[Материалы для студентов-историков]
Unit 1(H. Young)
1. Bestriding the politics of this cosy little place was, by then, a tall, pious white-haired man, Alderman Alfred Roberts, of whom Margaret was the younger daughter. On the day she entered 10 Downing Street as prime minister, in May 1979, she asserted that there was an unbroken link between what she learned from him and what she now believed, between the values of the Roberts household and the message that carried her to victory. «I owe almost everything to my father», she said. And this was not a ritual nod to sentiment. Six years later, when time might be held to have modified such obligations, her gratitude was undiminished. Asked by a television interviewer what she owed to him, she said: «Integrity. He taught me that you first sort out what you believe in. You then apply it. You don't compromise on things that matter».
Alfred Roberts was a paragon among political parents, an influence acknowledged with repeated and explicit reverence by his daughter throughout years [when other political leaders might have been pleased to see their present achievements obliterate their past].
In Margaret's adult mind, Alfred was as prominent as her mother was obscure. Numerous interviews after she became famous managed to exclude all references to Beatrice Roberts. There was an almost obsessive reluctance to refer to her. Whenever a question was asked about Beatrice, the interviewee tended to take the conversation straight back to Alfred. If she was alluded to at all, it was under the patronising designation of «rather a Martha». Beatrice was a practical, downtrodden housewife who played remarkably little part in the development of her younger daughter: a fact duly made manifest by her exclusion from Margaret's biographical entry in Who's Who. There Margaret always appeared as the daughter of Alfred Roberts and no other. Rather like her sister Muriel, who trained as a physiotherapist and never featured importantly in Margaret's life again, Beatrice fell victim to a life which established very early in its course that most of the people who mattered were men.
2. There is scarcely an aspect of Alfred that has failed to find its way into the politics of his daughter. Rarely in the history of political leadership could one find an example of such extravagant filial tribute.
Alfred was a self-made man. The son of a Northamptonshire shoemaker, he left school at thirteen and went into the grocery business. But he was ambitious. After moving to Grantham and getting married, he had saved enough to buy a grocery shop of his own at the crossroads of the Al1 and the road to Nottingham. His two daughters were born above the shop. [It is from this place, and the upright patriarch who presided over it, that many lessons were learned which touched the governance of Britain fifty years later.]
This was not an easy time for shopkeepers. In the early 1930s, as the young Margaret was acquiring the beginnings of an awareness of the world around her, few such businesses prospered. As one historian has written, «It was certainly not a heroic time, and there was much gloom overhanging it, particularly in the distressed areas».
While Grantham, as a small town rather than an industrial city, could not be categorised as distressed, nor was it flourishing. Careful husbandry was necessary to ensure that a business survived. This Alfred had little difficulty in providing. He was by nature a cautious, thrifty fellow, who had inherited an unquestioning admiration for certain "Victorian values: hard work, selfhelp, rigorous budgeting and a firm belief in the immorality of extravagance. [Margaret often testified later to the inextinguishable merit of having served in a shop, as she sometimes did, and having watched the meticulous reckoning of income and expenditure.] The experience was a model for the management of economies small and large. «Some say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour», prime minister Thatcher told the Lord Mayor's Banquet in November 1982. «But I do not repent. [Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis.]» «The more often these simplicities were ridiculed, the more insistently did she tend to repeat them.»
3. Alfred, formally ill-educated himself, had a Victorian passion for education, which was the key, he thought, to a full and useful life. Margaret later called him «the best-read man I ever knew». Self-made, he was also selftaught, a tireless user of the local library, and determined that his younger daughter, the one who showed real 
academic promise, should have every educational opportunity which he had been denied. From an early age there were therefore piano lessons, compulsory library visits and an elementary school not close to the shop but at the smarter end of town where the teaching was better and the child's peer group would be properly motivated. Margaret was a bright child, still remembered by her contemporaries at that young age for her bulging satchel and earnest questioning in class. The questioning went on at home. Alfred's own didactic tendencies never waned. He was determined to equip Margaret with every precept and perception about life that he had ever learned, most particularly where these concerned money. Later, she described with awe his Micawberish2 lessons in [the practice of saving, to which end every penny piece she came by as a child had to be devoted].
