God and Mrs Thatcher (11 page)

While Margaret Roberts cast Marxism as a foreign and abstract materialist creed, her claim was that One-nation Conservatism aspired to something higher: the moral law of Christianity.
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In this, Margaret Roberts was mirroring arguments that Quintin Hogg, her future Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham and then MP for Oxford, had recently set out in his
The Case For Conservatism.
Intriguingly, though, Margaret Roberts articulated a more libertarian vision of Conservatism when canvassing at an event in Erith, Kent, in 1950. Drawing on the words of her father and echoing sentiments of Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom,
which she had read while at Oxford, she criticised socialism not from a One-nation perspective as a threat to a harmonious
social order but as a threat to individual liberty. According to the
Erith Observer
: ‘Recalling what her father had said about the bird in the cage, Miss Roberts concluded: “It has social security. It has food and it has warmth, and so on. But what is the good of all that if it has not the freedom to fly out and live its own life?”’
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Here we have both Margaret Roberts ‘the paternalist’ and Margaret Roberts ‘the libertarian’. In this, the young candidate was in fact reflecting the ideological tensions within her party at the time.

Above all, the general elections of 1950 and 1951 revealed Margaret Roberts’s natural ability to run a campaign. ‘She was like someone who had made a vow to take up a religious life, she was so dedicated,’ remembered one Young Conservative from her Dartford days.
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If Margaret Thatcher had one natural gift as a politician, it was not in aspects of philosophy or policy, but in the congregational side of politics. The importance of this cannot be overstated and would be an area where she would later outshine her contemporaries. Much like a religious leader, she was at her best when mingling with the party faithful and converting people to the cause.

Dartford was a solid Labour seat with strong trade union support, yet Margaret Roberts proved herself adept at targeting potential voters, such as the non-unionised working class, women and, particularly, Nonconformists. During the election in 1951 she addressed the local Free Church Council, delivering a speech that tied together themes of patriotism, Christian decency and the religious calling to public service; qualities that she, reportedly a politician of ‘sound Christian convictions’, sought to personify.
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She offered some rousing words to the Dartford Congregational Church, pledging: ‘If we [do] not revive Christianity in this country it [is] not only ourselves, but the whole world that [will] suffer.’
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In the 1950s, chapels were still the main access point to the community and its votes; a fact that Margaret Roberts, more than anyone would have been conscious of. She may have also have recognised
the potential rewards of canvassing to Nonconformists, given that they were likely to be aspirational lower-middle-class voters and possibly wavering Liberals. In both elections, Margaret Roberts was unsuccessful in defeating the incumbent Labour MP, Norman Dodds, but she managed to cut his majority by a third and, more importantly, had impressed Conservative Central Office with the energy she had brought to an unwinnable seat.

‘She stood for Dartford twice and lost twice and the second time she cried on my shoulder I married her’, so said Denis Thatcher, who had first encountered his future wife at her adoption meeting for the Kent constituency. Born into an upper-middle-class family, Denis Thatcher was a son of the empire, whose father had emigrated to New Zealand in the 1870s and founded a paint and chemicals business, Atlas Preservatives. Denis had joined the family firm in 1933, serving until war broke out. He had married in 1942 but, like many wartime unions, it had ended in divorce soon after he returned home in 1948. He was a default Anglican, but, by all accounts, was not an active believer, with the war only enhancing his scepticism. He always insisted on calling clergymen by the deferential term ‘padre’, yet would deliver it with a touch of irony that hinted at underlying contempt.

In many ways, Denis Thatcher was the perfect match for Margaret Roberts, even though she herself did not immediately recognise it. They had met at the right time in their lives. At thirty-three, Denis was then considering that he should find a wife, while she was increasingly aware of the disadvantages of being a single woman of little means in politics. Yet this union was not mere expediency. Politically, of course, they shared a great deal in common, but they were from quite different spheres: he was worldly, she was provincial; he was establishment, she was Nonconformist; he was rich, she was not. Margaret Roberts’s marriage to Denis represented the final severing from her roots. This process had begun in Oxford,
continued in Essex, but was only made permanent once she was married.

