![]() She also received the degree of Master of Arts in 1950 (as an Oxford BA, she was entitled to the degree 21 terms after her matriculation). Her dissertation was on the structure of the antibiotic gramicidin. Roberts arrived at Oxford in 1943 and graduated in 1947 with a second-class degree in chemistry, after specialising in X-ray crystallography under the supervision of Dorothy Hodgkin. Roberts studied chemistry at Somerville College ( pictured ) in 1943–1947 He served as Mayor of Grantham from 1945–46 and lost his position as alderman in 1952 after the Labour Party won its first majority on Grantham Council in 1950. Alfred came from a Liberal family but stood (as was then customary in local government) as an Independent. He brought up his daughter as a strict Wesleyan Methodist, attending the Finkin Street Methodist Church, but Margaret was more sceptical the future scientist told a friend that she could not believe in angels, having calculated that they needed a breastbone 6 feet (1.8 m) long to support wings. Īlfred was an alderman and a Methodist local preacher. With her pen-friending elder sister Muriel, Margaret saved pocket money to help pay for the teenager's journey. In 1938, before the Second World War, the Roberts family briefly gave sanctuary to a teenage Jewish girl who had escaped Nazi Germany. Roberts spent her childhood in Grantham, where her father owned a tobacconist's and a grocery shop. Her father's maternal grandmother, Catherine Sullivan, was born in County Kerry, Ireland. Her parents were Alfred Roberts (1892–1970), from Northamptonshire, and Beatrice Ethel Stephenson (1888–1960), from Lincolnshire. Margaret Hilda Roberts was born on 13 October 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Margaret and her elder sister were raised in the bottom of two flats on North Parade. Her tenure constituted a realignment towards neoliberal policies in Britain, and the complicated legacy attributed to Thatcherism has been debated into the 21st century. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the Ritz Hotel, London, at the age of 87.Ī polarising figure in British politics, Thatcher is nonetheless viewed favourably in historical rankings and public opinion of British prime ministers. After retiring from the Commons in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher (of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire) which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. She resigned as prime minister and party leader in 1990, after a challenge was launched to her leadership, and was succeeded by John Major, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ![]() Thatcher was re-elected for a third term with another landslide in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge (also known as the "poll tax") was widely unpopular, and her increasingly Eurosceptic views on the European Community were not shared by others in her cabinet. She survived an assassination attempt by the Provisional IRA in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing and achieved a political victory against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984–85 miners' strike. Victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her landslide re-election in 1983. Her popularity in her first years in office waned amid recession and rising unemployment. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. On becoming prime minister after winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high inflation and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an oncoming recession. In 1975, she defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election to become Leader of the Opposition, the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970–1974 government. She was elected Member of Parliament for Finchley in 1959. Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist before becoming a barrister. ![]() A Soviet journalist dubbed her the " Iron Lady", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. ![]() As prime minister, she implemented economic policies that became known as Thatcherism. She was the first female British prime minister and the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, DStJ, PC, FRS, HonFRSC ( née Roberts 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013), was a British stateswoman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990.
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