Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut
Äàòà 15.04.2013 19:21:00
Ðóáðèêè WWII; Ñïåöñëóæáû; Àðìèÿ; ÂÂÑ;

Âîåííûå è òîïè÷íûå íåêðîëîãè èç áðèòàíñêèõ ãàçåò

>Flight Lieutenant Les Brodrick

>Îäèí èç ïîñëåäíèõ îñòàâøèõñÿ â æèâûõ ó÷àñòíèêîâ ïîáåãà èç Øòàëàã Ëþôò 3

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9990823/Flight-Lieutenant-Les-Brodrick.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3739118.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00404/125927187_BRODERICK_404074c.jpg



Bomber pilot shot down over France who took part in, and survived, the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III

The death of Les Broderick leaves only two known British survivors of the Great Escape from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III in March 1944. Hitler had ordered all the recaptured prisoners to be shot, but 23 were spared.

Broderick had completed 18 bombing missions with No 106 Squadron, RAF when the Lancaster he captained was shot down returning from an attack on Stuttgart, in April 1943. Although hit by ground fire over the target, causing loss of height, he was hopeful of getting the Lancaster home until it was set ablaze by machinegun fire while flying low over Amiens.

Too low to bale out, he was forced into a crash-landing in which four of the crew of seven were killed. He and an air-gunner were slightly injured but the navigator was badly burned, so they went to find help rather than try to evade capture. They were captured. The navigator was sent to hospital and, after interrogation, the other two were sent to prison camp, in Broderick’s case to Stalag Luft III in Sagan, Silesia The camp stood in a clearing in a vast pine forest, with each hut on stilts to prevent tunnelling. When Broderick arrived it held 900 Allied airman and was seriously overcrowded. He was one of a large group of prisoners moved into a new compound, to ease the congestion and also prompting a new appraisal of escape possibilities. It was decided to construct three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry, starting from different points.

Broderick joined the team working on tunnel Dick being dug westwards towards the perimeter wire. The entrance shaft to each tunnel was chiselled through a concrete base where the stoves and washroom stood at the end of a hut, then concealed by a concrete slab fitting the space. Good progress was being made in the soft sandy earth, which was distributed around the compound by prisoners carrying it in bags beneath their trousers, until the work force was reduced by a group of prisoners being sent to a camp in Poland. Digging was concentrated on Tom, but this was discovered through traces of sand found near the entry point, resulting in all effort being switched to Harry, the longest tunnel.

After two months of feverish working in claustrophobic conditions in the two-foot high tunnel, 30 feet below the surface, Harry was completed on March 14, 1944. Some 4,000 bed boards had been used to shore up the tunnel’s roof and sides in the sandy soil.

The moonless night of March 24 was chosen for the breakout by 200 men. The first 30 were fluent German speakers and so judged to have the best chance of making a home run, the next 70 had all worked on the tunnels and the final 100 were taken out of a hat. Broderick went through the tunnel as number 52 but, shortly after the 76th man got clear, a sentry outside the wire stumbled across the open exit hole and fired a warning shot to alert the guards.

Broderick and two companions, Flight Lieutenant Birkland and Flying Officer Street were well clear by that time but after three days of being soaked by rain and suffering from the bitter cold, they gave themselves up. Broderick’s companions, Birkland and Street, were among those shot. Broderick was returned to Stalag Luft III, where there was talk of a new tunnel but with the news of the D-Day landings most inmates settled down to wait for the end of the war.

The Allied prisoners faced terrible hardships in 1945 in the course of the long march westwards away from the advancing Red Army during one of the coldest winters ever. There was no longer any purpose in escaping and their German guards were in little better condition than they. Three officers were killed and four wounded by a mistaken RAF attack on the column but, after marching for seven days and travelling in rail cattle trucks for another three, Broderick’s column reached Celle, from where they were moved in British transport and flown home.

Leslie Charles James Broderick was born in Wandsworth and educated at Bancrofts School. He joined the Territorial Army in 1939 and, following mobilisation, served with a searchlight unit on Canvey Island, Essex, where he met his wife, Teresa Nash. He transferred to the RAF in August 1940 and undertook pilot training at the British Flying Training School in Texas at the end of which he was commissioned and returned to England for duty.

On demobilisation in 1945, he took up teaching at a primary school on Canvey Island, but after the great floods of 1953 moved to South Africa. He taught in primary schools in Johannesburg and Natal until his retirement in 1982. He is survived by his wife, and two sons.

Leslie C. J. Broderick, survivor of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, was born on May 19, 1921. He died on April 8, 2013, aged 91


>Jim Fraser

>Ëè÷íûé ìåõâîä òàíêà ìàðøàëà Ìîíòãîìåðè, ïîäàðèâøèé åìó çíàìåíèòûé áåðåò

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/army-obituaries/9967708/Jim-Fraser.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3728306.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00400/124873336_Fraser1_400165c.jpg



Fraser suggested that Montgomery wear a beret, which became emblematic of the wartime military commander

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00400/125069514_Fraser2_400166c.jpg



Jim Fraser: He drove the 8th Army Commander in the ‘charger’, an adapted American Grant tank

Montgomery’s driver in the Western Desert who was earlier decorated for saving the life of an officer

It was Jim Fraser’s claim that it was his idea that General (later Field Marshal) Montgomery should adopt the black Royal Tank Regiment’s beret as his headgear in the Western Desert campaign. He was the driver of Monty’s “charger” — the American “Grant” tank, with its 37mm gun replaced by a wooden dummy and ammunition racks removed to make way for extra radios, in which the 8th Army commander travelled from El Alamein to Tunis.

Having won the Military Medal at the battle of Sidi Rezegh in November 1941, Fraser was already a battle-hardened soldier when he was selected to be the driver of the newly appointed Commander of the 8th Army in August 1942. To make himself readily identifiable to the troops, Montgomery had adopted an Australian bush hat adorned with the cap-badges of units under his command. When he raised his head out of the tank turret, however, it blew off in the slipstream. So Fraser suggested that he should wear his beret instead, as it was designed to stay on and not show dirt. Monty accepted the offer, later adding his General’s cap badge to that of the Royal Tank Regiment — and wore both together for the rest of his service.

Fraser won his Military Medal for saving the life of an officer during the battle of Sidi Rezegh, when the 8th Army under Sir Alan Cunningham had fought a confused and indecisive battle against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the desert east of Tobruk. When Fraser’s troop leader, Lieutenant Kitto, was seriously wounded by an 88mm shell hitting the side of their tank, he volunteered to find medical assistance.

Despite a confused situation with neither side being clear who held which ground, as dawn broke on the second day of the battle Fraser set off through the litter of bodies and burning tanks and returned with a medical party despite persistent shellfire. He was persuaded to abandon his tank only when it became clear the damage sustained in the battle made it a non-runner.

Born in Glasgow in 1920, Fraser came south as boy when his father was unable to find steady work in the Glasgow dockyards and moved to Colchester. Young Jim attended the Bluecoat School but left aged 14 to begin work at the Britannia Lathe & Oil Engine Company in Colchester. He hoped to join the Royal Navy but the naval recruiting office in Ipswich sent him away at 16, telling him to return when he was older.

Aged 17, but pretending to be 18, he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps (as it then was) on November 5, 1937, intending to be a career soldier. He served in England with the 8th Royal Tanks, exercising on Salisbury Plain until after the outbreak of war. In the spring of 1941 he sailed from Greenock with the 8th Royal Tanks for the Middle East and the 8th Army.

After the Sidi Rezegh battle in November 1941, his regiment was again engaged in a furious encounter on New Year’s Eve. This time the tank commander was killed, the gunner lost a leg and Fraser suffered burns. On another occasion, in the summer of 1942, the tracks were blown off his tank by enemy fire, rendering it immobile. The crew baled out to take refuge beneath the hull but another shell lifted the tank so that it crushed three of the crew. Fraser was unhurt but hit in the leg by machinegun fire as he crawled away.

On return to the desert from hospital in Cairo, he was selected to drive the new Army Commander’s “charger” tank and remained in that role until the spring of 1943. Subsequently he served in Italy with 6th Royal Tank Regiment and was mentioned in dispatches at the crossing of the River Senio in April 1945.

He continued in the Army after the war, serving in India during the approach to Partition in 1947 and later in Korea. Promoted sergeant and later to warrant officer, in 1955 he was the squadron sergeant-major of the vehicle park squadron at the Royal Armoured Corps driving and maintenance school at Bovington, Dorset. So diligently did he perform his duties, acting as the squadron’s second-in-command and administrative officer, that he was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1956.

On completion of his 22 years’ service, he worked as postman in Colchester, becoming involved in the trades union movement and also serving as a local councillor.

His wife predeceased him. He is survived by three children.

Squadron Sergeant-Major James Fraser, MM, BEM, Royal Tank Regiment, was born on September 19, 1920. He died on March 21, 2013, aged 92


>General Sir Michael Gow

>Êîìàíäóþùèé áðèòàíñêîé Ðåéíñêîé Àðìèåé

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9957789/General-Sir-Michael-Gow.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3725552.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00399/124871792_Gow_399250c.jpg



General Sir Michael Gow, during Soverign’s Day Parade at Sandhurst 11th December 1982

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Gow was also County Commissioner for British Scouts in Western Europe

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Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Gow of the 2nd Battalion, The Scots Guards, in 1965

Commander of the British Army of the Rhine who won his allies’ trust during turbulent political times

Michael Gow appeared the archetypal General but he had a light-hearted manner useful for taking some of the sting out of serious issues. His rise to prominence inevitably drew comment that he owed much to influence within the Household Division, but his command of Nato’s Northern Army Group earned the confidence and friendship of his Allied subordinates.

James Michael Gow was born in 1924, the son of J. C. Gow, sometime manager of Cammell Laird’s steel works. He was educated at Winchester, where he excelled at cricket and soccer. Commissioned into the Scots Guards in June 1943, he served with 3rd (Tank) Battalion Scots Guards during the North West Europe campaign in the 6th Guards (Tank) Brigade and later the Guards Armoured Division. Equipped with Churchill infantry support tanks, this battalion helped to debunk the myth that it was wasteful to put tall guardsmen into tanks.

He took part in the battles of Caumont in Normandy at the end of July 1944 and at Estry in August against combat-hardened German panzer divisions. These and later engagements with the Guards Armoured Division were useful preparation for dealing with Nato plans to stem any onslaught of Soviet armour more than 30 years later.

