By Dr Jessica Henderson
It is rare to find a woman barrister with a genuine interest in taxation law; rarer still to find one who is also a mother of twins. The discovery that I shared both of these characteristics with a young Margaret Thatcher thoroughly piqued my interest.
There is much to admire in the skill with which Thatcher created and mythologised her image in male dominated professions. At a 1980 Conservative Party Conference she delivered what is now recognised as a defining line of her political identity:
To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the ‘U-turn’, I have only one thing to say:
You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.
Thatcher’s sharp quip drew from a 1948 comedy by Christopher Fry titled ‘The Lady’s Not for Burning’, a distinctly Shakespearean tale set in the Middle Ages about a witch-hunt and a despairing soldier. It signalled high-status rhetorical style, and weaponised Thatcher’s femininity with aphoristic force. Thatcher glowed in binary moral logic: others are indecisive and despairing, the lady alone is principled and true.
The imagery invoked by the phrase sat well with the ‘Iron Lady’ epithet bestowed on Thatcher by the Soviet Army newspaper Red Star on 24 January 1976, a construct that she had already made her own. With one phrase contested economic policy became a stable moral identity that would see her returned for three consecutive terms, making her the longest running Prime Minister of the 20th century.
It was a rhetorical trick worthy of a barrister.
The forging of the Iron Lady
If the study of history has taught me one thing it is this. Real change occurs between the moments of spectacle. Inspirational female leadership is a marvellous thing, but it is nothing without a study of the quiet formation of the professional woman who learns, case by case and room by room, how to withstand pressure, master detail, and exercise authority without permission.
The daughter of a politically active grocer, the entrée of a young Margaret Hilda Roberts (as she then was) to Oxford University was by way of scholarship. An Oxford scholarship was no small matter for the daughter of a grocer in the 1940s, but Miss Roberts had work, wit and windfall behind her. She missed out on the scholarship in the first round of offers but benefitted from a late drop out.
Somerville College in 1943, when Miss Roberts commenced study there, was led by Miss Helen Darbishire, a British literary scholar specialising in Milton and Wordsworth and one of the first women to hold senior academic authority in the University of Oxford. Darbishire was both an effective governor and a deeply invested humanitarian; her support for displaced European academics fleeing Nazi Germany resonated with Miss Roberts, whose family had given a home to a young Jewish woman in transit from Austria to America during the Anschluss.
Darbishire measured success by the highest academic standards of Oxford and would not accept adjustments for feminine convenience; academic life for women was a serious business and intellectual rigour more important than social polish. Although the fertile ground had already been laid, it was undoubtedly Darbishire’s Somerville that germinated in Thatcher her discomfort with lowered standards, her belief in competitive merit, and her overwhelming hostility to institutional softness.
Darbishire pioneered support for married women with children continuing in academic pursuits, including Dr Dorthea Hodgkin, a talented crystallographer, who was tutor to Miss Roberts and would become her lifelong friend.
In many ways Hodgkin was a most satisfactory role model for the young female Conservative; she was married with three children and at the start of what would be recognised as a brilliant career; she would be elected to the Royal Society in 1947, elected the first Wolfson Research Professor of the Royal Society in 1960 and win a Nobel Prize in 1964 for her work on penicillin and B12. Infamously the Daily Mail would headline the latter as “Oxford Housewife Wins Nobel”.
Dr Hodgkin was a socialist and her husband a member of the Communist party. Miss Roberts was already a member of the Oxford University Conservative Association, OUCA and her Conservative stance would be tested against what was then arguably the very best of socialist feminism. Dr Hodgkins was at a great disadvantage in the commercial world, as a direct result of her university ties and the enduring myth that commercial enterprise was necessarily the enemy of elite scholarship.
None of her discoveries were protected or commercially leveraged, although they supported billion-dollar pharmaceutical industries. That sat comfortably with the socialist but not with the Conservative and highlighted a key weakness of socialism in education.
Miss Roberts graduated in 1947 with more than a second-class chemistry degree; she had the confidence that comes with meeting the expectations of respected seniors, and a conviction in beliefs that had been strengthened by challenge.