The spiritual dimension through which this commitment to self-help was filtered was entirely of a piece. Alfred and Beatrice Roberts were both dedicated Methodists, and Margaret spent every Sunday of her childhood years trekking to and from the Methodist Church in the centre of Grantham. Like many other buildings associated with her youth, including both her schools, the Finkin Street Methodist Church still stands; Grantham, of all the towns in England, has been one of the least touched by the developer's hammer. A square, imposing room with space for a thousand worshippers, this place of worship was later replaced in Margaret's spiritual preferences by an irregular association with the Church of England. The world of chapel was left behind. But Finkin Street was close to the centre of the child's life, the fount of the unfailing seriousness that surrounded her. Visited at least twice every Sunday, it symbolised how little time she had for joy. On Sundays every kind of pleasure was banned, even a Sunday newspaper. The church was also where recitals were attended and concerts given. [It was where Alfred himself preached], and the centre from which he set out, in his maturer years, to deliver the Methodist message to the villages around the town.
It was, perhaps especially, the place where Margaret first worked out her own connection between the religious and the practical life, a connection which emphasised the latter rather more than the former. «We were Methodists, and Methodist means method», she primly told an earlier biographer.
4 Order, precision and attention to detail are the hallmarks of this kind of piety, along with a methodical approach to the differences between right and wrong. «There were certain things you just didn't do, and that was that», she added. «Duty was very, very strongly ingrained into us, duties to the church, duties to your neighbour and conscientiousness were continually emphasised».
This household, then, was meritorious. It exhibited many social virtues, struggled constantly to adhere to creditable values, and its children were instructed with unimpeachable devotion. It was not, however, poor. The Roberts children had few possessions, and were indulged in fewer fripperies. They had no bicycles, and visits to the cinema or theatre were a rarity. But this was the result not of poverty so much as thrift carried to the point of parsimony. In later years, Margaret made much of the material sparseness of her upbringing. She used to cite as evidence for the grinding poverty of her origins the lack of both a lavatory and running hot water in the house until after the war. Although this was the norm in her part of Grantham, it cannot have been due, in the Roberts' case, to a straightforward lack of money. [Before war began, Alfred's shop had prospered sufficiently for him to buy another on the other side of town.] He was a small businessman on the way up. Choice not necessity led him to make his family take baths in an unplumbed tub for the first twenty years of Margaret's life: the muscular meanness of a man who positively frowned on the smallest form of self-indulgence.
Although no one can question that he pulled himself up from the humblest origins by hard work and driving determination, Margaret's own life did not follow the same pattern. She was reared in spartan circumstances as much because of Alfred's belief in self-denial as because he started poor. The Roberts she knew belonged to the rising petty bourgeoisie not the beleaguered working class. In the mid-1930s, according to a historian, 75 per cent of all families were officially designated as working-class, earning £4 weekly or less. As the owner of two shops, Alfred was already among the 20 per cent who could call themselves, if they chose, middle-class.
5 But these moral qualities, growing out of this self-imposed penury, were not the whole of Alfred's legacy to the future political leader. A significant part of his formidable energy was devoted not to his business but to public life. Even before Margaret first went to school, he was a local councillor, nominated by the Chamber of Trade. His political life, which he conducted with great intensity across the narrow field of one town and its problems, awakened appetites in his daughter which made it the reverse of surprising that she should eventually have sought national office.
