). This is what Margaret chose to do, under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin.

‘I must say I was very pleased with her for this,’ Professor Hodgkin wrote to a scientific colleague in 1988. ‘I tended to encourage my Somerville chemists to spread their wings if they wanted to go off into other fields…I was sent from America and Moscow several gramicidin, antibacterial peptides, which are still providing difficult problems for X Ray analysis…Gerhard Schmidt [a Jewish refugee scientist] started working on the simplest, gramicidin S from Moscow…Margaret helped him with growing heavy atoms containing crystals but all proved too complex to solve.’ (Indeed, it took over forty years more to solve some of them.) ‘The measurements they did were eventually useful.’ ³⁵

How good a scientist was she? She certainly had a serious interest in the subject – one which she would deploy in future years. She liked to point out that she was the first prime minister with a science degree, rather than boasting that she was the first woman prime minister. After going down, she went back to Oxford to call in on old friends in the crystallography department, and she records, in letters to Muriel written during and shortly after Oxford, the pleasure of meeting famous scientists like Linus Pauling and Max Perutz, and of visiting Cambridge to meet fellow crystallographers. She worked hard at it, too, winning two college prizes in her first two years, experiencing many an essay crisis and demonstrating the ability, so famous in later life, to study late into the night. When she took her exams at the end of her third year, she had to sit some of them in the sanatorium. Margaret told friends that she was ill at the time, but there is some evidence that she was suffering more from nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork. ³⁶ At the end of her fourth year, she was awarded a respectable second-class degree. Janet Vaughan, a scientist but not a chemist, said disparagingly of Margaret: ‘She was a perfectly adequate chemist. I mean nobody thought anything of her.’ ³⁷ But her judgment may have been coloured by the strong political antagonism she felt towards Margaret in later years. Professor Hodgkin, who also differed politically from Margaret, * ⁶ but knew her and liked her better, was fairer: ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay and yet there was something that some people had that she hadn’t quite got.’ ³⁸

Margaret herself would not have disagreed with her tutor’s view. Speaking in praise of Dorothy Hodgkin in later life, she referred to a conversation with Max Perutz in which, she said, he told her that, in science, ‘reason and maths can get you so far, but you need inspiration on top.’ There is ‘a fascinating link’, she went on, ‘between art and science’. ³⁹ Dorothy Hodgkin, she believed, had that inspiration, that artistic, imaginative gift. It is not something she would ever have claimed for herself. Indeed, for all her astonishing self-confidence in some areas, Margaret never boasted of an intellectual mastery that she did not possess: at Oxford, she met many people who were her intellectual superiors, and she had no trouble recognizing this and deferring to them.

It was true, too, as Dorothy Hodgkin also said, that ‘she was not absolutely devoted’ to chemistry, ⁴⁰ that, as Betty Spice put it, ‘her heart wasn’t in it’. ⁴¹ While at Oxford, she developed a growing interest in the law. In her memoirs, she records that her father, as mayor of Grantham in 1945–6, sat automatically on the magistrates’ bench. She would go along with him, during vacations, to the Quarter Sessions, at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as recorder: ‘On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning…At one point I blurted out: “I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.” ’ ⁴² Winning said he had read physics at Cambridge but had then stayed on to do a second degree, in law. She replied that she could not afford to do this, so Winning explained that the other way (‘very hard work’) was to get a job in or near London, join an Inn of Court and study for the Bar in the evenings. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher sets all this in the context of her later life – ‘And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done’ ⁴³ – but it is important to note that the bent towards law was already so strong at Oxford as to tempt her away from chemistry, and to remember that, in 1945–6, she had no clear prospect of being able to do what Winning suggested. When she started applying for jobs before leaving Oxford, one of the considerations which governed her choice was the possibility of combining the job with legal studies. Writing to Muriel in the early summer of 1947, she describes interviews for a job at ICI’s Billingham plant near Stockton. She likes the idea of the work, but says that it is six hours from London which ‘would be an awful disadvantage for the Bar Exams’. ⁴⁴ Although she began reading for the Bar before her marriage in 1951, the certainty that she could afford to start a legal career came only with the financial security that Denis Thatcher brought her.

In later years, Margaret Thatcher discerned a pattern in her youthful interests: ‘As a Methodist in Grantham, I learnt the laws of God. When I read chemistry at Oxford, I learnt the laws of science, which derive from the laws of God, and when I studied for the Bar, I learnt the laws of man.’ ⁴⁵ This was an honest enough résumé of her reverent interest in the splendour of certain types of knowledge. Her belief in the rule of law as the foundation of politics was one of the strongest and most often repeated in her creed. But her account probably underplays the extent to which she saw all her main occupations, the law not the least, as instrumental to her pursuit of a political career. Thus at Oxford she remained an active Methodist, even going on the preaching circuit, where her sermons were reported as ‘most impressive’. ⁴⁶ She was a keen member of the Bach Choir. She was a conscientious and interested chemist, but her obsession, her dream, was politics. ‘I had a passion for history,’ she said fifty years later, ‘and a passion for politics. Politics is living history.’ ⁴⁷ She was probably projecting on to the past an interest in history which she did not exhibit much at the time, but it is true that she had already conceived a passion for politics. She joined OUCA as soon as she went up to Oxford, and threw herself into its activities. Hers was not, at this stage, a strong engagement with political ideas and beliefs, nor yet the undergraduate love of politicking. It was simply a determination, entered into without apparent self-examination, to engage in political life, re-energize political organization, and to do it as well as she possibly could.

