Kieran Morris and Fergus Butler-Gallie are both obsessed with the Iron Lady, so they took the train to Lincolnshire for a Thatcher-fuelled day out.
The brass Thatcher stares determinedly at a bookies across the road. Next to her is an elaborately crafted iron bench in the form of the face of Captain Tom Moore, underscored, bizarrely enough, by Liverpool Football Club’s motto of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’. The statue, installed in May 2022 after nearly a decade of wrangling, stands just outside the Grantham Museum, an organisation which was critical in breaking the political deadlock and getting the project to go ahead.
Despite its role in the installation of the statue, there is a narrative in the press and among some local figures that the museum is suspicious of Margaret Thatcher, or even ashamed. There’s a suggestion that bubbles through the online comment sections of local newspapers, in pubs after several pints and on the front page of the Daily Mail, that in this very ordinary Lincolnshire town, there is a conspiracy to hide the legacy of their most famous daughter. There have been multiple battlegrounds before, but the museum has now become the centre of a row about the role of Thatcher in modern Grantham.
When the statue of Thatcher was first unveiled, it took hours for it to be egged, days before it was daubed in red paint, and it took only a matter of weeks before somebody glued a dildo to its head. Earlier this year, a pensioner was caught on CCTV spray-painting the word ‘BASTARD’ on the pedestal. Clear as the footage was – the Daily Mail described her in condemnatory tones as ‘sporting a white patterned scarf [with] short grey hair’ – Lincolnshire Police, clearly overrun by the errant elderly, were still moved to appeal for the doddery vandal to come forward voluntarily.
This sort of blatant disrespect has wound up the pro-Thatcher group. Alongside the explicit traducement of the head-dildoing, the museum was at the heart of a more insidious snub earlier this year when it rejected the demands by the leader of South Kesteven District Council, Ashley Baxter, to rename itself ‘The Margaret Thatcher Museum’.
Baxter is exactly the sort of quixotic figure who is found across English local government. Despite voting in favour of the installation of the statue and leading the renaming push, he claims to ‘not be a fan’ of Thatcher. He publishes each of his grandiose council interventions on a personal blog and his personal account on ‘X’ is an eclectic mix of replies to nostalgia accounts and tweets implying that Tommy Robinson is gay. Arguing, as Thatcher doubtless would have thought proper, that her name is good for local business, Baxter has long pushed for more Thatcher visibility and publicity in the town, with the museum becoming the latest target of his campaign.
Opposing Baxter is Councillor Charmaine Morgan. Now a member of the council’s Democratic Independent Group, Morgan was originally elected as part of the Labour Party but, between the two affiliations, she was a colleague of Baxter’s in the town’s other independent group, Alliance SK. Baxter characterised her most recent departure as ‘an issue of personality’. Morgan is the town’s ‘Civic Ambassador’; endless infighting meant that the council suspended the role of ‘mayor’ when it proved impossible to agree on who it would be. Morgan is persistent in her opposition to the Thatcher-Grantham association: she first protested the statue’s installation in 2013, fiercely opposed the naming of the Margaret Thatcher bypass in 2015, and has battled the council tooth-and-nail – we assume privately, and have seen so publicly – over the continual costs of keeping Maggie clean. The museum is the latest battleground in more than ten years of back and forth between the two. Morgan summed up her stance succinctly: ‘There is far more to Grantham than Margaret Thatcher.’
We hadn’t arrived with designs to glimpse the Grantham beyond. No, we were both very much here for Maggie. We are both, for our sins, amateur and active Thatcherologists. With the possible exception of her party predecessor, Ted Heath, she is without a doubt the strangest individual to cross the threshold of Number 10. Awkward, stiff and banterless to the point of neurodivergence, the woman herself is more interesting than her myth – indeed, she was more comfortable being the latter over the former. Where better to find out where it all went weird than in the town that forged her?
Margaret Thatcher’s bed is hidden behind a selection of Pokémon cards. Gastly, Staryu and Poliwag. The place where a young Thatcher hit the hay during her childhood years is the centrepiece of the exhibit dedicated to her in the Grantham Museum. Around the Tracey Emin-esque installation of the bedroom are other relics of her childhood: a black and claret dress spread out on the bed, physics textbooks on the shelves, a hockey stick carved along the flank with ‘M. ROBERTS’. Next to it stands a mounted panel that stressed her childhood of voluntary austerity, led by her proudly skinflint grocer father: ‘Duty and public service, rather than personal pleasure, was the rule.’
As the course of her political career is traced, more exhibits appeared: her houndstooth Aquascutum power coat from the 1987 Moscow summit, then the TV set arranged to simulate election night 1979: David Steel’s pasty face and mustardy colour palette, Jim Callaghan sloughing out of Millbank like the old man from Up, clippy David Dimbleby reading out the results, and then, of course, ‘And I would just like to remember some words of St Francis of Assisi.’
For children, or profoundly suspect adults, there was a Thatcher quiz, uncontroversial to the point of dryness if you read it too closely. What was her favourite alcoholic drink? A) Whiskey and soda B) Gin and tonic C) She didn’t drink alcohol. There was a glass cabinet strewn with pin-portraits, pop-art posters, promotional champagne bottles, buttons, keyrings and invitations to her funeral. Finally there was the memorial book from the town when she died, itself an artefact of the Britain she created. ‘Rest in peace :)’, read the entry on the page on show.