She did not, however, inherit her party affiliation. Alfred was first elected councillor as an Independent and never, actually, as a conservative. His earliestknown intellectual attachment was to the programme of the Lloyd George Liberals. Other biographers of his daughter, in fact, record it as the opinion of Grantham's Conservative Party agent in the post-war years that Alfred, whom he knew well, was at heart a right-wing Labour man. What stopped him doing anything about this was probably the strength of the local Cooperative Party, which controlled Labour in Grantham. Alfred called for a massive programme of expenditure to improve roads, public transport, health and child welfare services, and to «build houses by the thousand. It was, said the Grantham Journal, one of the best mayoral speeches for years, «modest, brilliantly delivered and full of promise».
In his smaller territory, Alfred Roberts emerges as almost as committed a municipal activist as Herbert Morrison, who bestrode the London County Council between the wars. There was more than a touch of Morrisonian idealism in his mayoral address. It was a time when few people seriously challenged the necessity for public action to ameliorate the condition of cities and their people; and it would never have occurred to Alfred that the business of local government was to scale itself down or reduce its own importance, the position which Margaret in later life came to espouse as a matter of faith. He may not have been a conservative, but insofar as he was allied with conservative ideals, this placed him firmly among the Tory reformers rather than those romantics who still imagined that Britain could somehow revert to the minimalist State of the pre-war years.
6. Upon an observant and ambitious adolescent, this towering local leader could not but have a powerful impact. He brought Margaret up in his own image. In a different time and different circumstances, she came to have a different opinion about the value of municipal expenditure and the role of the State as the upholder of the common weal. [But as regards public duty, and the satisfaction to be gained from being a public person], Margaret's father was the model whose example she was drawn early to follow. His shopkeeping business was secondary: the necessary source of a living, and the origin of many a moral and economic lesson, but essentially a base for public work. Alfred exhibited no ideological belief in the superiority of the wealthproducing or commercial way of life, as against a lifetime spent supervising the expenditure of public money. Quite the contrary. [Public spending, properly directed, seems to have been in his eyes the acme of public morality.]
Most valued of all areas of public spending was education. Alfred was deeply involved here too. His daughters were sent to Kesteven & Grantham Girls School of which, inevitably, he was already a governor. Later, just as predictably, he became chairman of the governors: another exercise in local commitment by this compulsively active man.
At school, Margaret fulfilled all that he expected of her. As a grantaided grammar school, Kesteven normally required parents to pay half the fees, but Margaret secured a county scholarship. She was not particularly brilliant, but she was very hard-working, and her contemporaries remember her as a model pupil of demure habits and tediously impeccable behaviour. She never put a foot wrong, in the classroom or on the hockey field. Every term from autumn 1936 to summer 1943, her school reports read with an uncritical consistency that even the most doting parents might get a little tired of. In December 1936, she had «very definite ability and her cheeriness makes her a very pleasant member of her form». Two years later, «she is keenly interested in all she does and her conduct is very satisfactory». By July 1940 she had «the makings of a real student», which in the sixth form she confirmed with her intelligence and determination». Logic and diligence, the two of them identifying her as a natural head girl, were the intellectual qualities most frequently attributed to her by her teachers. «Margaret is ambitious and deserves to do well» was the verdict in her final report.
7. Those were the days when English secondary education still left some room for variety. In the lower sixth, instead of devoting themselves exclusively to two subjects, as their own children would often do, the pupils of the war years continued to escape the fiercest specialisation. Margaret started Latin and continued with English and Geography, as well as the sciences to which she was by then more fully committed: chemistry, biology, zoology. The choice of science, and most specifically chemistry, did not spring from an overwhelming natural preference, more from the fact that some choice had to be made and the accident that the chemistry teacher at Kesteven was especially inspiring. It was not a choice which always pleased Mrs Thatcher. To Tricia Murray she recounted her memory that science had been «the coming thing», but also recalled her adolescent disappointment on realising too late that what she really wanted to be was a lawyer. Accompanying her father to court (he was, naturally, a Justice of the Peace), she conceived a fascination with the law which, alas, could not now be satisfied. Chemistry she had picked, and a chemist she would have to stay until she qualified.
