A Chain of Events

Young Lives; Margaret Thatcher

By Richard Coppin

Way back in 1984, the town’s business community staged an ambitious Trades’ Fair inside the

dusty and oil-stained remains of an old and long-abandoned factory, once used for heavy

industry; Ruston & Hornsby’s, on what is now the B&Q car park on London Road. It was dubbed Expo 84 and entry to participate in it came with an offer that if you joined The Chamber of Trade the cost of one’s stand would be halved. My wife Andrea thought this a thoroughly good idea and so I signed up. I was an up-and-coming graphic designer back then; keen to make a name for myself in what was a new town to me and so we both grabbed whatever wood we could purloin and erected the best display stand we could muster. We even secured enough work in the first twenty minutes to pay for it all.

The quickly assembled display stand, complete with wooden drawing board for ‘Expo 84’

A more professional affair three years later

Three years later, around the time that Andrea and I had set up a design studio on Castlegate, I had been invited to join the committee of this august body, allowing me to be better placed to take advantage of what being at the heart the Chamber offered, particularly from the next big event in the planning; ‘Tradex 87’. This was another exposition on the same site and building on the experience of the previous one, an even more ambitious affair, brimming with the trade stands of almost every business in town. Much of the work I received came as a result of designing other exhibitor’s stands for it even before it opened. As a means of networking it proved superb; helping me to gain many more clients who eventually became good friends.

Our Castlegate premises.

In 1993, I was elected to be second in command of the organisation, which meant that by protocol, two years later, I donned the chain of office as President. It seemed to me that this opportunity was best honoured by having at its heart a central driving ambition, a platform with which to make a difference for traders as well as the whole town in general. For me, this was forcing home the introduction of CCTV to Grantham; a monumental and labourious undertaking that was eventually achieved with the dedication of a hard-working and enthusiastic committee and the pledges from virtually every local business, in tandem with SKDC. 

The newly elected President on the Chamber of Trade; 1995-97. 

Looking at the ornate pendant on the official chain, my attention was led to the names on the silver plates secured to the ribbon. The first one mentioned was H. Sharpley; 1920. He owned a business around the area where Connell’s the Estate Agents now stands on Watergate and was a high class outfitters and draper. I worked my way up both sides of the ribbon and came across a certain A. Roberts; 1931. It’s from this modest engraved entry where our story really starts.

The Chamber President’s pendant.

Alfred Roberts had begun his working life as an assistant grocer in Oundle, Norhamptonshire; although he’d held out hopes of becoming a school teacher; a career path he had been forced to abandon at thirteen years of age to help support his family, he being the fifth member of seven children born to Benjamin Roberts, a shoemaker and Ellen (nee Smith). His move to Grantham helped him to secure an apprenticeship with a greengrocer. His deeply held patriotic desire to join up in 1914 to fight in the First World War was likewise dashed due to him having such poor eyesight.

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Alfred Roberts’ plate. And mine at the top. Alfred Robert (1892 – 1970).

Alfred was a spiritually upright man and was a firm follower of the Methodist ideals of the

Christian church which the eighteenth century preacher John Wesley had established. Every

Sunday he would attend the Methodist church on Finkin Street and it was there where he met a

young lady named Beatrice Ethel Stephenson; a seamstress and dressmaker. They were married

on Monday 28 th May 1917 about seven weeks after the United States had joined Britain to fight

the German forces in the Great War. A year after ‘The War to end all Wars’ had ended in an armistice, Alfred and Ethel set their

sights on a grocery shop and tobacconist on the corner of North Parade and Broad Street in

1919. An advertisement at the time declared that he was a ‘Grocer and Provision Dealer’ as well

as running a Post Office. They ran the shop within the rigid financial principles of thrift and

common sense. In this way they created a sound way of life, so much so that a few days short

of their fourth wedding anniversary on May 21 st 1921 their first child was born, a girl they

named Muriel. Another four years would pass before a second baby arrived to fill the upstairs

family flat with the cries of an infant child. They called their little baby girl Margaret Hilda; the

date was 13 th October 1925. As she grew, Margaret became ever more aware of the life of the town around her. In her

second autobiography, paradoxically dealing with her formative years titled; ‘The Path to

