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My family understood clearly Hitler’s brutal treatment of the Jews. At school we were encouraged to have foreign penfriends. Mine was a French girl called Colette: alas, I did not keep up contact with her. But my sister, Muriel, had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Edith’s father, a banker, wrote to mine asking whether we could take his daughter, since he very clearly foresaw the way events were leading. We had neither the time nor the money to accept such a responsibility alone; but my father won the support of the Grantham Rotarians, and Edith came to stay with each of our families in turn until she went to live with relatives in South America. She was seventeen, tall, beautiful, well-dressed, and spoke good English. She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.
We wanted to see Hitler’s wickedness ended, even by war if that proved necessary. From that point of view Munich was nothing to be proud of. We knew too that by the Munich Agreement Britain had complicity in the great wrong that had been done to Czechoslovakia. When fifty years later as Prime Minister I visited Czechoslovakia I addressed the Federal Assembly in Prague and told them: ‘We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence. Churchill was quick to repudiate the Munich Agreement, but we still remember it with shame.’ British foreign policy is at its worst when it is engaged in giving away other people’s territory.
But equally we all understood the lamentable state of unpreparedness in Britain and France to fight a major war. Also, unfortunately, some were taken in by the German propaganda and actually believed that Hitler was acting to defend the Sudeten Germans from Czech oppression. If we had gone to war at that point, moreover, we would not have been supported by all of the Dominions. It was the Germans’ subsequent dismemberment of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that finally convinced almost everyone that war would soon be necessary to defeat Hitler’s ambitions. Even then, as I have pointed out, Labour voted against conscription the following month. There was strong anti-war feeling in Grantham too: many Methodists opposed the official recruiting campaign of May 1939, and right up to the outbreak of war and beyond pacifists were addressing meetings in the town.
In any case, the conflict was soon upon us. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. When Hitler refused to withdraw by 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September in accordance with Britain’s ultimatum we were waiting by the radio, desperate for the news. It was the only Sunday in my youth when I can remember not attending church. Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words, relayed live from the Cabinet Room at No. 10, told us that we were at war.
It was natural at such times to ask oneself how we had come to such a pass. Each week my father would take two books out of the library, a ‘serious’ book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read. I soon knew what I liked – anything about politics and international affairs. I read, for instance, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, which had first appeared in 1932. The contents of this fashionable communist analysis, which predicted that capitalism was shortly to be superseded by socialism, seemed to many of my generation exciting and new.
But both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay. Such an admission is probably unfashionable. But though I had great friends in politics who suffered from attacks of doubt about where they stood and why, and though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind. I can see now that I was probably unusual. For the Left were setting the political agenda throughout the thirties and forties, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of the war itself. This was evident from many of the books which were published at about this time. The Left had been highly successful in tarring the Right with appeasement, most notably in Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, the so-called ‘yellow books’. One in particular had enormous impact: Guilty Men, co-authored by Michael Foot, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ after Dunkirk in 1940.
Robert Bruce Lockhart’s best-selling Guns or Butter? appeared in the autumn of 1938, after Munich. Lockhart’s travels through Europe led him to Austria (now Nazi-controlled) and then to Germany itself at the height of Hitler’s triumph. There the editor of a German national newspaper is reported as telling him that ‘Germany wanted peace, but she wanted it on her own terms.’ The book ends with Lockhart, woken by ‘the tramp of two thousand feet in unison’, looking out of his window onto a misty dawn, where ‘Nazi Germany was already at work’.
A more original variation on the same theme was Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair. This made a deep impression on me. Reed witnessed the persecution of the Jews which accompanied the advance of Nazi influence. He described the character and mentality – alternately perverted, unbalanced and calculating – of the Nazi leaders. He analysed and blisteringly denounced that policy of appeasement by Britain and France which paved the way for Hitler’s successes. Written on the eve of the Anschluss, it was powerfully prophetic.
Out of the Night by Jan Valtin – pen name for the German communist Richard Krebs – was lent to my father by our future MP Denis Kendall. It was such strong meat that my father forbade me to read it – but when he went out to meetings I would take it down and read its spine-chilling account of totalitarianism in action. It is full of scenes of sadistic violence whose authenticity makes them still more horrifying. The appalling treatment by the Nazis of their victims is undoubtedly the most powerful theme. But underlying it is another, just as significant. For it describes how the communists set out in cynical alliance with the Nazis to subvert the fragile democracy of Germany by violence in the late twenties and early thirties. That same alliance against democracy would, of course, be replicated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to 1941 which destroyed Poland, the Baltic States and Finland and plunged the world into war. The book undoubtedly contributed to my growing belief that Nazism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.
A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a powerful analysis of how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to western liberal democratic values and – though I liked this less – a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar’s book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other – doubtless important – stuff of power politics.