Returning to 3rd Scots Guards from hospital in April 1945 after being blown up in a scout car, he was informed that he was to take the place of the battalion quartermaster who had been taken prisoner. He got to grips with an armoured regiment’s demands for ammunition, petrol, food and spares but subsequently would dismiss any credit for this, pointing out that the war in Europe was by then almost over.

His wartime battalion brought the friendships of officers who subsequently became the Archbishop of Canterbury (Lord Runcie), Home Secretary (Lord Whitelaw), the Chief Scout of the Commonwealth (Lord Maclean) and the chairman of United Biscuits (Lord Laing of Dunphail).

His interest in military ceremonial was stimulated by his involvement in London duties in the immediate postwar years. In retirement he became an authority on the subject and on the ceremonial units of foreign armies.

He returned to active service in 1949 when he joined 2nd Battalion Scots Guards in 2nd Guards Brigade in Malaya, where the communist insurrection had erupted in 1948. The terrorists adopted bold tactics early in the campaign and suffered severely. The Scots Guards killed 100 terrorists, captured 11 and wounded 24, a tally that later battalions found difficult to match as the enemy moved deeper into the jungle.

He then spent a year as an equerry to the Duke of Gloucester. He tried to avoid the post, fearing that it would take him out of the regimental swim, but accepted it on hearing of the death of George VI, knowing that he would be involved in the Coronation. At one of the rehearsals at Westminster Abbey, after the Duke had practised his declaration of allegiance, he heard the Queen say, “That was not very well done, Uncle Harry, please do it again.”

After Staff College in 1954 he became Brigade Major (chief of staff) of 11th Infantry Brigade in the Army of the Rhine commanded by Brigadier (later Lieutenant-General Sir) Dick Fyffe of the Rifle Brigade. Fyffe was an experienced, cerebral officer from whom Gow learnt much. It was not long before he joined the directing staff at Camberley, then took over command of 2nd Scots Guards in 1964.

He commanded 4th Guards Brigade in Germany 1968-69 and after the 1970 course at the Royal College of Defence Studies was appointed Assistant Chief of Staff (Intelligence) at Nato’s Headquarters Northern Army Group and Head of Rhine Army’s counter-intelligence staff. This was outside his experience but brought him into close contact with the British, US and Nato intelligence agencies, providing him with invaluable background on the threat to Nato’s Central Region.

After promotion to major-general and command of 4th Armoured Division in Germany he returned to London as Director of Army Training in the Ministry of Defence, then Scotland as GOC on his advance to lieutenant-general in 1979. He was appointed KCB in 1980 and it was generally expected that he would retire from Edinburgh. Instead he was promoted to command Northern Army Group and BAOR. Although he did not seek to introduce radical changes or reforms on how Northern Army Group fitted into the Nato pattern of deterrence in Western Europe, he won the confidence of Allied commanders and staffs and kept stable a structure under constant threat of financial cuts restricting modernisation and training.

In 1983 he was the UK member of a Nato European group that toured the US, appearing on radio and television and addressing audiences in Washington and other cities, presenting the economic, military and political issues confronting Nato.

Gow was Colonel Commandant of the Scottish Division 1979-80 and of the Intelligence Corps 1973-86. He was County Commissioner, British Scouts Western Europe 1980-83. On leaving Germany, he returned to London as Commandant of the RCDS until his retirement. He had been advanced to GCB in 1981 and was an ADC (General) to the Queen 1981-84. At the time of his retirement in January 1986, he was the senior general in the Army.

Subsequently he launched himself into numerous charitable and public duties. He was president of the Royal British Legion Scotland and of the Earl Haig Fund Scotland 1986-96, a member of the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland, Royal Company of Archers, from 1964 and Captain 2000 to 2006. In addition he was an Elder of the Church of Scotland and a Deputy Lieutenant for Edinburgh from 1994.

His publications included Trooping the Colour (1989), Jottings in a General’s Notebook (1989) and General Reflections (1991). He is survived by his wife, Jane, whom he married in 1946, a son and four daughters.

General Sir Michael Gow, GCB, Commander Northern Army Group and BAOR 1980-83, was born on June 3, 1924. He died on March 26, 2013, aged 88

'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (15.04.2013 19:21:00)
Äàòà 15.04.2013 19:25:33

Âîåííûå è òîïè÷íûå...

John Wright

Êðèïòîàíàëèòèê â Áëåò÷ëè Ïàðêå

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3724558.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00398/124786243_Wright1_398865c.jpg



John Wright, wartime cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00398/124792806_Lorenz_398867c.jpg



A Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine on display at Bletchley Park museum

Wartime cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park who decoded the German high command’s vital ‘Tunny’ messages

One of the dwindling band of veterans of Bletchley Park who worked on the German “Lorenz” cipher, John Wright was a toiler at the coalface of intelligence gathering, deciphering encrypted German signals traffic at their highest level of command.

In early 1942, before Wright was diverted from the Royal Armoured Corps where he was a radio operator, the Lorenz cipher system — codenamed Tunny by the British code-breakers — had been cracked. The system was used to encrypt messages between the German Army HQ in Berlin and field commanders of huge forces on all the key battle fronts. The system could be used only by the most senior commanders and by Hitler himself.

Unlike the now better-known Enigma cipher machine, the Lorenz (pictured right) had 12 rotors, as distinct from Enigma’s three, and incorporated three levels of encryption. The system had proved impossible to break until August 1941, when a German operator requested a resend that provided the code-breakers with encrypted versions of the same message but with minor human error variations. After intensive work, these allowed them to break the code. Wright was a member of a 21-man and woman group working in three shifts to cover the 24 hours. Listening stations radioed the still encoded German teleprinter traffic to Bletchley Park where it would be decoded using the calculated German rotor settings of the day. Each message was then converted from five-symbol groups into German language before translation into English.

This work was exacting routine; yet those working on each process had to be alert to indications that a message related to a previous one or to any German operational decision or strategic deployment and give it priority attention. Speed was as important as precision, as the knowledge of enemy intentions could be of vital importance to Allied decision-making and counter action. As with all members of Bletchley Park staff, Wright had to undertake to keep secret the nature of his work, even after the war had ended.

After the close of hostilities in 1945 he joined what is now known as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that continued to monitor, decode and translate the radio and electronic communications traffic of various countries having interests that might be considered counter to those of the United Kingdom. As well as at the main base of GCHQ at Cheltenham, Wright worked for the organisation in Australia and the US.

After retirement he travelled abroad extensively, something that had been restricted during his service, and was active in the local Probus group of former professional and business persons of responsibility in the fields of commerce, industry and education in Gloucestershire.

Born in Southwark, the only son of Sam and Desdemona Wright, John Thomas Wright attended Kingston Day Commercial School. He is survived by his wife, Doreen, née Arthur, and a son and daughter.

John T. Wright, cryptanalyst, was born on May 5, 1924. He died on March 7, 2013, aged 88


Gilbert Turck

Îôèöåð SOE, óçíèê Áóõåíâàëüäà è êàâàëåð áðèòàíñêîãî è ôðàíöóçñêîãî Âîåííîãî Êðåñòà

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00404/TTM15TURCK_404072c.jpg



Turck: he was tortured by the Gestapo but gave nothing away and was sent naked in a truck to Buchenwald

French SOE agent who with his fiancée ran a secret escape group before being captured by the Gestapo

Before the Franco-German armistice of June 1940, Gilbert Turck had been a liaison officer of the French Deuxième (Intelligence) Bureau with Section D of the Foreign Office in London. Having escaped from France after the armistice, he joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was dispatched on an early SOE operation into Vichy-controlled France.

He and fellow SOE agent Jacques de Guélis were parachuted into central France on the night of August 6, 1941. De Guélis landed safely but Turck knocked himself out exiting the aircraft, landed in a quarry and recovered consciousness in the hands of the Vichy police. This was before the German occupation of the whole of France, so Pétain’s police were not yet in the Germans’ pocket. Those who arrested Turck released him accepting his story, that he had bribed the RAF to drop him back into France as he could not bear les Anglais.

On locating de Guélis, they headed for Marseilles, where Turck rented lodgings as his base for future operations. De Guélis passed the address on to SOE headquarters on his return to London.Turck had been instructed to sound out the Bergerac region for setting up a subversion and sabotage organisation and four sabotage instructors were dropped by parachute near Bergerac on the night of October 10. One, who had the address of the lodgings on his person, was captured. The Vichy police were able to arrest the other three when they called there to make contact with Turck.

Ten more agents were trapped in the same way before SOE in London realised that the address was compromised. Aware that Vichy police were hunting him, Turck crossed into the German-occupied zone of northern France and changed his alias to Georges Delanoe.

He took refuge in Paris with his fiancée and they took over the running of a commercial transport company, financed by Pierre de Vomécourt, head of the SOE Autogiro circuit, which was used to smuggle escapees from occupied France into the Vichy zone, and agents and sabotage materials in the opposite direction. When the Autogiro circuit was compromised and snuffed out, de Vomécourt did not reveal his association with Turck.

A too casually arranged meeting that proved to be a Gestapo trap led to Turck’s own arrest in July 1942. He gave away nothing about SOE under torture and was sent naked and starving on a three-day journey via cattle truck to Buchenwald concentration camp. There he spent 15 months before transfer to the Dora sub-camp, where he remained until the liberation.

Gilbert Charles Georges Turck was educated in Paris, studied engineering and was working as an industrial architect on the outbreak of war.

The arrest of the SOE agents at the Marseilles lodgings had led SOE headquarters to suspect him of treachery. Indeed, one agent caught there, George Bégué, after release at the war’s end asserted that Turck had met him outside the villa only seconds before his arrest. This led to Turck being interrogated by British intelligence, but he was exonerated as it was surmised that the individual who met Bégué had been a Vichy policeman of similar build to Turck, who could have passed for him in the evening light. Turck then rejoined the French Army and received the MC. He was also appointed to the Legion of Honour and received the Croix de Guerre.

On return to civilian life he resumed work as an architect and undertook the restoration of the château at Le Frestoy-Vaux, in the Oise where he followed his father as the mayor.

He is survived by his wife, Christa, and a son and daughter.

