Speeches, etc.

Margaret Thatcher

Interview for Daily Express

Document type: Speeches, interviews, etc.
Venue: The Dormers, Holwood Park Avenue, Farnborough, Kent
Source: Daily Express, 17 April 1961
Journalist: Godfrey Winn, Daily Express
Editorial comments:

Item listed by date of publication

Importance ranking: Key
Word count: 1910
Themes: Autobiographical comments, Autobiography (childhood), Autobiography (marriage & children), Famous statements by MT, Parliament, Taxation, Women

Because This Week it is the Queen's Birthday …

35 A challenge to every woman

I have to admit the name Mrs. Margaret Thatcher conveyed nothing to the assistant in the post office at Farnborough, Kent. Which was something of a shock, as I had imagined that all M.P.s, especially women ones, were national figures.

However, the other career woman, in her blue cardigan, did recognise the address of Holwood Parkavenue, and directed me to the private road with the substantial houses, set back with well-pruned rose beds and smooth lawns, near to Farnborough Hospital.

The Dormers lay almost at the end, and there seemed only to be one more house and then a wood beyond.

“Yes, it's a cul-de-sac” my hostess remarked with obvious satisfaction and relief, though anything less like a cul-de-sac than her own life it was hard to imagine, I reminded myself, as we sat in the lounge, and had our elevenses.

Flawless

One thing had struck me at once. The woman opposite me on the sofa could not have been born and brought up in any other country except ours.

With the Queen she shares not only a birthday year, but possesses the same flawless, cold-water, utterly English complexion.

In fact, the present M.P. for Finchley is so much more attractive and human-looking than you somehow expect a woman politician to be that I was intrigued to know, as you may be, how it all began: the long road that she had successfully made so short into politics, via scholarships at Somerville, Oxford, and later a training in research chemistry, mingled with her Bar exams, in her spare time.

All this and marriage, too, crowned with twins, a boy and girl of seven, by the time she had reached 35.

Placid

I had half expected to find her, even at home, with the harassed air that many executive women wear, or the defensive air, or even the battleaxe air.

But the woman who has already piloted one Private Bill successfully through the House of Commons on the subject of free speech sat and talked as placidly as though she had all the time in the world to give me.

Meeting Mrs. Thatcher anonymously in a railway train I would have mistaken her, in her expensive-looking oatmeal skirt, the paler jumper to match, the two ropes of pearls at her throat, as someone from an upper middle-class background whose husband enjoyed taking her with him to shoot in Scotland. Discreetly but impeccably dressed.

While, in actual fact, the only thing she has shot at in her life is political targets.

Moreover, her upbringing had been in a small village outside Grantham, where her father had been the local grocer, with an average of £10 a week coming into the home.

They had lived over the shop which was combined with a post office, and Margaret had taken her share of serving behind the counter in her school holidays.

First Lesson

It was her first lesson in unselfconsciousness.

“When did you know that your future lay in politics?” I asked, thinking how women are quicker to learn than men, subtler and sharper at covering up their origins too, when necessary. “Or wasn't there such a positive moment of decision?” I added.

“Oh yes there was.” Her very blue eyes sparkled.

“I was home from Oxford. I suppose I was about 20, and a crowd of us had been to a village hop, and come back to make midnight cups of coffee.

“I was in the kitchen helping to dish up and having a fierce argument with one of the boys in the crowd when someone else interrupted to say: ‘Of course, Margaret, you will go in for politics, won't you?’ I stopped dead.

“Suddenly it was crystallised for me. I knew.”

Mind you, she does not believe in a man or woman going blindly to their destiny. She believes instead that luck and good fortune come to those who work for it, who are competent and well-organised.

Baptism

I am not sure under which heading you would place it, but if she hadn't been prepared to contest the Labour stronghold of Dartford in 1950, a pretty rowdy baptism for a girl novitiate, she would never have met her husband.

One of his chemical factories was situated near by. So Denis Thatcher was present at her adoption meeting, and afterwards, because petrol rationing was still in force, in order that she might stay longer with her supporters, he offered her a lift back to town, since the last train had gone.

“Did you fall in love at once?” I asked, wondering if there were depths of emotion under the cool, collected exterior.

“No, there were two elections to fight first,” she answered briskly.

“Is it difficult for him now to have an M.P. wife?” I really meant, and she realised I meant: Are you inclined to be bossy in the home? Do you address him like a public meeting sometimes? Quote figures and statistics out of White-papers? Start talking about that evening's debate in the House, just when he wants to switch off the beside lamp in his own house?

Breadwinner

“My Denis Thatcherhusband is the real breadwinner,” she replied simply. “Without him, none of this”&em;she made a gesture towards the handsome decor in which nothing jarred, the vista of well-laid-out landscape garden beyond&em;“none of this,” she repeated, “would exist. And I am glad it's that way.”