If school had an impact on Margaret's political formation it was, with one exception, at a subconscious level. Kesteven was a completely orthodox girls' grammar school, and such institutions had few of the perquisites and none of the history of other places more precisely designed for the preparation of public men. The public schools existed in substantial part for this purpose, and it was from public schools that the ruling class not only of the conservative Party, but of the Labour Party as well, was then substantially drawn. Girls' schools were keen enough on academic success, and Kesteven had its share of this with a thin but steady stream of pupils passing on to Oxford and Cambridge. But they did not expect to go into politics or the civil service. For the most part, girls simply didn't. Besides, for Margaret there was the abiding problem of money. She has always said that [she knew from an early age that she would have to get a job and keep herself]; and this excluded politics, an ill-paid, expensive activity which the Conservative Party was still, in the 1940s, encouraging its aspirant performers to pay to enter, even to the extent of making part-purchase of their seats sometimes a condition of selection as a candidate.
8. So there was no serious thought of professional politics lurking yet in the young girls mind. But she did exhibit one political talent. The school had a debating club in which Margaret shone. She had a good deal of practice in argument at her father's knee — it seems to have been the main didactic tool of that intensely didactic man. Although reputedly quiet in class, she debated with more self-confidence than any of her contemporaries. They did not think her brilliant, but she was unrelenting. Visiting speakers would always receive a question from Margaret Roberts: slow and careful questions, so they say, in a voice still tinged with the Lincolnshire accent which the elocutionists later buried, but clear and ringing all the same. In debate, determined and unselfconscious, she was hard to beat.
This, then, was Alfred Roberts' girl. She came from a contented but pretty joyless home. Father and daughter were happy in their earnestness. «I don't think she has much of a sense of humour, I don't think her father had and I certainly don't think her mother had», recalled her friend and contemporary Margaret Wickstead. «They were all very serious-minded, and they worked too hard. life was a serious matter to be lived conscientiously.»
They were fall of the sense of public duty, of which Alfred, however, was the sole and dominant exponent. Their household experienced the pervading sense of poverty, if not the painful fact of it. [What Margaret would frequently describe in later years as the disadvantaged background from which she sprang would in fact have been more accurately described as a home of aggressive thrift.] Alfred was not rich, but neither was he poor. And more important than his financial state was his role as the moral arbiter who in her eyes could do no wrong — a view she never changed. Few scions of the nobility, however high their destiny in the conservative Party, have been able to say the same.
NOTES
1. Al — a main road which goes from London to Edinburgh.
2 Micawber, Wilkins — a character in the book David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Mr. Micawber is put in prison because he owes money and cannot pay it, but he is always happy and spends any money he gets on himself, confident that something will turn up to get him out of trouble.
TASKS
I. Read the text and summarise it using the words in bold type.
II. Translate into Russian the items in brackets.
III. Answer these questions (use the words in bold type).
1. Which of Margaret's qualities impressed her teachers and contemporaries in particular
2. What qualities inherited from her father did she especially value?
3. How do you assess all these qualities?
a) What do you find good or bad, important or irrelevant?
b) What is, in your opinion, worth developing in yourself?
IV. Make comments on the following points (use the words in
bold type).
1. The role of the family members in Margaret's upbringing.
2. Alfred Roberts and his way of raising the two daughters.
3. Margaret as a child.
4. Grantham.
V.I) Explain in English the meaning of the words and phrases:
to go into grocery business (2); to be ill-educated (3); lessons in the practice of saving (3); to show real academic promise (3); to be a dedicated Methodist (3); to be at heart a right-wing Labour man (5); lack of money (4).
2) Find in the text synonyms to the words and phrases:
uwillingness (1); economical management (4); shy (8); debate (8); to do harm (8).
3) Find in the text antonyms to the words and phrases:
well-educated (3); to play an important part in (1); an ordinary person (3); to be allowed (3); light-minded (8).