Agar also wrote of the need, as part of the moral regeneration which must flow from fighting the war, to solve what he called ‘the Negro problem’. I had never heard of this ‘problem’ at all. Although I had seen some coloured people on my visit to London, there were almost none living in Grantham. Friends of ours once invited two American servicemen – one black, one white – stationed in Grantham back to tea and had been astonished to detect tension and even hostility between them. We were equally taken aback when our friends told us about it afterwards. This sort of prejudice was simply outside our experience or imagination.
Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cartland’s Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. It was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was ‘all of a piece’, something which I always admired. But the sense that the war had a moral significance which underlay the fear and suffering – or in our family’s case in Grantham the material dreariness and mild deprivation – which accompanied it, was perhaps most memorably conveyed by Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy. The author – a young pilot – portrays the struggle which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, and which would claim his own less than a year later, as one which was also being fought out in the human heart. It was a struggle for a better life in the sense of simple decency.
A generation which, unlike Richard Hillary, survived the war felt this kind of desire to put things right with themselves, their country and the world. As I would come to learn when dealing with my older political colleagues, no one who fought came out of it quite the same person as went in. Less frequently understood, perhaps, is that war affected deeply people like me who, while old enough to understand what was happening in the conflict, were not themselves in the services. But we all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different. It never seemed to me, for example, as it apparently did to many others, that the ‘lesson’ of wartime was that the state must take the foremost position in our national life and summon up a spirit of collective endeavour in peace as in war.
The ‘lessons’ I drew were quite different. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed, Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilization had constantly to be nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. And, finally, I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.
Our life in wartime Grantham – until I went up to Oxford in 1943 – must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But there were twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory – the British Manufacturing and Research Company (BMAR Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) – was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line – the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter – we had no outside shelter for we had no garden – until the ‘all clear’ sounded. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.
In fact, Grantham itself was playing a more dramatic role than I knew at the time. Bomber Command’s 5 Group was based in Grantham, and it was from a large house off Harrowby Road that much of the planning was done of the bombing raids on Germany. The Dambusters flew from near Grantham – my father met their commander, Squadron Leader Guy Gibson. I always felt that Bomber Harris – himself based in Grantham in the early part of the war – had not been sufficiently honoured. I would remember what Winston Churchill wrote to him at the end of the war:
For over two years Bomber Command alone carried the war to the heart of Germany, bringing hope to the peoples of Occupied Europe and to the enemy a foretaste of the mighty power which was rising against him …
All your operations were planned with great care and skill. They were executed in the face of desperate opposition and appalling hazards. They made a decisive contribution to Germany’s final defeat. The conduct of these operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your air crews and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command. I believe that the massive achievements of Bomber Command will long be remembered as an example of duty nobly done.
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
In Grantham, at least, politics did not stand still in the war years. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sharply altered the attitudes of the Left to the war. Pacifist voices suddenly became silent. Anglo-Soviet friendship groups sprouted. We attended, not without some unease, Anglo-Soviet evenings held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.
Although it can now be seen that 1941 – with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December – sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.
Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East – the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong and then Singapore, the retreat through Burma and the Japanese threat to Australia. One evening in the spring of 1942 when I had gone for a walk with my father I turned and asked him when – and how – it would all end. He replied very calmly: ‘We don’t know how, we don’t know when; but we have no doubt that we shall win.’
In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was a blow. If I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third-year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.
* (#ulink_e7a927c3-c533-5270-a3af-d9bcc8adff5a) Theosophy was a mixture of mysticism, Christianity and the ‘wisdom of the East’, sense and nonsense.
* (#ulink_dd38fcdc-bf66-5d88-9338-4acaa0dc330c) Aldermen were indirectly elected council members – elected to serve a fixed term by the directly elected element in the council; a highly honoured position which has since been abolished.
* (#ulink_d61660db-7563-5961-945d-f08c6d178250) From God Knows, by Minnie Louise Haskins.
CHAPTER TWO (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)
Gowns-woman (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)
Oxford 1943–1947
OXFORD DOES NOT SET OUT TO PLEASE. Freshmen arrive there for the Michaelmas term in the misty gloom of October. Monumental buildings impress initially by their size rather than their exquisite architecture. Everything is cold and strangely forbidding. Or so it seemed to me.
It had been at Somerville during bitterly cold mid-winter days that I had taken my Oxford entrance exams. But I had seen little of my future college before I arrived, rather homesick and apprehensive, to begin my first term. In fact, Somerville always takes people by surprise. Many incurious passers-by barely know it is there, for the kindest thing to say of its external structure is that it is unpretentious. But inside it opens up into a splendid green space onto which many rooms face. I was to live both my first and second years in college, and in due course, a picture or two, a vase and finally an old armchair brought back from Grantham allowed me to feel that the rooms were in some sense mine. In my third and fourth years I shared digs with two friends in Walton Street.
