Margaret Thatcher was a working chemist long before she became prime minister
As a Methodist schoolgirl in Grantham, Margaret Roberts told a friend she could not believe in angels: by her reckoning, wings would need a breastbone six feet long. The sceptical young scientist went on to study chemistry at Oxford under Dorothy Hodgkin, and later took more pride in her science degree than in any gender first.
Hodgkin, the X-ray crystallographer who tutored chemistry at Somerville College, rated her a good student who reliably turned in a sensible, well-read essay. For her extra research year Roberts worked with Gerhard Schmidt on the structure of the antibiotic gramicidin S, which proved more tangled than expected; she learned only in the 1960s, on a visit to the Weizmann Institute, that Schmidt had finally solved it. Teacher and pupil disagreed on politics yet kept writing to each other into the 1980s, and a portrait of Hodgkin hung in Downing Street.
Industry was less welcoming. At BX Plastics in Colchester, a promised assistant's role evaporated, and she seems to have studied ways of bonding PVC to metal. Imperial Chemical Industries turned her down in 1948, its personnel office describing her as headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated. At J. Lyons and Co. in Hammersmith she fared better, investigating how an emulsifier used in foods breaks down, work possibly tied to ice cream. It produced her only scientific paper, published in September 1951. Her old boss Hans Jellinek later praised her determination.
Politics had been pulling at her since Oxford, where she led the university Conservative Association in 1946 and read Friedrich Hayek. After meeting the businessman Denis Thatcher at a Dartford dinner in 1949, she described him to her sister as not a very attractive creature, reserved but quite nice. She married him anyway, then trained as a barrister and won Finchley in 1959.
From 1979 to 1990 she led Britain as its first woman prime minister and the century's longest-serving, a Soviet journalist having already named her the Iron Lady. Her record, from privatisation to the miners' strike, still divides opinion.
Source: Margaret Thatcher