Power’, she sheds light on her early years, saying how she was born into a home which was

practical, serious and intensely religious. Her parents were both staunch Methodists; her father

in fact was in great demand as a lay preacher in and around Grantham. It was he who shaped

the character of his growing daughter. This is exemplified by his attitude to leisure, like when

her parents attended the Sunday evening services each week at their Finkin Street church

leaving Margaret occasionally with time on her hands at home. She recalled that this gave her

too much of a good thing, and reminisced that on a few occasions she would attempt to get out

of going so that she could go for walks with her friends or go to the cinema. Her father would

explain that even though her friends did these things, he would say; ‘Never do things just

because other people do them’. The sentiment stood her in good stead, just as it had done

throughout her father’s life. Alfred Roberts displayed his cast iron ethics by taking part in the

civic life of Grantham, becoming a councillor, a member of the Urban District Council, Justice of

the Peace, President of the Chamber of Trade, President of Rotary, director of the Grantham

Building Society as well as the Trustee Savings Bank (TSB), chairman of the local National

Savings movement, chairmen of the Borough Council, alderman, governor of Grantham’s boys’

and the girls’ grammar schools, chairman of the Workers Educational Association and the

Mayor of Grantham between the years of 1945-1946; all the while running a thriving business.

This brought Margaret into marginal contact with the great and the good in the area; Lord

Brownlow, Wing Commander Guy Gibson; leader of the Dambusters’ raid (which had been

coordinated from St. Vincent’s Hall in Grantham), the Manners family (the Dukes of Rutland)

and many others.

Her childhood though was not as austere as it might be imagined. Margaret grew up in a

musical family and was encouraged even from the age of five to learn to play the piano,

something her mother Beatrice was already good at. She described her teachers as excellent

and through their tutelage she managed to win several prizes at local music festivals. Never one

to hide her musical light under a bushel, she was pleased to admit to herself that she was quite

good. In fact it was her uncle John Roberts who had made the piano on which she practiced, he

being a church organ builder. On a visit to see her uncle, around the time she was aged about ten she was granted the chance to play on one of the two gigantic instruments in a ‘cavernous’

barn where they were being stored. Happy musical evenings passed with Margaret playing and

her father adding his bass voice along with the contralto harmonies of her mother. Often as not

friends would join in these musical soirées too and make a homemade concert of it. Music at the Finkin Street Methodist church also provided the family with, as well as the

religious side, a great breadth of music to appreciate, not least the fine Wesleyan hymns she

loved to sing. There were some great preachers too filling the large building with powerful

moral lessons for life, her father being one of them. Always a questioning girl, Margaret

confided to a friend that some of what she’d heard during the sermons didn’t add up. She had

learned about angels descending from heaven and so, using her scientific mind, she calculated

that for an angelic creature to gain the power of flight it would need a breastbone of six feet or

so to support the wings. Notwithstanding that consideration her time at church, school and

home provided a secure way of life built on good principles and spiritual guidance.

Such upright qualities instilled in the young Margaret from her earliest days a refusal to never

alter her convictions just because others disagreed with them or because it might have made

her unpopular. Nevertheless, life was full for her; going for long walks often on her own. She

loved the countryside and thinking things to herself, walking up Hall’s Hill especially when the

country was at war when children were given a week off to go gathering rose hips and

blackberries. When winter came Margaret could be seen tobogganing down the same hill when

it snowed.