Both Oxford and Somerville were strongly if indirectly affected by the war. For whatever reason, Oxford was not bombed, but like everywhere else, both town and university were subject to the blackout (‘dim-out’ from 1944) and much affected by wartime stringencies. Stained-glass windows were boarded up. Large static water tanks stood ready for use in case of fire. Most of our rations were allocated direct to the college which provided our unexciting fare in hall, though on rare occasions I would be asked out to dinner. There were a few coupons left over for jam and other things. One of the minor benefits to my health and figure of such austerities was that I ceased having sugar in my tea – though only many years later would I deny my ever-sweet tooth the pleasure of sugared coffee (not that there was over-much coffee for some time either). There were tight controls over the use of hot water. For example, there must be no more than five inches of water in the bath and of course I rigidly observed this, though coming from a family where the relationship between cleanliness and Godliness was no laughing matter. Not that we ever felt like complaining. After all, we were the lucky ones.
I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge and I knew that, however undemonstrative they might be, my parents were extremely proud of the fact. Before I went up to Oxford, I had a less clear idea of what the place would be like than did many of my contemporaries. But 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. So, excellent as it was, particularly in the sciences, I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham, our ‘local’ university. Another aspect of Oxford which appealed to me then – and still does – is the collegiate system. Oxford is divided into colleges, though it also has some central university institutions, such as the Bodleian Library. In my day, life centred on the college (where you ate and slept and received many of your tutorials) and around other institutions – church and societies – which had more or less a life of their own. My experience of college life contributed to my later conviction that if you wish to bring the best out of people they should be encouraged to be part of smaller, human-scale communities rather than be left to drift on a sea of impersonality.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which wartime conditions affected the ‘feel’ of university life was the fact that so many of us were very young – only seventeen or just eighteen. From 1944, the feel of Oxford changed again as older people, invalided out, started coming back from the services either to complete a shortened wartime degree or to begin a full degree course. They had been through so much more than we had. As Kipling wrote (in ‘The Scholars’) of young naval officers returning to Cambridge after the Great War to continue their studies:
Far have they steamed and much have they known, and most would they fain forget;
But now they are come to their joyous own with all the world in their debt.
By the time I left I found myself dealing with friends and colleagues who had seen much more of the world than I had. And I gained a great deal from the fact that Oxford at the end of the war was a place of such mixed views and experience.
I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment. I continued to take long walks on my own, around Christ Church Meadow, through the university parks and along the Cherwell or the Thames, enjoying my own company and thoughts. But I soon started to appreciate Oxford life. I was a member of a Methodist Study Group which gave and attended tea parties. My mother would send me cakes through the post and on a Saturday morning I would join the queue outside the ‘cake factory’ in north Oxford for an hour or so to buy the sustenance for tea that Sunday. I joined the Bach Choir, conducted by Sir Thomas Armstrong (by a nice coincidence Robert Armstrong’s father), whose repertoire was wider than its name suggested. I especially remember our performance of the St Matthew Passion in the Sheldonian Theatre, which Wren might have designed for the purpose. We also sang Prince Igor, Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande, and Holst’s Hymn of Jesus. Sometimes I went to listen rather than to sing: I heard Kathleen Ferrier in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.
With the end of the war and the return of the servicemen, the pace of entertainment quickened. Eights Week was revived and I went down to the river to watch the races. It was at this time that I first went out to dances and even on occasion drank a little wine (I had previously only tasted sherry and did not like it; nor do I now). I smoked my first cigarettes. I did not like them much either, though I knew I would get the taste if I persisted. I decided not to, to save the money and buy The Times every day instead. I now went to my first commem ball, and, like the girl in the song, danced all night. I saw Chekhov and Shakespeare at the Playhouse and the New Theatre. (Christopher Fry’s first plays were being performed at that time.) And I saw a wonderful OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) production performed in a college garden and featuring Kenneth Tynan, Oxford’s latest dandy. I cannot remember the play, partly because it was always difficult to distinguish Ken Tynan on stage from Ken Tynan in everyday life.
I might have had a more glittering Oxford career, but I had little money to spare and would have been hard put to make ends meet if it had not been for a number of modest grants secured for me from the college at the instance of my ever-helpful tutor, the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. I was also assisted by some educational trusts. I might have been able to supplement my income further from such sources if I had been prepared to give an undertaking to go into teaching. But I knew I had no such calling; and I did and do believe that good teachers need a vocation. In fact, I did teach science for one vacation at a school in Grantham in the summer of 1944: this earned the money for that luxury in Grantham but near-necessity in Oxford – a bicycle. It was while I was teaching there that Paris was liberated. The headmaster called the school together, announced that Paris was free again and told us how the brave Resistance fighters had helped the Allies by rising up against the German occupiers.
It was a thrilling moment. The war was evidently being won; I felt somehow less guilty for not being able to play a larger part; and I shared the joy of the British people that the French Resistance had restored French honour and pride. We may have had an exaggerated view in those days of the universality of resistance – we told each other stories of how the customers of a café would tap out ‘V for Victory’ in morse code on their glasses when a German soldier entered the café – but we had no doubt that every true Frenchman wanted to be free.
