Margaret Thatcher: her unswerving faith shaped by her father

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Finkin Street Methodist chapel is quiet now: on its occasional Sunday services, 90 worshippers gather in a building built for 600.

For three years, the church was on the market, with the only potential buyer, a pizza chain, pulling out once it realised that the interiors were protected under its Grade II listed status.

But rewind to the Thirties and Finkin Street was a hub of activity, a thriving centre point for Grantham’s Wesleyan Methodist community. In the pews was a young Margaret Roberts, listening to her lay preacher father evangelise on the meaning of the Word.

Most people are aware that Baroness Thatcher was a product of a Methodist household and that her father was a lay preacher; most, however, probably think that Methodism was part of her childhood that dissipated later in life.

In fact, the intensity of this early instruction had a lasting impact on her character, leadership style and political values.

Even by interwar standards, her Methodist upbringing would have been considered austere.

Viewed through the lens of post-Christian Britain, it seems positively archaic. Like all good Methodists, the Roberts family – Alf, Beatrice and their daughters Muriel and Margaret – said grace before and after every meal. Strict teetotallers, a dusty old bottle of sherry was kept for guests.

Above all, their Methodism centred on an absolute observation of the Sabbath. Adhering to the letter of the Fourth Commandment, board games, sewing and even newspapers were forbidden. The family would attend morning and evening services at the chapel, where Margaret and Muriel also attended Sunday school. As a teenager Margaret would play the piano, a duty she stopped only when she went to Oxford.

Her childhood catechism shows no signs of boredom; no doodles or names of boys encased within a heart and arrow, only the markings suggestive of an attentive scholar with the words “service” and “sin” underlined.

The chapel was a social centre as much as it was a place of worship. On Fridays, the two sisters would attend the Youth Guild, Tuesday evenings were set aside for the ladies’ sewing club, while Alf and Beatrice attended separate weekly prayer meetings.

“For us, it was rather a sin to enjoy yourself by entertainment,” Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. “Life was not to enjoy ourselves. Life was to work and do things.”

She remembered looking, enviously, out of her bedroom window at the Roman Catholic girls celebrating their first Holy Communion “dressed in white party dresses with bright ribbons”. The Methodist look was “much plainer”. “If you wore a ribboned dress, an older chapel-goer would shake his head and warn against the “first step to Rome’.”

Finkin Street, built in 1840s Tuscan style is typical of the provincial grandeur that marked out 19th century Wesleyan places of worship. Inside there is a raised lectern for the Word, a bellowing organ, and the pulpit for the sermon.

For a young Margaret, by far the most inspiring figure up there would have been her father. More than 6ft 3in tall with a shock of white hair, Alf Roberts had an “affected sermon voice” and the air and authority of an Old Testament prophet.

A famed preacher, he would tour the Lincolnshire Methodist circuit, often with his youngest daughter in tow. A circuit calendar from 1944 shows that every Sunday he preached in different chapels at both afternoon and evening services.

As a child, Margaret would sit in the pew listening to her father hammer home messages on the Protestant work ethic, God-given liberty and individualism.

His sermons were jotted down at the back of her chemistry exercise books from school – the war meant paper was in short supply – and donated later by her to Churchill College, Cambridge, which holds her archive.

They give a teasing insight into the mind of the man of whom so little is known but to whom so much is attributed.

Like a musical score, the underlying aspect is the rhythm of the preacher’s pulse: staccato sentences, repetition of phrases, a built crescendo followed by exaltation.

But there is little appreciation of language for its own sake, no flowery semantics, just simple words of faith. For the source of Lady Thatcher’s political emphasis on freedom and individualism, we need look no further than childhood Sundays spent in Finkin Street chapel.

In one section, Mr Roberts notes that “a lazy man” is one who “has lost his soul already”, while he describes religious uniformity as a “denominational closed shop”.

He was making a political point: wasn’t compulsory membership of a trade union much like mandatory membership of a particular church? This Nonconformist certainly thought so. Individual liberty was always the starting point for his religion and politics.

In another sermon from 1950, five years into Clement Attlee’s Labour government, he offered a subtle warning on socialism, which he feared strangled the individual and constrained their faith.