Although the war provided the subject of constant and consuming interest for undergraduate conversation, it had the curious effect of making Oxford less actively political than at many other periods, notably the 1930s. This was partly because so many men were away in the forces. The Oxford Union, the centre of university political debate, allowed only men to take part in debates. * ⁷ It was also because the overriding need to win the war produced, if not agreement about post-war politics, at least a determination not to quarrel. As Margaret Thatcher said, when talking fifty years later about the wartime political atmosphere at Somerville, ‘You couldn’t but be patriotic in wartime because so much was at stake.’ ⁴⁸ Contemporaries remember that, although the progress of the war was constantly discussed in casual mealtime conversations, controversial issues were not. According to Amy Wootten, typical Somerville table talk would move between war news to its small consequences – ‘They’ve got bananas in a shop in the High’ – to the ordinary gossip of the day. Most undergraduates were quite religious, and, as at KGGS, it was more likely God than Soviet Communism or economic policy that they, including Margaret, could be found debating. ⁴⁹ Political awareness was quite low. Amy Wootten, in fact, was under the misapprehension that Margaret was a Liberal, just because her two fellow chemists were. ⁵⁰

This absence of political controversy characterizes Margaret’s correspondence with her sister throughout her time at Oxford. Admittedly, Muriel was not a highly political person, but it is still striking that Margaret’s letters to her contain scarcely a single expression of political views and next to nothing about current political events. Politics, when it occurs, is presented as an activity requiring a great deal of work but also opening up social opportunities and giving pleasure. It is something to be done, not something to be debated. Only one witness can recall having an actual political argument with Margaret at Oxford. Pauline Cowan remembered that Margaret was the very first person she met at Somerville and that Margaret’s first act had been to try to recruit her for OUCA which, considering herself a Communist, she refused. Pauline shared digs with Margaret in Richmond Road in 1945–6, and recalled the ‘rather unpleasant breakfasts’ cooked by the landlady consisting of dishes like hot pilchards with mashed potato. She and Margaret had at least one argument over breakfast about the structure of post-war society and how egalitarian it should be. She cannot remember much of what was said, but she collected the sense that ‘Margaret disapproved as well as disagreed.’ ⁵¹ This argument was exceptional, though. Even Mary Wallace, who knew Margaret from Grantham and was active in OUCA, has no memory of her ever expressing any political views. ⁵²

Conservatism at Oxford towards the end of the war, although it had a surprisingly large number of recruits, was not spoiling for a fight. It did not, for instance, warn of the dangers of too uncritical an association with Stalin or cry out in protest at the growth of the welfare state. When working on her memoirs in the 1990s, Margaret struggled to recall her views at the time. On Anglo-Soviet friendship, she said, ‘We never felt right about it. This unbelievably cruel man got to be called “Uncle Joe” because of wartime propaganda.’ ⁵³ She also recalled reading Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom , which was published in 1944. ⁵⁴ But there is a sense that these memories are dredged up rather than strongly felt, and Margaret herself admitted that ‘I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at the time.’ ⁵⁵ ‘The times were political,’ she declared of her Oxford period in 1994; ‘how on earth had war happened again?’, ⁵⁶ but there is no evidence that this was the subject which she and her fellow youthful Tories discussed much. Indeed, there is a curious, cosy feeling about student political discussion at that time, as if people believed, somehow or other, that everything was going to be all right.

The fact was that, in common with almost all her fellow Conservatives at the end of the war, Margaret had a fairly strong belief in the capacity of Whitehall men and ideas to run the country in a humane and orderly way. She admired the White Paper on Full Employment, closely and directly influenced by Keynes, which appeared in 1944, and she credited ‘Winston’, as she always in later life referred to Churchill, * ⁸ with wisdom in creating the Ministry for Reconstruction and Development. Administrative thinkers like Oliver Franks * ⁹ at the Ministry of Supply, who subsequently served her well in his inquiry into the Falklands War, commanded her confidence, as did Sir William Beveridge for his report on Social Security in 1942 and R. A. Butler for his Education Act of 1944. ⁵⁷ She liked the fact that the wartime economy was ‘an economy with a purpose’ which gave almost everyone a job. ⁵⁸ She said that she didn’t feel she was a ‘right-wing Tory’ at the time: ‘Fairness is a big streak in the British character,’ a streak which was satisfied by rationing. ⁵⁹ To the extent that her Toryism at this stage went beyond an instinctive loyalty to the non-unionized classes of society, its chief characteristics were a sense that collectivism threatened both freedom and economic success, and a romantic imperialism which saw the British Empire as ensuring civilized values, even in its process of decline. Indeed, these two things combined in her perception. She said that what she wanted was ‘a freer society, which produced a large part of the power that made Britain great’. ⁶⁰ She was also struck with the idea that Utopias were dangerous. Although a scientist, she recalled that she was always suspicious of those who tried to apply the scientific method to politics: ‘you get Utopian government.’ ⁶¹ In 1944, she saw the film of J. B. Priestley’s play They Came to a City , and derived from it the idea that ‘You can’t get a solution that ignores human nature.’ ⁶²

