The Iron Lady

The shop was a general store and also a post office. This is something which the iconography of Thatcherism tends to overlook; yet it subtly changes the picture of Alfred as the archetypal small businessman and champion of private enterprise. He was that; but as a sub-postmaster he was also an agent of central government, a sort of minor civil servant. The post office franchise was an important part of his business. The Post Office Savings Bank was the only bank most people knew; and old-age pensions had been paid through the post office since their introduction in 1908. The elderly of north Grantham collected their weekly ten shillings from North Parade. To this extent Alfred – even in the 1920s and much more so after 1945 – was an agent of the nascent welfare state; and Margaret was brought up with first-hand knowledge of its delivery system.

The post office was open from 8.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., Monday to Saturday, with Thursday early closing. During these hours either Alfred or Beatie was always in the shop – Alfred normally at his corner by the bacon slicer – but they also employed two or three assistants, plus another permanently in the post office. In the early years Grandmother Stephenson served in the shop too; and later, as they grew up, the girls helped out when they were not at school – not only serving, but weighing out the sugar, tea, biscuits and lentils in the back. From an early age young Margaret gained a close awareness of the market in its purest form.

Alfred’s move into politics was a natural extension of his business. In a place like Grantham most members of the town council were tradesmen of one sort or another, effectively representing the Chamber of Trade. It happened that in April 1927 the council was expanded from twelve members to eighteen. Alfred was one of six candidates put up by the Chamber of Trade to fill the additional vacancies. He represented St Wulfram’s for sixteen years until he was elected an alderman in 1943.

His overriding purpose in local politics was keeping the rates down. He very quickly became chairman of the Finance and Rating Committee, and retained that position for more than twenty years. He established a formidable reputation for guarding the ratepayers’ pennies as carefully as his own. One need seek no further for the origin of Mrs Thatcher’s visceral hostility to public spending. In 1936 he successfully opposed a proposal that the council should employ its own direct labour force to maintain the town’s newly built stock of public housing. ‘I do not believe’, he argued, ‘that there is an instance where jobs done by direct labour save money over jobs done by contract.’⁴ He faced his greatest embarrassment in 1937 when he was obliged to ask for a seven pence rate increase to fourteen shillings in the pound. Characteristically he blamed his colleagues for having approved excessive commitments; his job, he protested, was merely to find the money. ‘It is just brought to your notice now’, he told them, ‘what exactly you have been approving.’⁵

On top of his seat on the council and chairmanship of the Finance Committee, Alfred was active in many other areas of Grantham life. In 1943 he was elected the town’s youngest alderman and in 1945 – 6 served as mayor. He was a good mayor in a particularly testing year, presiding not only over victory celebrations and Remembrance Day parades but also the rebuilding necessitated by Grantham’s extensive bomb damage.

The most celebrated episode in Alfred’s political career was its ending. By 1950 Labour had won a majority on Grantham council for the first time; they naturally installed one of their own councillors as chairman of the Finance Committee. Two years later they used their majority, quite legitimately, to elect their own aldermen, thereby displacing Roberts from the council after twenty-seven years. His removal was widely deplored as an act of petty ingratitude to an outstanding servant of the local community. Thirty-three years later his daughter famously shed tears when she recalled his deposition in a television interview.

At the heart of all Alfred’s community activity was his religion. As a devout Methodist, he made no distinction between commercial, political and religious values. Simultaneously shopkeeper, local politician and lay preacher, he conducted his business on ethical principles and preached business principles in politics. In all three spheres he prided himself on hard work, high standards and integrity. He was indeed a proud man, with a powerful sense of his own worth – tempered by proper Christian humility.

Alfred Roberts’ Methodism was a religion of personal salvation. His preaching was fundamentalist, Bible- based, concerned with the individual’s responsibility to God for his own behaviour. Unlike the nonconformist tradition which played such a large part in the foundation of the British labour movement, it was not a social gospel, but an uncompromisingly individualistic moral code which underpinned an individualist approach to politics and commerce. A man’s duty was to keep his own soul clean, mind his own business, and care for his own family. At best it was a philosophy which instilled a further obligation to look after neighbours in need and thence, by extension, to wider community service and private charity. At the same time, however, it carried a strong undercurrent of self-righteousness and moral superiority.

Relative Values

Margaret’s childhood was dominated by her parents’ faith. Sundays – the only day in the week the shop was closed – were almost wholly taken up with church attendance. Sunday school at ten was followed by morning service at eleven. There was just time to get home for lunch before afternoon Sunday School at 2.30 at which Margaret, from the age of about twelve, played the piano for the younger ones; then it was back again for evening service at six. During the week, too, the family’s social life was almost entirely church-based. Beatie attended a sewing circle on Tuesdays, often taking Margaret with her; Muriel and Margaret attended the Methodist Guild on Fridays. Life at home was austere, teetotal, governed by strict rules, particularly while Beatie’s mother was still alive. Grandmother Stephenson, Margaret told one of her first biographers, was ‘very, very Victorian and very, very strict’.⁶ The greatest sin of all was wasting time. Every minute of the day was to be filled with useful occupation. Never was a childhood lesson more thoroughly taken to heart.

Alf Roberts was not poor.As a successful shopkeeper he belonged by the 1930s to the middle middle class; he could scarcely have devoted so much of his time to politics had his business not been securely profitable. At a time when quite ordinary middle-class families up and down the country were discovering the liberation of vacuum cleaners, washing machines and even cars, he could certainly have afforded his family the luxury of a few modern conveniences; at the very least hot water. They did in fact have a maid before the war, and later a cleaning lady two days a week. It was for religious and temperamental reasons – puritanism and parsimony – not economic necessity, that Alfred kept his family in such austerity. The flashes of rebellion that illuminate Mrs Thatcher’s recollections fifty years later betray a sense that she felt the parsimony, like the churchgoing, was taken too far. Ironically Alf and Beatie did move to a larger house with more home comforts soon after Margaret left to go to Oxford.

The family did get a wireless set after Grandmother Stephenson died in 1935 (when Margaret was ten). This was such an event that she remembers running all the way back from school that day. The wireless was the one form of popular entertainment that was allowed. Margaret unquestionably longed for a bit more glamour than her parents’ principles allowed. The highlight of her whole childhood was a visit to London, without her parents, when she was twelve. She was sent to stay with friends – a Wesleyan minister and his wife – in Hampstead. ‘I stayed for a whole week’, she recalled, ‘and was given a life of enjoyment and entertainment that I had never seen.’ As well as all the usual sights – the Tower of London, the Changing of the Guard, the Houses of Parliament and the zoo – ‘we were actually taken to the theatre’. The show was the musical The Desert Song at the Catford Theatre. ‘We saw the crowds and the bright lights and I was so excited and thrilled by it that I’ve never forgotten that week.’⁷

What she did do during her childhood was to read precociously. This was undoubtedy the medium of her father’s most direct and lasting influence. Alfred was a voracious autodidact, reputed to be ‘the best-read man in Grantham’ (though one has to wonder when he found the time).⁸ ‘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.’⁹ From an early age Margaret shared her father’s – rather than her mother’s – taste. Reading was a means of self- improvement and advancement in the world; perhaps because he had no son, Alfred encouraged his younger daughter to read influential books of the moment, like John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, and discussed them with her. He was a member of the library committee, so he got first pick of these topical books. Of course she read some classic fiction too; but she confessed that her favourite Dickens novel was A Tale of Two Cities, because it was about politics.¹⁰

This utilitarian attitude to literature was reinforced by her education. At school she specialised in science, went on to read chemistry at Oxford, and then took up law. From Oxford onwards she devoted most of her spare