Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not for Turning

Margaret won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, for 1944. At the last minute, someone dropped out and she was able to take up her place in October 1943, reading chemistry.

 

She was a serious and slightly isolated student. Her main social contacts came through the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). As a girl in Grantham, she had had, it seems, no boyfriends, but at Oxford she began her first relationship. At the 21st birthday party of a Grantham schoolfriend in December 1944 – the occasion when she confided in her friends that her ambition was to become a Member of Parliament – she arrived proudly carrying a carnation which, she explained, had been given to her by a man. Neither then, nor later, did she ever name him to any of her friends. He was called Tony Bray.

 

Tony was an Army cadet who had arrived in Oxford in October 1944. He was attached to Brasenose College, but due to the exigencies of wartime had been accommodated in the buildings of Christ Church. He was pursuing a special six-month course, devised to combine military training with lectures on the “general sciences”.

Educated at Brighton College, Tony was from a solidly bourgeois background, and before joining up had already been an articled clerk to a solicitor. He was short and not particularly good-looking, but, by his own account 60 years later, “not half bad as a dancer”. Born in 1926, he was a little younger than Margaret.

The two had met through OUCA, probably at the association’s coffee discussions at the Randolph Hotel, some time that autumn of 1944. Margaret seemed to Tony “very thoughtful and a very good conversationalist. That’s probably what interested me. She was good at general subjects”. He was also impressed with her enthusiasm for politics – “That was something very unusual. Not many girls were like that” – and, like Tony, she was “a genuine, old-fashioned Conservative”.

 

He was also taken with her appearance: “She was a plump, attractive girl in a well-built way. That wasn’t ill thought of,” and she had “elegant, dark hair” (“I’d have told her I didn’t like blondes if she had become blonde then”). She “dressed elegantly, though not in a top stylish way”. He felt also that she had “a degree of loneliness” which was “part of the reason we got on”.

At that time, it was unusual for couples to go around as “an item”, and Margaret and Tony did not do so. But, at tea in one another’s rooms, where, according to Tony, she proved herself a “good housekeeper” with her cooking of crumpets, they quickly became close. He found her serious, and “a bit bluestocking”, but he liked the fact that she read a great deal and loved music. She took him to the Matthew Passion in which, as a member of the Bach Choir, she was performing.

Tony respected her because “she held her thoughts very sincerely”. At roughly the same time as he gave her the carnation – Christmas 1944 – she gave him Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which he kept beside him every day until he lost it in a house move 40 years later. It was his impression from the way Margaret kissed that she had had no boyfriend before, but she showed a delight in physical intimacy. They followed the rules of those days, however, and never slept together. As he got to know Margaret better, Tony, whose parents were quite well off, noticed the “great strain it was to finance her time at university”; she was “not ashamed of her background” but exhibited “a degree of reticence” about it. He detected that she was “very determined to make good”, but, with pleasure and surprise, he also noticed something else: “She was a person who, though not apparently sociable, enjoyed socialising . . . she astonished herself how much she could relax and be relaxed.” They had fun together.

 

This pleasure, and the heightened sense of life’s possibilities that comes through first love, can be found in Margaret’s letters to Muriel. Her descriptions, normally rather tart or matter of fact, take on a different tone. On March 25 1945, back in Grantham for the Easter vacation, Margaret wrote with details of every dance she had been to. Wartime had stopped the traditional full-scale Commem balls in the summer, but the approach of victory permitted a rash of college and other dances in March. Margaret went to five.

The first, and best, was the Randolph Ball at the Randolph Hotel: “We had a marvellous time … Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country Inn 'Crown and Thistle’. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak which match [sic] the blue frock perfectly.” Tony presented her with a spray of eight carnations “sent for me from London so with the front part of my hair piled up on top Jean and Mary [Oxford friends] said I looked simply smashing. I felt absolutely on top of the world as we walked through the lounge at the Crown and Thistle and everyone looked up and stared.”

In the manner of the wartime deprived, Margaret went on to describe, in detail, what they ate and drank: “We went into the bar and had gin and grapefruit and then to the dining room for dinner. We had some lovely thick creamy soup followed by pidgeon [sic] and then a chocolate sweet. With it we had Moussec to drink. Moussec in case you don’t know is a sparkling champagne.”

When they reached the Randolph at a quarter to nine, “Things were in full swing . . . The ballroom was marvellously decorated and all the lighting was done with huge coloured lamps operating from the balcony. The floor was simply packed so from the point of view of dancing it wasn’t terrifically marvellous. The Duchess of Marlborough arrived soon after we did and seemed very nice. The refreshments were lovely. Altogether it was the best and biggest ball I’ve ever been to.”