4) Find in the text equivalents to the following Russian words and phrases:
быть обязанным всем к-л. (2); быть образцовыми родителями (1); идти на компромисс по к-л. поводу (1); читать нотации (2); тщательный учет доходов и расходов (2); быть бережливым, экономным (2); безупречное поведение (6); человек, сделавший сам себя,свою карьеру (2); руководство Великобританией (2). 5) Translate into Russian:
to fall victim to (1); to compromise on things that matter (1); to inherit an unquestioning admiration for smth. (2); to have few possessions (4); to rear smb. in spartan circumstances (4).
VI. Write an essay and discuss the following topics:
1
This did not deter Margaret Roberts, although she nearly failed to get there. Her offer of a place at Somerville1 came only at the last minute. She had had to mug up Latin, and had failed to reach
2 Although Alfred had given her almost all she had in the way of standards and ambition, one thing he had been unable to supply was the experience of freedom from his influence. Before she went up to
Wartime
3 Margaret's first preoccupation was with her work. It was a time when hard work was both obligatory and fashionable. No shades of Brideshead 3 here. Lectures and labs were in heavy demand. According to Sidney Bailey, a contemporary of Miss Roberts, who has taught chemistry at
NOTES
1
2. Desert Song (The) (1926) — a famous operetta by the Hungarian-American Sigmund Romberg.
3 Brideshead Revisited — (1945), — E. Waugh's novel depicting the recovery of a family's faith in Roman Catholicism suggested a pleasant idea of the past and is considered by many critics his finest work.
TASKS
I. Read the text and summarise it using the words in bold type.
II. Translate into Russian the items in brackets.
III. Answer these questions (use the words in bold type).
1. Why could
2. Was Margaret easily and quickly offered a place there?
3. Was her father indifferent to it?
4. What was her first thrilling impression?
5. Could her desire to become an actress come true?
6. What, to your opinion, might be Margaret's two driving
preoccupations?
IV. 1) Explain in English the meaning of the words and phra
ses:
to fulfil the ambition (1); to deter (1); a well-organized performer in the labs (3); an unsophisticated head girl (2).
2) Find in the text synonyms to the words and phrases:
to put smth. into practice (1); ordinary-looking (3).
3) Find in the text antonyms to the words and phrases:
subtle (2); to pass the exams (3); dependence on smb./smth. (2).
4) Find in the text equivalents to the following Russian words
and phrases:
пытаться реализовать свои амбиции в ком-либо (1);не получать стипендию (1); свобода от чьего-либо влияния (2); смена караула (2); иметь блестящую жизнь (2); обычная, ничем не выделяющаяся девочка (3); рисковать чем-либо (3).
5) Translate into Russian:
a state of mind (2); to be excited and thrilled by smth. (2); someone dropped out (1); never ran any risk of (3).
V. Write an essay and discuss the following topics:
1.
Margaret Thatcher as a student of
Unit 3 MARRIAGE
1 [To many politicians the law inhabits a world as mysterious as that of medicine], and lawyers share with doctors the status of a kind of priesthood, by turns bitterly resented and excessively respected. Legal detail, although it is what the law-makers are elected to concern themselves with, often baffles them. As prime minister, Mrs Thatcher used the law relentlessly as an instrument of political change. Having been a lawyer, she was at home with the thinking and language this process imposed: the first prime minister of the modern, satute-bound political era who could say as much.
Acquiring this invaluable credential was a turning-point in Margaret's career. It was accompanied, and crucially facilitated, by another: marriage to a man of means.
Denis Thatcher was a better-breeched product of north Kent Conservatism than many others in the party when Margaret Roberts became the candidate at Dartford. They did not meet at a Young Conservatives' dance but, in rarer and more earnest style, on the night of her adoption in 1949. There can be little doubt that to the life and politics of Margaret Thatcher Denis has been the longest-serving, most influential contributor — and she has never forgotten it.