The end of the war in Europe in May 1945 and the general election in July hardened politics up. Margaret took part in the campaign – mostly, since it was held on 5 July, * ¹⁰ in Grantham rather than Oxford. In those days, the mainstay of election campaigns was the public meeting, and it fell to Margaret to act as the warm-up speaker for the Conservative candidate, Squadron Leader Worth, as he toured the villages surrounding Grantham night after night. She remembered these occasions quite self-critically: ‘I wasn’t terribly good at keeping going. My training had been scientific. Therefore I spoke in short sentences…machine-gun style,’ ⁶³ but her readiness to do so showed precocious courage. She already had some experience of speaking, having talked that spring, for example, to the Grantham Rotary Ladies on ‘A Day in the Life of an Oxford Undergraduate’ and having put on a performance at OUCA of which she boasted to Muriel: ‘I gave my paper on Agricultural Policy which was a staggering success.’ ⁶⁴ But as she was a woman and someone who, aged nineteen, was still not old enough to vote, * ¹¹ when she spoke she was bound to attract local attention.

One meeting, at Sleaford on 25 June 1945, was extensively reported by the Sleaford Gazette (‘Rousing Meeting at Mart’). Margaret, warming up for the candidate for his sixth meeting of the day, was described as ‘the very youthful Miss M. H. Roberts, daughter of Alderman A. Roberts of Grantham’. She struck out at once into world affairs, and how prosperity could not return to this Britain ‘until we had helped to put the other European countries onto a wholesome footing’, by re-establishing trade. She spoke of Germany: ‘Miss Roberts said that once in her lifetime, twice in many people’s time, and three times in the lives of some people, Germany had plunged the world into war. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice. She did not mean that they should be deprived of everything, but just punishment must be meted out.’ The formulation about the frequency with which Germany had caused war is almost uncannily similar to that repeatedly used by Lady Thatcher in the 1990s, although sometimes the word ‘Germany’ was replaced with ‘Continental Europe’.

Much of her Sleaford speech was in praise of Winston Churchill – the country ‘must see that they do not lose the only remaining man who had the world’s confidence’ – and it was in this context that Margaret Roberts uttered an apparently surprising view about the Soviet Union: ‘The Socialists said that we did not want to make friends with Russia but Mr Churchill and Mr Eden had gone to Russia and had worked unsparingly for co-operation with Russia.’ She saw Britain as a great power that should play an equal part in discussions with America and the Soviet Union.

And she dwelt on the theme which, at that time, most fired her imagination: ‘Miss Roberts was very fervent in her determination to stand by the Empire. It was the most important community of peoples the world has ever known. It was so bound with loyalty that it brought people half way across the world to help each other in times of stress. The Empire must never be liquidated.’ ⁶⁵

There is something laughable, perhaps, about the thought of the nineteen-year-old alderman’s daughter laying down the law for the world in this way, but also something astonishing and impressive. It and other speeches made by Margaret during the campaign caused Liz Barrington, an old nursing friend of Muriel, to write to her a couple of weeks later:

Liz adds: ‘Like yourself I did not wish to vote Labour or Tory.’ ⁶⁶ Was it this that Muriel chose to ‘remain unheard’ in the Roberts household?

Clement Attlee’s Labour Party was swept to office by a landslide. In Grantham, Denis Kendall, the flamboyant Independent, held his seat against the Tory challenge. Margaret attended the count in Sleaford and then went to the Picture House in Grantham to watch the results come through on the screen. ⁶⁷ They shocked her. Sixty years later, Margaret said that the loss of Winston Churchill was ‘really quite shattering’, ⁶⁸ but she also came to see in it the natural high point of the process of collectivism which, from 1979, she tried to reverse. ⁶⁹ At the time, however, it seemed to her against nature and it ended her experience, until then continuous in her entire political memory, of Tory dominance. As it was to do even more markedly in 1974, defeat galvanized her.

