God and Mrs Thatcher (3 page)

I
T IS NECESSARY
for all modern political leaders to construct a personal narrative. Their journeys must be enlightening tales demonstrating their sound character, verifying their populist credentials and making them flesh in the public mind. The result is often a series of self-conscious, politically motivated, dewy-eyed reminiscences, which often do little more than provide material for satirists.
Margaret Thatcher's tales of growing up in Grantham were different. She paraded the family's humble origins and upbringing more than any other modern politician. The parable of the young Margaret schooled in the principles of the market in the family grocery shop in Grantham became central to Iron Lady mythology. ‘I had precious little privilege in my early years,' she would declare, in a calculated swipe at the gentlemen squires that dominated her party and the champagne socialists that filled the Labour benches.
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Her predecessor, Edward Heath, was actually from lower stock – the son of a carpenter and a maid from Broadstairs in Kent – but few voters knew it. Heath never hid his heritage, but he never traded on it either. Few could say that about Margaret Thatcher.
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In fact, Thatcher rarely referred to her Grantham beginnings until her bid for the Conservative leadership in 1975 when, in a radio interview just before the first ballot, she marked out her provincial roots and class credentials as key to understanding her political values:

What began as a simple rebranding exercise to alter the public perception of Margaret Thatcher as a privileged millionaire's wife would later come to serve as the moral foundations for the reformulation of the Conservative Party under her leadership. Out went the Disraelian ethos of ‘one nation' and in came the shopkeeper's ethic of ‘getting on'.

Thatcher's purposeful reminiscences supposedly harked back to a time when the community governed rather than the state, when free enterprise and personal responsibility reigned and when the church (in her case the Methodist chapel) was the focal point of town life and the
fountain of moral guidance. She weaved the historical with the personal in what amounted to a seemingly naive but damning critique of Britain's record since 1945. Her recollections were a conscious exercise in historical revisionism, a narrative that challenged the deeply entrenched view that the pre-welfare age was a blot on the nation's conscience; far from it, according to Thatcher, it was a time when hard work, pride and patriotism prevailed. In the 1960s, at the height of modernist optimism and Prime Minister Harold Wilson's ‘White Heat' technological revolution, Thatcher's quaint provincial tales would have been laughed out of the conference hall. But in the hazy and chaotic years of the mid-1970s, they touched a nerve. Hers was, of course, a highly edited narrative for obvious reasons: the grocer's daughter rather than the millionaire's wife suited the austere times of 1970s Britain. From the moment Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, Grantham was routinely referenced as a worthy guide for a nation in crisis.

Thatcher's evocation of her early years was so deliberately political that it is easy to dismiss it all as pure spin. And yet, as the local archives reveal, Margaret Thatcher's account of Grantham was not too distant from the reality; although it was not always as benign or as simple as she liked to claim. Understanding Grantham, however, is key to understanding Thatcher; not only the religious and political values to which she subscribed but also crucial to explaining some of the naivety and short-sightedness in her political thinking.

As a former minister and one of Thatcher's loyal lieutenants, Lord Parkinson, made clear: ‘It all goes back to Grantham. Grantham was the essence of Thatcherism.'
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GRANTHAM, A SMALL
town in the heart of the East Midlands, has always been a stop-off point en route to somewhere more exciting.
Today, its buildings are uncomfortably meshed together and act as layered sediments of centuries of social and economic change.
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There is medieval Grantham with its quaint alms-houses and timberframed thatched-roof pubs that are dwarfed by St Wulfram's Church, whose steeple still dominates the skyline. There is also Georgian Grantham; no sweeping circular crescents like that of Bath or Bristol, just a few rows of houses in perfect symmetry, which still house the town's professionals. The dominant architectural style is Victorian, reflective of the fact that in the nineteenth century Grantham developed into an important engineering centre and railway depot. But there are no vast factories or affiliated culture of working men's clubs as in the industrial north, only endless rows of small terraced houses designed for Grantham's workers. All roads lead to the main square with its faux-grand town hall honouring the moment in 1835 when Grantham assumed charge of its own governance. There are signs too of Margaret Thatcher's inter-war childhood: the bustling high street and those ‘palaces of escapism', the (now redundant) cinemas. Finally, there is post-war Grantham with its brutalist maze-like shopping centre and municipal post-office, which is awkwardly plonked on the edge of the square. Today, with Woolworths and Marks & Spencer gone, it is pound shops and charity shops that dominate, with the largest employer the local hospital and the mammoth supermarket warehouses situated on the fringes of town.

With a population of approximately 20,000, Grantham between the wars was a medium-sized place run by the local borough council, then in the hands of the small businessmen: the brewers, tradespeople, manufacturers and shopkeepers such as Margaret Thatcher's father, Alfred Roberts. On the periphery were the working class, a mixture of agricultural, railway and industrial workers. The nobility's influence, although fading, still lingered with Lord Brownlow, the local grandee of the nearby Belton estate. Brownlow served once as mayor and served as Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire between 1936 and 1950, but was clearly content to leave the day-to-day governing to Grantham's petite bourgeoisie.

