John Major: The Autobiography

I know little about my family’s time across the Atlantic. No photographs or records survive. If they wrote or received letters, they are lost. But Abraham apparently prospered, and my father had a happy and comfortable American upbringing. Perhaps something of his classless, independent background was to rub off on me.

My father often spoke of living in Fall Hollow, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania. He used to tell me he had found Indian arrowheads in the woods behind his house. I could find no place named ‘Fall Hollow’. Panic. Was his – and my – story true? Terry, with the aid of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette came to the rescue. Fall Hollow, near Braddock, did once exist, just as my father said.

I would know more if I still had the dented travelling trunk in which he kept old documents and cuttings about his time in America and his work as a trapeze artist. The trunk ended up in a dusty alcove in the cellar at 80 Burton Road, Brixton, my parents’ last home, and was left there when my sister Pat and her husband Peter moved out. I remember investigating it as a child. I saw the oversize evening suit and top hat my father wore in his publicity postcards, photographs (including one of him wearing his trapeze costume), and scores for a music-hall band.

The new owners of the bungalow in Worcester Park, Surrey, where I lived as a boy, found a number of remarkable items from my father’s life in their loft: a make-up box, a clown suit, shoes, wigs and scores of sheets of old music-hall songs, many signed by the composers. It was the residue of a music-hall life on the move.

My father began his career as a performer in America. He used to say that as a child he joined a local fife-and-drum band in Pennsylvania, became skilled at twirling a baton, and twice performed as a young drum major in front of President Grover Cleveland. I cannot prove this, but I do remember my mother swinging a baton of her own on our lawn at home (to the astonishment of our neighbours – it was not the sort of thing one did in Worcester Park) and telling me Father had taught her, so there is some circumstantial support for the story.

Soon my father was performing in the circus ring. He taught himself acrobatics in the cellar of his father’s building workshop, and by the age of eight, he claimed, he was the top man in a four-man pyramid. As a teenager, he said, he performed on the flying trapeze without a safety net – to attract a larger crowd and earn a bigger fee.

I can’t be certain exactly when or why my grandparents returned to England but by 1896, when Tom was seventeen, he and Alfred and their father were back in the West Midlands. The two young men were active members of the Walsall Swimming Club, and in the late 1890s their names appear repeatedly in local newspaper reports of swimming galas, taking part in an odd array of events, from canoe races in comic costume and aquatic ‘Derbys’ (with the swimmer as a horse carrying a ‘jockey’), to life-saving exhibitions, swimming races in fancy dress (Tom winning a prize as a ‘new woman’ in bloomers) and water-polo matches.

By the turn of the century, press mentions of my father cease. He may have moved away from Walsall; certainly less-newsworthy things now occupied his time. One of them became a family secret, unmentioned, something which again I did not discover until I was researching this book. As well as an adopted uncle, I had another brother.

In July 1901 a young dancer, Mary Moss, married to a musician named James Moss, gave birth to a son in Wigan. They called him Tom and registered his birth on 25 July, but the details they gave were untrue: the baby’s father was not James Moss but my father, Tom – then a twenty-two-year-old bachelor. James Moss brought the boy up as his own; indeed he may never have known he was not the father. But Tom Major did not lose touch with his son, and the child – my half-brother – was to enter my life many years later in Brixton, in circumstances no one could have imagined.

It is not hard to guess how my father met Mary and James Moss, for he was now a professional stage performer. The first of his variety shows that I can trace was ‘The Encore’, put on at the Grand Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees, in August 1902. Tom Major appeared on the bill as part of a double act, ‘Drum and Major’, with his future wife, Kitty.

Five years my father’s senior, Kitty was already married to a masseur, David Grant, when they met. The appeal of a life with a masseur must have worn off, for she soon formed a permanent professional partnership with my father which took her away from her husband, and she married Tom after Grant’s death, in 1910.