The Oxford to which she returned in October 1945 was changed in atmosphere – by the atom bombs and subsequent allied victory in the Far East, by the Labour election victory, and by the return or first arrival of undergraduates who had fought. Although Margaret had been quite close to the war in Grantham, which was bombed more than most places, she was rather unusual in that none of her immediate family served. Meeting men who had done so excited her. She had returned to what she called ‘a more mature Oxford’ which benefited from being ‘more cross-generational’. ⁷⁰ By this time an officer in OUCA, she joined its policy sub-committee with Stanley Moss, an undergraduate who returned injured from the war, and Michael Kinchin-Smith, who subsequently married Rachel Willink. Their report, produced that term, was ambitious in its scope. The first part, grandly entitled ‘The Basis of Conservatism’, was drafted by Moss; the second, ‘The Role of the Conservative Party Today’, was written by Margaret and by Kinchin-Smith, ⁷¹ but the three put their signatures to the whole.

Moss’s section is windy and sometimes obscure, and none of the pamphlet is scintillating, in either manner or matter, but there are notes to be found of what later became the Thatcher tunes: ‘the individual is more important than the system,’ ‘Individual enterprise is the mainspring of all progress,’ ‘there is no empirical evidence at all for the existence…of the mystic community, state or nation that figures in all systems opposed to this principle, such as the Nazi.’ It is also oppositional in tone, much more so than would have been the case during the war. While saying that the party should eschew factionalism, it demands ‘strong and vocal’ criticism wherever the government exceeds its electoral mandate, and declares that threats to liberty should be opposed by ‘every possible weapon of resistance and without thought of compromise’. The toughest comments refer to the Conservative Party itself: ‘It is suggested that this general election marks a turning point in the political development of the country equivalent to the election of the Reform Parliament of 1831 and that a reorientation of conservatism within the framework of the 20th century state such as that carried out by Peel will be necessary if the party is to avoid annihilation.’ The party needs to be ‘much clearer than in the past as to what its basic principles are’; it needs ‘house-cleaning’; it should have a proper research department (which, thanks to R. A. Butler, it duly got). The section labelled ‘Policy’ begins:

Re-reading the pamphlet fifty years later for her memoirs, Lady Thatcher jibbed at a few passages, such as a section which appears to propose a redistribution of wealth, attributing them to the other authors, and particularly at a comically self-important passage on the nature of leadership: ‘In an organisation such as OUCA, relying on voluntary effort, perhaps the ideal is a position parallel to that of Roosevelt as President of the United States, following public opinion while at the same time moulding and keeping slightly ahead of it.’ That self-contradiction of leading and following at the same time, she declared, was not her style. ⁷³ But in general she accepted that these had been her thoughts at the time. They were scarcely revolutionary ideas, but they did represent a fiercer, more rebellious and more socially mobile Conservatism than had expressed itself in wartime. It was a Conservatism which could not assume its right to rule, and knew that it had to fight for its existence.

In the following March, Margaret was an Oxford representative at the conference of the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations (FUCUA was the unhappy acronym) at the Waldorf Hotel in London. Both she and Kinchin-Smith spoke in favour of a resolution, which she moved, ‘demanding that oft-repeated resolutions’ for more working-class officers and candidates ‘be implemented forthwith’. ⁷⁴ At a conference at Swinton College, the country house in Yorkshire reserved at that time for weekend gatherings for intelligent young Tories to discuss ideas, Margaret remembered getting into an argument with those of her fellows – more left-wing and better born – who wanted a redistribution of wealth. ‘ “How would this work” ’, she recalled asking sharply, ‘ “in relation to large country estates?” Answer came there none.’ ⁷⁵ In October 1946, the same month in which she became president of OUCA, Margaret went for the first time as a representative to the party conference in Blackpool. By the standards of Tory conferences at that time, the mood from the floor was rebellious. The rank and file attacked the leadership for not putting forward clear Tory policies and beliefs. She was ‘entranced’, she wrote. ⁷⁶ This is perhaps the only recorded occasion when anyone has used that word about a Conservative conference, and yet it is probably an apt one in Margaret’s case. She identified with the feelings of the body of the Tory hall, and felt liberated and uplifted by them. Such identification would one day help make her leadership so secure for so long when more senior figures in the party hoped to undermine her. In 1946, those senior figures felt a little beleaguered. ‘I had the sense’, wrote Margaret, ‘that the Party leadership – with the notable exception of the Party Leader [Churchill] – had arrived at Blackpool prepared to reconcile itself and Conservatism to the permanence of socialism in Britain…This was decidedly not what the rank and file wanted to hear…My instincts were with the rank and file, though I had not yet fully digested the strong intellectual case against collectivism…’ ⁷⁷

It should not be thought, however, that Margaret’s meritocratic, ‘rank and file’ political beliefs went so far as to exclude her from the Oxford Tory mainstream. Serious though the young Margaret Roberts was about everything, including her politics, no one should imagine that she had no interest in pleasure, elegance and the sphere of society into which she had not been born. However genuine her political convictions, she also saw OUCA as a form of social advancement, the opening of the door upon a more civilized world. She might, in the words of William Rees-Mogg, another Oxford (slightly younger) contemporary and a future editor of The Times , have been a ‘narrow-gauge’ Conservative, ⁷⁸ but she saw OUCA as widening her, and raising her up.