“Men, nations, races or any particular generation cannot be saved by ordinances, power, legislation. We worry about all this, and our faith becomes weak and faltering.” It was the only part of his sermons quoted in her memoirs.

This was a specific reading of the relationship between God, man and temporal authority. In one of his more dismissive phrases, Mr Roberts judged churches’ forays into politics and their prioritisation of “social issues” such as housing, poverty and welfare as a diversion from the call to evangelise, turning the church into “a glorified discussion group”.

Contained here are guidance on effective preaching. “Your task demands and deserves sheer hard work. Sweat of brains and discipline of soul. Such toil and care can never be wasted for under God you desire your sermon to make a difference to human lives and lead them more thoroughly to surrender to the sovereignty of Christ.”

Methodism is often assumed to be on the Left; Harold Wilson declared that the Labour Party “owed more to Methodism than to Marxism”. The story is a little more complex.

The collapse of the Liberal Party in the Twenties triggered a split in Methodist voting. Primitives turned to Labour while Wesleyans joined the Conservatives. Alf Roberts, a Wesleyan, was typical in this respect.

Thatcherism should be seen as a legacy of this realignment of party politics. Her first exposure to life – and politics – beyond Finkin Street was at Oxford, where she joined the Wesley Memorial chapel and became a lay preacher. A fellow Methodist recalled one of her sermons, “seek ye first the Kingdom of God”, as outstanding.

Nigel Gilson, a contemporary who became a Methodist minister, remembered Margaret Roberts as “effervescent”, with a spiritual but inquisitive faith, taking prayer meetings extremely seriously.

The social and intellectual temptations of Oxford did not affect her faith, although she did experiment with spiritual offerings, attending Somerville College chapel and the main well of intellectual Anglicanism, the University Church of St Mary.

None the less, her mission lay in politics rather than religion and quickly she transferred Methodist zeal from the circuit to the constituency, campaigning with the same gusto, sniffing out doubters who needed converting; first in Dartford, then in Finchley and then across Britain.

The turning point in her life was meeting Denis Thatcher, a millionaire who represented a break from her past. Their wedding took place in 1951 at Wesley’s Chapel in London, Methodism’s headquarters. It was certainly more splendid than Finkin Street, but another factor may have played a part: Denis was divorced.

Four years earlier, the Church had allowed the innocent party to be remarried in chapel on the personal discretion of the minister. Historically, Methodists dealt with divorce and sexual ethics with a lighter touch than Anglicans, while maintaining a firmer line on the real ungodly diversions of gambling and drink.

Indeed, for his new in-laws, Denis Thatcher’s taste for gin may well have been more problematic than his first marriage.

The minister of Wesley’s Chapel, the Rev R V Spivey, conducted the service, assisted by the Rev Reuben F Skinner, a family friend from Finkin Street.

The ceremony included the new Mrs Thatcher’s favourite music, Handel’s Water Music and the hymn Lead Us, Heavenly Father, Lead Us. Her father, however, was unimpressed, considering the ceremony “halfway to Rome”.

Margaret Thatcher moved away from Methodism and became an Anglican, albeit of a “low church” variety, later explaining, that John Wesley “regarded himself as a member of the Church of England to his dying day”.

It was also politically expedient: Tories were still expected to be Anglicans.

If she changed Church, she did not lost lose the trappings of Methodism: as party leader, conferences took on the feel of a religious rally. “The Old Testament prophets did not say, 'Brothers, I want a consensus,’” she proclaimed. “They said, 'This is my faith. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it, too, then come with me.’”

Thatcherism always owed more to Methodism than it ever did to monetarism. This was the real source of Mrs Thatcher’s “conviction politics”. Thatcherism centred on a charismatic leader who cultivated a religious aura, was promoted like a religion, had notable converts like a religion, was rejected like a religion, and would cause a sharp divide within the nation like that of a religious war from centuries past.

Christianity was not only fundamental to the political leader, but also the person.

In the aftermath of the 1984 Brighton bomb, she confided that it would have been difficult to get through “without a very strong faith”. As prime minister, she was a regular at St Peter and St Paul in Ellesborough, nearest to Chequers, attending – according to the rector – more often in the first two years of her premiership than all the previous post-war prime ministers put together.

