The Path to Power

The general election came in October 1951. This time I shaved another 1,000 votes off Norman Dodds’ majority and was hugely delighted to discover when all the results were in that the Conservatives now had an overall majority of seventeen.

During my time at Dartford I had continued to widen my acquaintanceship with senior figures in the Party. I had spoken as proposer of a vote of thanks to Anthony Eden (whom I had first met in Oxford) when he addressed a large and enthusiastic rally at Dartford football ground in 1949. The following year I spoke as seconder of a motion applauding the leadership of Churchill and Eden at a rally of Conservative Women at the Albert Hall, to which Churchill himself replied in vintage form. This was a great occasion for me — to meet in the flesh and talk to the leader whose words had so inspired me as I sat with my family around our wireless in Grantham. In 1950 I was appointed as representative of the Conservative Graduates to the Conservative Party’s National Union Executive, which gave me my first insight into Party organization at the national level.

But it was always policy rather than organization which interested me. In my holidays I would attend courses at Swinton College,[5] where the Director, Reggie Northam — a man of great generosity of spirit and a friend of John Maynard Keynes, who in the 1930s had gone to South Wales to experience for himself the life of the unemployed — would instil into us that the real political battle was for ‘the hearts and minds of the people’. At Swinton and at the various Conservative Political Centre (CPC) meetings in different constituencies, to which I was frequently asked to speak, I was made to think through the real implications for policy of such widely toted concepts as ‘One Nation’, ‘the property-owning democracy’ and ‘the safety net’ (of Social Security benefits).

The greatest social events in my diary were the Eve of (parliamentary) Session parties held by Sir Alfred Bossom, the Member for Maidstone, at his magnificent house, No. 5 Carlton Gardens. Several marquees were put up, brilliantly lit and comfortably heated, in which the greatest and the not so great — like one Margaret Roberts — would mingle convivially. Sir Alfred Bossom would cheerily describe himself as the day’s successor to Lady Londonderry, the great Conservative hostess of the inter-war years. You would hardly have guessed that behind his amiable and easygoing exterior was a genius who had devised the revolutionary designs of some of the first skyscrapers in New York. He was specially kind and generous to me. It was his house from which I was married, and there that our reception was held; and it was he who proposed the toast to our happiness.

I was married on a cold and foggy December day at Wesley’s Chapel, City Road. It was more convenient for all concerned that the ceremony take place in London, but it was the Methodist minister from Grantham, our old friend the Rev. Skinner, who assisted the Rev. Spivey, the minister at City Road. Then all our friends — from Grantham, Dartford, Erith and London — came back to Sir Alfred Bossom’s. Finally, Denis swept me off to our honeymoon in Madeira, where I quickly recovered from the bone-shaking experience of my first and last aquatic landing in a seaplane to begin my married life against the background of that lovely island.

On our return from Madeira I moved into Denis’s flat in Swan Court, Flood Street in Chelsea. It was a light, sixth-floor flat with a fine view of London. It was also the first time I learned the convenience of living all on one level. As I would find again in the flat at 10 Downing Street, this makes life far easier to run. There was plenty of space — a large room which served as a sitting room and dining room, two good-sized bedrooms, another room which Denis used as a study and so on. Denis drove off to Erith every morning and would come back quite late in the evening. But I found that I had plenty to do: this was the first time I had had to keep house. We quickly made friends with our neighbours; one advantage of living in a block of flats with a lift is that you meet everyone. By the end of the month I knew most of my neighbours, some of whom were rather distinguished. Late at night there was always the possibility of hearing Dame Sybil Thorndike’s unmistakable contralto booming around the courtyard as she returned from a show. During the time we were there we did a good deal of entertaining, with drinks in the evening or supper at the weekend.

