An interest in chemistry was not something she derived from her father, nor was it the most obvious subject for a girl precociously consumed by current affairs; later, when she had set her sights on a political career, she regretted having been sidetracked into science. At the age of sixteen, however, chemistry was her best subject. It suited the practical bent of her mind, and – most important at that age – she liked her teacher. It was a sensible subject, leading to good employment prospects.
Margaret was not quite fourteen when the war began, nearly twenty when it ended; it overshadowed her entire adolescence and was overwhelmingly the formative influence on her political development and specifically her approach to international relations. She came to political awareness in the mid-1930s at just the moment when international crises – in Abyssinia, the Rhineland, Spain and Czechoslovakia – began to dominate the news. Her first political memory was the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’ organised by the League of Nations Union in 1934.At a time when most Methodists inclined towards pacifism, Alfred appears to have been exceptionally aware of the threatening European situation, convinced of the need for rearmament to resist Nazism, and also – more unusually – concerned about the plight of the Jews. In 1938 the Roberts family briefly gave sanctuary to a seventeen-year-old Austrian girl – the penfriend of Margaret’s sister Muriel – sent to England by her parents to escape the Anschluss. She did not stay long – Alfred persuaded other Rotary families to take her in turn – but she brought the reality of what was happening in Central Europe home to North Parade.
The war itself was a formative influence for Margaret Thatcher’s whole generation, yet it affected her in a crucially different way from her male contemporaries. She was not only just too young to fight: she was the wrong sex. She could have joined one of the women’s services when she left school, which would have got her into uniform and closer to the action; but still she could never have gained that first-hand experience of combat which left such a deep and lasting impression on practically all the young men who became her rivals and colleagues in the years ahead. Mrs Thatcher’s experience on the home front – listening to Churchill in the blackout, following the campaigns with little flags on maps – taught her different lessons.
Unlike those who served during or after the war in France, Germany, the Mediterranean or the Far East, Mrs Thatcher never set foot out of England before her honeymoon in 1952, when she was twenty-six. Seen from Grantham, the peoples of the Continent were either odious enemies to be defeated, or useless allies who had to be saved from the consequences of their own feebleness by the British and Americans. By contrast the Americans were cousins, partners, friends: powerful and generous, the saviours of democracy, champions of freedom, prosperity and progress. Nor was this a merely abstract admiration: from 1942 onwards there was a large presence of American airmen stationed at bases around Grantham. Though they excited considerable interest among the local girls, there is no record that any of them tried to take up with Margaret Roberts. She never had much time for that sort of thing. But she saw the Americans around the town, noted the spending power they brought to the local economy, and could hear them flying out each day to bomb Germany.
We are dealing with simplistic stereotypes here. But there can be no doubt that Mrs Thatcher’s instinctive and lifelong belief in the Atlantic alliance as the first principle of British foreign policy, and her equally instinctive contempt for the continental Europeans, both derived from her particular experience of the Second World War – an experience unique among British politicians of the post-war era. It is impossible to overemphasise the significance of this gulf of perception. It was not just her sex which made Mrs Thatcher different: the most important consequence of her sex was her lack of military experience.
Though she did not sit her Higher School Certificate until 1943, she had already received offers from both Nottingham (‘our local university’) and Bedford College, London, before the end of 1942. However, she was determined, with Alfred’s support, to try for Oxford. (‘I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for…I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham.’)21 So she sat a scholarship exam in December 1942. She narrowly missed the prize (she was, as she points out in her memoirs, only seventeen); but she was offered a place at Somerville College, Oxford, for October 1944. The lost year was important since, under wartime regulations, unless she went up in 1943 she would only be allowed to take a two-year degree before being called up for National Service. Still, it was a considerable achievement to have won a place.
With a university place secured, but a year to fill before she could expect to take it up, the natural thing for a patriotic eighteen-year-old in the middle of the war might have been to do as many of her contemporaries had already done and join one of the women’s services; or, if that would have committed her for too long a period, at least find some other form of war work while she waited to go to Oxford. It is a little odd that she chose instead to go back to school for another year.
The autumn term began in August, three weeks early to allow an October break for potato picking. Just three weeks into the term, however, there came a telephone call from Somerville: a vacancy had arisen – another girl had presumably decided that she had more compelling priorities – so Miss Roberts was offered the chance to take up her place immediately. She therefore left KGGS in the middle of the term, left home and Grantham and went up to Oxford in October 1943, with the opportunity, after all, to enjoy a full three years.
Oxford
Going to Oxford was the great opportunity which changed Margaret Roberts’ life, opened doors to her and set her on the way to a political career. Yet Oxford was not for her, as it was for so many others, a golden period of youthful experiment and self-discovery. In the four years she eventually spent there she made no lasting friendships, underwent no intellectual awakening. She did not light up the university in any way: none of her contemporaries saw her as anything remarkable, still less picked her as a future Prime Minister. Yet she was already more than half-determined to go into politics and used her time at Oxford quite deliberately to make connections which would be useful to her in years to come. The fact that no one noticed her was largely a function of her sex: Oxford in the 1940s was still a predominantly male society. The Union, in particular, was barred to women, who were obliged to confine their political activity to the less glamorous back rooms of the Conservative Association and the Labour Club. But even within the Conservative Association Margaret Roberts seemed no more than diligent. The most remarkable thing about her Oxford career, in fact, was how little the experience seemed to change her.
Admittedly, Oxford in wartime was a shadow of its normal self. There were more women than usual and fewer young men; rather than giving the women more opportunity to shine, however, the men’s absence seemed to drain the place of much of its energy. Margaret was given rooms in college, but was slow to make friends. ‘Yes, I was homesick,’ she admitted to Patricia Murray.‘I think there would be something very wrong with your home life if you weren’t just a little.’22 She gradually filled her rooms with familiar pictures and bits of furniture brought from home.
Her principal antidote to loneliness was work; but in some ways this only increased it. Chemistry is an unsociable course of study, involving long hours alone in the laboratory: years later she recalled that science was ‘impersonal’, compared with arts subjects which gave more opportunity for discussion and debate.23 She was probably already beginning to regret having chosen chemistry; but she stuck at it conscientiously and she was more than competent at it, combining as she did a clear mind with an infinite capacity for taking pains. In her third year she devoted more of her time to politics and less to work. Had she dedicated herself single-mindedly to getting a first she might – by sheer application – have succeeded. As it was she won a university essay prize, shared with another Somerville girl. But she was not so single-minded. Moreover she was ill during her final exams. In the circumstances she did well to take a solid second. It was good enough to allow her to come back for a fourth year to do a B.Sc.