One of the chief embodiments of the world to which she aspired was Edward Boyle. * ¹³ Neither handsome nor self-confident, Boyle was nevertheless a very appealing figure to Margaret. An Etonian at Christ Church who had already inherited a baronetcy, he was a man of intellectual refinement and gentle good manners who immediately captured her respect in a way that no one else managed until, years later, she met another kindly baronet, Keith Joseph. Boyle was generally seen as a future Conservative prime minister by his fellow undergraduates and was ‘brilliant in a way you couldn’t quite fathom’. ⁷⁹ He was also vague, known for shaving and then forgetting to wash the white remains of shaving soap off his face. ⁸⁰ Boyle, who was to become minister of education under Harold Macmillan, later moved to the extreme left of the Conservative Party, but in the 1940s was closer in politics to Margaret. His influence over her was anyway not so much ideological as moral. She considered that he had ‘a great mind. He never had a mean or trifling thought.’ ⁸¹ And, as so often in her feelings about people, this admiration for his mind and character was linked with an attraction towards his physical surroundings. She vividly remembered, from Oxford times, Boyle’s mother’s ‘fabulous flat in Portman Square’ with its ‘treasures’, some of them Chinese: ‘To me it was a different world. I’d never been in a flat like it.’ She also remembered in the 1960s, when she and Denis were renting a cottage in Kent, visiting Edward Boyle at his family’s house, Ockham in Sussex, and being given ‘the best wine’. Boyle fell on hard times towards the end of his life: ‘Edward wouldn’t have known about money: it was just there.’ ⁸² She did not share his form of unworldliness, but she loved him for it, and for his lack of snobbery towards her. * ¹⁴

There was no one else quite like Boyle in OUCA, but to those of the upper class who were friendly towards her she felt a particular affection. The Earl of Dalkeith, * ¹⁵ another Christ Church man later to become a Conservative MP and, after that, Duke of Buccleuch, was one such. When he was an officer of OUCA in 1947, he called together the better off among the OUCA committee and said, ‘Look here, we’ve got somebody here who’s our hardest worker. She pedals off to Morris Cowley [the motor works] when Edward Boyle couldn’t even cross the road. She’s going to be prime minister one day, but she hasn’t got any money, so let’s get up a Special Fund for her.’ ⁸³ Dalkeith asked for £25 each, but could not remember, nearly sixty years later, whether it was raised or what, precisely, it was for. * ¹⁶ He recalled that Margaret was ‘completely unchippy; so nice’. History does not record Margaret’s attitude to the gift, but she described Johnny Dalkeith as ‘rather a marvellous person’. ⁸⁴

It is clear from Margaret’s letters to Muriel what pleasure she derived from her OUCA friendships and what prestige she believed she had acquired by her OUCA work. Writing to her on OUCA paper in October 1946, she thanks Muriel for the twenty-first-birthday present she sent her and asks if she can borrow her pearls and her black dinner frock because she has to go to two OUCA dinners in quick succession. She also explains that she has written to thank Mrs Nidds, a Grantham neighbour, for her present: ‘The reason it was such a large package was that there was an OUCA card in, and I thought she might like it for show.’ ⁸⁵ In May of the following year, when Muriel’s birthday is approaching, she writes to tell her sister that she has found her ‘ sheer silk stockings – fully fashioned…( not black market)’ plus ‘a bottle of “Great Expectations”, the one created specially for Valerie Hobson’. * ¹⁷ She also mentions that she went to Cambridge for a Conservative (Balfour Club) dinner, after which ‘at about midnight – we unmoored a punt and went on the river. (I did not wear my black velvet frock thank goodness.)’ ⁸⁶

In January 1947, Margaret wrote to Muriel explaining that she was attending an OUCA dinner for L. S. Amery, the leading Churchillian, and another for Lord Woolton, the Chairman of the Conservative Party: ‘This in addition to the annual dinner’. ⁸⁷ ‘My black velvet frock looks positively opulent! The skirt is cut on the cross so it hangs beautifully.’ The rush of dinners leads her to ask Muriel for the loan of her black and gold evening dress. It is clear, too, that OUCA produces more informal pleasures. ‘Neil and Roger’, she writes, ‘have been round to tea etc. several times. Two evenings we have been out “on the razzle” and have had the most hilarious time.’