Asked about it 60 years later, Tony remembered buying the carnations from Moyses Stevens. When reminded of Margaret’s blue dress, he suddenly broke down in tears and said: “It was a very special evening.”

Once term had ended, Tony whisked her off for a day in London which included coffee at Fullers in Regent Street, lunch at the Dorchester (“It is not the acme of hotels it is reported to be”), a matinée performance of Strauss’s A Night in Venice at the Cambridge Theatre and finally a tea dance at the Piccadilly Hotel before Margaret got the train to Grantham and Tony returned to Oxford. For her, who had seen so little of the pleasures of the world, it was heady stuff. It also, in her mind, betokened something quite serious, although Margaret seldom directly described her feelings to her sister.

In the same letter to Muriel, she writes: “Preparations are going ahead fast and furiously for next weekend. I do hope everything will be all right.” Tony was coming to stay with her parents above the shop. This would not have happened if she had seen her relationship with Tony as some passing fancy; and her parents, themselves serious-minded, unused to guests and protective of their daughters where men were concerned, would have regarded this as a potentially very significant occasion.

Such thoughts seem to have crossed Tony’s mind, and to have worried him a little. In old age, he recalled that he and Margaret never discussed marriage, and that he was very wary of doing so because of the threat, still lingering from Victorian times, of an action for breach of promise. He thought of their relationship at that time as that of “just a boy and girl who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company”, which was hardly surprising, since he was only 18, but Margaret, perhaps, thought it meant rather more.

In any event, the visit to Grantham was “all right”, but not much better than that. Tony found Alfred Roberts “slightly austere” and “totally correct”, a good, chapel-going man; Beatrice was “very proper” and “motherly”. The shop struck him as “a very modest business establishment”. Tony and the Roberts family all attended the Methodist church together. It was not a riotous weekend.

It also marked a moment of parting. Tony’s six-month course at Oxford had come to an end and his full military training began in April, very shortly before the end of the war in Europe. He went to Bovington Camp in Dorset. After a month at Bovington, Tony went on to another training camp and continued to move from one establishment to another, including a return to Bovington, until he was posted to Germany in the following year after being commissioned in the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. He sent Margaret a photograph of himself in military uniform, which he inscribed to her.

 

But at some time in the course of the ensuing year Tony’s replies to Margaret’s letters began to peter out and eventually stopped altogether. After writing some letters reproaching Tony for his silence, Margaret became so distressed that she wrote to Tony’s mother, whom she had never met, to ask what had happened to him. The answer was, nothing very much. It was simply, though his mother naturally did not say this, that Tony had decided that the relationship should be allowed to “fizzle out”.

To Margaret’s sister Muriel, there was a clear explanation. Tony, she believed, was snobbish, and had decided that Margaret was not from a good enough family for him. Tony, not surprisingly, saw things differently. He agreed that Margaret’s background did make him uneasy, but not, he said, because of its relatively modest circumstances. What worried him was its austere seriousness. He wanted fun, and he found it. At his second stay at Bovington, he formed a relationship with a Dorset girl called Prudence whom he describes as “vivacious, outgoing and attractive”. Once posted, he found that he “was living in a fairly glamorous world in Germany – a cavalry regiment, green trousers, all the rest of it.” Aged barely 20, he was not looking for commitment.

What of Margaret herself? When I asked her, she replied with the understandable untruth that she had had no boyfriends before Denis; and when later asked specifically about Tony, she acknowledged the circumstances described above but would not be drawn into any detail.

 

Margaret heard from Tony again in February 1948 when she had left Oxford and had begun working as a research chemist at BX Plastics at Manningtree in Essex. He had returned to Oxford as a full undergraduate after his military service and was missing her. They had several more dates before the relationship petered out in 1949. Although fond of Margaret, he said, he realised that she was embarking on a serious political career and she was “so determined to make her own way”. In June 1950 Tony Bray became engaged to the woman who remained his wife until her death more than 50 years later. Now in poor health, Tony Bray lives in a nursing home.

 

While working at BX Plastics in Manningtree, Margaret continued to advance her political ambitions. She threw herself into Conservative politics in the constituency of Colchester, where she lived in digs. She was also approved as Conservative party candidate by Central Office and, early in 1949, was selected as the parliamentary candidate for the safe Labour seat of Dartford.

At the dinner after a meeting to introduce her as the candidate on February 28, she met a prominent local businessman, whom she described to Muriel as “a Major Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money)...not a very attractive creature – very reserved but quite nice”. Denis chivalrously drove her all the way to Liverpool Street station to get the milk train in the early hours of the following morning. But she was already receiving other attention. At a Colchester Conservative party earlier in the month, she met an Essex farmer of Scottish origin, who was determined to ask her out.