Kitty and Tom – ‘Drum and Major’ – were in regular work. September 1902 saw them on stage in Portsmouth; December took them to Hastings; and in the first half of 1903 they appeared in turn at Camberwell, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Manchester, Birkenhead, Plymouth, Stockton and Wolverhampton. Only political party leaders perform in a more bewildering succession of venues.

It was a peripatetic existence, but they must have loved travelling because they did not stay long in Britain. In July 1903 the pair sailed from Southampton, and did not return for almost a year. An advertisement in the Stage announced that they were ‘Touring in South America’; which was brave of them, since neither spoke Spanish. While they were there, I learned from my father, they spent time on a cattle ranch in Argentina. He used to tell me tales of the gauchos and their way of life. He also claimed that in Buenos Aires he had worked in a millionaires’ club, looking out for card-sharpers and winning back their gains. As an old man he was still an avid card-player.

And he crossed the River Plate – at least according to family legend – stumbling into a civil war in Uruguay, and was forced to enlist briefly in a local militia. Perhaps the name ‘Major’ confused someone. Tom used to recount how he had a white band pinned to his arm and had been ordered to march a group of undesirables out of town. He claimed that the white band denoted his status as an officer, but in fact, as my brother has subsequently discovered, at the time of his visit Uruguay was hotly divided between two political clans, the Blancos and the Colorados – the Whites and the Reds. Even a small piece of clothing of either colour committed you to one side or the other. Probably inadvertently, my father had joined the rebellious Blancos in their failed challenge to the Colorado party.

Their revolutionary phase behind them, Tom and Kitty returned to England in April 1904 to a thriving career. A fortnight after docking they were on stage in Blackpool, and they toured the country continually until the outbreak of war in 1914. They must have appeared in almost every big theatre in Britain, but life was not easy for music-hall performers. Contracts were cancelled without notice; shows were moved from theatre to theatre without compensation; and some theatres demanded that artistes play daily matinees but take payment only for evening shows. Individually, most performers were at the mercy of management. Collectively they believed they could protect themselves, and decided to do so.

A conference was called of leading stage figures, which Tom and Kitty attended, and on 18 February 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was formed at the Vaudeville Club in London. Everyone present joined that same evening, and queued to pay the subscription of two shillings and sixpence. Tom and Kitty were Founder Members Numbers 97 and 98; my sister Pat still has our father’s white-and-green membership badge. I cannot recall, however, mentioning to the Huntingdonshire Conservative selection committee that my father was a pioneer trade unionist.

By 1914 Tom and Kitty were running a successful touring company. Tom had developed a heart condition which disqualified him from active service in the First World War, but they continued to appear on stage, their entertainments doubling as recruiting drives. My family still has an autograph book in which Tom collected the signatures of soldiers in the audience who had been decorated for their valour.

The end of the war saw the music-hall business return to normal. Throughout 1920 and 1921 Tom and Kitty travelled Britain, never stopping anywhere for more than a month, performing sketches and revues such as ‘Stop Press’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘After the Overture’.

And now, as I found out to my astonishment while researching this book, a surprise half-sister joins the family troupe. At about this time my father had an affair with one Alice Maude Frankland. She became pregnant, and a daughter, Kathleen, my father’s second child, was born in October 1923. Alice soon disappeared from the scene, but Tom and Kitty adopted Kathleen just a month after her birth. While they criss-crossed the country with their shows, the baby was boarded with a foster-couple. In about 1927 or 1928, they decided to bring her home. ‘The Majors want to take Kath away,’ her foster-parents were told – a heartbreaking moment. Sense prevailed, and Kathleen stayed where she was, though my father continued to provide financial support.

I have yet to reach 1930 in my family’s story, and already we have stumbled across an unrelated ‘uncle’, a wayward father, illiteracy, adultery, remarriage and two previously unknown half-siblings. Childhood memories have left me with a rock-solid respect for the traditional basics of family life and family duty; but if, unlike some Conservative colleagues and supporters, I have always taken with a pinch of salt the myth of a past golden age of conventional families, splendid education and national virtue, then I, and millions of my compatriots, have reason to. Life in Britain has never been simple, and never will be.

