Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

My father’s position as a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, then alderman* and finally, in 1945–46, mayor meant that I heard a great deal about the town’s business and knew those involved in it. Politics was a matter of civic duty and party was of secondary importance. The Labour councillors we knew were respected and, whatever the battles in the council chamber or at election time, they came to our shop and there was no partisan bitterness. My father understood that politics has limits – an insight which is all too rare among politicians. His politics would perhaps be best described as ‘old-fashioned liberal’. Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion. He was an admirer of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Like many other business people he had, as it were, been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism. He stood for the council as a ratepayer’s candidate. In those days, before comprehensive schools became an issue and before the general advance of Labour politics into local government, local council work was considered as properly non-partisan. But I never remember him as anything other than a staunch Conservative.

I still recall with great sorrow the day in 1952 when Labour, having won the council elections, voted my father out as an alderman. This was roundly condemned at the time for putting party above community. Nor can I forget the dignity with which he behaved. After the vote in the council chamber was taken, he rose to speak: ‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour they are laid down.’ And later, after receiving hundreds of messages from friends, allies and even old opponents, he issued a statement which said: ‘Although I have toppled over I have fallen on my feet. My own feeling is that I was content to be in and I am content to be out.’ Years later, when something not too dissimilar happened to me, after my father was long dead, I tried to take as an example the way he left public life.

But this is to anticipate. Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs. We read the Daily Telegraph every day, The Methodist Recorder, Picture Post and John O’London’s Weekly every week, and when we were small we took The Children’s Newspaper. Occasionally we read The Times.

And then came the day my father bought our first wireless – a Philips of the kind you sometimes now see in the less pretentious antique shops. I knew what he was planning and ran much of the way home from school in my excitement. I was not disappointed. It changed our lives. From then on it was not just Rotary, church and shop which provided the rhythm of our day: it was the radio news. And not just the news. During the war after the 9 o’clock news on Sundays there was Postscript, a short talk on a topical subject, often by J.B. Priestley, who had a unique gift of cloaking left-wing views as solid, down-to-earth, Northern homespun philosophy, and sometimes an American journalist called Quentin Reynolds who derisively referred to Hitler by one of his family names, ‘Mr Schicklgruber’. There was The Brains Trust, an hour-long discussion of current affairs by four intellectuals, of whom the most famous was Professor C.E.M. Joad, whose answer to any question always began ‘It all depends what you mean by …’ On Friday evenings there were commentaries by people like Norman Birkett in the series called Encounter. I loved the comedy ITMA with its still serviceable catchphrases and its cast of characters like the gloomy charlady ‘Mona Lott’ and her signature line ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’

As for so many families, the unprecedented immediacy of radio broadcasts gave special poignancy to great events – particularly those of wartime. I recall sitting by our radio with my family at Christmas dinner and listening to the King’s broadcast in 1939. We knew how he struggled to overcome his speech impediment and we knew that the broadcast was live. I found myself thinking just how miserable he must have felt, not able to enjoy his own Christmas dinner, knowing that he would have to broadcast. I remember his slow voice reciting those famous lines:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’

And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’*

I was almost fourteen by the time war broke out, and already informed enough to understand the background to it and to follow closely the great events of the next six years. My grasp of what was happening in the political world during the thirties was less sure. But certain things I did take in. The years of the Depression – the first but not the last economic catastrophe resulting from misguided monetary policy – had less effect on Grantham itself than on the surrounding agricultural communities, and of course much less than on Northern towns dependent on heavy industry. Most of the town’s factories kept going – the largest, Ruston and Hornsby, making locomotives and steam engines. We even attracted new investment, partly through my father’s efforts: Aveling-Barford built a factory to make steamrollers and tractors. Our family business was also secure: people always have to eat, and our shops were well run. The real distinction in the town was between those who drew salaries for what today would be called ‘white collar’ employment and those who did not, with the latter being in a far more precarious position as jobs became harder to get. On my way to school I would pass a long queue waiting at the Labour Exchange, seeking work or claiming the dole. We were lucky in that none of our closest friends was unemployed, but we knew people who were. We also knew – and I have never forgotten – how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together. Looking back, I realize just what a decent place Grantham was.

So I did not grow up with the sense of division and conflict between classes. Even in the Depression there were many things which bound us all together. The monarchy was certainly one. And my family like most others was immensely proud of the Empire. We felt that it had brought law, good administration and order to lands which would never otherwise have known them. I had a romantic fascination for out-of-the-way countries and continents and what benefits we British could bring to them. As a child, I heard with wonder a Methodist missionary describing his work in Central America with a tribe so primitive that they had never written down their language until he did it for them. Later, I seriously considered going into the Indian Civil Service, for to me the Indian Empire represented one of Britain’s greatest achievements. (I had no interest in being a civil servant in Britain.) But my father said, all too perceptively as it turned out, that by the time I was ready to join it the Indian Civil Service would probably not exist.

As for the international scene, I recall when I was very young my parents expressing unease about the weakness of the League of Nations and its failure to come to the aid of Abyssinia when Italy invaded it in 1935. We had a deep distrust of the dictators.