To be a young married woman in comfortable circumstances must always be a delight if the marriage is a happy one, as mine was. But to be a young married woman in those circumstances in the 1950s was very heaven. I am always astonished when people refer to that period as a time of repression, dullness or conformity — the Age of Anxiety, etc. The 1950s were, in a thousand different ways, the reawakening of normal happy life after the trials of wartime and the petty indignities of post-war austerity. Rationing came to an end. Wages and salaries started to rise. Bananas, grapes and fruits I had never heard of suddenly reappeared in the shops. After the drabness of Utility clothing, fashion recovered its confidence and colour with Dior’s wide skirts, strapless evening dresses, and Ascot hats. Italian restaurants popped up where boarded-up shop fronts had been before. Coffee bars, selling cappuccino, instantly christened ‘frothy coffee’, spread down high streets. Teenagers were invented. Ordinary homes began to accommodate fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines. Billboards sprouted fewer Government notices and more commercial advertising (‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints. Too-good-to-hurry mints’). TV aerials multiplied across the rooftops of England. Hollywood responded to the expansive mood of those years with the invention of wide-screen Cinemascope and big films to go with it, whether biblical epics like Quo Vadis or picturesque musicals like South Pacific. And people who had never thought to afford a foreign holiday discovered Spain.

It was the age of affluence, and with affluence came a relaxation of all the restrictions that had marked English life since wartime and, even beforehand, the Grantham of my youth. I cannot pretend to have liked, or even understood, all the expressions of this new popular freedom. When rock and roll was imported from America, along with names like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, I assumed it would be a nine days’ journalistic wonder. (It has never eclipsed The Desert Song in my affection.) The Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama also appeared to challenge the West End. Again, I assumed that this too would disappear in short order and, besides, I had had too much of kitchen sinks in real life to want to visit them on my night out. I little imagined that I would one day read John Osborne with approval and become a good friend of Kingsley Amis, grateful for his support in the culture wars of my administration. And as Ascot, the Derby, Henley and Wimbledon recovered their old style in those years, the gossip columnists who lived off them re-emerged from their post-war hiding places in Obituaries or Garden Notes. Reading them was a somewhat shameful taste, like gorging on liqueur chocolates. But I have to admit it was a taste few could resist. Readers made the acquaintance of new household names like Lady Docker, Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos; and Monte Carlo once again became a synonym for high life.

People felt that after all the sacrifices of the previous twenty years, they wanted to enjoy themselves, to get a little fun out of life. Although I may have been perhaps rather more serious than my contemporaries, Denis and I enjoyed ourselves quite as much as most, and more than some. We went to the theatre, we took holidays in Rome and Paris (albeit in very modest hotels), we gave parties and went to them, we had a wonderful time.

But the high point of our lives at that time was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June 1953. Those who had televisions — we did not — held house parties to which all their friends came to watch the great occasion. Denis and I, passionate devotees of the monarchy that we were, decided the occasion merited the extravagance of a seat in the covered stand erected in Parliament Square just opposite the entrance to Westminster Abbey. The tickets were an even wiser investment than Denis knew when he bought them, for it poured all day and most people in the audience were drenched — not to speak of those in the open carriages of the great procession. The Queen of Tonga never wore that dress again. Mine lived to see another day.

Pleasant though married life was in London, I still had time enough after housework to pursue a long- standing intellectual interest in the law. As with my fascination with politics, it was my father who had been responsible for stimulating this interest. Although he was not a magistrate, as Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 my father would automatically sit on the Bench. During my university vacations I would go along with him to the Quarter Sessions (where many minor criminal offences were tried), at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as Recorder. On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning. I was captivated by what I saw in court, but I was enthralled by Norman Winning’s conversation about the theory and practice of law. At one point I blurted out: ‘I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.’ But Norman Winning said that he himself had read physics for his first degree at Cambridge before changing to law as a second degree. I objected that there was no way I could afford to stay on all those extra years at university. He replied that there was another way, perfectly possible but very hard work, which was to get a job in or near London, join one of the Inns of Court and study for my law exams in the evenings. And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done. Now with Denis’s support I could afford to concentrate on legal studies without taking up new employment. There was a great deal to read, and I also attended courses at the Council of Legal Education.