Kathleen was not to enter my life until after I had left Downing Street. Although she always knew of my family, I was not aware of her, and she was startled when in 1990 her half-brother became prime minister. She could have sold her story to the press for a small fortune. Instead, she kept the secret. Only after the 1997 general election did I learn that I had a half-sister, alive, well and living in England.

It was lucky for young Kathleen that she stayed with her foster-family, for a catastrophe would soon cost Kitty her life. While she was rehearsing on stage, a steel girder from the safety curtain came loose, fell, and struck her on the head. She was terribly injured, and though she lingered on for months with her mind impaired, she died in June 1928, perhaps mercifully for so vibrant a woman, and was buried at Prees Cemetery in Shropshire. Kitty and my father had been together for over twenty-five years. When she died my father was deluged with sympathetic letters, from everyone from theatre managers to call-boys. She was much loved.

After the accident Kitty had been comforted and nursed by a young dancer who had joined my father’s show six years earlier, at the age of seventeen. She was one half of ‘Glade and Glen’, a speciality act – and a cheeky, teasing, self-willed girl, often in trouble for misbehaviour and pranks. But she charmed her way out of every scrape, and had been a favourite of Kitty’s. A year after Kitty’s death, she married her boss, Tom, twenty-six years her senior, and cared for him for the rest of his life. Her name was Gwen, and she was my mother.

Gwen’s past held surprises for me, too. In 1991, one of my constituents with an interest in family history wrote a letter to me in which he suggested that I might have shared more than my job with Margaret Thatcher. My mother’s family had roots in the Boston district of Lincolnshire, not far from Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, and research suggests that it is likely – though not certain – that through my mother Margaret Thatcher and I have common ancestors in eighteenth-century Lincolnshire.

As the 1920s ended and music halls gave way to cinemas, my father left show business. It was the right decision, for his profession was dying, but it must have hurt. His 1929 marriage certificate shows his occupation as ‘builder’, but I have no reason to believe he ever was one – though he may have financed the building of bungalows. Certainly he was soon in a different trade, modelling animals and garden ornaments. My parents moved from Shropshire to a bungalow in Worcester Park, and children soon came along. A son, Thomas Aston, was born in 1929, but sadly lived only a few days. Then came Pat, born in 1930, and Terry, in 1932.

In the course of his life, my father once told me, he had made and lost fortunes several times over. What he meant by a fortune I don’t know, but for him the 1930s were good times. He became the first car-owner in the area; Pat and Terry were sent to fee-paying schools; and my mother had domestic help while she worked to build up my father’s business. All this changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. My father was sixty. His workforce joined the services and, as he had foreseen, the market for his ornaments collapsed. The car went. Pat and Terry were withdrawn from their private schools. Pat, the more academic of the two, won a scholarship to Nonsuch Grammar School for Girls, but Terry went to the local state school. My father became a Senior Air Raid Warden, and my mother began work in the local library, supplementing the family income by giving dancing lessons at home.

She had hoped for another child, but did not expect one. In late 1942 she began to suffer persistent heartburn and went to her doctor, a salty-tongued medic with a sharp bedside manner. ‘Don’t be bloody silly, woman,’ he boomed at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’ It was not an easy pregnancy, and my birth was dramatic. My mother collapsed in the kitchen with double pneumonia and pleurisy, and was rushed to St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, where she nearly died. I was born a few hours later, on 29 March 1943. Within days I, too, was perilously ill with a virulent infection. I only just survived, and to this day bear scarred ankles from the many blood transfusions.

My mother returned to her job in the library, taking me with her in my pram. When a German flying bomb landed in a nearby street, it killed ten people and shattered hundreds of windows. Glass splinters fell into my cot which, mercifully, was empty. Forty-seven years later I was to hear the sound of breaking glass when the IRA launched a mortar at Downing Street. For my mother, the flying bomb was too much. The family moved to Saham Toney in Norfolk for the rest of the war, returning to Worcester Park in 1945.