Denis had a family business. He was the grandson of a farmer-entrepreneur who had started making weed-killer and sheep-dip. When the Atlas Preservative Company, as it became, was handed down to Denis from his father, it had expanded into paint and other chemicals, and was making good money for the family. Denis was the managing director and, with a break for the war (Mentioned in Despatches), had worked there since 1934. He is described as being athletic and even handsome at the time. [He certainly seems to have been on the lookout for a wife.] In the most devoted of the early biographies of Margaret, one of the few works in which Denis has allowed himself to be directly quoted, George Gardiner recreates a scene which is redolent of a certain kind of courtship. One gets the impression that Denis had produced a number of potential spouses for the inspection of his business friends. After going out with Margaret for quite a while, Gardiner reports, he took her to the annual dinner dance of his trade association. It was there that the romance received final approval. Gardiner writes, without a blush: «Towards the end of the evening, his company chairman leaned over to mutter in his ear, 'That's it, Denis — that's the one!'»
2 This verdict, on which Denis in due course acted, is one which Margaret herself has never had any cause to regret. They always had quite a lot in common: an interest in economics, whether from the political or the business angle, and an abiding belief in the unchallengeable virtues of the Conservative Party. Denis himself was never a politician, although he once stood in the Ratepayers'1 interest for the Kent County Council. But he was and always has been an utterly dependable upholder of all the things his wife believed in.
Denis's first service to her was as agent of her definitive break with the past. When she married him in December 1951, she broke with her town, her class and her religion. From Grantham and its lower bourgeoisie she was already detached by her years at Oxford. Marriage marked and sealed the distance she had come. [Never very fond of her home town, she would now return there even less frequently.] By marrying the successful inheritor of a medium-sized family business, she placed herself in the affluent rather than the struggling middle class. She married above herself, he, by conventional standards, below. Nobody who knows them denies that it has been a very happy match, which has flourished on the pressures of her life rather than being at all diminished by them.
3 But the most jarring rupture marriage brought was with the Methodism of her youth. Denis had been married before, just as the war was starting. When he returned from the fighting, the pair found themselves to be strangers and got divorced. At that time, the strict code of Methodism still did not entirely approve of divorce and remarriage, and Margaret had been reared as a strict Methodist. [This does not appear to have caused her to hesitate.] Other factors did: this was no instant love-match, and the courtship took two years to mature. But the injunctions of Methodism were set aside. In any case they weren't so stern as to preclude the marriage taking place in the very temple of British Methodism, Wesley's chapel in City Road, London. Alderman Roberts, doubtless wincing at such a repudiation of the orthodoxies, gave his daughter away. Kent Conservatism was prominently represented among the guests, and from now on, if there was any religious leaning in the Thatcher household, it was towards that more comfortable Tory solace, the Church of England.
These were only the opening contributions Denis made to Margaret's public character. Having married him, she didn't need to earn a living. This is what enabled her to read for the Bar. «It was Denis's money that helped me on my way», she readily admitted when she became famous. When she had children, he could afford a living-in nanny, thus enabling her to work. When she began to practise at the Bar, this wasn't out of any driving economic need. Her real ambition, after all, was for a career that was not at all well rewarded. The career itself is what she wanted, and in one of the earliest of her opinions to have been preserved she wrote about this with fiery prescience. Invited to contribute to a popular newspaper series about women and public life, the young Mrs Thatcher wrote in the Sunday Graphic in February 1952 that women should not feel obliged to stay at home. They should have careers. «In this way, gifts and talents that would otherwise be wasted are developed to the benefit of the community". She thought it nonsense to say that the family suffered. Women, indeed, should not merely work but strive to reach the top of their profession. Above all should this be true in politics. There should be more women at Westminster — there were then only 17, out of 625 MPs — and they should not be satisfied with the lesser posts. «Should a woman arise equal to the task, I say let her have an equal chance with the men for the leading Cabinet posts. Why not a woman Chancellor? Or Foreign Secretary?"