We did not know much about the ideology of communism and fascism at this time. But, unlike many conservative-minded people, my father was fierce in rejecting the argument that fascist regimes had to be backed as the only way to defeat communists. He believed that the free society was the better alternative to both. This too was a conviction I quickly made my own. Well before war was declared, we knew just what we thought of Hitler. On the cinema newsreels I would watch with distaste and incomprehension the rallies of strutting brownshirts, so different from the gentle self-regulation of our own civic life. We also read a good deal about the barbarities and absurdities of the Nazi regime.

But none of this meant, of course, that we viewed war with the dictators as anything other than an appalling prospect, which should be avoided if possible. In our attic there was a trunk full of magazines showing, among other things, the famous picture from the Great War of a line of British soldiers blinded by mustard gas walking to the dressing station, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front to guide him. Hoping for the best, we prepared for the worst. As early as September 1938 – the time of Munich – my mother and I went out to buy yards of blackout material. My father was heavily involved in organizing the town’s air raid precautions. As he would later say, ‘ARP’ stood for ‘Alf Roberts’ Purgatory’, because it was taking up so much time that he had none to spare for other things.

The most pervasive myth about the thirties is perhaps that it was the Right rather than the Left which most enthusiastically favoured appeasement. Not just from my own experience in a highly political right-wing family, but from my recollection of how Labour actually voted against conscription even after the Germans marched into Prague, I have never been prepared to swallow this. But it is important to remember that the atmosphere of the time was so strongly pacifist that the practical political options were limited.

The scale of the problem was demonstrated in the general election of 1935 – the contest in which I cut my teeth politically, at the age of ten. It will already be clear that we were a highly political family. And for all the serious sense of duty which underlay it, politics was fun. I was too young to canvass for my father during council elections, but I was put to work folding the bright red election leaflets extolling the merits of the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender. The red came off on my sticky fingers and someone said, ‘There’s Lady Warrender’s lipstick.’ I had no doubt at all about the importance of seeing Sir Victor returned. On election day itself, I was charged with the responsible task of running back and forth between the Conservative committee room and the polling station (our school) with information about who had voted. Our candidate won, though with a majority down from 16,000 to 6,000.

I did not grasp at the time the arguments about rearmament and the League of Nations, but this was a very tough election, fought in the teeth of opposition from the enthusiasts of the Peace Ballot and with the Abyssinian war in the background. Later, in my teens, I used to have fierce arguments with other Conservatives about whether Baldwin had culpably misled the electorate during the campaign in not telling them the dangers the country faced. In fact, had the National Government not been returned at that election there is no possibility that rearmament would have happened faster, and it is very likely that Labour would have done less. Nor could the League have ever prevented a major war.

We had mixed feelings about the Munich Agreement of September 1938, as did many people. At the time, it was impossible not to be pulled in two directions. We knew by now a good deal about Hitler’s regime and probable intentions – something brought home to my family by the fact that Hitler had crushed Rotary in Germany, which my father always considered one of the greatest tributes Rotary could ever be paid. Dictators, we learned, could no more tolerate Burke’s ‘little platoons’ – the voluntary bodies which help make up civil society – than they could individual rights under the law. Dr Jauch, of German extraction and probably the town’s best doctor, received a lot of information from Germany which he passed on to my father, and he in turn discussed it with me.

I knew just what I thought of Hitler. Near our house was a fish and chip shop where I was sent to buy our Friday evening meal. Fish and chip queues were always a good forum for debate. On one occasion the topic was Hitler. Someone suggested that at least he had given Germany some self-respect and made the trains run on time. I vigorously argued the opposite, to the astonishment and doubtless irritation of my elders. The woman who ran the shop laughed and said: ‘Oh, she’s always debating.’

My family understood clearly Hitler’s brutal treatment of the Jews. At school we were encouraged to have foreign penfriends. Mine was a French girl called Colette: alas, I did not keep up contact with her. But my sister, Muriel, had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Edith’s father, a banker, wrote to mine asking whether we could take his daughter, since he very clearly foresaw the way events were leading. We had neither the time nor the money to accept such a responsibility alone; but my father won the support of the Grantham Rotarians, and Edith came to stay with each of our families in turn until she went to live with relatives in South America. She was seventeen, tall, beautiful, well-dressed, and spoke good English. She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.

We wanted to see Hitler’s wickedness ended, even by war if that proved necessary. From that point of view Munich was nothing to be proud of. We knew too that by the Munich Agreement Britain had complicity in the great wrong that had been done to Czechoslovakia. When fifty years later as Prime Minister I visited Czechoslovakia I addressed the Federal Assembly in Prague and told them: ‘We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence. Churchill was quick to repudiate the Munich Agreement, but we still remember it with shame.’ British foreign policy is at its worst when it is engaged in giving away other people’s territory.

But equally we all understood the lamentable state of unpreparedness in Britain and France to fight a major war. Also, unfortunately, some were taken in by the German propaganda and actually believed that Hitler was acting to defend the Sudeten Germans from Czech oppression. If we had gone to war at that point, moreover, we would not have been supported by all of the Dominions. It was the Germans’ subsequent dismemberment of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that finally convinced almost everyone that war would soon be necessary to defeat Hitler’s ambitions. Even then, as I have pointed out, Labour voted against conscription the following month. There was strong anti-war feeling in Grantham too: many Methodists opposed the official recruiting campaign of May 1939, and right up to the outbreak of war and beyond pacifists were addressing meetings in the town.

