God and Mrs Thatcher (9 page)

‘Grantham has provided us with more inquiries and problems than any other town in the Region', ran a secret memo from Major Haylor soon after the bombing of the BMARC factory in June 1941.
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It advised that all Grantham telephone calls and post should be put under special surveillance. Why? It was not the factory that was of concern, but its owner – industrialist, playboy and suspected fascist sympathiser, William Kendall. A notorious figure in Grantham, Kendall was councillor and later MP when he successfully stood as an Independent MP against the Conservative War Coalition candidate. Kendall was a huge hit with Grantham workers, whom he won over with decent pay, parties and a morale-boosting visit by Clark Gable. He was also a close acquaintance of the Robertses. On the most dramatic day of Alfred Roberts's political career, when he was voted off the council in 1952, Kendall was the only man to speak in his defence. Kendall would also be the one to accompany Margaret Roberts on the train when she left Grantham for Oxford University in 1942.

William Kendall, who, it was said, ‘talks like Beaverbook and looks like [James] Cagney', had had a spell in the Royal Navy, been in Russia for the 1917 Revolution (‘on the side of the pretty girls' according to Kendall) and had worked at a car-manufacturing plant in Philadelphia before arriving in Grantham in 1938 as managing director of BMARC.
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MI5 had monitored him from the start of the war and had recently released files revealing his links with the fascist British
National Party and suspicions that he was supplying photographs of his factory to the Germans (the bomber which hit BMARC was found to have detailed photographs of the grounds). MI5 were also wary of Kendall's Jewish servants, Leo and Milada Borger and especially local doctor Dr Jaugh, a known Nazi-sympathiser and Rotary member, who Margaret Thatcher remembers as a ‘cold man' who used to give her father pro-Hitler literature in the mid-1930s.
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Also implicated was Lady Ursula Manners, then women's officer at the factory and a one-time girlfriend of both Lord Brownlow and Lord Beaverbrook, who was suspected of trading secrets to Kendall. Grantham was awash with rumours about spies at BMARC. The town hall was aware of the investigations, but given that Kendall reportedly used to entertain councillors with trips to Paris, they may have felt a little uneasy themselves. It was in 1942, when Alfred Roberts visited BMARC to preach a sermon to the munitions workers that Kendall suggested that he accompany his daughter, Margaret, to London to ensure that she reached the Oxford train safely.

In 1980, William Kendall wrote to Margaret Thatcher from America, where he was now living, to congratulate her on her election victory. Thatcher replied in warm tones, remarking that she indeed remembered him as an MP and ‘as a very successful industrialist'.
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Things were not always what they seemed in Grantham, nor were they always as Thatcher remembered.

In many ways, Thatcher's Grantham can be seen as a microcosm of inter-war British society with the dominant influence of the petite bourgeoisie, the diminishing input of the landed gentry and the provincial working class beginning to flex their muscles through the Co-op and the Labour Party. Grantham also reflected the changing religious make-up of Britain. The chapel was in decline but still the source of civic energy, while closer relations between all denominations symbolised the end of sectarianism but ultimately reflected the weakening hold of Christianity over the populace. Grantham's class structure was
prejudicial and undoubtedly full of tension, yet ultimately harmonious. This was a situation which would ensure that, on the national scene, Britain did not fall to fascism or communism and in a small town like Grantham, why men such as Alfred Roberts and Lord Brownlow could get along. Yet it was in a state of flux. The arrival of party politics in the town chamber, the influence of American consumer culture and post-war pledges of reconstruction challenged the dominance of the petite bourgeoisie and gave hope for a more egalitarian age. As Prime Minister, Thatcher would frequently speak of the harmony between capitalism and civil society, but in Grantham she had experienced a distinctly provincial form of capitalism and a complementary civic culture that served a clique and was built on a set of values and class structure that was under increasing threat.