I threw myself into intensely hard work. In Dorothy Hodgkin the college was fortunate to have a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher, working in the comparatively new field of X-ray crystallography. Mrs Hodgkin was a Fellow of the Royal Society and later made a decisive contribution towards discovering the structure of penicillin, the first antibiotic, for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1964. In my fourth and final year (1946–47) I worked with a refugee German scientist, Gerhard Schmidt, under Dorothy Hodgkin’s direction, on the simple protein Gramicidin B as the research project required to complete Part II of my chemistry course. Through the Cosmos Club and the Scientific Club I also came across other budding young scientists and heard many well-known scientists speak, including J.D. Bernal. His politics were very left wing, as indeed were those of many other scientists at that time. But they would never have dreamt of carrying their politics over into their professional relationships with their students.
Religion also figured large in my Oxford life. There are many tales of young people entering university and, partly through coming into contact with scepticism and partly for less wholesome reasons, losing their faith. I never felt in any danger of that. Methodism provided me with an anchor of stability and, of course, contacts and friends who looked at the world as I did. I usually attended the Wesley Memorial Church on Sundays. There was, as in Grantham, a warmth and a sober but cheerful social life which I found all the more valuable in my initially somewhat strange surroundings. The church had a very vigorous Students’ Fellowship. After Sunday Evening Service there was usually a large gathering over coffee in the minister’s house, where there would be stimulating discussion of religious and other matters. Occasionally I would go to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin to listen to a particularly interesting university sermon and sometimes I would go to the college chapel, especially when I knew that Miss Helen Darbishire, who was Principal and a distinguished scholar of Milton and Wordsworth when I first went up to Somerville, was preaching.
Generally speaking, though, I did not go to Anglican churches. But oddly enough – or perhaps not so oddly when one considers the great impact he had on so many of my generation – it was the religious writing of that High Anglican C.S. Lewis which had most impact upon my intellectual religious formation. The power of his broadcasts, sermons and essays came from a combination of simple language with theological depth. Who has ever portrayed more wittily and convincingly the way in which Evil works on our human weaknesses than he did in The Screwtape Letters? Who has ever made more accessible the profound concepts of Natural Law than he did in The Abolition of Man and in the opening passages of Mere Christianity? I remember most clearly the impact on me of Christian Behaviour (republished in Mere Christianity, but originally appearing as radio talks). This went to the heart of the appalling disparity between the way in which we Christians behave and the ideals we profess. One of C.S. Lewis’s messages was that the standards of Christianity are not just binding on the saints. As he put it:
Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars.
Similarly, I was helped by what he wrote of the application of that sublime principle of Christian charity which seems to most of us so impossible of fulfilment. Lewis did not for a moment contest or diminish the sublimeness; but he very helpfully set out what charity is not.
… what [does] loving your neighbour as yourself [mean?] I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’ … I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do … Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery … Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another be cured: in fact, to wish his good.
Such words had a special poignancy, of course, at this time.
The main contribution one can make as a student to one’s country in peace or wartime is to study hard and effectively. But we all also tried to do something more directly. For my part, I would serve one or two evenings a week at the Forces canteen in Carfax. British soldiers and American airmen from the nearby bases at Upper Heyford were among our main customers. It was hot, sticky and very hard on the feet, but also good fun, with plenty of company and wisecracking humour.
Reports of the D-day landings in July 1944, though, brought both apprehension and anxiety. The deadly struggle on those exposed beaches made us deeply uneasy. For perhaps the only time I wondered whether I was right to be at Oxford.
In fact we were now within a year of the end of the war in Europe. There were still the Battle of the Bulge and the tragedy of Arnhem to come. But slowly the emphasis came to be on preparing for peace. And among the peacetime activities which began to take an increasing amount of my time was politics.
Almost as soon as I came up to Oxford I had joined the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), which was founded in the 1920s under the inspiration of a don at Christ Church – Keith Feiling, the historian of the Tory Party and later biographer of Neville Chamberlain. Although the national agreement to suspend party political electoral contests for the duration of the war had no direct implications for politics at the universities, in practice political life in Oxford was a good deal quieter than it had been in the 1930s. But, for all that, OUCA activities quickly became a focus for my life. In those days the Oxford Union, in which star speakers would come to debate issues of the highest importance as well as ones of unbelievable triviality, did not admit women to its membership, though I used sometimes to listen to debates. But I would never have excelled in the kind of brilliant, brittle repartee which the Union seemed to encourage. I preferred the more serious forensic style of our discussions in OUCA and of the real hustings. OUCA also provided a further network of acquaintance and friendship. It was, indeed, an effective forum for matchmaking, as a number of my OUCA colleagues demonstrated.
