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Margaret was born to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts. Her father was a hard-working shopkeeper, and Maggie was actually born in an apartment directly above the shop. The shop was a busy place and very much the center of gravity in the family. Business, local politics, and family life all took place here.
It seemed plain that he had at least designated Margaret as his intellectual heir, and he gifted her with many of his favorite books. As the chairman of Grantham’s library committee, Alf was sure to instill in his daughter a great love of reading. All of this was apparently done in an effort to prepare her mind to engage in his favorite pastime: philosophical debate. It was, in fact, a classic book he lent her called A Tale of Two Cities which first got her interested in the finer points of political discussion.
Although Margaret would later find many of her mother’s qualities quite endearing, even influential, it would indeed take the passage of many decades for her memories to grow so wistful.
Margaret was so ahead of her peers, in fact, that she was soon bumped up a grade. She continued to do well, and by the time she was ten, she had won a scholarship to attend a prestigious grammar school called Kesteven
and Grantham Girls’ School. Margaret continued to work hard, and the report card she brought home during the Christmas break of 1936 is said to have borne this out.
the certificate that she received indicated that she did well in all fields but that she was particularly gifted in chemistry. The clinical work of a chemist is certainly a far cry from the back-slapping world of politics, and even as Margaret was making high marks in chemistry, the bonds that made up civilization itself seemed to have begun coming apart.
At any rate, it was during the later years of the war that Margaret was accepted at Oxford University. At Oxford, she embraced what she thought was her strength—science. She worked hard, at one point even laboring under the guidance of none other than the famed chemist Dorothy Hodgkin.
Shortly after finishing her schooling, Margaret got a job at a company by the name of BX Plastics located in the county of Essex. She was hired on as an expert due to her knowledge of chemistry and was primarily tasked with researching the best chemical formulation for adhesives to use on PVC products.
Margaret’s budget was much tighter now that she was away from her family and making her own money. With often only enough to pay her rather high-priced rent, she had to correspondingly tighten her purse strings, as was indicated when she wrote a letter to home, which mentioned her inability to buy her mother a birthday present and her hope that “just a card” might suffice.
A possible alternative to her work as a chemist presented itself to her in the meantime when one of her roommates, who just so happened to be the secretary for a budding group of British right-wingers dubbed the Young Conservatives, made her acquaintance.
The meeting would prove to be eminently fortuitous for her since it would have her introduced to John Miller, the chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association. Miller was looking for new and fresh political candidates. In particular, he was looking for a fresh face to challenge the hold of the Labour Party over a seat in Dartford since the previous candidate for the Conservative Party had bailed out.
There simply weren’t many female contenders in those days, and Miller openly wondered if Margaret could hold her own. It was only when he introduced her to other members of the group, and he saw that they were just as impressed as he was that he decided to roll the dice and go with Margaret. This chemist-turned-politician would now engage in some alchemy all her own as she transformed into the Tory standard bearer for conservatism.
Margaret attended a so-called adoption or formal meeting of the party accepting her into its fold on February 28, 1949. Here, she gave a rousing speech in which she introduced herself and her views as to what the best direction for Britain would be.
Denis, a recent divorcee, was in a dark place and looking for someone to fill the void of his former wife, who had cheated on him while he was away during the war. When he heard Margaret speak to the assembled crowd, something within him was stirred to life. He then introduced himself as Margaret wined and dined with the rest of the group and offered to give her a ride after the meeting came to a close. The two began seeing each other shortly thereafter.
When reporters later asked her about the whole thing, Margaret sarcastically remarked that they were at least “in tune” for the tango despite their differences on just about everything else.
The next day they flew to Portugal and spent some time in Madeira before returning once again to the Savoy. Margaret Roberts, thus officially transformed into Margaret Thatcher, was like a woman reborn and ready to take on the world.
As she more closely eyed obtaining that ever-elusive political seat in Parliament, she realized that it was the Church of England—Anglicanism—that had the most clout in the country. As such, she and Denis would naturally become members.
Margaret and Denis Thatcher were quite busy, however, and as such, much of the child-rearing was left to nannies—first to an Austrian nanny by the name of Gerda and then to a local girl named Barbara. It was Barbara who would later recall what it was like seeing the Thatchers trundling off in the morning, always in a hurry. She would remember that of the two, it was typically Denis that remembered to wave up at the nursery as they passed.
she gave it another go a few years later in 1959. This time, she would come out of this fateful contest triumphant. The then-34-year-old Margaret Thatcher had finally won her seat as MP and made her way into Britain’s House of Commons as an official representative of Parliament.
The Admission to Meetings Act of 1960, as it was known, was ultimately successful and would indeed become law. Not everyone wanted to give the press access, and although Thatcher faced a lot of pushback on this bill from the old hands on Downing Street, she stuck by it all the same. The speech she gave to introduce it would gain her much national attention and would be regarded as one of the first great addresses of her career.
She would once again find herself at odds with her own party when she decided to vote in favor of so-called “birching.”