Grantham did not escape the Depression although in her memoirs Margaret Thatcher offered a somewhat sanitised description of the queues outside Grantham's labour exchange, remarking ‘how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were', which in her view was evidence of the ‘spirit of self-reliance and independence … in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns.'
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Importantly though, Grantham was no Stockton-on-Tees, where widespread unemployment and poverty in that deprived part of the north-east would compel the local MP, Harold Macmillan, to pen
The Middle
Way in 1938: the founding tract of twentieth-century One-nation Conservatism. The 1930s Hunger Marchers only travelled through Grantham, they did not originate from there. The Depression was a defining moment for the ruling class, which swung the political barometer firmly in favour of statist solutions, but as Thatcher later remarked in her memoirs: ‘Things look different from the perspective of Grantham than from that of Stockton.
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It was true, they did.

Alfred Roberts, a working-class man whose family had been in the shoe-making trade, had arrived in Grantham via Northamptonshire in 1913. Over the course of three decades, he would go from grocer's apprentice to owner of two shops and mayor of the town. Roberts immersed himself in Grantham's social, religious and political life in his multiple roles as lay-preacher at Finkin Street Methodist Church, trustee of Grantham Savings Bank, governor at the local school, president of the Chamber of Trade and the Rotary Club, as well as alderman on Grantham's borough council. In Margaret Thatcher's eyes, he was the embodiment of individual aspiration and social responsibility, but he was no exception. In these days of genuine local autonomy, men like Alfred Roberts not only felt a social and religious expectation but also enjoyed genuine power and prestige. Her mother, Beatrice, in contrast, is a lightly sketched figure in the Grantham parable. Thatcher once remarked that ‘at fifteen we had nothing more to say to each other'. Speaking in 1985, Margaret Thatcher likened her mother to
Martha in St Luke's Gospel. In the story, Mary dutifully sits and listens intently at the feet of Jesus while Martha is preoccupied with household chores. The biblical comparison is an unfavourable one and suggests that Margaret considered her mother, like Martha, a woman with the wrong set of priorities.

Margaret was born above the shop on the 13 October 1925, four years after the Robertses' first child, Muriel. Thatcher once compared living in the No. 10 flat to living above the shop, for ‘you are always on duty'. In one sense she was right; being a grocer did mean unsociable hours. The shop was open until 7 p.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. on a Saturday, although it was closed on the Sabbath. More importantly, as one of Thatcher's biographers has noted, the grocer was the centre point of trade at its most basic level, the intermediary between the market and the home.
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The small grocer was king in the inter-war period. Supermarket chains had not yet achieved their dominance, while the expansion of the high street and a rise in disposable incomes precipitated an increase in independent shopkeepers from 275,000 in 1911 to 362,000 by 1931. The establishment of the National Federation of Grocers' Associations in this period reflected the independent grocers' strength but also a desire to protect their interests against the emerging threat of the Co-op and chains such as J. Sainsbury, which even in the 1930s took 30 per cent of all sales. The grocery business was more than just a profitable trade, for during the ‘hungry thirties' food inevitably became a politically potent issue, especially as women – traditional regulators of the household budget – now had the vote. As the political class clashed over whether protectionism and imperial preference was the solution to Britain's economic woes, so consumer behaviour assumed ever-greater importance. The Empire Marketing Board, established in 1926, urged consumers to buy only imperial goods: an initiative that was adopted sporadically in Grantham. Under such circumstances, Alfred Roberts must have felt the threat of competition and political pressures on his
business, but it was equally possible that, in his role behind the counter, he felt that he was dutifully serving the nation and the empire too.

Whereas Grantham's working class would have shopped at the nearby Co-op, Alfred Roberts's store catered for a distinctly middle-class clientele. The fact that Roberts's shop also had a sub-post office, however, meant that the working-class residents would stop by to collect their pension, unemployment benefit or deposit money into their savings accounts. This did not make Roberts's shop an off-shoot of the state, but did mean that the heterogeneous mix of Grantham society would come through its door, all assured of their place and defined by which part they used. As one Grantham resident, Vic Hutchinson, has recalled:

During the Depression, though, it is highly likely that the Co-op store posed a threat to Roberts's business. Situated not far from his shop on St Catherine's Road, it offered cheaper priced goods and the additional incentive of the ‘divi'. Queuing for the dividend was an annual event for Grantham's working-class residents as it was for the other four million Co-op members of Britain. Redistribution through consumption had been its founding principle; however, in practice, this meant taking business away from private small shop-owners. It is little wonder that Alfred Roberts and other tradesmen in Grantham viewed the Co-op's arrival with even greater suspicion than the local Labour Party.

Margaret Thatcher later claimed that she had ‘little privilege' in her childhood, but this was down to her parents' thrifty values, rather than a lack of money. Funds were made available for things deemed
worthwhile, such as Latin or piano lessons, while birthday gifts and pocket money were invested in saving stamps. The Robertses purchased their first radio set in 1935 (relatively late for an inter-war household) and their first car (second hand) just after Margaret left for university in 1942. If thrift was considered a virtue, then debt was the ultimate vice. In a presidential speech to Grantham's Rotary Club in 1936, Roberts spoke of the ‘manacles of debt' as the ‘curse of mankind' and, as bank trustee, publicly pledged to ‘get Grantham saving'.
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From the archives, it is striking how often debt is a recurring theme in Alfred Roberts's dealings, whether it be balancing the council budget or maintaining the church finances.