Oxford politics was a nursery for talent. I made friends in university politics who, as in the novels of Anthony Powell, kept reappearing in my life as the years passed by. Much the closest was Edward Boyle who, though he moved easily in a sophisticated social and political world which I had only glimpsed, shared with me a serious interest in politics. At this time Edward, the wealthy and cultivated son of a Liberal MP, was himself a classical liberal whose views chimed in pretty well with my own provincial middle-class conservatism. Although we were later to diverge politically, we remained dear friends until his tragically early death from cancer.
William Rees-Mogg, whom I knew in my final year, was a distinguished editor of The Times from a very early age. I was never as close to William as I was to Edward, but one sensed that he was marked out for higher things.
Robin Day was a prominent Liberal. Like Edward he was a leading light in the Oxford Union, and we later met as lawyers in the same chambers. One sometimes wondered what career would be open to the brilliant wits of the Union, until Robin Day invented a new one by pioneering television interviewing – after which our paths and our swords crossed frequently.
Another star was Tony Benn, at that time still rattling his full complement of syllables as the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn. From start to finish he and I have rarely agreed on anything, but he was always a courteous and effective debater, an English patriot, and as time has made socialism more and more a thing of the past, even a traditional figure. But perhaps we enjoy a sympathy based on our religious roots. When Tony became President of the Union I was invited to a celebration, attended by his father Viscount Stansgate, which, true to Tony’s Nonconformist principles, was teetotal.
Kenneth Harris was another leading debater, who along with Edward Boyle and Tony Benn spent several months touring the United States giving demonstration debates. He subsequently had a distinguished career in political journalism. We met again many times, notably when he wrote my biography.
As an officer in OUCA I was naturally taken up with the 1945 general election campaign. In Oxford I was busy campaigning for the city’s MP Quintin Hogg until term ended, when I returned to Grantham to work for Squadron Leader Worth in his attempt to dislodge the sitting Independent Member, Denis Kendall.
In retrospect, we should all have known what to expect. By some mysterious but inexorable law, wars always seem to advance state control and those who advocate it. My husband Denis’s view was that in the services people from totally different backgrounds mix in an unprecedented way and that the result is an acute twinge of social conscience and a demand for the state to step in and ameliorate social conditions. But, in any case, the Conservatives had done uniformly badly in the limited number of wartime electoral contests, and there was a general tendency for our share of the vote to fall. Nobody paid much attention to opinion polls then: but they too told the same story. As I have noted, the Left were extremely effective after Dunkirk in portraying the Conservatives as exclusively responsible for appeasement, and managed to distance Churchill from the party he led. Nor did people remember that Labour had opposed even the limited rearmament carried out by Baldwin and Chamberlain.
But there were also other influences at work. The command economy required in wartime conditions had habituated many people to an essentially socialist mentality. Within the Armed Forces it was common knowledge that left-wing intellectuals had exerted a powerful influence through the Army Education Corps, which as Nigel Birch observed was ‘the only regiment with a general election among its battle honours’. At home, broadcasters like J.B. Priestley gave a comfortable yet idealistic gloss to social progress in a left-wing direction. It is also true that Conservatives, with Churchill in the lead, were so preoccupied with the urgent imperatives of war that much domestic policy, and in particular the drawing up of the agenda for peace, fell largely to the socialists in the Coalition Government. Churchill himself would have liked to continue the National Government at least until Japan had been beaten and, in the light of the fast-growing threat from the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then. But the Labour Party understandably wished to come into its own collectivist inheritance.
In 1945, therefore, we Conservatives found ourselves confronting two serious and insuperable problems. First, the Labour Party had us fighting on their ground and were always able to outbid us. Churchill had been talking about post-war ‘reconstruction’ for some two years, and as part of that programme Rab Butler’s Education Act was on the Statute Book. Further, our manifesto committed us to the so-called ‘full employment’ policy of the 1944 Employment White Paper, a massive house-building programme, most of the proposals for National Insurance benefits made by the great Liberal social reformer Lord Beveridge and a comprehensive National Health Service. Moreover, we were not able effectively to take the credit (so far as this was in any case appropriate to the Conservative Party) for victory, let alone to castigate Labour for its irresponsibility and extremism, because Attlee and his colleagues had worked cheek by jowl with the Conservatives in government since 1940. In any event, the war effort had involved the whole population.
I vividly remember sitting in the student common room in Somerville listening to Churchill’s famous (or notorious) election broadcast to the effect that socialism would require ‘some sort of Gestapo’ to enforce it, and thinking, ‘He’s gone too far.’ However logically unassailable the connection between socialism and coercion was, in our present circumstances the line would not be credible. I knew from political argument on similar lines at an election meeting in Oxford what the riposte would be: ‘Who’s run the country when Mr Churchill’s been away? Mr Attlee.’ And such, I found, was the reaction now.