4 In 1952 these trenchant demands were being made by a woman without a job, who was in the early stages of reading for the Bar. It was Denis who afforded her the luxury of making them. He thus fulfilled the role that can sometimes give a woman politician her one big advantage over a male: the financial security she herself has not had to earn. In this respect, the early Margaret Thatcher bore some resemblance to the conservative landed gentry, the element in the party which she later came most powerfully to despise. [She may not have inherited a private income], but she married an alternative to it. Financially she belonged to the leisured classes. This fortunate condition enabled her to pursue a political career with undistracted singlemindedness.
Denis had no political ambition himself. He has always been a prop, never a rival. From the beginning, self-effacement has been his lot. He stuck to his last, as a businessman. «I've always taken the view that my job comes first», he told George Gardiner. »People have often said, 'You do so much for Margaret in politics.' It's a beautiful theory, but it's not really true. I've had a wife and two kids to keep, and my job comes first.»
Later, the job grew and fructified. With the family business taken over by Castrol in 1965, and then Castrol taken over by Burmah Oil, Denis ascended through the pecking-order of boardrooms from minor local concern to major national company, with the perquisites to match. The original sale, which raised £560,000, made him rich, and the Burmah board gave him a bigger income as well as a Daimler, to which he appended the number-plate DT3. When he retired from Burmah in 1975, the Daimler had become a Rolls-Royce, which he took with him and was still discreetly using ten years later.
5 [By marrying him, Margaret secured a like-minded consort for the post she was eventually to attain.] His retirement happily coincided with her own elevation to the party leadership, which made him more available for service on the road — «always half a step behind", as he would wryly say. As it turned out, he agreed with everything important she stood for, by the time this settled itself into the collection of ideas to which he gave his name — Thatcherism. He believed in them with decidedly fewer qualifications than she did. Publicly, one of his talents was to remain the soul of almost unfailing discretion. Give or take the occasional after-dinner speech to a rugby club — he had been a first-class rugby referee — Denis gave nothing away. But privately he was an influence of positive importance.
He retained during all these years the innocence of the non-politician, the plain man in the Home Counties saloon bar. He gave the prime minister a direct line to every 19th hole in the country. Everything he felt and thought — from staunch hostility to socialists and trade unions, through his no-nonsense approach to business accountancy, to his inextinguishable affection for white South Africa — could be privately expressed without regard for the hesitations deemed prudent by public people. At home he did not shrink from expressing them. Coinciding as they usually did with the raw instincts of his wife, they played their part in the ceaseless struggle between gut instinct and political calculation which became so prominent among the motifs threading themselves through her prime minister-ship. Denis, after all, saw her almost every day, and he was not a shrinking violet.
After their marriage, [he might have had his moments of ambivalence] about precisely how much he wanted to involve himself as a stage extra in the great drama of British government. [Reports would occasionally surface of his eagerness to escape from 10 Downing Street], and he retained a number of business interests. But he remained an affectionate comrade-in-arms. «'When I'm in a state', his wife told a reporter shortly after becoming prime minister, 'I have no one to turn to except Denis. He puts his arm round me and says, 'Darling, you sound just like Harold Wilson'.' And then I always laugh».
6 The caricature which immortalised him as a major satirical character in Private Eye2 was in some respects defective. In showing his love of golf and golf-clubs, and his preference for businessmen over politicians, it was true to life, but the image of a man frightened of his wife or less than loyally affectionate was misleading. [The vows they made in Wesley's Chapel were put to the test far more severely than either can have expected], both for better and for worse. But the bond endured. When the values thus conjoined were put in charge of the country, they survived remarkably unimpaired.