Gilbert Turck, MC, veteran of the SOE, was born on September 3, 1911. He died on December 11, 2012, aged 101


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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (15.04.2013 19:25:33)
Äàòà 18.04.2013 13:38:52

Re: Âîåííûå è

Lady Thatcher

Òóò ïîíÿòíî

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/8093845/Lady-Thatcher.html

Jake McNiece

êîìàíäèð ðåàëüíîãî ïðîîáðàçà "Ãðÿçíîé Äþæèíû"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10001451/Jake-McNiece.html

Frank Panton

Ó÷¸íûé, ðàáîòàâøèé íà âîåííóþ ðàçâåäêó è ñûãðàâøèé ðîëü â óêðàïëåíèè îáîðîíîñïîñîáíîñòè Áðèòàíèè â Õîëîäíîé âîéíå

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9998602/Frank-Panton.html

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Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (18.04.2013 13:38:52)
Äàòà 18.04.2013 13:41:40

Re: Âîåííûå è

>Lady Thatcher

>Òóò ïîíÿòíî

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/8093845/Lady-Thatcher.html

Baroness Thatcher

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2775390.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00402/125516282_Margaret__402341c.jpg



Margaret Thatcher stands in a British tank on a visit to British forces in Fallingbostel, Germany in 1986

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Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference, Oct 1982

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Outside 10 Downing Street in May 1979, on becoming Prime Minister: Thatcher had proved to be an adroit and effective campaigner with a keen awareness of public relations and the techniques and requirements of the television age

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Margaret Thatcher leaving her office in Chesham Place in 1992

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Margaret Thatcher

Indomitable Prime Minister whose unswerving belief in free enterprise transformed the political and social landscape

Margaret Thatcher was one of the greatest British politicians of the 20th century. The first woman prime minister in Europe, she held the job for 11 years. In the 20th century no other prime minister had been in office for such a long unbroken period, and no one since Lord Liverpool (1812-27) had had such a long continuous run as Prime Minister.

She led the Conservative Party for 15 years, won three general elections in succession, and never lost a significant vote in the House of Commons. Since Walpole in effect invented the role, only six men have served for longer than her as prime minister: Walpole himself, Pitt, Lord Liverpool, Lord Salisbury, Gladstone and Lord North. She fully earned her place in this company.

Thatcher set out, first as party leader and then as prime minister, to overturn the consensus that had shaped postwar British politics and to replace it with a more competitive ethos of free enterprise. She wanted to rescue Britain from the debilitated state to which she believed it had been reduced by socialism and, in the words of her last bravura speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, to give back “control to people over their own lives and over their livelihood”.

It was a paradox of British politics that Thatcher, suspicious of government, made activist government possible again after a decade or more in which it seemed that the abuse of union power had rendered Britain ungovernable. A country that had become resigned to genteel decline was for a time imbued by Thatcher with a confidence in its ability to succeed economically and to take a leading role in the defence of the West.

Thatcher did not succeed in all her objectives. Argument will continue to focus on the extent of the improvement in Britain’s underlying economic performance under her premiership, on the marginalisation of Britain within the European Union, and on the divisiveness occasioned by her abrasive approach to social policy and, indeed, to politics as a whole. But the scale and permanence of her impact on British politics can be judged by the move of the Labour Party under three successive leaders — Kinnock, Smith and Blair — back into the centre ground, and by the moderate, market-orientated and fiscally cautious policies of the Blair administration elected in 1997. Her opponents attacked her furiously even while implicitly accepting much of her reshaping of the country’s political landscape. It was a tribute she accepted with ironic satisfaction.

Thatcher was immensely hard-working and highly intelligent without being intellectual. In practice her ideological attachments and prescriptions owed more to her gut feelings than to any works of political philosophy, although one aspect of her occasional vulnerability was her determination that what she stood for should always be invested with appropriate academic seriousness. She was familiar with the classics of economic theory, and would often produce from her capacious handbag fragments of philosophy and literature to buttress her arguments. She enjoyed the company of academics and intellectuals, particularly when it offered the prospect of a good row about first principles.

Unlike any of her predecessors, she saw her name become attached to the policies she pursued. “Thatcherism” and “Thatcherite” became terms of bitter abuse or warm approbation. But “Thatcherism” did not encapsulate a wholly coherent political approach that could be passed inviolate to future generations.

Thatcher believed in thrift, hard work, personal responsibility and market forces, but would not push these ideas so far as to weaken her base of middle-class support. She was often radical in language and design, but invariably cautious and suspicious of change when it came to action. Her dislikes — as important as spurs to action as her beliefs — included trade unions, corporatism, the political left, local government, the BBC and what she regarded as the enfeebling consequences of a welfare state out of touch with its original purposes.

Thatcher had no time for those who espoused a traditional, moderate Toryism. They were in her view “wet”, and she often ascribed their concern for the social results of tough economic policies to the guilty feelings of the well-off. In her attitude to foreign and defence policy, she saw herself as a simple patriot, instinctively Atlanticist and suspicious of the European Union. She gained much political credit at home — and opprobrium abroad — for standing up for what she perceived to be Britain’s interests, however much offence this might cause to foreigners.

In her early political life, Thatcher undoubtedly felt an outsider in a man’s world. The “clubbiness” of parliamentary life meant nothing to her, and while as leader she assiduously cultivated her links with the parliamentary party, she never much liked the Commons as an institution. She had a tendency to be the “odd one out” in any discussion, and once described herself as the rebel in her own Cabinet. She was suspicious of pressures to arrive at a consensus as the basis for making policy; which of the prophets, she used to ask, had sought a consensus before charting the way ahead? In her early days of leadership, men often underestimated her talents, and throughout her career many of her colleagues seemed uncertain how to treat a woman in authority.

Thatcher possessed most of the important political skills. While not a persuasive or emollient public speaker, she had an effective combative style and was rarely worsted in debate inside or outside Parliament. She was one of the best campaigners in modern electoral politics, with a keen awareness of the techniques and requirements of the television age, in which she was schooled by her long-time adviser, Sir Gordon Reece.

But her greatest attributes as a political leader were courage and luck, both shown in full measure during the Falklands War of 1982. At almost every turn in her political career she was braver than her foes — sometimes to a point which seemed reckless — and she rode her good fortune hard. She was lucky in those who opposed her — Galtieri and Scargill, Foot and Kinnock; lucky to lead her party at a time when the political forces against her were split; lucky to be at the helm as the Soviet Union and its European empire began to disintegrate; and lucky to be Prime Minister in a decade when North Sea oil revenues were at their highest.

Public opinion was warmed by her courage and cooled by her obstinacy. Though personally considerate and generous to her friends (sometimes to a political fault), she acquired somewhat unfairly a reputation for being mean-spirited and narrow-minded. She was admired and hated, both (for a democratic politician) in rather alarming measure.

From Thatcher’s earliest days as Prime Minister, the Cabinet acquired something of a ceremonial character and real political argument — when there was any — took place in smaller, ad hoc groups. Thatcher towered over her political colleagues, and suffered from being isolated from the rest of the political world by a personal staff who often confused loyalty with servility. Her style of government and her lack of candid friends led directly to the Westland political crisis in 1986 and to the introduction of the hated poll tax, which played a substantial part in her fall.

Thatcher was the first leader of the party for many years who felt instinctively in tune with the simplest views of her supporters. For their part, they responded enthusiastically to a woman who showed such evident contempt for hand-wringing defeatism and who regularly rode out to slaughter the dragons they had learnt to loathe. By the tests of party politics, Thatcher was indisputably a champion.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts of Grantham, in the heart of middle England. Like Edward Heath, she came from a modest background; one grandfather was a shoemaker, the other a railway cloakroom attendant. Alfred Roberts kept a corner grocer’s shop in which both of his daughters helped out. Margaret was often to cite in later years the lessons she had learnt from this small business background and what her father taught her about responsibility, self-reliance and hard work. “I owe almost everything to my father,” she once said. In particular she was grateful for what he had taught her about integrity. “[You] first sort out what you believe in. You then apply it. You don’t compromise on things that matter.” Her mother appeared to have made no similar impression on her outlook and attitude.

Alfred Roberts was intelligent, energetic and self-educated. He was a Methodist lay preacher, much interested in current affairs. Originally a Liberal, he turned to the Conservatives after the First World War but sat for 25 years as an Independent, Chamber of Trade representative on the borough council. He became Mayor of Grantham and an alderman. He was ambitious for his children and at the age of 10 Margaret lived up to his expectations by winning a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. She narrowly obtained a place in 1943 at Somerville College, Oxford, to read chemistry, taking coaching in Latin to meet the university’s entrance requirements. With the help of bursaries and some last-minute elocution lessons, she went up to Oxford in the autumn of that year.

She threw herself enthusiastically into politics. Though the mood in her college was left-wing, Thatcher was a committed Conservative. In her third year she became president of the University Conservative Association, the second woman elected to the post. It was a tribute to her assiduous political work.

In January 1985, however, after the university’s Hebdomadal Council had proposed to grant Thatcher an honorary degree, the Congregation refused it, by 738 votes to 319; although the previous six Oxford-educated postwar Prime Ministers had all been granted the honour, many dons were protesting against a reduction in funding in higher education.

She gained an adequate second-class degree and took a job as a research chemist with J. Lyons and Company and became the prospective Conservative candidate for the Kent industrial seat of Dartford, whose Labour incumbent had a majority of nearly 20,000. She fought the 1950 and 1951 elections with great vigour but no success. At the same time she married Denis Thatcher, a business manager ten years older than herself whose previous wartime marriage had been dissolved before he met her.

The marriage was to prove long and happy, with Denis — a man of bluff, right-wing views — playing a loyal supportive role as his wife’s career prospered. Margaret gave birth to twins, Mark and Carol, in August 1953. Mark was to become a businessman, Carol a journalist.

On her marriage, Thatcher gave up her job as an industrial chemist to read for the Bar and to keep house for her new husband. After passing her Bar finals, she specialised in tax law. She continued to pursue her parliamentary interests and missed selection in several constituencies until eventually, in 1959, she was chosen as Conservative candidate in Finchley, North London.

She won the seat at the subsequent general election and retained it for the rest of her parliamentary career. She was a conscientious and popular constituency member, continuing to devote much time and attention to her constituents’ affairs even when Prime Minister. Many Jewish families live in Finchley, and through them she developed her first contacts and friendships with the Jewish community at home and abroad.

Thatcher was not slow to make her mark in the House of Commons, piloting through Parliament a Private Member’s Bill to open council meetings to reporters. This was less the result of a passion for press freedom than an attack on those Labour councils which had excluded journalists who worked for papers that had used strike-breaking labour during the newspaper dispute of 1958.

In 1961 Harold Macmillan appointed her Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, a post which she retained in the Douglas-Home administration.

In the years of Opposition after 1964, she held a wide range of Shadow responsibilities, impressing her colleagues by her rapid mastery of the subjects she was covering and by her competence at the Dispatch Box. When the 1970 election came she was covering education, and after the Conservative victory Edward Heath invited her to run that department because (in his words) she had shadowed it so effectively. Thatcher found the constraints of the department (described by Harold Wilson as “a post box”) irksome, and the attitudes of her civil servants and the educational establishment provocatively hostile. She got off to a bad start with the educational press and with public opinion over the decision to end free school milk for 7 to 11-year-olds at a saving of £8 million a year. The controversy — which earned her the nickname, “Milk Snatcher” — was out of proportion to the size of the issue. She also presided over a policy that she did not like, namely the comprehensivisation of secondary schools.