The gap between Margaret’s old life and new was made blatantly apparent when it was time for her prospective husband to meet her parents. Soon after the engagement, Denis whisked his new fiancée up to Grantham in his sports car. On the way, Margaret felt compelled to tell him the bad news: ‘I think you ought to know, my parents don’t drink.’ The renowned tipple-loving Denis may have felt a compulsion to slam down on the brakes, but he drove on in silence. Passing Grantham town hall, Denis quipped, ‘I bet they’re awfully proud of that!’ Misinterpreting Denis’s irony for sincerity, Margaret gushed with pride, ‘Daddy thinks it’s wonderful.’ Denis silently cautioned himself: Watch it, Thatcher.

After introductions, Margaret told her father that her fiancée would like a drink: ‘I swear her father had to blow the dust off the South African sherry bottle,’ Denis later recalled. They didn’t stay for long, and afterwards Denis insisted that they stop off somewhere for a stiff gin.
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Pitted against her father’s strait-laced Nonconformity, Denis undoubtedly offered the prospect of a more exciting life. Yet this tension between the two central male figures in her life is crucial to understanding the mix of Roundhead and Cavalier in Margaret Thatcher’s personality – a tension that would become even more pronounced when she was Prime Minister.

The wedding took place in December 1952 at the spiritual home of Methodism, Wesley’s Chapel in the City of London. The discreet splendour of Wesley’s over Finkin Street was no contest, but the location was also further evidence of Margaret Roberts’s determination to escape her small-town roots; her sister, in contrast, had been married in Grantham. The fact that Denis was divorced may have been a factor too. Methodist guidelines published in 1948 permitted that the innocent party could be remarried in chapel but only on the personal discretion of the abiding minister. Historically, Methodists had always
dealt with divorce with a lighter touch than Anglicans (and certainly Catholics), while maintaining a firmer line on what was considered to be the true ungodly diversions: gambling and drink. It is quite possible then that the Robertses found Denis’s taste for gin more problematic than his first marriage.

The service was conducted by the minister of Wesley’s Chapel, Rev. R. V. Spivey and assisted by an old family friend of the Roberts’, Primitive Methodist and socialist, Rev. Skinner. The ceremony had been full of Margaret’s favourite music, including Handel’s ‘Water Music’ and the hymn ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us’. Alfred Roberts, according to Denis Thatcher, thought the ceremony ‘halfway to Rome’.
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The reception was held at Carlton Gardens, in the home of Thatcher’s friend, Conservative MP Alfred Bossom, who had made his fortune building skyscrapers in New York and was renowned as one of the great party-givers of his generation, particularly for his free-flowing champagne. Bossom took charge of the toast. Standing in the wings were Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, presumably raising a cup rather than a glass and possibly feeling a tad uncomfortable in the plush metropolitan surroundings and lifestyle that their daughter had so willingly embraced. This provincial girl had definitely ‘married up’ and Margaret Roberts severed, albeit temporarily, her links with her town, class and religion and adopted the life of a southern millionaire’s wife. As John Campbell has neatly surmised: ‘Grantham remained in her blood; but for the next twenty-five years she steadily suppressed it.’
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Margaret Thatcher wrote of these years: ‘To be a young married woman in those circumstances in the 1950s was heaven.’
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Indeed, Margaret Thatcher had never had it so good. It was a time for holidays on the Continent, dinners at the Ivy and a four-bedroom country house in Kent, which they had seen advertised in
Country Life.
She once said: ‘I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had.’
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Margaret Thatcher had grown
up yearning for frivolity and with Denis she got it. The Thatchers watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 under the seated covered stand in Parliament Square opposite Westminster Abbey. This was a long way from Grantham’s Dysart Park where Margaret Thatcher had last celebrated the crowning of a monarch sixteen years previously.