A pre-marital petri-dish
Leaving Oxford and seeking employment as a chemist, Miss Roberts had ‘three or four interviews’, in the course of which she recalled reading an upside-down notation by a manager that she had ‘much too strong a personality to work here’.
She was taken on as a personal assistant at BX Plastics and quickly transitioned to a chemist. She worked in that role whilst pursuing opportunities in politics in the Conservative Party and in 1950 ran as the Conservative candidate for Dartford.
She openly leveraged her femininity in the Dartford campaign, later reflecting of this time that an advantage of being a woman candidate was the basic courtesy extended to her at public meetings, which she used to considerable effect demonstrating that she could take control where men could not.
Taking to heart advice given to her by Lady Williams (wife of Sir Herbert Williams, veteran Croydon MP) she bought a tailored black suit and hat for campaigning, painstakingly placing on the hat a black and white ribbon with a hint of blue in the bow. That commitment to her appearance would stay with Thatcher throughout her political career. The pearl adorned Prime Minister Thatcher in conservative, monochromatic skirt suits and pussy-bow collars would become deeply embedded in British cultural narratives.
On 13 December 1951 Miss Roberts married Denis Thatcher. The contrast to her campaign face in her wedding photo is stark. She married in a blue velvet dress, with a matching blue muff and a cascade of ostrich feathers from her matching blue hat. There is considerable symbolism in that outfit of which she cannot have been unaware. Marriage was a pivotal moment for Thatcher; most women of her class still gave up their careers when they married in 1950s Britain.
Her flamboyant blue marital garb was undoubtedly a proclamation of intent for her future as was her choice of venue; she was married from the home of Sir Alfred Bossom, an English architect of renown in America who had returned home to a successful career as a Conservative MP.
The flash forge of a legal career
For the first two years of her marriage Thatcher took a tactical break from both chemistry and politics, citing not married status but a “longstanding interest in law”. She made no move to take the Bar exam however until the birth of her twins Mark and Carol in 1953. Perhaps she genuinely contemplated remaining a professional wife and mother. Perhaps not.
A week into motherhood Thatcher announced that it was time for her to take the step into law and asked that the application form for Bar finals be brought to her in hospital so that she could commit herself to sitting them at the next available opportunity.
Thatcher passed the Bar exam in December 1953 and joined the new set at 5 Kings Bench Walk for a six-month pupillage under Frederick “Fred” Lawton. Thatcher’s experience of her pupillage is largely undocumented, but we know that she was in chambers with people that she respected, including Robin Day (who she had known from Oxford University, described as a ‘brilliant wit’ and would later cross swords with repeatedly when he ‘invented’ television interviewing) and Michael Havers (who she would recommend for appointment as Attorney General in 1979, and who served in that role until 1987 when he became Lord Chancellor).
Thatcher was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1954. Her autobiography states simply that she practiced as a barrister specializing in taxation and patent law. There is no record of any appearance, nor any person or corporation claiming to have been her client, however, and no existing chambers claims her as a tenant after the conclusion of her pupillage under Fred Lawson. 5 Kings Bench Walk (which eventually became Red Lion Chambers) reports Thatcher as a pupil but records its ‘first female tenant’ in 1972.
The period of time from Thatcher’s call to the Bar to her first successful candidature was very brief and whilst her reasons for that brevity are not a matter of record it is clear that she took away some strongly mixed feelings about the legal profession. She would later describe Fred Lawton in her autobiography as ‘witty with no illusions about human nature or his own profession’, suggesting perhaps some frank conversations with him about the failures of the Bar or its instructors.
Replying to a toast at a dinner given by Lincoln’s Inn in her honour shortly after becoming Prime Minister she noted acerbically the tendency of barristers to value prominence in their profession ahead of achievement elsewhere, stating that in their midst she was not Prime Minister but merely “an errant daughter who ceased to practise early in life”.
In the 1950s it was very common for young barristers to train, be admitted to practice and then depart the profession for politics. There is nothing inherently sinister in Thatcher’s brevity of tenure as a barrister. However, she was a married woman with children less than a year old. The number of married women at the Bar was extremely small, and there is no evidence to suggest that there were any married women with children practicing as barristers in 1950s London save for Thatcher herself.