Despite her difficult start and her distaste for much of what she had to do, she gradually earned the grudging respect of her civil servants and many in the educational world for her hard work and her success in winning resources for her department. Education spending reached 6.5 per cent of gross national product, exceeding for the first time the proportion spent on defence. She was keen to ensure that much of this increase in spending went to develop nursery education.

During her three years as Secretary of State for Education, Thatcher was never a member of Heath’s inner group of ministers and was not closely involved in the major policy issues of that period. Her range of government experience was therefore narrow. If she disapproved of the twists and turns of economic policy, she was cautious about demonstrating it. Nevertheless, the Heath Government’s record of economic interventionism, and its attempts to run a statutory pay and prices policy, confirmed her growing conviction that Conservatives should put their trust in market economics. She was to draw a direct connection between the shifting policies pursued by the Heath administration and her own later approach as Prime Minister.

The surprising and calamitous defeat of the Conservative Government in the February 1974 “Who Governs Britain?” election (brought on by the miners’ strike) called Heath’s position into question. Pressure for his replacement was inhibited between the February and October elections by the certainty that the fine balance of the parties in the Commons would sooner or later lead on to a second election. In the event, the Conservative Party fought a surprisingly successful defensive campaign and the Wilson Government was re-elected by only a slender majority. But criticism of Heath mounted, and he was forced to concede an election for the leadership.

Of all the candidates Thatcher seemed at the outset the least likely winner. However, several factors played into her hands and she seized every opportunity with verve and courage. First, she gained prominence in the October election campaign as the party’s environment spokesman, promulgating campaign promises to abolish domestic rates and to establish a ceiling for mortgages of 9.5 per cent “by Christmas”. The Nuffield study of that campaign suggested that Thatcher gained more sympathetic coverage for these policies (neither of which she much cared for) than had been attracted by any similar electoral initiative since the war.

Secondly, she was then able to demonstrate her talents in the Commons. As number two to Robert Carr in the Shadow Treasury team with special responsibility for financial legislation, she made as much of a mark in this job as Heath himself had in leading the opposition to the 1965 Finance Bill. In particular, she earned much credit from a withering attack on the Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey: “Some Chancellors are micro-economic, some Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap. If this Chancellor can be a Chancellor, anyone in the House of Commons could be Chancellor.”

Thirdly, the leading intellectual critic of Heath’s policies, Sir Keith Joseph, scratched himself from the race after he had attacked the Keynesian consensus in an embarrassingly timed speech at Preston just before the October election. Thatcher was close to Joseph and regarded him as the intellectual standard-bearer of her brand of Conservatism.

In the first ballot Thatcher secured 130 votes to Heath’s 119. Heath immediately resigned, and in the second ballot Thatcher easily defeated William Whitelaw, by 146 votes to 79. Her triumph was a tribute to her daring and to her ability to rise to the occasion. She also benefited from the advice of a shrewd campaign manager, Airey Neave, the MP for Abingdon and a former escaper from Colditz. One of many Conservative MPs with personal cause for disliking Heath, he became Thatcher’s most trusted lieutenant until his murder by Irish terrorists in March 1979.

Thatcher’s first task was to consolidate her position and unite her party. Four of the contestants in the leadership election agreed to serve under her: William Whitelaw, as deputy leader, James Prior, Sir Geoffrey Howe and John Peyton. Former ministers such as Sir Ian Gilmour accepted Shadow appointments in her team. Her exclusion of Peter Walker was rectified when she formed her first administration. Reginald Maudling was brought back as Shadow Foreign Affairs spokesman, though his relationship with Thatcher was never easy and she replaced him the following year. She bowed to advice not to appoint Sir Keith Joseph as Shadow Chancellor, on the ground that his known views would make this too controversial a move. She turned instead to Howe, who was to serve her loyally in and out of government in economic and foreign policy. She also cultivated her contacts with backbench MPs, a job which she was always to regard as important.

Caution also played a part in her political tactics. She steered the party through the parliamentary arguments over the Labour Government’s devolution proposals. Despite her instincts, the party did not oppose the Government’s rescue of the British Leyland and Chrysler companies; nor did it wage all-out war on the closed shop.

In the development of policy, overall, she was keen to avoid too many specific commitments. This affected even her attitude to the economic argument which raged over the nature and causes of inflation and unemployment. In the academic world, in the media and now at Westminster, there was increasing interest in the relationship between the money supply and inflation, and much scepticism about the economic policies of the past three decades. In the past there had been little political challenge to the idea that when unemployment went up demand should be boosted, and that when inflation rose demand should be curbed. The discrediting in the 1970s of wage and price policies gave added attraction to the views of the monetarists.

There was no doubt where Thatcher stood in this argument; her monetarist sympathies were closely related to her conviction that public spending should be restrained and taxes should be cut as the best means of promoting economic growth and personal choice and liberty. However, she contained the party disputes over these matters within some fairly bland statements. The main policy documents of the period, The Right Approach (1976) and The Right Approach to the Economy (1977) were primarily aimed at uniting the party and reassuring the public.

In only two areas did Thatcher take obvious risks. First, in January 1978 she courted the populist right-wing vote on race by referring to fears that the country would be “swamped” by Asian and West Indian immigration. Both the criticism and the praise which she elicited were predictable and strident. Secondly, while almost totally inexperienced in defence and foreign affairs, she chose to question more publicly than others the Helsinki agreement with the Soviet Union and the policy of detente. Not for the last time, she abandoned the customary euphemisms of diplomacy and earned Moscow’s sobriquet of “the Iron Lady”. This did her no harm in her own party.

Following the inflationary storms of 1975 and 1976, and the agreement with the International Monetary Fund in that year, the Labour Government under James Callaghan made a slow but steady recovery in public esteem. Its fragile parliamentary position was temporarily secured by a pact with the Liberal Party in March 1977, and for a while a more orthodox economic policy helped to restore economic stability, albeit at the expense of a rise in unemployment to more than 1 million. By the autumn of 1978, living standards showed an annual advance of 6 per cent, and the political standing of the Government had risen too. At the same time, the Conservative Party still had difficulties in living down its defeat at the hands of the miners in 1974, and in explaining how it would avoid similar difficulties in the future.

Much against expectation, Callaghan announced in September 1978 that there would not be an election that autumn, but committed the Government firmly to a 5 per cent wage limit for the coming year. The initial consequence was a row within the Conservative Party, with Heath bitterly attacking Thatcher’s refusal to support this pay policy in the national interest. At the Berwick and East Lothian by-election at the end of October there was a swing to Labour. However, the Labour Party’s pleasure was short-lived. In the first days of 1979 a lorry drivers’ strike against the pay policy began and this was followed by a series of strikes in the public sector. A Government which had been thought to have a special relationship with the unions was left looking helpless as union action, sometimes of a deliberately vindictive nature, disrupted the health and local government services. The Conservative Party’s main handicap was removed at a stroke, and Thatcher took advantage of the chaos to appeal for an all-party agreement on legislation to prevent this sort of industrial militancy.

Any doubts that the Conservatives might win the forthcoming election disappeared. With the Lib-Lab pact ended, the Government lost a confidence vote in the Commons by one vote. A general election was called for May 3. The polls favoured Thatcher from the start of her campaign, which concentrated more on sophisticated public relations techniques than on the setting out of detailed policies.

She exploited her personality, energy and convictions for the cameras. Simple themes were reiterated in campaign speeches, broadcasts and the advertisements which had been designed by the agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Most damning was the slogan “Labour isn’t working”, set against a picture of the unemployed.

The Conservative Party won 43.9 per cent of the vote — little more than its postwar average but enough to give it a majority of 43 over all other parties, since Labour’s share fell to 36.9 per cent, its lowest since 1931.

In Downing Street, after being asked to form a Government by the Queen, Thatcher quoted the purported words of St Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Her years in office were characterised more by faith than harmony.

She saw the main tasks of her Government as lying in the economic field. She wanted to revive private enterprise and initiative, to curb public spending, to reform the tax system, to reduce the size of the Civil Service and to break away from the Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy which had in her view led to ever higher rates of inflation and to an aggrandisement of trade union power. Her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe, accordingly took an axe to the controls over pay, prices, dividends, bank lending, hire purchase and foreign exchange. In his first budget he cut taxes on income (particularly the higher rates) and doubled VAT. He also began the attack on the spending plans inherited from Labour, squeezed public borrowing hard and set tough targets for monetary growth.

The initial results were disconcerting. The new Government’s first months had been accompanied by a steep rise in the price of oil, and this, taken with the transfer of part of the tax burden from income to spending, helped to push inflation up from 10 per cent to 22 per cent by May 1980. High interest rates at home hurt industry, and the pain was intensified by a soaring exchange rate — a result of sterling’s status as a petro-currency and the tight domestic squeeze. Manufacturing industry in particular found it expensive to borrow at home and difficult to sell abroad. The reduction in industrial over-manning, essential to the restoration of Britain’s competitiveness, arguably went far further than was necessary.

The result was a sharp contraction in production and output, a rush of bankruptcies and an alarming rise in unemployment. While inflation fell after its peak in May 1980, the jobless figures doubled in the two years after the 1979 election and exceeded three million in January 1982.

Other measures were introduced at home to encourage ownership and an enterprise economy. The first steps were taken in a substantial programme to privatise nationalised industries. Council tenants were allowed to buy their own homes. This was popular and led to a marked increase in home ownership. It was the first of a series of interventions in local government under Thatcher. Her ministers took powers to limit rate rises and to check town hall spending. Under Thatcher, while economic power was devolved, political power was ruthlessly centralised.

Rising unemployment and the recession helped to produce a calmer period on the industrial relations front. There were disputes with steel workers in 1980, civil servants in 1981 and railway workers in 1982. In 1981 a dispute with the miners over pit closures was avoided by a government climbdown. The time was not yet ripe for taking on this most powerful of industrial unions. Despite this tactical retreat, however, the political and industrial grip which the unions had seemed to exert over the country was steadily weakened. “Beer and sandwiches” at No 10 — political deals between ministers and union leaders — were things of the past. The Government began a reform union legislation with limitations on secondary picketing and the closed shop.