 

She wrote to her sister to tell her about their first date.

 

“He drove me home in his present rather old car – and got quite ardent on the way! I said I couldn’t possibly fix another definite date so he’s going to ’phone me! The funniest part is that although I have been introduced to him twice, I can never catch his name and still don’t know it! His people are farmers . . . He speaks with a frightfully Scotch accent. I’m afraid he’s going to be an awful nuisance. But I’d rather like to see his farm as a matter of curiosity. I gather the farmhouse is three hundred years old.”

Her romance, if that is the right word, developed fast. In the letter in which she also described Denis at her Dartford meeting, Margaret told Muriel: “My Scottie farmer met me off the train” and took her to A Lady from Edinburgh at the Ipswich rep and then for dinner at the Great White Horse. “I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, but I’m afraid he’s got it rather badly.” She now knew his identity: “His name, by the way, is William Cullen, and he lives at Foulton Hall (!) Ramsay near Dovercourt.”

 

She invited Muriel to come down to Colchester to meet him. Her motives for doing so were interesting. Four days earlier, she had written to Muriel: “Went to the flicks yesterday with my farmer friend and got him all primed up to meet you sometime. I showed him the snapshot of you and I [sic] together – and he said he could scarcely tell the difference so I should think we could easily substitute me for you. When can you come down for a weekend?”

She seemed at one and the same time to be searching for a husband for herself and for her sister, and to be thinking of the man who was chasing her in the latter role.

On April 8, only a few weeks after Margaret’s relationship with Willie had begun, she had Muriel to stay in Colchester and introduced her to Willie Cullen. But the Margaret-Willie flirtation continued, perhaps a merry diversion for Margaret, perhaps more serious for Willie.

Willie persevered, giving Margaret “frightfully expensive” Crêpe de Chine scent and visited her “every other day with butter, eggs and grapes etc.” when she was ill in May. The record of one of his presents, particularly well suited to the recipient, survives. Margaret wrote to Muriel to describe it: “. . .William has given me a very nice blackcalf handbag. It’s not an awfully expensive one as my conscience wouldn’t let me do that – but I chose a very nice one at £7-3s. We had my initials put on as well and it looks awfully nice . . . I quite loftily say it’s not 'very expensive’ – it’s about twice as much as you or I would pay. But compared to some of the others (£15-£20) it’s quite reasonable. I’ll have to hang on with William for a while longer now!”

Margaret drew a picture of the bag for Muriel, and one can see exactly how well it suited its owner from a press photograph of the two of them at a Dartford fête.

 

There is an almost humorous heartlessness of youth in all of this, a Margaret who plays with men and enjoys it. In the very same letter, she mentions another date. She was going to the North Kent Rotary Ball, she said, “with a chap called Denis Thatcher who is managing director of the Atlas paint works in Erith . . . He’s all right – but is most unpopular with his men. He’s far too belligerent in dealing with them and they naturally don’t like it.” (She had forgotten that she had already told Muriel about Denis.)

Willie Cullen introduced Margaret to his family. In May, she was received for dinner at Foulton Hall, his farm near Harwich where his sister Agnes kept house (“the perfectly natural hostess”, said Margaret). She enjoyed the dinner, but it made an interesting impression upon her: “The wives were typical wives – they know of domestic matters and nothing else. I stayed with the men after supper talking about many other things and when William suggested that maybe we ought to 'join the ladies’ David [Macauley, a local farmer] said in rather contemptuous fashion 'Why, – they don’t talk politics or anything else in there.’ And that’s how they regard their wives.”

 

What is visible here is not only Margaret’s lifelong preference for male company, but a sort of presentiment of what marriage to Willie Cullen would involve. Socially, she had begun to feel part of a more cosmopolitan sphere. And she knew that, both by temperament and by intellect, she could not be happy as a farmer’s wife. Margaret continued to encourage and arrange meetings between Willie and Muriel.

The process of Willie being gently dumped by Margaret and pushed towards her elder sister instead must have been a complicated one. It seemed to involve a good deal of negotiation, but with no apparent falling out between the sisters. Willie Cullen recorded in his diary what was probably his last meeting with Margaret alone: he took her to see The Third Man in London on October 27 1949. On December 16 he arrived to stay at the Robertses’ house in Grantham for the weekend and took Muriel out to the Golf Club Dance. Margaret was not present.

Early in January 1950, writing from 63 Knole Road, the address of her new Dartford landlords, local Conservatives called Mr and Mrs Ray Woollcott, Margaret kept Muriel fully informed of the course of the break-up: “I have written to William in the vein I told you. He wrote a letter to me – much warmer in tone than his others and the two must have crossed in the post … We are meeting in London on Saturday afternoon to talk over the various aspects of 'we three’ and it will then be broken off between he and I [sic], for good and all.”