My first memories are of a small bungalow with four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Our garden was long and narrow, dotted with sheds in which my father worked. We had a lawn just large enough for ball games, and two ponds: one shallow with a few goldfish, the other a deep iron tank sunk into the ground. There were rockeries, fruit trees to plunder and larger trees to climb.

Money, though, was an irregular commodity. Mostly we were comfortable but not well-off. Our neighbours were friendly and we were relaxed and at ease in our community, but I soon realised my parents were more exotic than those of my friends. For a start they were much older – when I was born my father was nearly sixty-four and my mother a few weeks short of thirty-eight. Gwen, clad in straight-up-and-down 1930s sports garb, raised eyebrows even from friendly neighbours by exercising and throwing her Indian clubs in the garden. My father, in the early days, could be spotted with his batons, as could Pat, doing acrobatics. When I think of this scene, I’m reminded of the families of circus performers described by Dickens in Hard Times:

The father of one of the families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often made a pyramid of both those fathers … all the fathers could dance upon rolling casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins, ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing. All the mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight rope, and perform rapid acts on barebacked steeds; none of them were at all particular in respect of showing their legs …

They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving, often of as much respect, and always as much generous construction, as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world.

I remember my father as a stern old man, but kind. My mother idolised him and cared for him in every way. She must have known of his earlier dalliances, but nothing was ever said, at least not in our hearing. Our father’s word was law, and he never had to raise his voice to keep order. In his prime he had been a truly striking figure, ‘a great and stylish Edwardian actor,’ one biographer of mine has written, ‘over six feet tall, athletic in build and expansive in his gestures.’ Now ill and prematurely aged, he was still master in his house.

But it was my mother who brought up the family and ran the home. My father made the decisions. She carried them out. She was a Peter Pan figure who never quite grew up. The sprite of mischief was always with her. Loving and beloved, she was a magnet for lame ducks. I remember sitting at the table about to eat my lunch when a cold and hungry gypsy knocked at the door. He was invited in and my mother served him my meal, leaving me hungry. She did not ask me to do the washing up – she would not have considered that fair. But neither did she ask the gypsy to do it.

Gwen had a straightforward philosophy. Share what you’ve got. Be polite to others. Think of their feelings. Make allowances for them. Stand up for yourself but don’t cause unnecessary offence. Don’t show your own feelings. It was a simple code. She believed it and she lived it.

At the age of five I went to Cheam Common Infants’ School, which was around half a mile from our home in Longfellow Road, graduating to the Junior School in the autumn of 1950. I was taken to school at first, but it was an easy journey, and I was soon walking there and back on my own.

Sometimes I was given small amounts of pocket money on a rather haphazard basis – or earned it by doing small tasks. With this I often bought presents for my mother. My father did not approve. ‘That is not why we give him the money,’ I overheard him say to my mother. ‘Why does he do it?’ He was angry and I didn’t understand why. His view was that they had given me some of the little they had, and he did not think I should spend it on them. But I often did. I liked giving presents and my mother loved receiving them.

I liked receiving presents too, and except for one occasion when there was no money, Christmas and birthdays always brought something. Footballs, Meccano sets, pens and pencils for school, and classic books: Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Black Arrow, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Knights of the Round Table, the Greyfriars stories – all of these and many more were favourites. Thus began my lifelong love affair with books.

Books introduced me to a world I’d never known, and people I would never meet. My parents encouraged me to read, although my father was too active and physical a man to be a great reader himself. He had too much else to do. But later, after he began to lose his sight, he derived great pleasure from the ‘talking books’ sent to him by the Nuffield Centre for the Blind, which came in large pouches and were fragile records like the old 78s of the time. They kept introspection at bay when his dreams crumbled. I would sit with him and listen to them for hour upon hour. We often talked of books. The authors he remembered from his youth were Rider Haggard, Jack London and Arthur Conan Doyle – and not only, he said, for the Sherlock Holmes stories.

