bill as part of a double act, ‘Drum and Major’, with his future wife, Kitty.
Five years my father’s senior, Kitty was already married to a masseur, David Grant, when they met. The appeal of a life with a masseur must have worn off, for she soon formed a permanent professional partnership with my father which took her away from her husband, and she married Tom after Grant’s death, in 1910.
Kitty and Tom – ‘Drum and Major’ – were in regular work. September 1902 saw them on stage in Portsmouth; December took them to Hastings; and in the first half of 1903 they appeared in turn at Camberwell, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Manchester, Birkenhead, Plymouth, Stockton and Wolverhampton. Only political party leaders perform in a more bewildering succession of venues.
It was a peripatetic existence, but they must have loved travelling because they did not stay long in Britain. In July 1903 the pair sailed from Southampton, and did not return for almost a year. An advertisement in the Stage announced that they were ‘Touring in South America’; which was brave of them, since neither spoke Spanish. While they were there, I learned from my father, they spent time on a cattle ranch in Argentina. He used to tell me tales of the gauchos and their way of life. He also claimed that in Buenos Aires he had worked in a millionaires’ club, looking out for card-sharpers and winning back their gains. As an old man he was still an avid card-player.
And he crossed the River Plate – at least according to family legend – stumbling into a civil war in Uruguay, and was forced to enlist briefly in a local militia. Perhaps the name ‘Major’ confused someone. Tom used to recount how he had a white band pinned to his arm and had been ordered to march a group of undesirables out of town. He claimed that the white band denoted his status as an officer, but in fact, as my brother has subsequently discovered, at the time of his visit Uruguay was hotly divided between two political clans, the Blancos and the Colorados – the Whites and the Reds. Even a small piece of clothing of either colour committed you to one side or the other. Probably inadvertently, my father had joined the rebellious Blancos in their failed challenge to the Colorado party.
Their revolutionary phase behind them, Tom and Kitty returned to England in April 1904 to a thriving career. A fortnight after docking they were on stage in Blackpool, and they toured the country continually until the outbreak of war in 1914. They must have appeared in almost every big theatre in Britain, but life was not easy for music-hall performers. Contracts were cancelled without notice; shows were moved from theatre to theatre without compensation; and some theatres demanded that artistes play daily matinees but take payment only for evening shows. Individually, most performers were at the mercy of management. Collectively they believed they could protect themselves, and decided to do so.
A conference was called of leading stage figures, which Tom and Kitty attended, and on 18 February 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was formed at the Vaudeville Club in London. Everyone present joined that same evening, and queued to pay the subscription of two shillings and sixpence. Tom and Kitty were Founder Members Numbers 97 and 98; my sister Pat still has our father’s white-and-green membership badge. I cannot recall, however, mentioning to the Huntingdonshire Conservative selection committee that my father was a pioneer trade unionist.
By 1914 Tom and Kitty were running a successful touring company. Tom had developed a heart condition which disqualified him from active service in the First World War, but they continued to appear on stage, their entertainments doubling as recruiting drives. My family still has an autograph book in which Tom collected the signatures of soldiers in the audience who had been decorated for their valour.
The end of the war saw the music-hall business return to normal. Throughout 1920 and 1921 Tom and Kitty travelled Britain, never stopping anywhere for more than a month, performing sketches and revues such as ‘Stop Press’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘After the Overture’.
And now, as I found out to my astonishment while researching this book, a surprise half-sister joins the family troupe. At about this time my father had an affair with one Alice Maude Frankland. She became pregnant, and a daughter, Kathleen, my father’s second child, was born in October 1923. Alice soon disappeared from the scene, but Tom and Kitty adopted Kathleen just a month after her birth. While they criss-crossed the country with their shows, the baby was boarded with a foster-couple. In about 1927 or 1928, they decided to bring her home. ‘The Majors want to take Kath away,’ her foster-parents were told – a heartbreaking moment. Sense prevailed, and Kathleen stayed where she was, though my father continued to provide financial support.
I have yet to reach 1930 in my family’s story, and already we have stumbled across an unrelated ‘uncle’, a wayward father, illiteracy, adultery, remarriage and two previously unknown half-siblings. Childhood memories have left me with a rock-solid respect for the traditional basics of family life and family duty; but if, unlike some Conservative colleagues and supporters, I have always taken with a pinch of salt the myth of a past golden age of conventional families, splendid education and national virtue, then I, and millions of my compatriots, have reason to. Life in Britain has never been simple, and never will be.
Kathleen was not to enter my life until after I had left Downing Street. Although she always knew of my family, I was not aware of her, and she was startled when in 1990 her half-brother became prime minister. She could have sold her story to the press for a small fortune. Instead, she kept the secret. Only after the 1997 general election did I learn that I had a half-sister, alive, well and living in England.
It was lucky for young Kathleen that she stayed with her foster-family, for a catastrophe would soon cost Kitty her life. While she was rehearsing on stage, a steel girder from the safety curtain came loose, fell, and struck her on the head. She was terribly injured, and though she lingered on for months with her mind impaired, she died in June 1928, perhaps mercifully for so vibrant a woman, and was buried at Prees Cemetery in Shropshire. Kitty and my father had been together for over twenty-five years. When she died my father was deluged with sympathetic letters, from everyone from theatre managers to call-boys. She was much loved.
After the accident Kitty had been comforted and nursed by a young dancer who had joined my father’s show six years earlier, at the age of seventeen. She was one half of ‘Glade and Glen’, a speciality act – and a cheeky, teasing, self-willed girl, often in trouble for misbehaviour and pranks. But she charmed her way out of every scrape, and had been a favourite of Kitty’s. A year after Kitty’s death, she married her boss, Tom, twenty-six years her senior, and cared for him for the rest of his life. Her name was Gwen, and she was my mother.
Gwen’s past held surprises for me, too. In 1991, one of my constituents with an interest in family history wrote a letter to me in which he suggested that I might have shared more than my job with Margaret Thatcher. My mother’s family had roots in the Boston district of Lincolnshire, not far from Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, and research suggests that it is likely – though not certain – that through my mother Margaret Thatcher and I have common ancestors in eighteenth-century Lincolnshire.
As the 1920s ended and music halls gave way to cinemas, my father left show business. It was the right decision, for his profession was dying, but it must have hurt. His 1929 marriage certificate shows his occupation as ‘builder’, but I have no reason to believe he ever was one – though he may have financed the building of bungalows. Certainly he was soon in a different trade, modelling animals and garden ornaments. My parents moved from Shropshire to a bungalow in Worcester Park, and children soon came along. A son, Thomas Aston, was born in 1929, but sadly lived only a few days. Then came Pat, born in 1930, and Terry, in 1932.
In the course of his life, my father once told me, he had made and lost fortunes several times over. What he meant by a fortune I don’t know, but for him the 1930s were good times. He became the first car-owner in the area; Pat and Terry were sent to fee-paying schools; and my mother had domestic help while she worked to build up my father’s business. All