‘Roger’ was Roger Gray, from the Queen’s College, a handsome war veteran who had just become president of the Oxford Union and, as such, was probably the best-known undergraduate in the university. Margaret mentions that, because of his ‘arduous duties’, she will probably see less of him this term. ‘Neil’ was Neil Findlay, from Worcester College, unpolitical, but a great friend and wartime comrade of Roger Gray and, like him, fond of parties and drinking. * ¹⁸

Both men appealed more to Margaret than she did to them. Roger, apparently, ‘found her rather hard work’ and sometimes, after a few drinks, would poke her chest and say, ‘Is it marble, Margaret?’ ⁸⁸ It was not. Margaret was smitten with Neil, a fact of which he was half aware. According to Neil, Margaret felt attracted towards people with a greater social presence than her own, and they didn’t always respond. He felt a little sorry for her. ⁸⁹

At the time of Margaret’s crush on Neil, which probably began in late 1946, only little hints emerge in her surviving letters to Muriel. ‘Bumped into Neil only once this term – that was in the Grocer’s,’ she wrote in May 1947, ⁹⁰ but a later letter shows what she had felt. After becoming the candidate for Dartford in early 1949, Margaret moved to lodgings there. From these she wrote to Muriel describing a recent chance meeting: ‘When I went to Canterbury a week last Sunday for the political weekend school, I saw Neil Findlay with his new wife at the station on the way back. I don’t think they saw [me] for Neil is very short-sighted and I didn’t go up to them. His wife is a smart woman but she looked a Jewess. * ¹⁹ She was dark with a fair complexion and the typical long nose. I was standing with Doric Bossom (son of A. Bossom * ²⁰ MP for Maidstone): and Ian Harvey, candidate for East Harrow, * ²¹ and was glad that if he saw me, I wasn’t too badly off for male company. I didn’t feel one single twinge when I saw him. Strange how shallow infatuation is.’ ⁹¹

For all its jauntiness, the letter reveals some anxiety on Margaret’s part at being at a disadvantage in relation to Neil Findlay, and at being seen alone when he is with another woman. She spoke the truth when she said that the wound had healed. In the 1950s, the Findlays found themselves living in Swan Court, Chelsea, the same block of flats as the Thatchers, and were on good terms with them. ⁹² But it is clear that at Oxford she was susceptible to men she thought glamorous, and feared being disregarded by them. She saw OUCA as her best way of overcoming any handicap. Writing to Muriel in May 1947 to discuss her sister’s forthcoming visit to Oxford (her last before Margaret went down), she explains their social plans. She has asked Edward Boyle to get them tickets for a Union debate, and there is a possibility, no more, of their being asked to the President’s farewell party afterwards. ‘Edward also asked us to lunch one day – if he remembers,’ she goes on, and she also hopes to ‘wangle a meeting with Roger and/or Neil’. The problem, though, is that ‘OUCA activities for the term finish with a garden party tomorrow and I’m otherwise powerless to ask them round. I’ll just have to rely on their dropping in which they do on very rare occasions.’ ⁹³ Despite four successful years at the university, she was still in a position of traditional, womanly weakness.

Besides, she was still smarting from the loss of an earlier, more serious love.

It seems highly unlikely that Margaret ever had any boyfriends in Grantham. All those who knew her then, including her sister, believe there was none. There is no doubt, however, that Margaret was a carefully dressed young woman whom many considered attractive, and who noticed and enjoyed the attentions of others. People remember her rosy cheeks and elegant legs. Kenneth Wallace, of Grantham, was pleased with her fluent and intelligent conversation. ⁹⁴ As she started to go to parties in Grantham towards the end of the war men, often servicemen, asked her to dance, and some pressed their suit quite strongly. In August 1944, at the end of her first year in Oxford, she joined the local tennis club in Grantham (she complained that she had ‘schorched [sic]’ her tennis dress with her iron) and went to its dance there. Before long ‘…I had settled down with a Flight-Lieutenant aged about 40!!!! Or rather he had settled down with me.’ ⁹⁵ At the turn of the year, she went to a dance in Corby, near Grantham:

Margaret then spent the rest of the evening with a thirty-year-old pilot who had done several operational flights over Germany. What she did not mention when keeping her suitor at arm’s length – though she refers to it elsewhere in the same letter to Muriel – was that she already had a boyfriend.

The only previously known specific evidence of a particular man at this stage in Margaret Roberts’s life comes from Margaret Goodrich’s previously mentioned account (see Chapter 2 ) of what she believed to be Margaret’s first declaration that she wanted to be an MP. Margaret Goodrich celebrated her twenty-first birthday with a small party in the rectory at Corby Glen on 22 December 1944, and Margaret Roberts went to the party, sharing a bed in the overcrowded house with Sheila Browne, much later to become chief inspector of schools during the Thatcher premiership. Both Margarets have recorded, in rather different versions, * ²³ that they sat round in the kitchen discussing their ambitions, and Margaret Roberts publicly recognized her own. According to Margaret Goodrich, her mother asked Margaret, and she said, as if she had thought of it before, ‘I want to become an MP.’ ⁹⁷ In fact, as we have seen, she had already indicated her political ambitions to others, but what Margaret Goodrich also remembered was that Margaret had arrived clutching a carnation which ‘seemed very precious to her’ and had, she said, been given her by an Oxford boyfriend. She was concerned for its welfare, so Mrs Goodrich put it in a vase with water and an aspirin. ⁹⁸ The name of the boyfriend was Tony Bray.

