Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF

of every organization which made up our rich civic life filed past. It was also on the green at St Peter’s Hill that every Boxing Day we gathered to watch the pink coats of the Belvoir Hunt hold their meet (followed by the traditional tipple) and cheered them as they set off.
    Nineteen thirty-five was a quite exceptional and memorable year for the town. We celebrated King George V’s Silver Jubilee along with Grantham’s Centenary as a borough. Lord Brownlow, whose family (the Custs) with the Manners family (the Dukes of Rutland) were the most distinguished aristocratic patrons of the town, became mayor. The town itself was heavily decorated with blue and gold waxed streamers – our local colours – across the main streets. Different streets vied to outdo one another in the show they put on. I recall that it was the street with some of the poorest families in the worst housing, Vere Court, which was most attractively turned out. Everyone made an effort. The brass bands played throughout the day, and Grantham’s own ‘Carnival Band’ – a rather daring innovation borrowed from the United States and called ‘The Grantham Gingerbreads’ – added to the gaiety of the proceedings. The schools took part in a great open-air programme and we marched in perfect formation under the watchful eye of the wife of the headmaster of the boys’ grammar school to form the letters ‘G-R-A-N-T-H-A-M’. Appropriately enough, I was part of the ‘M’.
    My father’s position as a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, then alderman * and finally, in 1945–46, mayor meant that Iheard a great deal about the town’s business and knew those involved in it. Politics was a matter of civic duty and party was of secondary importance. The Labour councillors we knew were respected and, whatever the battles in the council chamber or at election time, they came to our shop and there was no partisan bitterness. My father understood that politics has limits – an insight which is all too rare among politicians. His politics would perhaps be best described as ‘old-fashioned liberal’. Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion. He was an admirer of John Stuart Mill’s
On Liberty.
Like many other business people he had, as it were, been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism. He stood for the council as a ratepayer’s candidate. In those days, before comprehensive schools became an issue and before the general advance of Labour politics into local government, local council work was considered as properly non-partisan. But I never remember him as anything other than a staunch Conservative.
    I still recall with great sorrow the day in 1952 when Labour, having won the council elections, voted my father out as an alderman. This was roundly condemned at the time for putting party above community. Nor can I forget the dignity with which he behaved. After the vote in the council chamber was taken, he rose to speak: ‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour they are laid down.’ And later, after receiving hundreds of messages from friends, allies and even old opponents, he issued a statement which said: ‘Although I have toppled over I have fallen on my feet. My own feeling is that I was content to be in and I am content to be out.’ Years later, when something not too dissimilar happened to me, after my father was long dead, I tried to take as an example the way he left public life.
    But this is to anticipate. Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs. We read the
Daily Telegraph
every day,
The Methodist Recorder, Picture Post
and
John O’London’s Weekly
every week, and when we were small we took
The Children’s Newspaper.
Occasionally we read
The Times.
    And then came the day my father bought our first wireless – a