She was a very divisive figure and even today she remains something of a political goddess in the eyes of the right. In contrast, she is still reviled in many working class communities because of the damage she caused and the disdain she showed towards those communities.
Like many, I loathed her for who she was and what she did.
Thatcher was born in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham. Her parents ran a grocery shop there. Until yesterday, I had never been to Grantham - apart from quick stops at the town's railway station when heading down to London.
Yesterday night I stayed at "The Angel and Royal Hotel" in the town centre before embarking on a very long country walk today. I didn't get home until 10.15pm tonight. I will write more about that adventure tomorrow but tonight I am just giving you Thatcher-related images, including her statue on St Peter's Hill Green.
The sculptor successfully captured her famous "helmet hair!"
ReplyDeleteI didn't like Margaret Thatcher either. She card about only one group of people. the workers could be thrown away. And hey , I don't even live in Great Britain.
ReplyDeleteIn the late 1980s, The Blow Monkeys released an album by the title "She Was Only A Grocer's Daughter". As a teenager in Germany, I didn't know at first that it referred to Margaret Thatcher, but then my friends and I read reviews in the New Musical Express and other magazines where it was mentioned.
ReplyDeleteMy mother-in-law keeps praising Thatcher for the mere fact that she was a woman and "showed the men". I have always found it wrong to praise or damn someone soleley for being a man or a woman (or anything else). Our appraisal (or not) should be based on someone's actions alone.
She still strides the land sadly. The miners and printers strike and the selling off of social housing is resounding now for our young people. But the moment she was politically assassinated by her own party a feeling of relief was felt.
ReplyDeleteMilk snatcher!
ReplyDeleteMy sister-in-law lived in Grantham up until about three months ago. I used to go up and visit quite a lot but never really wandered around the town as I spent most of the time in her house. Believe it or not I had not seen that statue or the shop until your blog today!
ReplyDeleteI would NEVER in a million years purchase anything with the name "Trump" on it. There's a Trump winery about an hour's drive from my house. The road that passes it is lines with at least 100 American flags. Every time I drive by (to go to another winery) I feel disgusted.
ReplyDeleteThe poll tax, paid by the poorest of poor. My late 80s gay workmate being beaten by police with batons after a peaceful protest in Croydon, London. The selling off and destruction of public housing in Newcastle, where fortunate people made a motza. The terrible attacks on miners where police were given free reign. The homophobic laws. The attacks on the Greenham Common women. But worst of all, her total lack of empathy.
ReplyDeleteWell, not my country, not my business, some might say. I say, what happens in the UK and the US is the world's business.
And why haven't these statues of her been knocked down?
ReplyDeleteHenry Moore and Jacob Epstein worked with black granite.
ReplyDeleteWakefield sculptor Barbara Hepworth liked Irish green marble & slate.
Barbara Castle would have made a good prime minister though she had
enemies on the Labour Left and in the trades unions.
She said Margaret Thatcher lacked the feminine virtue of tenderness.
Denis Thatcher told David Sheppard the Bishop of Liverpool that compassion
was not a word in Margaret's vocabulary.
Sheppard was a champion of social justice ; as a batsman he played 22 Test
Matches for England between 1950 and 1963.
As Education Minister Thatcher ended the free school milk which I drank
every school day aged 5 to 18. A gift of Clem Attlee's 1945 Labour government.
My mother who bore six children and lived to the age of 97 said,
* Mrs Thatcher took away the children's milk. What a mean thing to do ! *
So she is a real Iron Lady now.
ReplyDeleteHer politics were reprehensible and her views mystifying, but she was an interesting character. I didn't realize she was from Grantham when I passed through yesterday. Funny that you were there at the same time (although likely out on your walk)!
ReplyDeleteThe miners will never forgive her destruction of their lives and communities.
ReplyDeleteHWSNBN is not the first deeply divisive politician.
ReplyDeleteI don't know enough about her other than she was the Prime Minister of England. What little I have read about her, I don't think I would have liked her or her policies.
ReplyDeleteI was only in the country for the first year of Thatcher, so can only comment as an outsider. selling off council houses below market value seems crazy to me and don’t get me going on Section 28.
ReplyDeleteI don't have words, well I do but they aren't nice ones.
ReplyDelete