Tony was an army cadet, who had arrived in Oxford in October 1944, attached to Brasenose College, but, due to the exigencies of wartime, had been accommodated in the buildings of Christ Church. He was pursuing a special six-month course, devised to combine military training with lectures on the ‘general sciences’. Educated at Brighton College, a minor public school in the south-east, Tony was from a solidly bourgeois background, and before joining up had already been an articled clerk to a solicitor. He was short and not particularly good-looking, but, by his own account sixty years later, ‘not half bad as a dancer’. ⁹⁹ Born in 1926, he was a little younger than Margaret.

The two had met through OUCA, probably at the association’s coffee discussions at the Randolph Hotel, some time that autumn of 1944. Margaret seemed to Tony ‘very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That’s probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects.’ He was also impressed with her enthusiasm for politics – ‘That was something very unusual. Not many girls were like that’ – and, like Tony, she was ‘a genuine, old-fashioned Conservative’. He was also taken with her appearance: ‘She was a plump, attractive girl in a well-built way. That wasn’t ill thought of,’ and she had ‘elegant, dark hair’ (‘I’d have told her I didn’t like blondes if she had become blonde then’). She ‘dressed elegantly, though not in a top stylish way’. He felt also that she had ‘a degree of loneliness’ which was part of ‘the reason we got on’. ¹⁰⁰

At that time, it was unusual for couples to go around as ‘an item’, and Margaret and Tony did not do so. None of their university friends from that time remembered the one knowing the other. But, at tea in one another’s rooms, where she proved herself a ‘good housekeeper’ with her cooking of crumpets, they quickly became close. He found her serious, and ‘a bit bluestocking’, but he liked the fact that she read a great deal and loved music. She took him to the Matthew Passion in which, as a member of the Bach Choir, she was performing. Tony respected her because ‘she held her thoughts very sincerely’. At roughly the same time as he gave her the carnation – Christmas 1944 – she gave him Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which he kept beside him every day until he lost it in a house move forty years later. It was his impression from the way Margaret kissed that she had had no boyfriend before, but she showed a delight in physical intimacy. They followed the rules of those days, however, and never slept together.

As he got to know Margaret better, Tony, whose parents were quite well off, noticed the ‘great strain it was to finance her time at university’; she was ‘not ashamed of her background’ but exhibited ‘a degree of reticence’ about it. He detected that she was ‘very determined to make good’, but, with pleasure and surprise, he also noticed something else: ‘She was a person who, though not apparently sociable, enjoyed socializing…she astonished herself how much she could relax and be relaxed.’ They had fun together. ¹⁰¹

This pleasure, and the heightened sense of life’s possibilities that comes through first love, can be found in Margaret’s letters to Muriel. Her descriptions, normally rather tart or matter of fact, take on a different tone. On 25 March 1945, back in Grantham for the Easter vacation, Margaret wrote with details of every dance she had been to. Wartime had stopped the traditional full-scale Commem balls in the summer, but the approach of victory permitted a rash of college and other dances in March. Margaret went to five. The first, and best, was the Randolph Ball at the Randolph Hotel: ‘We had a marvellous time…Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country Inn “Crown and Thistle”. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [sic] the blue frock perfectly.’ Tony presented her with a spray of eight carnations ‘sent for me from London so with the front part of my hair piled up on top Jean and Mary said I looked simply smashing. I felt absolutely on top of the world as we walked through the lounge at the Crown and Thistle and everyone looked up and stared.’ In the manner of the wartime deprived, Margaret went on to describe, in detail, what they ate and drank: ‘We went into the bar and had gin and grapefruit and then to the dining room for dinner. We had some lovely thick creamy soup followed by pidgeon [sic] and then a chocolate sweet. With it we had Moussec to drink. Moussec in case you don’t know is a sparkling champagne.’ * ²⁴

When they reached the Randolph at a quarter to nine, ‘Things were in full swing…The ballroom was marvellously decorated and all the lighting was done with huge coloured lamps operating from the balcony. The floor was simply packed so from the point of view of dancing it wasn’t terrifically marvellous. The Duchess of Marlborough arrived soon after we did and seemed very nice. The refreshments were lovely. Altogether it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.’ ¹⁰² Asked about it sixty years later, Tony remembered buying the carnations from Moyses Stevens. When reminded of Margaret’s blue dress, he suddenly broke down in tears and said: ‘It was a very special evening.’ ¹⁰³

The next day was Somerville’s dance, for which Margaret wore the same thing (‘The flowers were still fresh’): ‘There were two other Conservative couples there…so we teamed up and had a thoroughly gay evening.’ The following week, there was Worcester College – ‘We had a thoroughly hilarious time’; then Wadham – ‘a bit of a bear-fight’; and finally, Merton, for which Margaret wore ‘my green crepe frock’. ¹⁰⁴

Once term had ended, Tony whisked her off for a day in London which included coffee at Fullers in Regent Street, lunch at the Dorchester (‘It is not the acme of hotels it is reported to be’), a matinée performance of Strauss’s A Night in Venice at the Cambridge Theatre and finally a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel before Margaret got the train to Grantham and Tony returned to Oxford. For her, who had seen so little of the pleasures of the world, it was heady stuff.