[Preliminary to this, a seat had to be found and Parliament had to be entered.] The ambition was uncluttered and the funds were available, but the search was not easy. The blooding in Dartford counted for little. In this respect, marriage had actually made politics harder to pursue. It was followed by children — twins, Mark and Carol, were born in 1953 — and Margaret's clarion-call for the rights of women hardly spoke for mainstream Conservative opinion. Several local Conservative Associations turned her down. Later she made a virtue of this. The mid-fifties, say Gardiner and other biographers, were designed to be devoted to the rearing of her children. She could manage two commitments, to the law and to family, but not a third, to politics. And it is certainly true that Conservative selection committees at that time had firm views about the proper priorities for a woman with young children.
All the same, the new Mrs Thatcher tried quite hard. Barely a year after giving birth, she was manoeuvring for the nomination at a by-election in Orpington. Short-listed but rejected there, she was too late for consideration in any other seat that met her specifications for the 1955 General Election — it must be winnable and close to home. In 1957, Beckenham and Maidstone both turned her down, the first on explicitly sexist grounds (although the epithet was not then in currency). She also tried but failed to get Oxford.
[But all these disappointments proved to be blessings.] In 1958, the pick of the bunch fell vacant: Finchley, closest of all to Westminster and with a Conservative majority of 12,000. All parliamentary nominations are more or less of a lottery, and when safe Tory seats present themselves for capture to 200 aspiring candidates, luck plays an inescapable part. Margaret Thatcher was by now a hardened campaigner on the circuit, and evidently put up a very good show. Against a short-list made up of three chips off the old Tory block — officers and gentlemen with a public school and a good war behind them — she emerged the winner on the second ballot.
Still quite young at thirty-two, she was a glamorous arrival in the staid world of a seat that had been held by the same unremarkable man for more than twenty years. The local press was delighted. From it we catch another glimpse of a politician who was by now fully accomplished across the field of party policy, including those areas which she had no personal reason to know anything about.
NOTES
1 Ratepayer — a person who pays for locally provided services.
2
Private Eye
— a British
humorous magazine known of making fun of
wellknown people, including politicians and
the royal family.
TASKS
I. Read the text and summarise it using the words in bold type.
II. Translate into Russian the items in brackets.
Ш. Answer these questions (use the words in bold type).
1. What do you understand as the two invaluable credencials in Margaret's career?
2. a) Who is Denis Thatcher?
b) Was he married when he met Margaret?
c) How can you explain his choice?
3. What did the marriage change in the life of Margaret?
4. Was it an equal marriage?
5. Was it happy? Why?
6. a) Was Margaret sincere saying that women should have careers?
b) In what way did she continue the pursuit of her own?
7. Why didn't Denis go into politics?
8. What sort of a husband did he make for Margaret?
9. The role of luck in the first steps into politics was great, wasn't it?
IV. 1) Explain in English the meaning of the words and phrases:
acquiring this invaluable credential (1); without a blush (1); to marry above oneself (2); with the perquisites to match (4); unfailing discretion (5); but the bond endured (6); the rearing of her children (6); to read for the Bar (3).
2) Find in the text synonyms to the words and phrases:
steadfast, firm (5); upbringing (6); to be completed (7).
3) Find in the text antonyms to the words and phrases:
to be quite different (2); to get married (3); weakness (4); misery (4).
4) Find in the text equivalents to the following Russian words and phrases:
в качестве премьер-министра (1); выйти замуж за состоятельного человека (1); может сложиться впечатление, что (1); с политической точки зрения (2); разорвать с прошлым (2); не одобрять Повторный брак (3); готовиться к адвокатуре (3); огромное преимущество перед мужчиной (4); содержать жену и детей (4); давать клятву (6).
5) Translate into Russian:
to pursue a political career with undistracted single-mindedness (4); to give one's daughter away (3); to the benefit of the community (3); by conventional standards (2); a like-minded consort (5).
V. Write an essay and discuss the following topics:
1. Denis Thatcher — a better-breached product of north Kent Conservatism.
The role he played in Margaret's career.