For the first time in her life she had money. She could at last surround herself with all those enviable mod cons she did not have in Grantham or in any of her cheerless digs. In Swan Court she could afford to entertain and quickly turned herself into a formidable hostess. But of course she also worked. Along with the cooking and the housework, she now had time to pursue her legal studies. She attended courses at the Council for Legal Education, working towards her intermediate Bar exams in the summer of 1953. If he did not know it already, Denis discovered that he had married a workaholic who would stay up long after he had gone to bed, or get up early, to finish whatever she had to do.
Almost certainly Margaret Thatcher wanted to have children – she would have regarded it as part of her duty, one of those social expectations she was programmed to observe – even though she must have known it would make finding a seat more difficult. She was confident of her own ability to handle the competing demands on her time; but local Conservative Associations were a different matter. Whatever her calculations, they were knocked sideways in August 1953 when she surprised herself and her doctors by producing twins. This was a wonderful piece of Thatcherite efficiency – two babies for the price of one, a boy and a girl, in a single economy pack, an object lesson in productivity. She had been expecting a single child in late September, but her labour pains started six weeks early. She went into Queen Charlotte’s Hospital on Thursday 13 August, was X-rayed next day and found to be carrying twins; they were delivered by Caesarean section on Saturday the 15th, weighing 4lbs each, and were christened Mark and Carol.
Giving birth to twins with the minimum disruption of her career became part of the Thatcher legend. She did not enjoy her pregnancy, which made her feel uncharacteristically unwell, so getting two children for the labour of one suited her admirably. ‘As she now had one of each sex’, Carol has written, ‘that was the end of it as far as she was concerned – she needn’t repeat the process.’16 She could get on with what was more important to her. There and then, in her hospital bed, she committed herself to taking her final Bar exams in December. She had passed her intermediates in May and, twins or no twins, she was not going to postpone her finals. In fact their arrival six weeks early gave her more time.
On coming out of hospital she first hired an Australian nurse for six weeks while she found a permanent nanny, called Barbara, who stayed for five years. To give themselves more space, she and Denis rented the adjoining flat, knocking through a connecting door: this arrangement, with Denis and Margaret in one flat and Barbara and the twins next door, ensured undisturbed nights and maximum peace and quiet in the daytime for Margaret to work. She duly passed her final exams, was called to the Bar and joined her first chambers in January 1954.
While she was practising at the Bar, in Mark and Carol’s pre-school years, she told Patricia Murray, ‘I was never very far away – my chambers were only about twenty minutes from home, so I knew I could be back very quickly if I were needed.’17 That was true – though perhaps optimistic – so long as the family was living in Chelsea. ‘I was there with them quite a lot during the early stages,’ she claimed in 1979.18 But in 1957, when the twins were four, the hitherto very low rent on their two flats in Swan Court was steeply increased as a result of the Conservative Government’s abolition of rent controls – an act which the Thatchers in principle approved. Rather than pay the new commercial rent they moved out of London to a large suburban house in Lock’s Bottom, Farnborough, in Kent. This gave Denis a much shorter daily drive to Erith. But it meant Margaret commuting every day. She could not now be home in twenty minutes. Then, when she got into Parliament in 1959, she was not at home in the evenings either.The nannies had to cope – first Barbara, later another, much older, known as Abby. ‘They kept the children in order and I always telephoned from the House shortly before six each evening to see that all was well.’19
Mark and Carol were not exactly spoiled, but they were certainly indulged. They did not lack for clothes or expensive toys: their childhood was very different from the constricted existence Margaret had endured in Grantham. They had family holidays – traditional English seaside holidays, first at Bognor, then on the Isle of Wight where they rented the same house for six years running from 1959. But Carol notes bleakly: ‘Family holidays didn’t appeal to Denis or Margaret.’20 More adventurously they also went skiing as a family every Christmas from 1962 – quite an unusual thing to do in the early sixties. Carol describes her mother as ‘a cautious skier’ who worked hard on perfecting her technique but eschewed speed: ‘she had no intention of returning with a leg in plaster’.21
‘When I look back’, Carol goes on, ‘I have no doubt that my mother’s political ambitions – and the single-mindedness with which she pursued them – eclipsed our family and social life.’ She does not blame Margaret. ‘No woman gets to the top by going on family picnics and cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch with friends.’22 As a working woman bringing a second full-time income into an already prosperous home (and then spending a good deal of it on child care and private school fees) Mrs Thatcher was blazing a trail which became commonplace in her daughter’s generation. Moreover she was not just working for her own fulfilment, or for money: she had a mission, and ultimately she achieved it. Plenty of prominent men – political leaders, businessmen and artists – have followed their calling at the expense of their families. History will not blame Margaret Thatcher for having done the same. But she deceived herself if she believed her family did not suffer for her single-mindedness.
Seeking a winnable constituency
Margaret Thatcher’s legal career was brief and undistinguished, but nevertheless an important stage in her political apprenticeship. Less than six years elapsed between her being called to the Bar in January 1954 and her entering the House of Commons in October 1959. For those six years, however, her commitment to the law was characteristically thorough and purposeful, and it achieved its purpose. She had recognised even before she went to Oxford that law would be a much better profession than chemistry from which to launch into politics, first as a means of gaining practical experience of legislation in action, and second as a profession whose short terms and flexible hours would allow her both to nurse a constituency – supposing she could find one – and feel that she could always get home in an emergency if required. So it proved.
Women were still conspicuous by their rarity in the Inns of Court: the few exceptions tended to stick to ‘feminine’ specialisms like divorce and family law, rather than challenge hard masculine preserves like tax. Undoubtedly Mrs Thatcher did meet some prejudice at the Bar. Wherever she did encounter male chauvinism, her technique was simply to ignore it while giving it nothing to feed on. She worked at least as hard as any man. She arrived promptly in the morning, wasted no time on gossiping or long lunches, went home at 5.30 and usually took work with her. As a woman she was different because she did not mix socially with other barristers and pupils: she did not go to the pub at the end of the day. But she pulled her weight professionally: she relished showing the men that she expected no concessions. If anything, Patrick Jenkin remembers, her reputation with her peers was the more formidable because they knew that she had passed her exams while nursing twins, and that she went home every evening to look after her husband and children.23