Thatcher may have eulogised Grantham later in life but as a teenager she probably had a better understanding of what it really was: a dull, stifling environment one wanted to escape from. In her memoirs, she remembers looking rather enviously out of her bedroom window at the Roman Catholic Church opposite with the girls celebrating their first communion ‘dressed in white party dresses with bright ribbons, and carrying baskets of flowers'. She admitted that the Methodist look was ‘much plainer … If you wore a ribboned dress an older chapelgoer would shake his head and warn against the “first step to Rome”'.
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Clothes for the future Margaret Thatcher would be an outward expression of her delight in decadence.

There was, however, one crucial reason she escaped Grantham and hardly went back. Unlike Churchill, who had a bullying father whom he was constantly trying to please, Thatcher had a doting father whom she soon outgrew. She had lived her early years in black and white; Margaret Roberts yearned for life in Technicolor.

W
ARTIME OXFORD WAS
a far cry from the romanticism of Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited.
The City of Dreaming Spires had succumbed to the tedious practicalities of war as air-raid instructions dominated the noticeboards, the infamous commemoration balls were abandoned and courses shortened to two years. The student population was different too. Disproportionately women, there was also a mix of younger students and men whose medical condition had kept them out of the war. Margaret’s base was Somerville College, situated at the end of Woodstock Road, which unlike the Anglican college, Lady Margaret Hall, was non-denominational and
catered for grammar-school sparks just like Margaret Roberts. The girl from Grantham, however, did not initially feel at home. ‘I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment’ Thatcher later admitted.
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To use a well-worn phrase, Margaret Roberts had gone from being a big fish in a small pond (winning a place at Oxford had caused a stir in Grantham) to a small fish in a very big pond.

Intimidated by the worldliness of Oxford, Wesley’s Memorial Chapel in the centre of town initially proved a safe haven. ‘Methodism provided me with an anchor of stability and, of course, contacts and friends who looked at the world as I did.’
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Thatcher became a committed member of the University’s Wesleyan Society, attending its study groups and socials as well as preaching in nearby chapels. She was in the home of Methodism, literally following in John Wesley’s footsteps as she toured the local circuit evangelising to congregations. Nigel Gilson, who after university became a Methodist minister and would later preach at Finkin Street, describes Margaret Roberts’s faith as ‘effervescent’; she was both spiritual and inquisitive and took prayer meetings and discussion groups seriously. Another contemporary, Jean Southerst recalled one of Margaret’s sermons – ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added onto you’ – as ‘outstanding’.
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It is worth reiterating a point made by her biographer John Campbell, that ‘Mrs Thatcher was a preacher before she was a politician’.
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Where more flighty souls may have floundered, Margaret Roberts’s faith remained unchallenged by the social and intellectual temptations of Oxford: ‘I never felt in any danger of that,’ she later said.
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Nonetheless, Margaret did experiment with the city’s various spiritual offerings, attending the college chapel and the centre of intellectual Anglicanism, the University Church of St Mary, which she noted had ‘a certain official formality which [made] it a somewhat cold place of worship’.
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She also invested time in her other passion, music, joining the joint Balliol and Somerville choir, and the Bach choir.

Margaret returned to Oxford for her third year in October 1945 to find
it a completely different place. The constraints of war had been loosened, the blackouts were no more, and, with demobbed soldiers now overrunning the lecture halls and the labs, the place had an altogether freer groove. She relished her newfound freedom and indulged even more in those things that had been denied her for most of her adolescence. She had joined the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) on her arrival in Oxford, but it was not until her third year that she made her mark, firstly on the policy sub-committee, then serving as its secretary, treasurer and, finally, its president in the Michaelmas term of her fourth year. As she became more involved in OUCA, so she attended the Wesleyan Methodist chapel less and less. The boundless energy she had channelled into preaching the Word was now redirected into rallying the Tory troops.