In its first two years the Government’s greatest successes were secured abroad. At the first meeting she attended of the European Council, in Dublin in November 1979, Thatcher raised the question of the UK’s high contribution to European Community revenues. She asked in effect for a renegotiation of the terms of the UK membership of the Community. She continued this campaign (more militantly than her European partners and many of her advisers cared for) and at the Venice summit of 1980 she secured much of what she had sought. In a rare example of Cabinet government, her colleagues insisted that enough was enough. It was a bruising but ultimately successful diplomatic episode, and set the pattern for her subsequent treatment of European affairs.

Even more notable was the Government’s success in ending the long-running Rhodesian dispute. Prolonged negotiations in London, during which Lord Carrington’s formidable diplomatic skills were fully stretched, led to an end to the guerrilla war and agreement on elections and a constitution. Lord Soames as Governor presided over elections in which guerrilla leaders and their supporters were involved, and then over the granting of independence to the new Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe. This ended the Rhodesian whites’ 15 years of unilateral independence.

The year 1981 proved to be the most testing for Thatcher’s policies. In his spring Budget Howe tightened the squeeze on the economy despite pressure — not least from sections of the Conservative Party — to allow a moderate expansion. Supporters of the Government’s strategy later argued that this tough Budget was crucial to the subsequent upturn in the economy. But at the time criticism (including coded comments by members of the Cabinet) was intense. The Government’s popularity sank. By the end of the year, support in the polls had fallen to 23 per cent. Thatcher’s own standing fell too, hitting in the autumn the lowest mark ever recorded for a prime minister. Riots in Brixton in April and Toxteth, Liverpool, in July further dented the Government’s image.

Thatcher’s reaction was to make it clear that she would not change her strategy. Critics who advocated a “U-turn” were reminded of what she had said at the previous year’s autumn conference: “The lady’s not for turning”. She had already made this clear with a Cabinet reshuffle. Gilmour, Soames and Mark Carlisle, all identified with the moderate left of the party, were ousted, as Norman St John Stevas had been in January. Jim Prior was moved from the Employment Department to the Northern Ireland Office. He was replaced by Norman Tebbit. Cecil Parkinson was made chairman of the party. The ministerial changes were a decisive act of prime ministerial authority. Thatcher had nailed her colours to the mast more firmly than ever before.

The following year saw a transformation of the Government’s electoral prospects under surprising circumstances. The apparent electoral liability of Thatcher’s obstinacy was transformed into a glittering asset. Since 1979 the UK had been involved in a dispute with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. But any compromise with Argentina over sovereignty had been bitterly resisted by the House of Commons and the Falklanders themselves. Suddenly the Argentine military junta lost patience and invaded the Falklands on April 2, 1982. The political effect was calamitous. Carrington and two other Foreign Office ministers had to resign on the grounds that they had misread Argentinian intentions. (The Franks inquiry into the causes of the war later concluded that the Government could not in fact be blamed for the Argentinian invasion.)

After initial uncertainty, Thatcher moved decisively, in support of the advice she received from the Royal Navy that an expedition to recover the islands could succeed. It was an enterprise fraught with political and military peril. Despite anxious moments, most notably the sinking of HMS Sheffield and the loss of two landing ships and 51 men at Fitzroy, the expedition succeeded. South Georgia was recaptured on April 25, and the expedition pressed on to relieve Port Stanley and secure the surrender of the Argentinian forces on June 15. During the campaign 255 British servicemen were killed and four fighting ships were sunk. After the first military success in South Georgia, Thatcher had advised the nation to “Rejoice”. Watching the successful campaign unfold on their televisions, the nation did rejoice. There was an upsurge of patriotic feeling, and any criticisms of the Government’s handling of the war (most notably, the sinking of an Argentine cruiser, Belgrano) were given short shrift.

The Falklands campaign led to a steep rise in the Government’s popularity, which was assisted by a fall in inflation and a rise in the living standards of those in work. The pressure to cash in on the change of electoral mood became irresistible and Thatcher eventually accepted the view of her closest advisers and went to the country in June 1983, buoyed up by an unassailable lead in all the polls.

One other factor played decisively into the Conservative Party’s hands in the campaign. In October 1980 Callaghan had retired as leader of the Labour Party, to be succeeded by Michael Foot. The choice confirmed the electorate’s fears of a leftward shift in the Labour Party and helped to precipitate the departure of some of its leading members to form the new Social Democratic Party. Foot’s unpopularity, combined with the mid-term unpopularity of the Government, helped to launch the SDP in alliance with the Liberal Party on a successful run of by-election campaigns.

By the general election campaign in the summer of 1983 a recovering Conservative Party was well placed to face a split opposition. Labour’s avowedly left-wing manifesto and unilateralist defence policy played into Conservative hands. The Conservatives took full advantage in a smooth campaign masterminded by Parkinson and on June 9 it won the largest margin in terms of seats since 1945 and the largest in terms of votes since 1935.

The Conservatives claimed 61 per cent of the 650 seats in the Commons, with 42.4 per cent of the vote. Their majority increased from 43 to 144, even though their vote was lower than in 1979. An indication of the importance of the split in the opposition was that in 1964 the Conservatives had lost an election with a slightly higher proportion of the vote than they secured in 1983.

While the election result was never in doubt, there was more uncertainty about what the Government would do with the fruits of victory. It had played safe in the election campaign and given little hint of a strategy, let alone of any radical proposals, in its manifesto. With no clear guidelines, it stumbled from one banana skin to another. A personal scandal caused the resignation of Parkinson and added to the Government’s misery. Much parliamentary time and some political credit were dissipated in bruising battles with Labour local authorities.

The struggle between central and local government played a prominent part in Thatcher’s second administration. Exasperation at the antics of left-wing Labour councils (for example in Liverpool) and anxiety that over-spending by local government could jeopardise the Government’s economic policies, triggered an ill-judged attack on the rights and functions of town and county halls. Eventually this was to lead the Government into its most electorally damaging policy, the poll tax. Legislation was first introduced to protect ratepayers from the consequences of high-spending local authorities. The Greater London Council and the Metropolitan County Council were abolished after a long battle. Thatcher also pressed ahead with plans to replace rates with what was formally called a community charge, initially in Scotland, where a revaluation of the domestic rates had greatly increased the unpopularity of this local tax.

A long, bitter dispute with the teaching unions over pay and the introduction of a contract of employment brought to a head dissatisfaction about the management of education by local authorities. Thatcher supported moves by her education ministers, Sir Keith Joseph and Kenneth Baker, to transfer more power from local authorites to parents and to central government.

A greater strategic grasp was evident in her Government’s programme of privatising state-owned assets. With the sales of British Telecom, British Gas and British Airways in the van, the Government had by the end of the Parliament sold 40 per cent of the state sector that it inherited. This helped to stimulate a threefold increase in share ownership and improved performances in some industries. The Jaguar car company, for example, increased its profits, investment, output and workforce. British Airways became one of the foremost world carriers.

The middle period of the Parliament from 1984 to early 1986 was dominated by the miners’ strikes and the Westland affair. These events showed Thatcher at her best and her worst.

During her first administration, the miners had been treated with kid gloves. The threatened walkout over pit closures in 1981 had been bought off, and generous pay settlements in the industry helped to ensure that three subsequent attempts to call strikes were defeated in pithead ballots. But Thatcher was in no doubt that sooner or later the militant leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, would try to engineer an industrial confrontation with her Government, aiming to break it as he had helped to break the Heath Government.

She ensured that the ground was carefully prepared for a battle which she reckoned was inevitable. She moved Peter Walker to the Energy Department, where his political skills could be deployed in a cause where he shared the Prime Minister’s views. MacGregor was moved from British Steel to the chairmanship of the National Coal Board. Stocks of coal were built up against a possible strike and police preparations were carefully made.

The first skirmishes began in the winter of 1983. Through the following year the confrontation was fought out with considerable brutality. There were pitched battles between rioting miners and the police. Mining communities were divided between those who wanted a settlement and those who stuck by Scargill. The Coal Board, the police and the Government stood firm, and with the more moderate among the miners breaking off from the NUM to form their own union, the militant leadership was eventually routed. While the dispute had provoked as much bitterness as any in Britain’s industrial history, it was essential for constitutional as well as economic reasons that it should be resolved in favour of the Government and the National Coal Board. Thatcher saw it through with steely resolve.

The Westland affair blew up out of a clear sky. This Somerset helicopter manufacturer, faced by a tightening market and growing competition, was seeking a foreign company which could take it over and secure its future. This relatively slight issue was inflated into a heated argument about whether the British armaments industry should be associated with European or US technological competitors. The Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, championed the European cause, while the Trade and Industry Secretary, Leon Brittan supported Westland’s preference for a deal with the US company Sikorsky.

Instead of restoring order between her warring ministers, Thatcher allowed the affair to boil over into a major political scandal which came close to bringing her down. In a welter of fabrications, leaks and banner headlines, Heseltine quit and Brittan was forced to resign, and the Government’s survival in the subsequent parliamentary debates owed more to the inadequacy of the Opposition and the skill of the whips than to the strength of the administration’s case.

The affair demonstrated the weakness of Thatcher’s style of political management, her difficulty in dealing with strong-minded colleagues, and her excessive reliance on close personal advisers such as her press spokesman, Bernard Ingham, and her Foreign Office Private Secretary, Charles Powell.

On the economic front, in the meantime, Thatcher continued to pursue fiscally cautious policies with what seemed to be growing success. Nigel Lawson, whom she had appointed to the Treasury in 1983, was able to point to steady economic growth, low inflation and public borrowing and growing investment. As the Parliament drew towards its end, the Chancellor was able to offer the prospect of increased public spending in areas such as health and education, reductions in taxation and an easing of interest rates. Moreover, in industrial relations, ministers were able to note that disputes were at their lowest level for 50 years.

Inevitably the longer that Thatcher remained in office, the more she became a significant figure on the world stage. In Europe she continued to battle successfully for reductions in Britain’s net contributions to the Community. She presided over an improvement in relations with Spain, which led to an agreement over Gibraltar in 1985, and she brought to a successful conclusion discussions with the Chinese over the future of Hong Kong. The Sino-British Joint Declaration, which was ratified in May 1985, represented the pragmatic side of her foreign policy.

The same could be said of the Anglo-Irish agreement concluded at Hillsborough in the same year with Dr Garret Fitzgerald’s Fine Gael-Labour Party Government. On October 12, 1984, at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, Thatcher had almost been killed by an IRA bomb at the Grand Hotel.