The museum has responded to the naming row by placing its Thatcher exhibit at the very back of its small premises, cordoned off by internal walls. There is a palpable keenness to show those parts of Grantham life not related to Thatcher: Isaac Newton’s death mask, a mock apothecary, and a collection that simply celebrates the concept of collecting things – shells, Pokémon, whatever. Central to the museum is a maze-like installation dedicated to PC Edith Smith, a groundbreaking female police officer used by the local constabulary to infiltrate the trade between sex workers and local soldiers, and who later killed herself with barbiturates aged 46 in the wake of a senior management coup at a nursing home in Runcorn. Indeed, the aged volunteer who greeted us explicitly asked if we were there for Smith. Our air of enthusiasm for pentobarbital (brought on by having to get up early for the train) was clearly dispelled as he took one look at the book on Thatcher we’d packed for the journey, his face registering it for a second before imparting more information about the late lamented PC.
That said, Thatcher is both hidden and yet on show everywhere. When we visited, the staff were having an argument over the misprinting of a Thatcher fridge magnet. There was an opportunity to dress up in what was called ‘a Margaret Thatcher style hat’, as if Mark and Carol would unleash their fury for infringement of copyright. The Grantham Hall of Fame book sat by the door, deliberately placing Nicholas Parsons, an entertainer from The Black and White Minstrel Show, and the 18th century’s fattest man, Daniel Lambert, before Thatcher in its list. Visitors – or perhaps, Councillor Baxter – had clearly kept it open on the section where Thatcher stares out from the laminated page. The guest book had entries specifically mentioning Thatcher from the progressive enclaves of Austria and Madrid.
As it was in the Museum, so it was in the town. Thatcher was ever-present and yet not. Banners from the tourist board proclaim ‘Hi Grantham!’, making it the only Lincolnshire town to have a strapline which echoes the final words of a West German taxi driver in 1960s Osnabrück. We strolled to the stolid, featureless Wesleyan chapel where Thatcher’s father, Alfred Roberts, would’ve preached and prayed with his family, no doubt extolling the godly virtues of outdoor plumbing. As per the strangeness of the museum’s exhibit, perhaps the most interesting Thatcher story that Grantham has to tell is the story of her relationship with him.
Interestingly, Grantham is filled with council-issued blue plaques. It is a place that visibly takes its heritage seriously. There is the inevitable one to John Wesley, one to suffragette Mary Jane Rawle, and one to the semi-mnemonic Hebrew scholar, theatre director and miniature painter Manuel Immanuel. On the birthplace of Thatcher, however, there is no council plaque but a small, brown, private one. The famous grocer’s shop of Thatcherite myth is now ‘Living Health’, an alternative medicine outfit specialising in crystal healing and reiki. In its window was an advert: ‘Give your vibes a holistic Halloween’.
We searched for more hints of Thatcher in the town. We popped into St Wulfram’s, Grantham’s monumental parish church, and right into a slice of middle-class rural Lincolnshire as it always has been – a private boys’ school prize-giving rehearsal. It felt very ‘Thatcher’ and yet, watching the boys studiously ignore their instructions in favour of playing Clash of Clans on their phones, very far from Thatcher too. Thatcherism in vibe if not deed. We spent a bright day in a town which was quiet but not derelict, backstreets dotted with storied pubs, magic shops and a railway collectors’ emporium with a needlessly acronymised name (MRSG, or its full title, Model Railway Shop Grantham). Among it all were little touches of an alternative community, not quite vape shops but vape-adjacent; products of the free enterprise she stood for, and the oddbods she may not have.
We made our way through them to the Nobody’s Inn, a genuinely good and authentically quirky boozer playing Metallica and selling freshly-popped pork scratchings and which hid their smoking area behind a bookshelf dummy-door. Sensing that the town’s most famous daughter might be a tired topic of conversation for the Grantham faithful, we told the barmaid a half-truth about our reason for visiting. Thankfully, she brought her up instead – before telling us, firmly, how she wishes everyone would just get over Maggie and leave her to history. There were some tourists who came in seeking Thatcher but they were generally ‘weirdos’.
More pubs followed: a highlight being the music bar run by the guy who didn’t like music, and in fact when asked, seemed if anything to actively dislike it, touting that he was a truck driver and ‘this was all his daughter’s idea’. More lager meant more confidence in bringing up the coiffured iron elephant in the room. As we drank more pints in more pubs, the unthinkable thought entered our heads: perhaps the conspiracy was true? Some locals raised the tantalising rumour that underneath the museum was a forbidden Thatcher cellar, containing yet more memorabilia.
One of the supposed hidden artefacts is Thatcher’s Spitting Image puppet. The programme, like the 1980s as a whole, had an obsession with Thatcher. She was monster, totem and God. The strangeness of the relationship is perhaps best encapsulated in an early song from the show, titled The Grantham Anthem. The premise – a strange mix of wit and rampant snobbery befitting the Footlights writing staff – depicts a troubled Thatcher recalling her time in Grantham. She sings:
When I feel like shouting ‘stop!’, I recall my father’s shop,
In the days when, goodness me, you made the best of it!
Wearing an old-fashioned grocer’s coat, she then lists a series of prices while the items are held up by the puppets of Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit and Michael Heseltine. Bottles of bleach, table salt, a gravy granule mix, etc. As the song reaches its dénouement, Thatcher passionately declares:
I will sing the Grantham Anthem, which I learnt at my father’s knee,
As I helped him in his corner shop in Nazareth, Galilee!
We then see her apotheosis and, above the Milky Way, Thatcher bedecked in angelic white plays an antiquated till as if it was a church organ. Meanwhile, a gospel choir howls:
She sings the Grantham Anthem and she made the universe!
The strains of the anthem can still be heard in the unwitting centre of that universe she created: the strange, greying town from which she hailed, marked by her presence and her politics forevermore; albeit, not as loudly as Councillor Baxter might like.