Margaret Roberts gained a reputation within OUCA not for her right-wing convictions but for her persistence and dedication. She was admired for her willingness to canvass in those places where upper-class Tories would not have dared, such as the Morris Cowley Motor Works just outside Oxford.
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While she undoubtedly gained respect from her OUCA colleagues, it was not the case within her own college. ‘Somerville had always been a radical establishment and there weren’t many Conservatives about then,’ remembered wartime college principal Janet Vaughan. ‘We used to argue about politics; she was so set in steel as a Conservative. She just had this one line.’
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Her first political tract ‘The Basis of Conservatism’, which she co-wrote for OUCA soon after the Labour election landslide, included a nod to individual enterprise but also to the redistribution of wealth. The overriding tone, however, was one of urgency: a desire for the Conservative Party to firmly and quickly frame its response to the 1945 result. This was certainly being done by those in the higher echelons of the party, principally R. A. Butler, who, under the guise of the Advisory Committee on Policy and Political Education, had been tasked with the difficult job of formulating economic planning and social welfare in a Conservative guise.

Margaret Roberts revelled in the social as well as the political life of OUCA, attending the dinners and balls and enjoying the company of the raffish Tory boys who were very much in charge. She was in awe of their wealth, connections and lifestyle and would be susceptible to such charms throughout her life. Her Oxford contemporaries also included future
Times
journalist William Rees-Mogg, Labour minister Anthony Crosland and writer and campaigner Ludovic Kennedy, but she appears not to have made a great impression, nor they on her.
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One future sparring partner whom Margaret Roberts did encounter was Labour stalwart Anthony Wedgwood Benn. She attended his election party as President of the Oxford Union, a strictly non-alcoholic affair. Thatcher later said that although she and Benn ‘rarely agreed on anything’, they shared a ‘sympathy’ based on their ‘religious roots’.
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When interviewed, Benn rejected such affinity and dismissed any notion that Thatcher’s politics had a Christian basis, although he did concede that Thatcher’s Methodist heritage was probably the source of her conviction style.
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According to Benn, Thatcher, like himself, was a ‘sign-post’ politician, as opposed to a ‘weather-cock’ (those politicians who fluttered in the wind such as Tony Blair). In this respect at least, Benn always preferred to identify himself as the left-wing equivalent of Thatcher rather than the socialist antidote to Blair. Benn and Thatcher stemmed from the same robust Reformist tradition, even if their politics sprouted in opposite directions. Seen together, they personify the divergent paths of Nonconformist Liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

It was as President of OUCA that Margaret Roberts first encountered Robert Runcie, her future Archbishop of Canterbury. With foppish auburn hair, good looks and Merseyside charm, Runcie had a social confidence and ease that enabled him to mingle freely with the upper classes. A war-hero for the boys and a hit with the girls, Runcie had returned to Oxford from the Normandy beaches having been awarderd a Military Cross and soon became notorious for chatting up ladies in
the Bodleian Library and for his ability ‘to sink a pint of beer straight off’.
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Keeping his political options open, Runcie had initially joined both the Labour and Conservative clubs but had stumbled onto the OUCA committee as representative of the newly established university wing of the Carlton Club (he had been one of its founding members). Despite being from similar stock, Runcie remembered: ‘[Thatcher] obviously associated me with those lordly characters who were giving Conservatism as a serious philosophy a bad name … I always regarded her as rather tubby, with rosy cheeks. Not my sort of girl!’ Clearly nor was he her sort of boy, for Margaret Roberts reportedly sacked him from the OUCA committee because of his ‘rather frivolous attachment to politics’. ‘She was trying to turn the Conservative Association into a serious political force … and I was nobody to have on board,’ Runcie later said with a hint of glee.
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In many ways, Robert Runcie was the complete antithesis to Margaret Thatcher in both personality and politics. He once remarked that he was ‘the meringue to [Thatcher’s] roast beef’.
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He was always suspicious of dogmatism and distrusted those with no sense of humour. As his son, James Runcie, later said of his father: ‘He had a sort of detached liberalism, which made him conscious of the ridiculousness of people and situations, yet this was combined with an enduring respect for the conservatism of institutions.’
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This was to be an outlook and demeanour that would both help and hinder him as leader of the Church of England and in his relations with the Prime Minister.