In her autobiography, The Downing Street Years (1993), she recalled: “At 2.54am a loud thud shook the room. There were a few seconds’ silence and then there was a second slightly different noise, in fact created by falling masonry. I knew immediately that it was a bomb — perhaps two bombs, a large followed by a smaller device — but at this stage I did not know that the explosion had taken place inside the hotel. Glass from the windows of my sitting room was strewn across the carpet. But I thought that it might be a car bomb outside. (I only realised that the bomb had exploded above us when Penny, John Gummer’s wife, appeared a little later from upstairs, still in her night clothes.) The adjoining bathroom was more severely damaged, though the worst I would have suffered had I been in there were minor cuts. Those who had sought to kill me had placed the bomb in the wrong place.”

Characteristically, she was determined that the conference should continue and she hastily rewrote the speech that she was due to deliver that day.

“I knew that far more important than what I said was the fact that I, as Prime Minister, was still able to say it. I did not dwell long in the speech on what had happened. But I tried to sum up the feelings of all of us.

“The bomb attack . . . was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference. It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared. And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”

Five people were killed in the blast and 34 were injured. Among the dead were Sir Anthony Berry, an MP, and Roberta Wakeham, whose husband John was Tory chief whip. Margaret Tebbit, whose husband Norman was a former Trade and Industry Secretary, was left paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.

The Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 improved relations between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, increased nationalist acceptance of the institutions of Northern Ireland and enhanced understanding and co-operation over Irish policy — not least in relation to terrorists in the US and elsewhere. However, the agreement was criticised by Unionists who refused to accept that its references to the principle of consent served to confirm the constitutional status of the Province. Thatcher, who had been in many respects the most Unionist of Conservative prime ministers, never much cared for this agreement and was to disavow it in her retirement.

But it was as an influential and outspoken western alliance leader that she played her most prominent international role. She remained a loyal ally of President Reagan and the US, and earned Washington’s warm approval for her politically brave decision to allow US military bases in Britain to be used for bombing raids on Libya in 1986. Her loyalty to the alliance earned her the right to express forcefully to the US Administration European concerns about disarmament and the Strategic Defence Initiative before and after Reagan’s summit at Reykjavik with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She journeyed herself to Moscow to meet Gorbachev in March 1987.

In the wake of this visit Thatcher faced the prospect of an imminent election with quiet confidence. She had made a major mark on the international scene and, despite a muddled record of domestic reform, she was seen to have presided over a steady economic recovery. Public spending had been increased in the autumn of 1986, taxes were cut in the spring Budget of 1987, and shortly afterwards the Conservatives did well in the local elections. Thatcher asked for a dissolution of Parliament in May.

With a comfortable lead in the polls, a Conservative victory never seemed in doubt, but the Conservative campaign was not a happy one. Labour fought with a new vigour and confidence, and the Conservative team was divided and mutually suspicious. Thatcher had become increasingly concerned that Tebbit, whom she had made party chairman, was trying to promote himself not her, and she inserted her trusted ally, Lord Young, into Conservative Central Office to keep an eye on its chairman. The result was predictable. Backbiting and indecision exploded into a full-scale row on “wobbly Thursday”, a week before polling day, when anxieties about the election’s outcome led to unnecessary expenditure on advertising.

On June 11 the Government was returned with a majority of 102 seats over all other parties. Thatcher was the first leader since Lord Liverpool in the 1820s to score three successive general election victories. She was granted a prospect given to no other 20th-century prime minister — a third full term and a clear parliamentary majority. She seemed to be more dominant than ever.

Her fall from this political peak three years later had three principal causes. First, learning from the mistakes of the previous Parliament, the new Government embarked on a sweeping programme of reform; yet the flagship of this programme — the launching of the poll tax — was to prove the single most unpopular domestic policy initiative taken by any postwar government. Secondly, Thatcher’s own concerns about developments within the EU, and particularly about moves towards monetary union, put her increasingly at odds with many of her own ministers and MPs. Thirdly, her style of political management brought her into collision with two senior ministers, and after his resignation following illness in 1988 she no longer had her loyal and politically astute deputy Willie Whitelaw to rescue her from the consequences of high-handed rashness in personal dealings.

The new Parliament was remarkable for the radicalism of the Government’s domestic programme. There were privatisations of steel (1988), water (1989) and electricity (1990-91), and the ailing Rover car firm was sold to British Aerospace. Of the core utilities only rail and coal remained in public ownership. The privatisation measures were largely responsible for extending share ownership from seven per cent to 21 per cent of adults.

At Education, Kenneth Baker was responsible for a far-reaching Education Reform Act (1988), which introduced a core or national curriculum in schools, permitted schools to opt out of local authority control and provided for the local management of school budgets. Thatcher, as a former Education Secretary, took a close interest in the policy. In higher education the number of students was significantly expanded and student loans were introduced.

Thatcher also headed a working group, based in Downing Street, to explore ways to improve the working of the NHS and contain the constant demands for more public money. The final policy was influenced by Kenneth Clarke, whom she had appointed Health Secretary in July 1988. In spite of the opposition of doctors, he imposed a new contract on them, relating payments to work done, and created an internal health market within the NHS.

The Government fought bitter battles with the professions. Earlier reforms had already produced far-reaching changes in the trade unions and local government; now the universities complained of niggardly public funding, teachers and doctors objected to the changes to their work practices, and barristers protested at the proposals of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, to extend competition in the legal system and give solicitors the right of audience in higher courts. The culture of the Civil Service was affected by the emphasis on managerial skills, value for money and the Next Steps programme, which transferred much Civil Service work to independent agencies.

In 1990 Thatcher achieved a long-held ambition when household rates were replaced by a community charge or poll tax (which had been introduced in Scotland the previous year). The scheme had been concocted by Kenneth Baker and William Waldegrave in 1986 and she backed it enthusiastically. The original proposal had been to phase in the introduction of this tax, but, spurred by the enthusiasm of a Conservative conference, the new Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, decided to bring it in without any phasing. This “big bang” proved disastrous. The tax had never enjoyed much more than lukewarm support from Cabinet members, and some — notably the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson — strongly opposed it. He set his face against any measures substantial enough to ameliorate its effects, arguing not unreasonably that only huge expenditure could soften its inherent unpopularity.

The principle behind the reform was that every adult should pay something for local services, and that this would produce the sort of democratic accountability which would rein in big-spending local authorities. But the size of the tax made its regressive nature ever more obvious and obliged the Government to cap the amounts that councils could charge. So the link between spending decisions and their political consequences was lost, and the perceived unfairness of the measure meant that the blame for high bills was mostly laid at central government’s door.

While Thatcher had always been very careful about the impact of any measures on the household accounts of the average family, her dislike of local government and other preoccupations blinded her to the poll tax’s effect on the living standards of many formerly loyal supporters. The political fallout was devastating.

Meanwhile, problems began to occur on the economic front as well. The boost to public spending and the tax cuts before the 1987 election were followed by a further tax-cutting Budget in 1988. Moreover, after the stock-market crash of October 1987 interest rates were also cut. For the moment Lawson was a Conservative hero, but inflationary fears soon began to arise as a serious difference on policy emerged between Thatcher and two of her senior ministers.

In her first two terms she had enjoyed good relations with her Chancellors but during 1989 tensions grew between No 10 and No 11 and the strains became semi-public. Since 1985, in an attempt to stabilise the value of sterling, Lawson (and Howe) had wanted Britain to enter the European exchange-rate mechanism (ERM), something that Thatcher would not entertain. Her vague promise to join “when the time is right” was a cover for “never”. As a substitute, Lawson arranged for sterling to shadow the mark, and the Bank of England dipped heavily into its reserves to maintain the target value.

When Thatcher learnt of the scale of the Bank’s intervention and of her Chancellor’s defiance, she was furious. Her opposition to this policy was supported by her economic adviser, Sir Alan Walters. “There is no way in which you can buck the market,” she said in the House of Commons, clearly dissenting from her Chancellor.

The Opposition exploited the split, just as other members of the European Union, encouraged by the President of the Commission, Jacques Delors, tried to speed up moves towards monetary union. On June 25, 1989, before the EC summit at Madrid, Lawson and the Foreign Secretary, Howe, presented what was in effect an ultimatum — backed by the threat of resignation — for Thatcher to agree to set a timetable for Britain to enter the exchange-rate mechanism. They were concerned that without such a commitment Britain would become increasingly isolated within the EU, unable to influence developments.

But Thatcher, who had stated her case for a Europe of nation states, in a controversial speech in Bruges the previous September, dug in her heels. She did not mind being isolated in Europe — indeed, she sometimes appeared to relish the prospect. She feared that any flirtation with monetary union would open the door to federalism and that Britain would lose control of monetary policy and interest rates. Helped by her foreign affairs adviser, Charles Powell, she refused to set a timetable but proposed a set of conditions for membership (including completion of the single market and the convergence of Britain’s inflation rate with the average of ERM states). She did not think the terms would be attained.

She resented the pressure put on her by her two colleagues, and as soon as an opportunity arose, in the July ministerial reshuffle, she broke up this dangerous alliance of senior ministers, moving Howe from the Foreign Office and replacing him with John Major. After much undignified argument, Howe was partially placated with the title of Deputy Prime Minister to go alongside his Leadership of the House of Commons, but he was aggrieved by his treatment and further wounded by briefings from Downing Street which suggested that his new title was of no consequence. The lines for the future calamitous Cabinet battles were now drawn.

The new Cabinet line-up did not last long. In October 1989 the publication of criticisms of the European Monetary System by Walters finally snapped the patience of the Chancellor. Although the article had been written many months earlier and said nothing new, Lawson insisted that Walters’s position as her adviser was unsettling the markets, and that unless Walters was dismissed he would himself resign. Thatcher made several unsuccessful attempts to keep her Chancellor and seemed genuinely surprised that he was so adamant. She later suggested that he was seeking an excuse to leave before the full inflationary consequences of his policies became apparent.

In place of Lawson as Chancellor, she appointed John Major (who, paradoxically, was also firmly committed to Britain joining the ERM). Walters was obliged to resign. And Douglas Hurd moved from the Home Office to become Foreign Secretary.

The politics of Europe continued to take their toll on Thatcher’s Government. In July 1990 she lost perhaps her closest Cabinet colleague, Nicholas Ridley, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. In the course of an extraordinarily frank interview in The Spectator, he bitterly criticised the European Community, claimed that the ERM and EMU were “a German racket” and compared current German ambitions within the EU to that of Adolf Hitler. What was especially damaging was that his sentiments were widely regarded as an expression of Thatcher’s own views.