It is often remarked that the coronation of Queen Elizabeth symbolised the Conservative mood of the 1950s and to a degree this is true. Discontent undoubtedly bubbled under the surface but this was far away from Westminster and its impact would not truly be felt until the 1960s. Meanwhile, a sort of genial Conservatism, almost neo-traditionalism prevailed: the calm before the storm. The coronation, which was brought to the masses through the new medium of television, was a majestic and monumental display of faith in Britain’s institutional life, especially the Established Church. Archbishop Fisher (1945–61), known as the ‘headmaster archbishop’, successfully resisted pressure from modernisers, including the Duke of Edinburgh, to ensure that no fundamental changes were made to the Rite last used for George VI in 1937. The one innovation was the relaying of the event on television, but even on this Fisher imposed restrictions. The anointing – the moment when the archbishop marked a cross on the Queen’s forehead with holy oil – was concealed from the cameras with a blackout interrupting the live event. Such things were still deemed sacrosanct in 1950s Britain.

Church and state enjoyed congenial relations in this period. The Conservative administration, which was overwhelmingly Anglican in character, would hold regular consultative meetings with the bishops and, although it was sometimes an uneasy relationship, this was only because there were still expectations and responsibilities. Gambling reform was halted in its tracks in 1951 on the insistence of Archbishop Fisher and the Cabinet again ruled it out in 1959, despite pressure from progressive Tories. Fisher also thought Harold Macmillan’s infamous
‘never had it so good’ remark a ‘dreadful current phrase’ that encouraged materialism: ‘Whenever I hear it I say to myself in the words of Our Lord, “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of Heaven?”’
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R. A. Butler wondered whether the archbishop would have preferred ‘you’ve never had it so bad’.
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In this period, however, the Church of England had more pressing concerns than politics, chiefly the rebuilding churches and congregations after the damage and upheavals of war. Anglican worshipping figures quickly recovered from its wartime dip, although the recovery was not sustained enough to be called a revival. Even in these years of so-called ‘strength’, nearly half of all Britons were not regular churchgoers. The main growth area was in suburbia, following the mass migration away from the cities; but this had the effect of exacerbating the enduring problem of the middle-class bias of Anglican congregations. Despite the dedicated efforts of some urban and industrial priests, the Church’s weak presence amongst the working class was insurmountable and remained unresolved.

Anglicanism, however, did seem to be in communion with the national mood. The resurrection of Coventry Cathedral, which was eventually consecrated in 1962 with Benjamin Britten’s
War Requiem
composed especially for the occasion, was a wondrous tying of Christianity and culture and a lasting symbol of reconciliation and reconstruction in the aftermath of war. When England cricket captain David Sheppard became an ordained priest in 1955, it seemed fitting that the nation should have a man of the cross at the crease. With his Dirk Bogarde looks and muscular Christianity, Sheppard became the housewives’ pin-up and, in these days before agony aunts and horoscopes, was given his own pastoral column in
Women’s Own.

In 1954, American evangelist Billy Graham arrived for the first of his evangelical crusades to Britain. Graham received a big welcome in the UK, as he did in any state in the US, and over the course of three months preached to 1.3 million (predominantly young) Christians, in
stadiums across the country, and to many more through live relays in cinemas, concert halls and churches. The bishops’ initial cynicism was put to one side when they saw the mass crowds, with even a reluctant Archbishop Fisher consenting to give the benediction at Graham’s last crusade at Wembley Stadium. Prime Minister Churchill, who had turned down an invitation to attend the Wembley event, was so impressed that he requested Graham’s presence at Downing Street the next morning. An uncharacteristically nervous Churchill pressed his aides as Graham was due to arrive: ‘What do you talk to an American evangelist about?’
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If the 1950s was a period of stability and consolidation for the Church of England, it was not so for the Nonconformists. Chapel life had been in decline since the Edwardian period and continued on this downward trend after the Second World War. It was especially acute amongst working-class communities and specifically the young, with Sunday school attendance halving between 1939 and 1959. Methodist chapels merged while lay-preachers were taken from an ever-decreasing pool and soon the idea of full communion with the Established Church – once deemed a total anathema – began to be seriously contemplated. Like once-rival companies in a dying industry, it made sense to merge. The majority of Methodists voted in favour (despite some serious misgivings), but it was the Anglican ‘shareholders’ who rejected the deal, largely due to the vociferous opposition from Anglo-Catholics.