In that environment securing briefs would have been extremely difficult. Thatcher characteristically indicated in her autobiography that politics was in her blood, and she felt called back to the fray, and made no further comment about her abrupt departure from the legal profession.
It was a period of significant subtextual gender discrimination, highlighted by the response Thatcher received on her return to politics. In her autobiography, Thatcher described the period February 1956 until her election in 1959 as one in which she was repeatedly shortlisted for seats, would make what she felt had been very good speeches to Selection Committees and then was met by a barrage of questions directed to her motherhood; did she really have time to be an MP with her family commitments? Would it be better to wait for a year or two?
Did she really think she could fulfill her duties as a mother and as an MP with young children to look after? Thatcher was clear in her autobiography that she felt Conservatives had every right to ask these questions of her, but that beneath them she felt an accusation: women did not belong in the House. She was scathing about the left-wing concept of sex discrimination at the hands of men, however, clear that it was Conservative women who came closest to openly instructing her that her place was in her home.
Thatcher claimed to have “talked frankly” to Donald Kaberry (Conservative Party Vice-Chairman) about the difficulties she was facing as a woman with the Selection Committees. His alleged reception will still resonate with women in the profession today:
Unfortunately, this is not one of the topics on which even the wisest male friend can give very useful counsel. But Donald Kaberry did give me advice on what to wear on these sensitive occasions – something smart but not showy. In fact, looking me up and down he said he thought the black coat dress with brown trim which I was wearing would be just fine.
Thatcher put her name forward for Finchley shortly afterwards and the rest, as they say, is history. Although Thatcher repeatedly attributed her success in preselection in large part to her husband’s unfailing faith in her, it was during her husband’s absence overseas that she was finally preselected for a winnable seat, and whilst she said that “it was easier for [the Committee] because poor Denis was absent” to ask her questions about her role as wife and mother, the point was perhaps that it was easier for her to reply to those questions in the absence of her husband. She was preselected, elected, and became leader of the Opposition then Prime Minister in short order.
Thatcher emphasised her chemistry background in her self-imagery thereafter, characterising herself as the first science Prime Minister at Number 10, which indeed she was; the first UK Prime Minister with a science degree and experience as a working scientist. She was also a lawyer, however, and it is regrettable that she felt the need to downplay that aspect of her education and training in her Prime Ministerial persona.
The consequence of Thatcher’s estrangement from the legal profession was to prove far more problematic for the traditional Bar than it was for Thatcher.
The end of the Bar as she knew it – the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990
The Thatcher reforms of the late 1980s have been called “the most obvious start to the Bar no longer being trusted to run its own affairs”. The Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 passed into law on 1 November 1990.
Part II of the Act, headed ‘Legal Services,’ set out a ‘statutory objective’: making provision for new and better ways of providing legal services and a wider choice of persons providing them, supplemented by a broader ‘general principle’ that the right of audience and the right to conduct litigation should be determined by education and training, by membership of a professional or other body, and by rules of conduct: Courts and Legal Services Act s 17(1), (2) and (4).
Implicit in the statutory objective was the proposition that legal services are not the same as lawyer’s services, and do not necessarily have to be performed by lawyers. The Act made rights of audience available to or potentially obtainable by solicitors and representatives drawn from outside the legal profession, as well as extending the authority and dignity of the regional courts.
The impact on the London Bar was immediately felt. By April 1991 the Law Society had already submitted a proposal to the Lord Chancellor for extending the rights of audience of solicitors. The importance of provincial courts rose sharply as a result of the reforms, and ‘local bars’ (barristers based in cities other than London) suddenly found much greater opportunities for improvement to both the quality and weight of work they were asked to undertake.
As at the date of this article roughly 50% of the practicing Bar is primarily based outside London, including ‘supersets’ based in Birmingham said to be ‘reshaping’ the market by drawing together barristers from smaller sets and providing ‘state-of-the-art premises aided by teams of business managers and professional marketers’, with ‘annexes’ in London and Bristol’.