During 1990 Hurd at the Foreign Office and Major at the Treasury — buoyed by Thatcher’s Madrid pledge on the ERM — induced her to take a more pragmatic approach to Europe, and eventually persuaded her to agree to British entry into the ERM that October. In return, she insisted on a 1 per cent cut in interest rates. She was already sensitive to the severity of the recession. Her ability to deny the Chancellor his way was weaker since she had already lost Lawson over this issue, and the rise in inflation and other economic difficulties made membership more attractive as a way of sustaining market confidence.

But Thatcher was half-hearted to the end. Her own view was that the European Community should be nothing more than an open economic market with no real political dimension, and that its members should remain independent states co-operating only in a few areas where this was mutually beneficial. She therefore supported the creation of a single market, but not steps to what she dismissed as federalism, including economic and monetary union, the Social Charter, majority voting on foreign affairs and defence, or any further transfer of power to the European Commission or Parliament. Membership of the ERM would undoubtedly constrain Britain’s room for manoeuvre in macroeconomic policy. Thatcher never accepted this, and became increasingly outspoken in her denunciations of it.

Nonetheless she continued to play a commanding role on the international stage. In part this was a consequence of her close relationships with the US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. She also enjoyed a good relationship with President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, and took pride in the claim that she had “discovered” him in 1984.

By nature an Atlanticist, suspicious of European entanglements and the ambitions of European “partners”, she was at first resistant to the idea of the speedy reunification of East and West Germany. Douglas Hurd persuaded her to acquiesce, however, largely on the ground that there was nothing Britain could do to stop it. The collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe enhanced her reputation in East European states, which were turning to their own versions of Thatcherism — experiments with markets, economic incentives, and the privatisation of state enterprises. She argued that it was the strong stand taken by herself and Reagan that helped to ensure the breakdown of Soviet hegemony.

Thatcher’s warrior qualities were again displayed in August 1990 in the Gulf crisis, occasioned by the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait. She was outraged by this aggression and clear breach of international law. From the outset she wanted strong measures. She helped to stiffen President Bush’s resolve to send troops to protect Saudi Arabia and free Kuwait, and Britain contributed to this force. The dilatory response of most other European states only increased her scepticism about their intentions.

Imperious abroad, Thatcher was starting to face stirrings of discontent at home as inflation and unemployment started to rise and the recovery to slow. Talk of Britain’s “economic miracle” began to sound hollow. Her own backbenchers became restive, and one, Sir Anthony Meyer, challenged her for the leadership in November 1989. He was seen, and presented himself, as a stalking-horse for the exiled Heseltine, who represented for many Conservatives a more politically acceptable style of charismatic leadership. Thatcher saw off the challenge easily, but her campaign managers told her that it represented a deeper dissatisfaction at Westminster, and the very fact of the challenge encouraged more mutterings about her political mortality. The scene was set for the terminal drama of the following year.

Once more Britain’s relations with the European Community and Thatcher’s tendency to stand apart from her own Government were at the root of the immediate problem. At the Rome meeting of the European Council in October 1990, Britain and the Prime Minister were isolated yet again, this time over the content and timing for stages two and three of the proposed economic and monetary union. Thatcher reacted with angry brio, declaring that she would simply veto any future EMU treaty. She accused foreign heads of government of living in “cloud-cuckoo-land”. Her anger boiled over in the House of Commons on October 30, when she went beyond the parliamentary statement agreed with her Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer and made a wide-ranging attack on the European Community, accusing its Commission of trying to “extinguish democracy” in Britain. Some Cabinet colleagues were appalled. The Conservative Party (particularly at Cabinet level) was still basically pro-European, although it contained a vociferous minority opposed to any further strengthening of links with the EU. Thatcher’s passionate attachment to sovereignty was proving increasingly unacceptable to many ministers and was clearly destabilising the Cabinet. Her senior colleagues were agreed that good relations with the EU were crucial to Britain’s foreign and economic policy.

Two days later, on November 1, Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons, resigned. His letter of resignation referred to growing differences from Thatcher over the EU. This move shook the party, leading to speculation about a possible leadership bid. More devastating than his resignation itself was his subsequent resignation speech in the House of Commons on November 13. It was such a spirited personal attack — and from one who was generally so mild-mannered — that it stunned Thatcher. He said that her attitude to Europe, especially on EMU was straining Cabinet government and risked damaging the national interest. The speech left Thatcher increasingly beleaguered, and made inevitable a more serious challenge to her leadership in the annual election. This time there was to be no “stalking-horse”, but a beast of real pedigree. Heseltine was catapulted into the contest by the exuberance of Howe’s parliamentary attack.

The election was held on November 20, when Thatcher was in Paris, at a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe to discuss the post-Communist future of Eastern Europe. The Prime Minister won the ballot by 204 votes to 152, but was four votes short of the necessary 15 per cent majority that would have settled the matter. Her supporters pointed out that in the second ballot she would need a simple majority of the 372 MPs — only 187 votes, or 17 fewer than she had just won. She had no doubts about fighting on and promised to campaign more vigorously. But Heseltine’s vote plus abstentions significantly exceeded expectations.

It was clear that at least 40 per cent of MPs wanted a change. Heseltine’s promises to alter the style of government, review the poll tax (which was already taking its toll on Conservative prospects) and adopt a more positive approach to Europe attacked Thatcher at her weakest points. Her campaign had been poor, although she felt that her prime ministerial duties and the need to appear confident limited the extent to which she could campaign.

In addition her advisers took too much for granted or were too abrasive in their approach. But in any circumstances it would have been uphill work. Many MPs, including those passed over or dismissed over the years, had reason to feel aggrieved about her. Above all, many also felt that they simply could not win another election under her leadership. For them, if not for her, it was clear that the Iron Lady was showing metal fatigue.

More significantly, many Cabinet ministers quickly decided that she would lose in the second ballot to be held a week later, or would win so narrowly that her authority would be fatally undermined and that she would still have to step down. Some of these were alarmed at the prospect of a Heseltine succession and wanted to have a wider choice in the ballot. But Hurd and Major still refused to enter the race and again signed her nomination papers.

Thatcher’s support was weakening the whole time. She consulted her Cabinet individually; most expressed doubts about whether she could win, and some argued that she should throw in the towel straightaway. Though the party in the country unsurprisingly remained loyal, she decided that without the strong support of the Cabinet she could not fight on.

It was time to depart, and she announced this to a meeting of the Cabinet on November 22. With typical courage she then went to the House of Commons to speak in a confidence debate. It was a rousing performance, a reminder of her gallantry, flair and conviction. She had not tired of her mission, but those whom she had led had tired of her.

Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister on November 28, leaving Downing Street, a little tearfully, though with the partial satisfaction of knowing that she was not to be succeeded by Heseltine but by her own favourite, Major, who had defeated Heseltine and Hurd in the parliamentary ballot to follow her.

Life out of office was initially miserable. Like her predecessor, Heath, she seemed disorientated by the loss of power. But with typical gumption she threw herself into establishing a foundation (named after her) to support business training projects in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and the establishment of a chair of Enterprise Studies at Cambridge University. She toured the world, speaking for large fees in the foundation’s name and to its great financial benefit. She remained immensely popular in several countries, particularly the US, Japan and Eastern Europe. She was the symbol of the defeat of communism and the triumph in the 1980s of market economics.

She returned sporadically, and not always helpfully, to the political fray. Her support for Major waned as he set out on a more pragmatic European policy than her own. She allowed her own more nationalist opinions to seep out into the public domain, and became ever more forceful, outspoken and extreme in her denunciations of the moves towards political and monetary union in Europe.

The division over Europe that had helped to end her years in office yawned ever wider within the Conservative Party, which had once regarded itself as the pro-Europe party.

Thatcher plainly admired the style and determination of Tony Blair, who crushed John Major’s Conservatives in the 1997 election, and he for his part seemed content from time to time to be compared with her as a strong leader. She regularly revisited some of the issues that had dominated her years in office; for example she gave strong support to the development of democracy and the protection of the rule of law in Hong Kong as promised in the treaty she had signed with China. In 1999, in her first conference speech since her resignation as leader, she defended General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, who was held in Britain after his arrest in 1998.

When Thatcher joined the campaign trail for the 2001 general election, she was followed closely by the media. After several minor strokes, however, it was announced in 2002 that she would cut back her heavy schedule.

By this time she was set to have a permanent place in the House of Commons, after the a rule change meant that an 8ft marble statue, for which she posed with her familiar handbag, could be placed there during her lifetime. When on display at Guildhall, however, it was decapitated by a man with a cricket bat, and so was withdrawn from public view. It was to be placed outside the House of Commons chamber, opposite Winston Churchill.

Thatcher received all the greatest honours that her country could bestow. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983, received the Order of Merit in 1990, was made a Baroness in 1992 and joined the Garter as a Lady of that Order in 1995.

She remained a political star until deep into her retirement from full-time politics. Like the greatest divas she could be temperamental and difficult but she was always able to rise to the great occasions, not because of her ability as an orator but because of the passionate strength of her convictions.

She was driven by those beliefs to tackle the task of halting and reversing her country’s decline and to ensure that it played its full part in defending the freedoms of the democratic West. Her record and her personality will be the subject of continuing controversy. But no one will ever doubt her sincerity and her courage, and most will concede that the far-reaching changes she made would have been impossible without her.

Her husband predeceased her. She is survived by their twin children, her daughter Carol and her son Mark, who has inherited his father’s baronetcy.

Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, Prime Minister, 1979-90, was born on October 13, 1925. She died on April 8, 2013, aged 87.



'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (18.04.2013 13:41:40)
Äàòà 19.04.2013 13:42:57

Re: Âîåííûå è

Lieutenant Bill Partridge

Ïîøåë â àðìèþ äîáðîâîëüöåì íåñìîòðÿ íà òî ÷òî áûë ïðèçíàí íåãîäíûì ïî çäîðîâüþ, è çàñëóæèë Âîåííóþ Ìåäàëü (òîãäà àíàëîã îôèöåðñêîãî Âîåííîãî Êðåñòà äëÿ íåîôèöåðîâ) â Íîðìàíäèè

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10004515/Lieutenant-Bill-Partridge.html

Molly Lefebure

Åñëè êîìó íðàâèòñÿ ñåðèàë "Âîéíà Ôîéëà", òî ñòîèò ïðî÷èòàòü ýòîò íåêðîëîã.  ñëåäóþùåì ìåñÿöå ïîÿâèòñÿ äâóõñåðèéíûé òåëåôèëüì ïî âîåííîé áèîãðàôèè

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10001457/Molly-Lefebure.html

'Á³é â³äëóíàâ. Æîâòî-ñèí³ çíàìåíà çàòð³ïîò³ëè íà ñòàíö³¿ çíîâ'
Îò Chestnut
Ê Chestnut (19.04.2013 13:42:57)
Äàòà 23.04.2013 18:23:14

Re: Âîåííûå è

Ian Henderson

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10011292/Ian-Henderson.html

Êàâàëåð äâóõ Ãåîðãèåâñêèõ êðåñòîâ (ýêâèâàëåíò Êðåñòà Âèêòîðèè çà ãåðîèçì íå ïîä îãí¸ì âðàãà) çà ïîäàâëåíèå âîññòàíèÿ Ìàó-Ìàó

Lt-Gen Sir Steuart Pringle, Bt

Âåòåðàí Ìàëàéè, Ñóýöà, âîéíû ñ Èíäîíåçèåé, ïîòåðÿâøèé íîãó îò èðëàíäñêîé áîìáû è êîìàíäîâàâøèé êîðîëåâñêîé ìîðñêîé ïåõîòîé âî âðåìÿ âîéíû ñ Àðãåíòèíîé

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/10008865/Lt-Gen-Sir-Steuart-Pringle-Bt.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3746016.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00406/1064198_Pringle_406689c.jpg



Pringle in 1981: his first question after an IRA bomb attached to the underside of his car exploded was “How’s my dog?”

