A Tory Wind of Change

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A bootmaker's son, Alfred Roberts was a pillar of the Methodist Church and once served as the mayor of Grantham. He and his wife Beatrice, a seamstress before her marriage, kept a well-appointed shop that also served as the local post office. They lived upstairs in spotless quarters, although the bathroom was in the backyard. For Margaret and her elder sister Muriel, now 57, family life in Grantham was frugal but warm, with a vision of something better: work hard, pay cash, save and get ahead. Years later, Thatcher remembered that "my parents embedded in us very strongly that work and cleanliness were next to godliness. There was more than just having to work to live—there was work as a duty."

Margaret Roberts, who was never called "Maggie," is remembered in Grantham as a studious, determined little girl with the cherubic looks of a cupid on a Victorian valentine. At the age of nine, she won a poetry-reading prize at the annual town festival. Her headmistress at Hunting Town Road Elementary School offered congratulations, saying, "You were lucky!" To which Margaret replied: "I wasn't lucky. I deserved it."

There are no recollections in Grantham of Margaret with chums or boyfriends. She was an exceptionally pretty girl, but very earnest. As teen-agers she and Muriel would help out in the store. Thatcher remembers fondly: "We used to stand in the shop sometimes late on a Saturday evening. It was quite a big shop, with all the beautiful mahogany fitments that I now see in the antique shops. A lot of people came in, and with Father on the [town] council, and knowing we were all interested in what was going on in the world, we would talk quite late." In this grass-roots setting, her conservative political views came into focus. By the time she was in her late teens, she has said, "politics was in my bloodstream."

A career in either politics or law, her other main interest, seemed beyond the family's means. "There was no question of my thinking I had a political future," she once observed. "We could not have afforded it . . . Somehow, if people wanted to get on in the world, they went into the professions. It made a good deal of impression on me that we were in trade. I've always been trade all my life."

But Alfred Roberts was determined that his daughters would have a better life than the family shop. "Very few girls from Grantham went to any university, much less Oxford," says John Foster, a local businessman. "But Margaret and her father were set on Oxford." The university required Latin for all entering students, a course not offered to girls in Grantham at that time. Roberts solved the problem: he hired a tutor for his daughter, and in three months she was able to meet the university's Latin qualifications.