The dismantling of the old regime and the open opportunities to market on merit were immediately and profoundly liberating for women in the profession, as was the reform to education for those studying the law. In 1979 British establishments still perceived ‘merit’ exclusively as intellectual excellence judged by the academic elite. They either failed to see or to address the resulting academic elitism propagated by that traditional system.
Even Somerville, a college of disciplined seriousness, where women were trained to think, failed to appreciate the need to translate learning into income if barriers were truly to come down for the children of the working class and women were to be independent of the financial control of men. Thatcher’s enthusiasm for measurable performance against proscribed outcomes exposed complacency, privilege and prejudice in the traditional system and opened the doors to those who could not afford to forgo commercially driven enterprise.
The passage of the reforms was dramatic, not only for the debate but for the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe on the date of their passing. In his resignation speech he announced that being in Thatcher’s government was like being on a cricket team whose “bats have been broken by the team captain.” A former barrister and a QC it is tempting to impute to Howe a deliberate reference to Lord Denning’s famous description of Mr Miller as “a newcomer who is no lover of cricket” seeking to disrupt the traditional cricket that is “the delight of everyone” leaving the village “much the poorer”: Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966 at 976.
Howe’s resignation is, of course, attributed to Thatcher’s ongoing opposition to European inclusion and is said to have been immediately brought about by the interest rate rise of the same date. The timing and flourish of his exit has not yet been adequately examined in relation to the law reforms and their effect on the English Bar, however – I suspect such examination might reveal more to the timing of the QC’s dramatic departure.
Thoughts for the legal profession
The polarisation over what it means to be a meritocracy and how success is measured is at the heart of issues confronting the legal profession today. As we face the commencement of AML CTF provisions purporting to turn the legal profession into a police force, we must ask difficult questions about how traditional responsibilities and legislative compliance sit with the practicalities of successful commercial endeavours. Ongoing reform of appointments of silk, equitable briefing practices, and the judicial tap are all challenging what we mean by ‘meritorious’ and how that criteria is best measured.
The answers are not simple and should not be reduced to the binary debate of sound bite politics. The ancient traditions are fraught with prejudice, most painfully the curious idea that one should not be driven by a need to put food on the table when engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. But Thatcher’s reforms in Britain gave rise to what has arguably become an unfortunate triumph of commerciality over philosophical merit.
Before privatisation, confrontation and political revolution, Thatcher was a woman learning how to command attention in rooms not built for her voice and her legacy survives not only in Britain’s institutions, but in the ambitions of women lawyers across the Commonwealth. It is apparent in the striking fact that the highest offices of Australia’s legal profession are now occupied (or soon to be occupied) by women who inherit, in very different form, the same hard-won tradition of authority.
The world has changed, in many ways, since Thatcher’s brief legal career. Like Thatcher I was called to the Bar at the commencement of parenthood but my experience was very different. In my pupillage I worked on a multibillion-dollar mining dispute, led by a woman silk and instructed by an all-female team of solicitors. When they heard that I was pregnant they were universally delighted and there was no hint of incompatibility with my profession.
I was encouraged to stay in Chambers; the then Francis Burt Chambers chairman caused a change table to be installed in the FBC unisex accessible toilet so that my husband (the full-time stay at home parent for our infant daughter) could be the one to change nappies when he brought my daughter in to visit.
Thatcher’s twins were six years old when she was first selected for the seat of Finchley, which she won in 1959 and held until her elevation to the House of Lords in 1992. My own twins are six years old as I write and were no barrier to my return from the Administrative Review Tribunal to full-time practice as a commercial barrister earlier this year.
It should now be regarded as settled then that complex family dynamics do not inevitably preclude high-powered professional careers. But women, and mothers in particular, can still learn much from the education, self-construction, and stubborn determination of Margaret Thatcher, a woman who was not afraid of her own opinion or her voice.
The steel of the “Iron Lady”, the discipline of her image, and the intellectual formation of Oxford and early legal training did not simply carry her through a conventionally masculine career — they allowed her to redefine it.