Back in Grantham, I was one of the ‘warm-up’ speakers for the Conservative candidate at village meetings. In those days, many more people turned out to public meetings than today, and they expected their money’s worth. I would frequently be speaking at half a dozen meetings an evening. Looking back at the reports in the local newspapers of what I said at the time, there is little with which I would disagree now. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice. There must be co-operation with America and (somewhat less realistically) with the Soviet Union. The British Empire, the most important community of peoples that the world had ever known, must never be dismembered. (Perhaps not very realistic either – but my view of Britain’s imperial future was not uncommon in the aftermath of victory.) The main argument I advanced for voting Conservative was that by doing so we would keep Winston Churchill in charge of our foreign policy. And perhaps if Churchill had been able to see through the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the post-war world might have looked a little different.
Like many other members of OUCA, I had received lessons in public speaking from Conservative Central Office’s Mrs Stella Gatehouse. Her emphasis was on simplicity and clarity of expression and as little jargon as possible. In fact, at election meetings, when you never knew how long you would have to speak before the candidate arrived, a touch more long-windedness would have been very useful. Most valuable of all for me personally, however, was the experience of having to think on my feet when answering questions from a good-humoured but critical audience. I recall a point made by an elderly man at one such meeting that had a lasting effect on my views about welfare: ‘Just because I’ve saved a little bit of money of my own, “Assistance” won’t help me. If I’d spent everything, they would.’ It was an early warning of the hard choices that the new Welfare State would shortly place before politicians.
Three weeks after polling day, by which time the overseas and service votes had been returned, I went to the election count at Sleaford. As we waited for the Grantham result, news trickled in of what was happening elsewhere. It was bad, and it became worse – a Labour landslide with Tory Cabinet ministers falling one after the other. Then our own candidate lost too. I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill. On my way back home I met a friend, someone who I had always thought was a staunch Conservative, and said how shocked I was by the terrible news. He said he thought the news was rather good. Incomprehension deepened. At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful. But was it not Edmund Burke who said: ‘A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world’? In retrospect, the election of the 1945–51 Labour Government seems the logical fulfilment of the collectivist spirit that came to dominate wartime Britain. It was to be about thirty-five years before this collectivism would run its course – shaping and distorting British society in the process, before it collapsed in 1979’s Winter of Discontent.
At the time, it was clear to everyone that fundamental reassessment of Conservative principles and policies was required. We felt this as much in Oxford as anywhere else. It lay behind the preparation of a report of the OUCA Policy Sub-Committee which I co-authored in Michaelmas term 1945 with Michael Kinchin-Smith and Stanley Moss. The report contained no more profound insights than any other Tory undergraduate paper. And its two themes we have heard many times since – more policy research and better presentation.
Perhaps the main problem as regards what we would now call the ‘image’ of the Conservative Party was that we seemed to have lost our way and our policies seemed to be devised for the wealthy rather than for ordinary people. As our OUCA paper put it: ‘Conservative policy has come to mean in the eyes of the public little more than a series of administrative solutions to particular problems, correlated in certain fields by a few unreasoning prejudices and the selfish interests of the moneyed classes.’ The accusation was, of course, unfair. If the Conservatives had won in 1945 we would still have had a Welfare State – doubtless with less immediate public expenditure and certainly with greater scope for private and voluntary initiative. But the idea that Conservatism was simply that – conserving the interests of the status quo against change and reform – was immensely powerful at this time.
In March 1946 I became Treasurer of OUCA and later that month went as one of the Oxford representatives to the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations (FUCUA) Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in London. It was my first such conference and I enjoyed it hugely. When I spoke it was in support of more involvement by people from working-class backgrounds in university Conservative politics. I felt that we had to get away from the perception of Conservatism as stuffy and frivolous. It was not so much that I wanted a classless society, as the socialists (somewhat disingenuously) said they did, but rather that I could not see that class was important. Everyone had something unique to offer in life and their responsibility was to develop those gifts – and heroes come from all backgrounds. As I put it to the FUCUA Conference: ‘We have heard all about this being the age of the common man – but do not forget the need for the uncommon man.’ Or, I suppose I might have added, ‘woman’.
In October 1946 I was elected President of OUCA – the third woman to hold the position. I had done my final exams that summer and was now beginning the research project which constituted the fourth and last year of the Chemistry degree, so I had a little more time to spend on politics. For example, I attended my first Conservative Party Conference, held that year in Blackpool. I was entranced. So often in Grantham and in Oxford it had felt unusual to be a Conservative. Now suddenly I was with hundreds of other people who believed as I did and who shared my insatiable appetite for talking politics.