These two different personalities, the humorous and carefree Runcie and the overly serious Margaret Roberts, had originated from two very different Englands. Runcie’s Crosby, near Liverpool, was a world away from Thatcher’s Grantham, and his father, an electrical engineer for Tate & Lyle, was certainly no Alfred Roberts. Life in the Runcie household was about leisure and pleasure: the world of Saturday football and the greyhound, the music hall and
the working men’s club. Runcie’s Scottish father was not a religious man and was distrustful of those who paraded their piety; he liked to recite chunks of Robert Burns on the hypocrisy of Calvinist ministers. One of Runcie’s abiding images of his father was of him belting out the songs of music-hall star Harry Lauder while shaving with a cut-throat razor. Runcie’s mother was a glamorous hairdresser who would often escape the drab confines of Crosby to serve on Cunard cruises, returning months later with tales from exotic locations such as Cairo or San Francisco. By Runcie’s own account, he did not enjoy his Methodist Sunday school (the non-Catholic option in the area) and only enrolled in confirmation classes because he had a crush on a girl. His devout sister had encouraged him to attend the local Anglo-Catholic church but he was unmoved by it and used to sit at the back with his friends chewing toffee and impersonating the vicar: ‘We tended to leave in giggles.’
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Runcie later admitted that his early flirtation with the church was rather like joining a gang.

Like most men of his generation, his war experience defined him. Runcie had managed to talk his way into a gentleman’s regiment, the Scot’s Guards, which was a remarkable achievement for a man of his class and income. His time as a lieutenant in the Guards would lead to lasting friendships and act as a fast track into the establishment, where he would first encounter future Conservative minister, Willie Whitelaw, the Lord Chamberlain, Charles Maclean, and Tory donor and businessman, Hector Laing (who would later help in the refurbishment of Lambeth Palace). More importantly, the war proved a pivotal moment in the development of Runcie’s faith. During the Normandy invasion, he was awarded a Military Cross for taking out an enemy gun and for rescuing his fellow soldiers from a burning vehicle. His regiment was also one of the first to liberate Belsen concentration camp, an experience Runcie later described as ‘having touched evil’.
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Runcie is the only modern archbishop who knew what it was like to kill a fellow human being and to bury his comrades. Years later,
Runcie pondered in a rather modest way on how the war had ignited his sense of vocation:

Based on childhood experience alone, Margaret Roberts appeared the more likely of the two to take up religious vows, but Runcie was part of a generation of educated gentlemen who still saw ministry as a desirable profession in which one’s lofty liberal aspirations could be fulfilled. This was a reflection of the strength of Anglicanism in the 1940s, in particular liberal Anglican social thought.

By the early twentieth century, the ‘social gospel’ had evolved from being a preoccupation amongst a group of committed Anglo-Catholic reformers to the orthodoxy amongst the Church leadership. Five Anglican bishops, including the Conservative Cosmo Gordon Lang, then Archbishop of York, had backed Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which was Britain’s first step towards redistributive taxation and a social welfare system. Three years later, the votes of the episcopal bench were crucial in pushing through the Parliament Act of 1911, which transformed the balance of power from the Lords to the Commons.

The evangelical conscience, which had guided the Church through the Victorian era, was gradually replaced with a deeper focus on the corporate morality of society, economics and the state. Nineteenth-century
laissez-faire capitalism and its complementary individualistic theology was increasingly denounced as ‘unchristian’, while Anglo-Catholics forwarded statist solutions and an incarnational theology in its place. The Bishop of Exeter, William Cecil, noticed the change at the Pan-Anglican Congress as early as 1908, complaining that he felt ‘almost out of place in speaking as a person with no belief in socialism’.
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Cecil was right to note the difference in tone even if he had perhaps exaggerated the left-wing influence.