‘Have you ever read The White Company?’ he asked. I hadn’t, and nor did I until the 1990s, when Stephen Wall, my Private Secretary at the Foreign Office and later at Number 10, and subsequently our Ambassador to the European Union, gave me his own precious copy.

My mother didn’t read much. She was too busy running the family, cosseting my father and helping lame ducks. I don’t think my brother Terry was much of a reader either, but I could be wrong, because he has surprised me all my life. I’m never quite sure what he’ll do next – and neither, I suspect, is he. He seems to enjoy allowing the world to underestimate him while he chuckles at it.

My sister Pat did read – a lot. Academically, she was the clever one of the family, and an astute judge of character. After I became prime minister she would phone me up and say, ‘Don’t trust him. He’s up to no good.’ She was almost always right.

For me, books were an escape and an education. Some became lifelong friends. Fame is the Spur, A Horseman Riding By, How Green was my Valley, Trollope – Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux were never far from hand. Biographies and histories joined Agatha Christie, Neville Cardus, Thomas Costain and many more, not forgetting Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne. I loved Jane Austen and Dickens – especially The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

I learned that there is as much to be learned from durable, well-written bestsellers as from more serious offerings. For me, these books were more than mere entertainment. They became companions and tutors, cherished friends to be picked up again and again, the true furniture of the mind. I did try more heavyweight reading when I began studying in my late teens. I read Kafka and Voltaire, Spinoza on ethics and Aristotle on politics. I even read Nietzsche, to try to see why his writings had become textbooks of the Nazis. I dipped into Colette, Hardy and Voltaire, and added them to my collection. Most of these books remain on my shelves today.

I can remember none of my friends from primary school, but I cannot have been unpopular for I was elected captain of the football team. We won most of our games and were good enough to reach the final of a local schools’ knockout competition, but lost 2–1 after I gave away a silly goal. I was inconsolable. I also learned to play cricket. Once I was given out lbw first ball, when I knew I had hit the ball smack in the middle of the bat. ‘But I hit it,’ I protested, confident that my explanation would persuade the umpire to put right his mistaken decision. It didn’t. ‘You’re out,’ he said, waving his hand in dismissal. ‘Now off you go.’ It was the first time I realised that adults were fallible and that, if on shaky ground, they could become even more assertive than if they were right.

I had a few fights at school, mostly with boys who were throwing their weight around, and it led to trouble. I was winning one when a teacher dragged me away from the scrap, slapping me painfully around my head and shoulders and visibly losing his self-control. I was contemptuous of him from then on. I thought he was unjust. But I wasn’t a natural troublemaker. I worked quite hard and was as keen to please as most small boys. When we were asked to produce a painting for an exhibition I misunderstood and took in one that my elder sister, Pat, an excellent artist, had painted. I was mortified to overhear a teacher saying I had brought in a painting, but ‘his sister did it’. I felt like a cheat and slunk away.

At home I had pets. I bred mice and sold them to friends, with a slice of fruitcake thrown in as an inducement to buy. My white doe angora rabbit, Frisky, was given an assignation with a blue bevan buck rabbit owned by a friend. We watched and waited with interest, and were not disappointed. A litter was produced, though not all survived. We had a dog, too, a white bull terrier called Butch. He was a wonderful companion and curled up on my bed each night, before returning to the lounge as soon as he thought I was asleep.

I pause, writing this. Everyone must have such stories from childhood. But perhaps it is worth illustrating that prime ministers are no different. From the pages of some politicians’ memoirs the statesman seems to spring perfectly formed, almost from the cot, without all the trivial things that matter so much to a child. But some of the memories which writing this has brought back are every bit as strong and as moving to me as the headlines about my life which were to come.