However, the Rev David Horner, the vicar, was under strict instructions from her husband: “Padre, most of us know what the Sermon on the Mount is about; we don’t need you to explain it to us. Twelve minutes is your lot.”

In retirement, Lady Thatcher became a regular worshipper at the Royal Hospital chapel, in Chelsea, home to the Chelsea pensioners.

But she had no interest in Church history, nor much time for ecclesiastics. Her faith was always rooted in scripture rather than sacraments. Her reading list included C S Lewis’s wartime lectures Mere Christianity, which she remembered listening to on the wireless as a child, and Wesley’s collected sermons.

She spent 1988 reading the whole of the Old Testament, which she delighted quoting to her civil servants.

Tony Blair may have avoided “doing God” but Mrs Thatcher harboured no such reservations, being happy to speak from the pulpit.

T E Utley, The Telegraph journalist, was brought in to help draft one such speech for the Church of St Lawrence Jewry in London in 1978.

He advised her against wading into debate with the Church of England and, instead, to focus on her personal faith.

This she did, but those listening could be in little doubt of the message. “I wonder whether the state services would have done as much for the man who fell among the thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him,” she said – to a chilly reception.

It was to presage a similar froideur when she spoke to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. Later nicknamed the Sermon on the Mound (the Mound is the hill on which the Assembly Hall is built) it offered a Christian apologia for Thatcherism.

“It is not the creation of wealth that’s wrong, but the love of money that’s wrong,” she said. “Christianity is about spiritual redemption, not social reform.”

It was an obvious swipe at the Churches, which were then denouncing her government as un-Christian, and contravened religious leaders’ broad post-war consensus that the welfare state institutionalised the Christian foundations of social democracy. Her conflict with the Churches, and the Church of England in particular, was not one she relished.

In 1988, she invited a group of Anglican bishops for a meeting at Chequers and delivered a full sermon on the doctrine of God-given free will. Midway through, the mild-mannered Bishop of Chester piped up. “I’m afraid you misunderstand, Prime Minister,” he said “Christianity is not about freedom, it is about love.” The intervention barely interrupted her flow. Though the meeting ended in a prayer, it had not been a meeting of minds.

Where critics go wrong with Thatcherism is to assume that there was no moral thinking behind the economics. Where admirers go wrong is to appreciate the moral underpinnings of Thatcherism without admitting that these often conflicted with its economic aims.

The Shops Bill in 1986, which sought to deregulate Sunday trading, was one such example. In apparently putting the free market ahead of tradition, the prime minister also appeared to be betraying her father’s legacy: Alderman Roberts had fought tirelessly for the preservation of the Sabbath in Grantham. Seventy Conservative rebels thought so too, and she suffered her only parliamentary defeat as Prime Minister.

Therein lies the great conflict within Thatcherism; she never reconciled the conflicting priorities of freedom of choice with the preservation of tradition. Over time, consumption became religion, the Sabbath like any other day, and the shopping centres the new churches and chapels.

No British prime minister since William Gladstone was more deeply marked, nor their personality so defined, by their religious heritage and faith.

Lady Thatcher’s religious doctrine was not confined to the heart nor to the head, nor was it mere political spin.

It is only by understanding Lady Thatcher’s faith that we can understand the philosophy that bore her name, her leadership style and that steely resolve that enabled her to sustain power for 11 years.

Finkin Street chapel is unlikely to become a museum or even a place of pilgrimage for her admirers, but its importance in the history of Thatcherism should be in no doubt.

Inside, to the right of the pulpit, stands a lectern with a small engraved plaque honouring Alfred Roberts for his service to the chapel and community, on the occasion of his death in 1970. Aptly, it is Grantham’s only commemoration of Mr Roberts, and then education secretary Lady Thatcher made a rare trip to Grantham for its unveiling.

Perhaps she too realised the debt she owed to those Sundays in the pew.

Dr Eliza Filby is a lecturer in modern British history at King’s College London. Her book God and Mrs Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul will be published later this year.