The war made a big impact on the adolescent Margaret, reading reports of the threat of fascism

gripping Germany and neighbouring countries. Her family understood clearly Hitler’s brutal

harassment of the Jews. Her school; the Huntingtower Primary School encouraged children to

have foreign pen pals. Margaret’s female pen friend was called Colette. Perhaps she lost

interest in keeping in touch and the contact with her faded away. However her sister, Muriel,

had been writing to a Jewish pen friend from Austria called Edith. After the March 1938

Anschluss when Hitler annexed Austria, Edith’s banker father, wrote to Alfred Roberts to ask if

his family could take care of his daughter. He could see only too starkly the way events were

leading. Margaret remembers that her family didn’t have time, space or money to do this,

although she saved up her pocket money to help pay for her travel ticket. Fortunately, Alfred

gained support from the Grantham Rotarians and found a way round the problem. Edith came

to stay with each of the Rotarian families ‘in rotation’ until she left to live with her relatives in

South America. Margaret described the seventeen year old girl as tall, beautiful and well

dressed, evidently from a well-to-do family who spoke very good English. What happened to

Edith’s parents can only be imagined.

The young Miss Roberts, had a strong dislike for Hitler, who was seen by some as the saviour of

his country; praising him for making the trains run on time and giving The Fatherland its self

respect back which it had lost in 1918. Her opinions about The Fuhrer came out often as not on

Fridays when she was sent to get the fish and chips from the nearby chippy, most probably the

one at 25 Manthorpe Road. Usually there was a long queue giving people chance to chat, gossip and exchange their views. Someone in the line up suggested that Hitler was doing a fine job;

Margaret vigorously argued the opposite. The lady serving the chips said, “Oh, she’s always

debating.” It was a sign of things to come. Margaret Roberts was in the top class at Huntingtower Primary School. It was here that she

became familiar with the works of Rudyard Kipling, gaining a fascination for his poems and

stories and was keen to add more of his books on to her Christmas list. This love of books made

her an outstanding pupil, quite ahead of her peers. Often she was chided by her teachers for

using words usually used by well-educated adults. To her, such a lexicon was simply a part of

her everyday language.

Beyond school there was the cinema. The Roberts family was well acquainted with the

Campbell family who owned and ran The Picture House (where the St. Peter’s Hill entrance to

The Isaac Newton Shopping Centre exists today), so it was deemed by her father to be a little

bit more acceptable to his principled morality for his daughters to go there. Margaret loved the

‘four handkerchief weepies’; starring the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and any film with Ingrid

Bergman in it. James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington displayed the same kind of

adherence to principles as her father exercised. The fight against the evils of the French

Revolution stirred something in Margaret too by watching Leslie Howard and Merle Oberon in

The Scarlet Pimpernel. She found the films starring actors like Robert Donat and the French

charmer Charles Boyer actually helped her with her grasp of history through the historical

movies they starred in. For a young girl growing up in a town like Grantham, the cinema gave

her access to a range of talent, dramatic form, human emotion and sex appeal.

From Huntingtower School the eleven year old Margaret moved up to senior school in 1936.

That meant the Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School; (KGGS); known at the time as Kesteven

and Grantham Girl’s Grammar School; gaining admission through winning a competitive

scholarship; something called academic fee assistance. Like many children of her age she would

walk home for lunch and then back home in the evening with a sack of homework to complete,

a full four miles of healthy exercise. She loved everything about the school, especially the

uniform of saxe-blue and navy which ushered in the nickname of; ‘The Girls in Blue’.

It would have created a great deal of pride for Alfred and Beatrice Roberts to read the contents

of their youngest daughter’s school reports; citing her hard work and continued improvement.

Outside of academic lessons she enjoyed the piano, played field hockey, took part in poetry

recitals, and kept fit by swimming and going for walks. Her parents would have beamed with

even greater pride when Margaret was made Head Girl in the 1942-43 term. Her name still

graces the roll of honour boards in the hall of the old KGGS building. With the Second World

War now ravaging the globe Margaret spent some of her time outside of school volunteering as

a fire watcher with the local ARP service; keeping a sharp lookout for incendiary bombs the

Luftwaffe dropped to try and set Grantham’s buildings alight.

Margaret Roberts aged thirteen during the 1938-39 term.