The Conference had a most extraordinary atmosphere. From my humble position as a ‘representative’, I had the sense that the Party leadership – with the notable exception of the Party Leader – had arrived at Blackpool prepared to reconcile itself and Conservatism to the permanence of socialism in Britain. A perceptive observer of the 1946 Conference, Bertrand de Jouvenal, wrote of our Front Bench: ‘These great, intelligent thoroughbreds, trained from their earliest years to prudent administration and courteous debate, were in their hearts not far from accepting as definitive their electoral defeat in 1945.’* (#ulink_219c2924-b151-5f8f-983f-75e0cb774bdd)
This was decidedly not what the rank and file wanted to hear. Indeed, there was open dissent from the floor. A request on the first day for a general debate on questions of philosophy and policy was refused by the chairman. There was a lukewarm reaction to the consensus approach of speeches from the platform, though these became notably tougher the longer the Conference went on, as Shadow ministers perceived our discontent. My instincts were with the rank and file, though I had not yet fully digested the strong intellectual case against collectivism, as I was to do in the next few years.
Back in Oxford I had organized a very full programme of speakers. Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) urged support for Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy – support we readily gave. Bob Boothby – a wonderful speaker, with great style – declaimed against the ‘revolutionary totalitarian absolutism of Moscow’. David Maxwell-Fyfe, whose daughter Pamela was at Oxford at the time, attacked nationalization and urged a property-owning democracy. Peter Thorneycroft put forward what seemed the very advanced views of the ‘Tory Reform’ wing in a debate with the University Labour Club at the Union. Lady (Mimi) Davidson told us how it felt to be the only Conservative woman Member of the House of Commons. Anthony Eden charmed and impressed us all over sherry. Each term we had a lively debate with the other political clubs at the Oxford Union, particularly the Labour Club, which at the time was very left wing and included some famous names like Anthony Crosland – who even in those days could condescend to a Duchess – and Tony Benn. Generally, however, OUCA met in the Taylorian Institute on a Friday evening, entertaining the speaker to dinner beforehand at the Randolph Hotel. So it was there that I first rubbed shoulders with the great figures of the Tory Party.
The most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time, and to which I have returned so often since, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, is dedicated famously ‘To the socialists of all parties’.
I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s, when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. Only then did I consider his arguments from the point of view of the kind of state Conservatives find congenial – a limited government under a rule of law – rather than from the point of view of the kind of state we must avoid – a socialist state where bureaucrats rule by discretion. At this stage it was the (to my mind) unanswerable criticisms of socialism in The Road to Serfdom which had an impact. Hayek saw that Nazism – national socialism – had its roots in nineteenth-century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors. He alerted us to the profound, indeed revolutionary, implications of state planning for Western civilization as it had grown up over the centuries.
Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society that professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group – and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation everyone will lose. Perhaps because he did not come from a British Conservative background and did not ever consider himself a Conservative at all, Hayek had none of the inhibitions which characterized the agonized social conscience of the English upper classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.
I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. My academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes published by the United States. Yet – cliché as it may be – I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majestic memoirs The Second World War: ‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’
The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess. But the direct human and environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2½ million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear cooperation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.
The greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time – and the one which would have a great impact on my political life – was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to The Road to Serfdom in 1976 he, too, felt that he had ‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.
By the time I left Oxford with a second-class degree in Chemistry under my belt, I knew a great deal more about the world and particularly about the world of politics. My character had not changed; nor had my beliefs. But I had a clearer idea of where I stood in relation to other people, their ambitions and opinions. I had, in short, grown up. And I had discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.
Shortly before my university days came to an end I went back to Corby Glen, a village some ten miles from Grantham, to a dance. Afterwards a few of us gathered for coffee and a sandwich in the kitchen of the house where I was staying. Not unusually, I was talking about politics. Something I said, or perhaps the way I said it, prompted one of the men to remark: ‘What you really want to do is to be an MP, isn’t it?’ Almost without thinking I said: ‘Yes: that really is what I want to do.’ I had never said it before – not even to myself. When I went to bed that night I found that I had a lot on my mind.
* (#ulink_6d8438a3-34e6-5146-a6ff-416ec1149d3e)Problems of Socialist England (1947).
CHAPTER THREE (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)
House Bound (#ubbcd25c6-e8b6-5542-b574-c2fe40e8af5b)
Marriage, family, law and politics 1947–1959
IF GOING UP TO OXFORD is one sort of shock, coming down is quite another. I had made many like-minded friends at Oxford, I had enjoyed my adventures in chemistry and I was passionately interested in university politics. It was a wrench to leave all that behind.
The newly created Oxford University Appointments Committee, which helped new graduates to find suitable jobs, arranged several interviews for me, including one at a Northern ICI plant. We hopefuls were interviewed by several managers whose written comments were passed on to the general manager, who gave us our final interview. The remarks on me were lying on the table at the interview, and I could not resist using my faculty for reading upside down. They were both encouraging and discouraging; one manager had written: ‘This young woman has much too strong a personality to work here.’ In fact, I had three or four interviews with other companies and eventually I was taken on by BX Plastics at Manningtree just outside Colchester to work in their research and development section. BX produced a full range of plastics both for industrial use and consumer use, including for films.