In any case, the conflict was soon upon us. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. When Hitler refused to withdraw by 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September in accordance with Britain’s ultimatum we were waiting by the radio, desperate for the news. It was the only Sunday in my youth when I can remember not attending church. Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words, relayed live from the Cabinet Room at No. 10, told us that we were at war.

It was natural at such times to ask oneself how we had come to such a pass. Each week my father would take two books out of the library, a ‘serious’ book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read. I soon knew what I liked – anything about politics and international affairs. I read, for instance, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, which had first appeared in 1932. The contents of this fashionable communist analysis, which predicted that capitalism was shortly to be superseded by socialism, seemed to many of my generation exciting and new.

But both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay. Such an admission is probably unfashionable. But though I had great friends in politics who suffered from attacks of doubt about where they stood and why, and though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind. I can see now that I was probably unusual. For the Left were setting the political agenda throughout the thirties and forties, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of the war itself. This was evident from many of the books which were published at about this time. The Left had been highly successful in tarring the Right with appeasement, most notably in Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, the so-called ‘yellow books’. One in particular had enormous impact: Guilty Men, co-authored by Michael Foot, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ after Dunkirk in 1940.

Robert Bruce Lockhart’s best-selling Guns or Butter? appeared in the autumn of 1938, after Munich. Lockhart’s travels through Europe led him to Austria (now Nazi-controlled) and then to Germany itself at the height of Hitler’s triumph. There the editor of a German national newspaper is reported as telling him that ‘Germany wanted peace, but she wanted it on her own terms.’ The book ends with Lockhart, woken by ‘the tramp of two thousand feet in unison’, looking out of his window onto a misty dawn, where ‘Nazi Germany was already at work’.

A more original variation on the same theme was Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair. This made a deep impression on me. Reed witnessed the persecution of the Jews which accompanied the advance of Nazi influence. He described the character and mentality – alternately perverted, unbalanced and calculating – of the Nazi leaders. He analysed and blisteringly denounced that policy of appeasement by Britain and France which paved the way for Hitler’s successes. Written on the eve of the Anschluss, it was powerfully prophetic.

Out of the Night by Jan Valtin – pen name for the German communist Richard Krebs – was lent to my father by our future MP Denis Kendall. It was such strong meat that my father forbade me to read it – but when he went out to meetings I would take it down and read its spine-chilling account of totalitarianism in action. It is full of scenes of sadistic violence whose authenticity makes them still more horrifying. The appalling treatment by the Nazis of their victims is undoubtedly the most powerful theme. But underlying it is another, just as significant. For it describes how the communists set out in cynical alliance with the Nazis to subvert the fragile democracy of Germany by violence in the late twenties and early thirties. That same alliance against democracy would, of course, be replicated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to 1941 which destroyed Poland, the Baltic States and Finland and plunged the world into war. The book undoubtedly contributed to my growing belief that Nazism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.

A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a powerful analysis of how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to western liberal democratic values and – though I liked this less – a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar’s book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other – doubtless important – stuff of power politics.

Agar also wrote of the need, as part of the moral regeneration which must flow from fighting the war, to solve what he called ‘the Negro problem’. I had never heard of this ‘problem’ at all. Although I had seen some coloured people on my visit to London, there were almost none living in Grantham. Friends of ours once invited two American servicemen – one black, one white – stationed in Grantham back to tea and had been astonished to detect tension and even hostility between them. We were equally taken aback when our friends told us about it afterwards. This sort of prejudice was simply outside our experience or imagination.

Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cartland’s Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. It was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was ‘all of a piece’, something which I always admired. But the sense that the war had a moral significance which underlay the fear and suffering – or in our family’s case in Grantham the material dreariness and mild deprivation – which accompanied it, was perhaps most memorably conveyed by Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy. The author – a young pilot – portrays the struggle which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, and which would claim his own less than a year later, as one which was also being fought out in the human heart. It was a struggle for a better life in the sense of simple decency.

A generation which, unlike Richard Hillary, survived the war felt this kind of desire to put things right with themselves, their country and the world. As I would come to learn when dealing with my older political colleagues, no one who fought came out of it quite the same person as went in. Less frequently understood, perhaps, is that war affected deeply people like me who, while old enough to understand what was happening in the conflict, were not themselves in the services. But we all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different. It never seemed to me, for example, as it apparently did to many others, that the ‘lesson’ of wartime was that the state must take the foremost position in our national life and summon up a spirit of collective endeavour in peace as in war.

The ‘lessons’ I drew were quite different. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed, Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilization had constantly to be nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. And, finally, I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.

Our life in wartime Grantham – until I went up to Oxford in 1943 – must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But there were twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory – the British Manufacturing and Research Company (BMAR Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) – was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line – the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter – we had no outside shelter for we had no garden – until the ‘all clear’ sounded. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.