It also, in her mind, betokened something quite serious, although Margaret seldom directly described her feelings to her sister. In the same letter to Muriel, she writes: ‘Preparations are going ahead fast and furiously for next weekend. I do hope everything will be all right.’ ¹⁰⁵ Tony was coming to stay with her parents above the shop. This would not have happened if she had seen her relationship with Tony as some passing fancy; and her parents, themselves serious-minded, unused to guests and protective of their daughters where men were concerned, would have regarded this as a potentially very significant occasion.

Such thoughts seem to have crossed Tony’s mind, and to have worried him a little. In old age, he recalled that he and Margaret never discussed marriage, and that he, with his legal training, was very wary of doing so because of the threat, still lingering from Victorian times, of an action for breach of promise. ¹⁰⁶ He thought of their relationship at that time as that of ‘just a boy and girl who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company’, which was hardly surprising, since he was only eighteen, but Margaret, perhaps, thought it meant rather more.

In any event, the visit to Grantham was ‘all right’, but not much better than that. Tony found Alfred Roberts ‘slightly austere’ and ‘totally correct’, a good, chapel-going man; Beatrice was ‘very proper’ and ‘motherly’. The shop struck him as ‘a very modest business establishment’. Tony and the Roberts family all attended the Methodist church together. It was not a riotous weekend.

It also marked a moment of parting. Tony’s six-month course at Oxford had come to an end and his full military training began in April, very shortly before the end of the war in Europe. He went to Bovington Camp in Dorset. As early as 19 April, the day before Hitler’s grim birthday celebrations in the Berlin bunker, Margaret wrote to Muriel * ²⁵ that a routine has been established in their communication: ‘I usually have a letter on Tuesday morning…He says there are all sorts of weird men there but fortunately the platoon he is in is composed entirely of Oxford cadets.’ Tony, she said, had to work the whole time: ‘On Saturday they are theoretically free from 2 o’clock but in practice there is so much to be done that this could hardly be called free time. Sunday they are again supposedly free but last Sunday Tony was peeling potatoes most of the morning!!’ ¹⁰⁷ The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945.

After a month at Bovington, Tony went on to another training camp and continued to move from one establishment to another, including a return to Bovington, until he was posted to Germany in the following year after being commissioned in the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. He sent Margaret a photograph of himself in military uniform, which he inscribed to her. But at some time in the course of the ensuing year Tony’s replies to Margaret’s letters began to peter out and eventually stopped altogether. After writing some letters reproaching Tony for his silence, Margaret became so distressed that she wrote to Tony’s mother, whom she had never met, to ask what had happened to him. ¹⁰⁸ The answer was, nothing very much. It was simply, though his mother naturally did not say this, that Tony had decided that the relationship should be allowed to ‘fizzle out’. ¹⁰⁹

To Margaret’s sister Muriel, there was a clear explanation. Tony, she believed, was snobbish, and had decided that Margaret was not from a good enough family for him. ¹¹⁰ Tony, not surprisingly, saw things differently. He agreed that Margaret’s background did make him uneasy, but not, he said, because of its relatively modest circumstances. What worried him was its austere seriousness. He wanted fun, and he found it. At his second stay at Bovington, he formed a relationship with a Dorset girl called Prudence whom he describes as ‘vivacious, outgoing and attractive’. Once posted, he found that he ‘was living in a fairly glamorous world in Germany – a cavalry regiment, green trousers, all the rest of it.’ Aged barely twenty, he was not looking for commitment. ¹¹¹

What of Margaret herself? When asked by the present author, she replied with the understandable untruth that she had had no boyfriends before Denis, and when later asked specifically about Tony she acknowledged the circumstances described above but would not be drawn into any detail. As we shall see, there was more to come in the story of Tony Bray. But this occurred only after she had gone down from Oxford. In her last two years at the university, therefore, she had an absent and eventually an exboyfriend who was refusing to communicate with her. When Tony faded away, in her final year she formed her unrequited crush on Neil Findlay. She was successful at Oxford, getting a good second-class degree, rising to the top of Conservative politics there and making the contacts that would stand her in good stead in her career. But when she went out into the world of work in the summer of 1947, she was, as she had been when she first arrived at the university, fundamentally alone.