It had been understood when we originally discussed the position that it would involve my being in effect Personal Assistant to the Research and Development Director. I had been looking forward to this because I thought it would allow me to get to know more of how the company as a whole operated and also to use the talents I had, over and above my knowledge of chemistry. But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity and so I found myself donning my white coat again and immersing myself in the wonderful world of plastics. By the time Christmas 1947 was approaching I had made one or two friends and the Section moved into a separate and rather pleasant house in nearby Lawford. Like many others at the company, I lived in Colchester – a town which I increasingly came to like and where I had found comfortable lodgings. A bus took us all out to Lawford every day.
And, as always with me, there was politics. I immediately joined the Conservative Association and threw myself into the usual round of Party activities. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed what was called the ‘39–45’ discussion group, where Conservatives of the war generation met to exchange views and argue about the political topics of the day. I also kept in touch with friends like Edward Boyle, who was later adopted for a Birmingham seat in the 1950 election. It was as a representative of the Oxford University Graduate Conservative Association (OUGCA) that I went to the Llandudno Conservative Party Conference in October 1948.
It had originally been intended that I should speak at the Conference, seconding an OUGCA motion deploring the abolition of university seats. At that time universities had separate representation in Parliament, and graduates had the right to vote in their universities as well as in the constituency where they lived. (I supported separate university representation, but not the principle that graduates should have more than one vote; my view was that graduates should be able to choose to vote in one or the other constituency.) It would have been my first Conference speech, but in the end the seconder chosen was a City man, because the City seats were also to be abolished.
My disappointment at this was very quickly overcome in a most unexpected way. After one of the debates, I found myself engaged in one of those speculative conversations which young people have about their future prospects. An Oxford friend, John Grant, said he supposed that one day I would like to be a Member of Parliament. ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘but there’s not much hope of that. The chances of my being selected are just nil at the moment.’ I might have added that with no private income of my own there was no way I could have afforded to be an MP on the salary then available. I had not even tried to get on the Party’s list of approved candidates.
Later in the day, John Grant happened to be sitting next to the Chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association, John Miller. The Association was in search of a candidate. I learned afterwards that the conversation went something like this: ‘I understand that you’re still looking for a candidate at Dartford?’ (In fact, Conservative Central Office was becoming exasperated at Dartford’s failure to pick someone to fight the seat in an election that had to take place in 1950 and might be called before then.)
‘That’s right. Any suggestions?’
‘Well, there’s a young woman, Margaret Roberts, that you might look at. She’s very good.’
‘Oh, but Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all.’
‘Well, why not just look at her?’
And they did. I was invited to have lunch with John Miller and his wife, Phee, and the Dartford Women’s Chairman, Mrs Fletcher, on the Saturday on Llandudno Pier. Presumably, and in spite of any reservations about the suitability of a woman candidate for their seat, they liked what they saw. I certainly got on well with them. The Millers were to become close friends and I quickly developed a healthy respect for the dignified Mrs Fletcher. After lunch we walked back to the Conference Hall in good time for a place to hear Winston Churchill give the Party Leader’s speech. It was the first we had seen of him that week, because in those days the Leader did not attend the Conference itself, appearing only at a final rally on the Saturday. Foreign affairs naturally dominated his speech – it was the time of the Berlin blockade and the western airlift – and his message was sombre, telling us that only American nuclear weapons stood between Europe and communist tyranny and warning of ‘what seems a remorselessly approaching third world war’.
I did not hear from Dartford until December, when I was asked to attend an interview at Palace Chambers, Bridge Street – then housing Conservative Central Office – not far from Parliament itself. With a large number of other hopefuls I turned up on the evening of Thursday 30 December for my first Selection Committee. Very few outside the political arena know just how nerve-racking such occasions are. The interviewee who is not nervous and tense is very likely to perform badly: for, as any chemist will tell you, the adrenaline needs to flow if one is to perform at one’s best. I was lucky in that at Dartford there were some friendly faces around the table.
I found myself short-listed, and was asked to go to Dartford itself for a further interview. Finally, I was invited to the Bull Hotel in Dartford on Monday 31 January 1949 to address the Association’s Executive Committee of about fifty people. As one of five would-be candidates, I had to give a fifteen-minute speech and answer questions for a further ten minutes.
It was the questions which were more likely to cause me trouble. There was a good deal of suspicion of women candidates, particularly in what was regarded as a tough industrial seat like Dartford. This was quite definitely a man’s world into which not just angels feared to tread. There was, of course, little hope of winning it for the Conservatives, though this is never a point that the prospective candidate even in a Labour seat as safe as Ebbw Vale would be advised to make. The Labour majority was an all but unscalable 20,000. But perhaps this turned to my favour. Why not take the risk of adopting the young Margaret Roberts? There was not much to lose, and some good publicity for the Party to gain.