We were both thinking now of the marriages&em;an ever-increasing number today&em;when the wife is earning as much if not more than her husband and is almost pathologically loth to relinquish her economic freedom when the honeymoon is over. Her financial sense of power.

That kind of prosperity in the home can lead to far worse nagging and disturbance than endless scraping and threadbare making-do.

“If there is an argument then, you give way?”

My companion was silent for a moment, thinking this over. Then her face with its April look, after rain, cleared. “I can truthfully say that I don't think we have ever had that sort of argument. Either in front of the children, which I always think is appalling, or even in private.”

Unforgivable

It was clear that she had a real horror of losing one's temper beyond control, as she put it.

“You come out with unforgivable things on the spur of the moment, and it doesn't matter how much you apologise afterwards, it's on record, and the other person is woefully aware that you meant what you said at the time.”

“Does nothing, then, make you fighting mad?”

Again she considered my question slowly before she answered with caution: “One thing aggravates me more than anything else. Inefficiency. I can be very sharp about that.”

I challenged her with the Budget. Supposing she was in the Chancellor's shoes at this moment, what changes would she make? [end p1]

“I would stop a wife's earnings being lumped with her husband's. It's absolutely monstrous. No other country in the world does what we do.

“And I would make provision for a wife to have a financial stake in the home. So that if a marriage went wrong she would not suffer so much economically.

“Equally important, I would see that anything she saved out of her housekeeping allowance was legally hers. It isn't as the law stands.”

Wages

Did you know that? I didn't, I have often thought myself there should be a law that compelled a man to pay the wife who stays at home a reasonable wage as his house-keeper.

“If we couldn't afford to have resident help in the home” the M.P. who is also a mother was saying, “I would give up my career tomorrow.

“Now I ring up at six each day, from the House, to see what sort of day the twins have had, and sort out any problems.”

Carol, a serious-looking little girl in a plain blue dress came in at that moment and stood devotedly, rather than dutifully beside her mother.

There was a striking likeness between them, and I remember what the mother had said earlier in our talk. “You always want for your children what you haven't had yourself.”

“One of the girls at school thought Big Ben was in Westminster Abbey,” Carol remarked scornfully.

Visit

This Monday, after a visit to the dentist, the twins' mother is taking them to lunch in the House of Commons.

“I want them to have as much share in my life as possible,” she explained. “So that when, later, they are in their teens, we shall have so much to discuss and they will still regard me as a contemporary.

“My Alfred Robertsfather was a wonderful [end p2] man” she went on. “He made me read widely, and for that I owe him everything.

“I loved my Beatrice Robertsmother dearly but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other. It wasn't her fault. She was weighed down by the home, always being in the home.”

“So your view is that all wives should, if possible, have a second career?”

“I hate those kind of sweeping generalisations. I hate the division of wives into those who go out to work and those who stay at home. I believe myself the real dividing line is something quite different.

“There are good wives and bad wives, good mothers and bad mothers. You can stay at home all day and every day, and still bring up your children appallingly.”

We went out into the garden between showers, and Mark joined us. He had been with a crammer for an hour. He was the extrovert of the family, and he lacked concentration, it was explained.

Worrying

So much so, that his mother, with her passion for efficiency, was already worrying whether he would get into Harrow in five years' time.

Would she send her daughter also to a public school? She was more doubtful about that. It might well be that a school-girl of, say, 14 needed both the security and the sophistication of constant home contact.

“Why are women so disloyal to each other, when they are thrown together in a close community?”

At that the fair woman at my side stopped dead in her track.

“Are they?” She looked at me in genuine surprise.

She herself got on very well with her colleagues in the House, in fact, she wished the number was doubled. And she would certainly go to a woman doctor, had done so when they lived in Chelsea.

“The trouble is,” she added thoughtfully, “there are still not so many of us who have made the grade as men. Therefore we stand out more conspicuously, and when we do make a mistake it's pounced upon.

“By the men, I mean, who are subconsciously afraid, not the women.

“I would always go myself to another woman for advice or help, never to a man.

“While as for my own sex doing each other down, or tittle-tattling in a damaging way, men are far worse gossips and intriguers. You only have to be a week in the House of Commons to realise that.”

It was the one thing that had depressed her; that had not lived up to her dreams that night, with the cup of coffee in her hand, after the village dance. The lobbying, the manoeuvring behind the scenes, the meretricious balance of power arrangements, in politics.

“What is your own final ambition?” I asked, thinking in terms of an Under-Secretaryship at least.

Ambition

“I'd like to go on being 35 for a long time. It's a wonderful age. I feel so much younger than I expected, and yet maturer, and more confident.

“And just occasionally I should love to have a day all to myself. With the family. Like when we went out picking bluebells, at Easter. Or if it was wet, to be able to read a detective novel, without feeling guilty.”

Whereupon I felt guilty at having taken up so much of her precious time. But she sent me on my way, more of an ardent feminist myself than ever.

For hadn't I met a genuinely emancipated woman at last?