It was better for them to meet, she wrote, perhaps anticipating a slight unease on Muriel’s part, because “it would be easier, for when we meet again in a different relationship such as we were sketching out over Xmas, if we parted in the flesh – not by letter – as friends. Hope you approve.”

In fact, the meeting did not take place. In a postscript, Margaret writes that Willie had rung her to cancel the meeting because “he has a party on in Colchester”. Instead, they discussed matters over the telephone. “I told him from henceforth that I would 'in law’ only be taking a sisterly interest in future. He seemed quite satisfied and is quite pleased with 'future prospects’.”

Once “we three” were rearranged, Margaret was keen to get everything settled. Willie Cullen went up to the Robertses in Grantham at the end of January, and Margaret wrote to Muriel beforehand urging her on: “I do hope it comes off and I see no reason for the pessimism you showed in a former letter.”

It did come off. On February 14, St Valentine’s Day, only a week before polling day, Margaret wrote a formal letter from the Conservative Committee Rooms, typed by a secretary, which said, without comment, “I saw your engagement in the Telegraph this morning.” It added instructions for the couple’s visit, “You, Daddy and I shall be dining with Lord Dudley Gordon on Tuesday night. Bring something decent to wear. You will be coming to the Count with me on Thursday night, so bring a smart hat.”

In her own hand, however, and presumably written so that no assistant would see it, Margaret added a PS: “So glad the announcement is in today’s Telegraph, one feels it gives the stamp of finality to the whole affair. Gather you’re having diamonds in your ring, a plum coloured corduroy suit to go away in and a blue gown for the ceremony . . . The campaign goes fairly well – we are having packed meetings.”

Willie and Muriel were married in April 1950 with Margaret their sole bridesmaid. They lived at Foulton Hall, and had two sons and a daughter. Willie died in 1998, and Muriel in 2004.

 

No letters from Margaret survive from her first year at Oxford, but in the fairly numerous ones she wrote, almost all to Muriel, in her next three years clothes and the difficulty of affording them provide the main subject.

Brownness recurs: “the rust-coloured material . . . will fit in with the brown side of my wardrobe,” she wrote in an undated letter sent after returning early to Oxford, in order to do fire-watching, before her second year in September 1944.

Margaret was self-conscious about her weight. When I once asked her what she thought of her own looks as a young woman, she answered, “Oh, I never thought I was good-looking. I thought I was slightly overweight.”

In those days, it was by no means as unfashionable as it is today for a woman to be quite plump, but, in another part of the letter quoted above, Margaret, with scientist’s humour, expresses her anxiety: “. . . I still weigh about 10 st 4 lbs . . . The slight decrease in volume doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the mass . . . Can you recommend . . . anything from the medical point of view for reduction of the area of the seat and control of the tummy muscles – oh and also reduction and uplift of bust?”

 

Margaret attended Kesteven and Grantham Girls School, a grammar school to which she won a county scholarship, between 1936 and 1943. In the small sixth form, despite the looming presence of the Second World War, there was more talk about religion than politics

Lorna Smith, one of Margaret’s contemporaries, remembered many schoolgirl discussions about faith, not least a surreal conversation with Margaret on an afternoon walk from school into Grantham just before Christmas in 1942.

“She remarked that, really, she didn’t think she could believe in angels. 'Oh, why?’ I asked, wondering what Alderman Roberts would think. 'Well,’ she replied, 'I have worked it out scientifically that in order to fly, an angel would need a six-foot-long breastbone to bear the weight of its wings.’”

Lorna added, perhaps superfluously, “. . . Margaret could be very earnest at times.”

There was something else that Margaret worked out scientifically, with alarming results. In the spring of 1943, the post-exam celebrations resulted in ink being spilt on the “precious parquet floor of our form-room”. For Lorna Smith, this was a second offence.

“Knowing that soap and water was useless, what was to be done? Surely, this time we would be expelled. Then someone thought of our star scientist – Margaret Roberts would know what would remove the now-spreading black stain. Her remedy was that it should be sprinkled with bleaching-powder and then have hydrochloric acid poured on (stolen from the lab). I scrubbed away furiously, and sure enough, the boards began to recover.

“But the next moment I was almost overcome by the fumes and had to rush out of doors, quite blue in the face – no one knew that the lethal mixture would give off chlorine gas. Our violent coughing and splutterings alerted the staff, who were too genuinely concerned about us to be angry at the mess. Indeed, the next day, there was surprisingly little retribution; I suspect that Margaret had quietly been to Miss Gillies [the headmistress] and owned up to her near-fatal advice. My lungs have not been the same since.”