The young schoolgirl had a deep admiration for Miss Williams, (Miss H. Gladys Williams M.A.; the founding Headmistress of the school from 1910); ‘a petite, upright, grey-haired old lady’. It

was she who insisted that all girls should take domestic science for four years. Her authority

was total throughout the school. Miss Harding was her history teacher who gave her a taste for the subject but which was never taken beyond the school classroom except for Miss Harding’s account about the Dardanelle’s campaign to the class, which replayed in her mind when she eventually visited the battlefield as Prime Minister. It was Miss Kay who set Margaret up for the next part of her life. She was her chemistry teacher and such was the young Miss Roberts’ enthusiasm for this particular branch of science she decided to specialise in it. She became regarded as a ‘Star scientist’.

This reputation came at a cost. It meant a lot of hard work; at school and at home, a workload

which grew as the terms became ever more challenging; spending many a Sunday night

completing homework in the flat above the shop. On top of all this Margaret read voraciously;

soaking up books on socialism, communism and fascism. One book her father denied her to

read was ‘Out of the Night’ by Richard Krebs who hid behind the nom de plume of Jan Valtin.

She learned where her father had hidden it and when he was out of the way at meetings she

took it off the bookshelf and discovered exactly what totalitarianism was really like; not the

kind of book a sixteen year old girl should have been exposed to, it being full of sadistic

violence. Eventually the soaking up of political literature had to give way to the next part of her

life. Towards the end of her schooling Margaret was busy ‘cramming’ for her university exam. The results of these examinations were clearly impressive enough to pave the way to a

university degree course in chemistry. Unfortunately, potential students like Margaret had the

hurdle of fees to consider. Wealthy parents could easily send their children to gain their

degrees and move on to positions that mirrored their high status. Margaret came from a

modest background which under the social framework of the day would have been the end of

the matter. As it turned out the founder of Somerville College in Oxford; Madeleine Shaw-

Lefevre had set up an academic scholarship to allow female students in Margaret’s position to

pursue the study of chemistry at that College.

Initially, she missed out on getting this scholarship during the time she was taking her entrance

exams in her upper sixth year towards the end of 1942. However, a vacancy became

unexpectedly available to her when another candidate withdrew. This gave her the go-ahead to

enter the college in October 1943. Even so, the scholarship’s financial lifeline wasn’t quite

enough to meet all of her needs so her education was given the extra support from a local

bursary to work in tandem with what the college was offering. So began Margaret Roberts’

time at university and she set forth to leave the younger part of her life behind.

University life would usher in a connection with the chemical industry as well as an ever

deepening political life. It would lead to a meeting with a certain Denis Thatcher. Her life would

see her becoming an MP for Finchley, to the leader of the Conservative party and in 1979 the

first ever female Prime Minister in Great Britain, going on to win three General Elections in a

row. It would mean becoming a World Leader, standing up to anyone who got in the way of her

and her country; Europe, Argentina, the unions. It would mean the creation of a new word;

Thatcherism, the running a country on a sound financial basis just as her father had run his

business when she had been a young girl growing up above the shop in Grantham all those

years before.

The shop where all this life took place changed when Alfred Roberts died in 1970. For a while it

became the Premier Restaurant followed by the Grantham Chiropractic Clinic before finally

changing its name to Living Health. Sandra and Neil who ran this business in the early part of

the millennium asked me to draw a fine-line marker pen illustration of their premises. I later

colourised it with caran d’ache pencil crayon.

In the years during which Andrea and I ran Grantham Now Magazine it was a vital part of the

business to participate in a great deal of networking. One of these networking groups was very

progressive and it regularly invited a number of charismatic speakers to inspire, entertain and

inform those attending. At Christmas there would be a special guest; Edwina Currie former M.P.

being one of them I recall. Another guest who, as well as being all of the above, was great fun

was Carole Thatcher, Margaret’s daughter. She attended the Christmas dinner in 2009 and

chatted with us individually with great gusto. I decided that a fine gift to give her would be a

framed copy of this drawing; two in fact, one for her and one for her mother, which she

promised to give to her. Today as I look back on that meeting, I somehow feel personally that

this brought her story full circle, right back to the little girl who once lived above a little shop.

My drawing of Margaret Roberts’ birthplace... …and the chance to present a copy of it to her daughter Carole.

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