Veteran of Malaya and Suez who became Commandant General Royal Marines and was seriously injured by an IRA car bomb

A veteran of the Malayan Emergency, the 1956 Suez landings and the 1960s counter-insurgency campaign in Borneo, Steuart Pringle had been in post as Commandant General Royal Marines for six months when he became the victim of an IRA bomb attack on his car on October 10, 1981, which caused him serious injuries. As he drove away from his home that morning, a bomb that had been attached to the underside of the vehicle exploded.

Pringle’s first concern was that a secondary device might injure those who had rushed to his aid. One of his first questions was, “How’s my dog?” Although his dog Bella was unscathed, the general was not. He lost one leg and the other was badly damaged.

These injuries forced an interregnum during which time Major-General Jeremy Moore took over the post. It was a period that also encompassed the Falklands conflict in the spring of 1982. Displaying great fortitude, Pringle struggled back to health and mobility, resuming his post and continuing as Commandant until 1984. Thereafter he led an active public and private life.

His tenure as Commandant General had opened in 1981 with the controversy surrounding the defence review ordered by the Conservative Secretary of Defence Sir John Nott. Despite Pringle’s efforts to persuade ministers, intended cuts to the naval budget were so severe that the complete disbandment of the Royal Marines after 317 years was proposed. But this defence review was overturned by yet another postwar demonstration of the utility of sea power — the Falklands crisis. The sea battle could not have been won without the ships that were to be sold or scrapped, and the land battle was largely won by infantry arms that were at that time most under threat — the Parachute Regiment, the Gurkhas and the Royal Marines.

Steuart Robert Pringle was born in Dover in 1928, the son of Sir Norman Pringle, 9th Baronet. He was educated at Sherborne and commissioned into the Royal Marines in September 1946, being awarded the Sword of Honour in his batch.

He was overseas for the next four years, serving in ships of the Mediterranean fleet during the troubled period of Jewish immigration into Palestine. This was followed by a posting as troop subaltern to 42 Commando in Hong Kong and in Malaya during the protracted jungle campaign to defeat communist insurgents.

Returning to the UK in 1952, he qualified as a signals specialist and was appointed to 3 Commando Brigade just in time to take part in the 1956 landings at Port Said in support of the ill-judged Franco-British and Israeli attempt to seize the Suez Canal and depose President Nasser of Egypt.

His frontline regimental service continued with two tours in Cyprus during the campaign by Eoka terrorists to further enosis, union with Greece, a long-drawn out, frustrating and eventually pointless conflict. Returning to the Far East in 1961 as Brigade Signals Officer, Pringle again saw action over the next two years in the Brunei rebellion as well as countering the Indonesian-sponsored insurgency in Sarawak and Sabah (North Borneo). Both of these uprisings were manifestations of the opposition by the Indonesian president, Ahmed Sukarno, to the newly established Federation of Malaysia, and his ambition to bring North Borneo and even Singapore and the Malay peninsula under Indonesian domination.

Meanwhile, on his father’s death in 1961 Pringle succeeded him as 10th Baronet.

A change from campaigning was a year at the naval staff college where he won the Director’s Prize. Promotion to major followed with an appointment in 1964 to the central planning staff of the MoD. In 1969 he returned to the Far East as second in command of 42 Commando, taking charge of the Army and Royal Marines personnel in the assault ship Intrepid which went to East Pakistan to provide disaster relief after a cyclone in November 1970.

Having rapidly learnt how to ski, Pringle commanded 45 Commando, the Arctic warfare specialists based at Arbroath in Scotland, for more than two years. Besides Norway, the Commando undertook two Northern Ireland tours, based in Belfast.

Pringle’s subsequent posts included a year at the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1977 and, after promotion to major-general, command of all commando forces in 1978. After serving as chief of staff to the Commandant General, he relieved his superior officer in that appointment. He was appointed KCB in 1982.

On leaving the Royal Marines, he was chairman and chief executive of the Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust until 1991. The trust was given 80 acres of the Georgian dockyard containing 47 scheduled ancient monuments, in varying states of maintenance to turn into a “living museum” with a meagre capital grant of £11.35m. Pringle and his trustees quickly determined the principle that the dockyard should combine living, working and museum aspects, and he set himself to achieve this.

The dockyard reopened to the public within a year of the Navy moving out, but the inadequate capitalisation severely hindered progress (an independent valuation concluded that at least £60 million would be needed) and the trustees seriously discussed shutting the gates and returning the keys to the Government. But Pringle persevered, and succeeding chairmen have built on the foundations he set in place.

Other charitable activities included his presidency of St Loye’s College for the Disabled and role as vice-patron of the Royal Naval Benevolent Trust.

Noted for his shrewdness and intellect, Pringle had great strength of character and an astringent sense of humour. A colleague wryly noted that “he was something of an acquired taste, especially for those who did not measure up to his standards”. He was a contributor to several defence-oriented journals and to the book Peace and the Bomb (1982). He was also the author of The Future of British Sea Power (1984).

His wife, Jacqueline Gladwell, whom he married in 1953, predeceased him in 2012. He is survived by their two daughters and a son; another son predeceased him.

Lieutenant-General Sir Steuart Pringle, 10th Bt, KCB, Commandant General Royal Marines, 1981-84, was born on July 21, 1928. He died on April 18, 2013, aged 84


Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Taylor

Îäèí èç ïîñëåäíèõ "÷èíäèòîâ"

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3746017.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00406/126310555_Taylor_406690k.jpg



Chindit who played a key role in Operation Thursday, a daring attack on an airfield deep behind Japanese lines in Burma in 1944

Peter Taylor was one of the dwindling band of surviving Chindits, the force formed and led by Major-General Orde Wingate that achieved deep penetration into Japanese-occupied Burma twice during the Second World War. Taylor distinguished himself during the second Chindit expedition, Operation Thursday in 1944.

The first Chindit expedition, Operation Longcloth, conducted in brigade strength in 1943 was led by Wingate in person. On the strength of a reputation built on his part in the campaign to restore Haile Selassie to the throne of Ethiopia in 1941, he had persuaded Lord Wavell, the C-in-C India, that operations against Japanese lines of communication in Burma would cause disruption out of all proportion to the size of the long-range penetration force involved. Opinion is divided on whether Longcloth achieved such results, as four of Wingate’s eight columns had disintegrated before his demolition of two bridges on the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway.

The second expedition, Operation Thursday, was a six-brigade operation mounted in early 1944. It began with 16th (LRP) Brigade, commanded by Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, marching some 250 miles into Burma from the Indian railhead at Ledo to set up a stronghold in the jungle in anticipation of the other brigades being flown in by gliders and Dakotas. Fergusson was to attack Indaw airfield at the mid-point of the Mandalay-Myitkyina railway.

Taylor was with the last but one of the eight marching columns of Fergusson’s brigade stretching in single file over 60 miles. In the attack on Indaw, his column hit a large enemy force and — as planned in such circumstances — dispersed in pre-determined groups to rendezvous at a chosen point. This was found to be in enemy hands, so Taylor was sent with a sergeant and three men to find the remaining seven columns and give them the alternative RV.

Having found and given the message to the sixth, he encountered a line of men and mules he mistook for the seventh. They were in fact Japanese and he and his small team escaped only by a bluff of shouting orders to an imaginary larger force behind them. On rejoining his column, Taylor commanded a company until the exhausted 16th Brigade was flown out to India in May 1945, using aircraft returning from delivering one of the fly-in brigades.

Taylor was mentioned in dispatches for his part in Operation Thursday and served with the 16th Parachute Battalion in India until seconded to Force 136, the Far East arm of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). As a liaison officer to the Malayan Anti-Japanese Army of resistance fighters preparing to attack the occupying Japanese, he saw action in the Muar district of Johor before the war ended in August 1945.

Peter Edwin Taylor, son of Commander H. E. Taylor, RN, was born in 1920 in Madrid where his father was the MI6 representative under the guise of being the assistant naval attaché during and shortly after the First World War. He began his education on HMS Conway but switched to RMC Sandhurst in 1939 to be commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment that December.

After staff college in 1952 and a subsequent staff appointment, he volunteered to serve with the recently formed Federation Regiment in Malaya, comprising 40 per cent Malays, 40 per cent Chinese and 20 per cent other races, commanded by his cousin Colonel Mike Osborn, (obituary February 3, 2010). Although the communist insurrection was all but contained by then, the Federation Regiment proved operationally competent and Taylor was again mentioned in dispatches.

He returned to regimental duty for the amalgamation of his regiment with the East Yorkshires and went to Aden at the outset of the terrorist campaign that continued intermittently until 1967. He moved into intelligence work as a liaison officer between Military Intelligence in London and the headquarters of MI6. During this period he wrote a play for the BBC called The Second Chance based on his time with the Parachute Regiment in India.

In the mid-1960s he commanded the 1st Battalion of his now amalgamated regiment in Berlin, which he enjoyed by declining to go along with the over-anxious attitude of the staff to anything with the least whiff of military misdemeanour about it, pointing out that such concern is far removed from army life as it really is. He later returned to intelligence at Headquarters Rhine Army and then to a security post in Berlin. On leaving the Army in 1975, he worked for ten years with the Civil Service security-vetting unit.

He married Pamela Wood in 1953. She survives him with a son and daughter.

Lieutenant-Colonel P. E. Taylor, Chindit veteran, was born on October 21, 1920. He died on April 10, 2013, aged 92





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