They fell out of a folder recently as I was decluttering a filing cabinet. And, boy, did these old photographs take me back.
The table in the dining room festooned with glasses, red napkins and table decorations – and with so many place settings they stretched into the distant darkness of the wood panelling.
The huge Christmas tree, already decorated when we arrived, bedecked in tinsel and baubles. The chefs and the serving staff, the guests laughing, reminiscing and – above all – tucking in.
This was Christmas with my mother Margaret Thatcher at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence, as revealed by pictures I took in her early years in Downing Street.
The photographs are admittedly ‘Box Brownie’ and amateurish but many have never before seen the light of day and they show Maggie as very few people ever saw her.
It was a time when she did her very best to relax with friends and family, to take a little iron out of the Iron Lady. Not that it came naturally to her – she was always a workaholic and I still remember the click-clack of her power heels as she went off to her Chequers office to ‘catch up on a little work’ during the festivities.
But guests could always rely on Denis to jolly things along, issuing witty apercus and stiff gin and tonics, ensuring glasses were topped up.
He always used to say that Chequers – which he referred to affectionately as ‘The Ranch’ – was the chief perk of the prime minister’s job. Never more so than at Christmas.
Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis at Chequers for Christmas, the Prime Minister’s official country residence
The former prime minister is served a flaming Christmas pudding at the Buckinghamshire residence
The house and surrounding grounds, 40 miles west of London in Buckinghamshire, are tailor-made for a traditional British Christmas: huge log fires, the honey-coloured panelling and, so it always seemed at that time of the year, frosted gardens.
My mother would invariably leave for Chequers on Christmas Eve, sweeping past the tree on the pavement outside No 10 – because Downing Street is a howling wind tunnel, the decorative silver balls on the tree were in fact tennis balls wrapped in foil and skewered to the branches so they would not fall off. (The join in the foil had to be on the underside of the tennis ball, otherwise rain water would seep in and the soggy ball would become so heavy it would plop to the ground.)
The tree at Chequers came from the 1,000-acre estate. It was not always what it seemed, however, thanks to my mother’s thrifty approach to housekeeping.
She insisted the estate woodsman should only cut down trees which were weak or failing. Which meant they were often lopsided and the branches were cut off and rearranged to be inserted where necessary into holes drilled into the trunk.
Carols would be playing throughout on loop on the sound system and we would hear endless replays of my mother’s favourites, Once in Royal David’s City and It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.
Without fail, my parents would go to church in the local village of Ellesborough on Christmas morning. Denis was very chuffed when a church source informed him that his and Maggie’s church attendance rate throughout the first two years of her premiership was higher than all the previous prime ministers since 1945 put together.
He was very strict about the length of the sermon and rather bossily informed the vicar that 12 minutes was the maximum.
One year the guests were all already there when they arrived back late from church. Her late friend and PR guru Tim Bell, who spent 12 Christmases at Chequers with Maggie, recalled: ‘Denis was muttering under his breath about the sermon going on too long and rushing for the drinks table.
The menu was ultra traditional with all the trimmings and cooked by the Chequers chef who posed for photos with the PM and the roasted turkey
‘Margaret said darkly, ‘That’s one vicar who doesn’t want to be a bishop’. That was her little joke.’ Normally, we were about 20 for Christmas lunch. The late Lord (Alistair) McAlpine, Tory treasurer, and his wife Romilly were always there as was the political strategist Lord Reece who became ‘terribly giggly’ after a few drinks.
Maggie welcomed everyone into the Great Hall for drinks and amateur graphologists had fun analysing the signatures on all the VIP Christmas cards on the grand piano or commenting on the official family photos.
Then – ‘luncheon is served, prime minister’ – would be announced by a member of staff and we would move through to the dining room. The panelling here was much darker than in the Great Hall but the polished table gleamed and was beautifully laid and decorated.
Any guest who had sunk, while downing a Denis special, a tad too deep into the squishy sofa cushions in the Great Hall had no such problem on the dining room chairs.
These were Queen Anne, straight backed, no armrests and definitely firm seats.
The menu was ultra traditional with all the trimmings and cooked by the Chequers chef who posed for photos with the PM and the roasted turkey, which was then impeccably served by the staff.
A guest who’d ask if he could say a few words would get permission from Maggie with the caveat ‘so long as he’s finished before the Queen’. This was, of course, a reference to the Queen’s Christmas Speech on TV which we always, always watched.
Except, one year, the Chequers television was broken. Tim Bell – who actually attended more Chequers Christmases than I did – remembered that she and Denis had been watching a video of The Sound Of Music.
The videotape had got stuck in the recorder part and she was in a terrible state, saying: ‘What about the Queen’s Speech? It’s a disaster!’ So she rang up Lord Weinstock, the head of the GEC [the General Electric Company], in a panic: ‘Arnold, my television’s not working. It has to be fixed for the Queen’s Speech’. And he found a GEC engineer and sent him round straight away to fix it.
Bell recalled: ‘At 2.45pm on the dot, we’d file into the Churchill Library and take our places for the Queen’s Speech, with Her Greatness in the middle, right opposite the television saying ‘SHHH!’ very loudly.
‘You couldn’t speak, you couldn’t cough. You couldn’t move. You had to get yourself into a reasonably comfortable position because if you shifted once it had started she’d give you a killer death stare.’
Mrs Thatcher hands out the drinks. Christmas was the time of year when she did her very best to relax with friends and family, to take a little iron out of the Iron Lady
The table is laid for Christmas lunch at Chequers
Afterwards, Maggie would get up and announce that it was time for some fresh air and a little leg stretching to shake down the mince pies.
The entire lunch party would stroll down to the small police lodge known as the Bothy to wish those on duty Merry Christmas and deliver a Christmas cake.
Maybe we’d pause and check on the growth-progress of some of trees planted by visiting dignitaries down the decades – such as America’s President Eisenhower during his 1959 visit.
Others enjoyed the view of the distinctive gothic brick silhouette of Chequers through the bare wintry trees.
One Christmas afternoon the weather turned a bit nippy so I lent Romilly McAlpine the coat the prime minister had worn to church that day which was hanging in the hall cupboard.
Halfway down to the Bothy, one of the security chaps told her that, as it was the PM’s, she made an excellent decoy prime minister. At the Bothy Maggie chatted to the police while I was absorbed by the banks of screens relaying photos from the security cameras around the grounds. Security was tight but not intrusive.
One evening I was searching for an item I’d brought down from London and concluded it must still be in my car parked outside. I lifted the heavy latch on the front door and was instantly stopped in my tracks by a member of staff: ‘You can’t go out: The dogs!’ I skipped the second Thatchers at Chequers Christmas in 1980, preferring the full Bondi-Beach
A menu from Christmas at Chequers during Mrs Thatcher’s reign as PM. Dessert included pavlova and brandy butter and cream
Aussie festive experience in Sydney. Not that I was short of news from the PM’s official country residence thanks to Mum, who sat down and wrote about the Christmas news to me Down Under.
She listed the guests for lunch on the 25th and wrote ‘more people coming to lunch on Boxing Day’.
‘But apart from that it will be quiet. Except that all secretaries and families are coming on the Sunday for buffet lunch and tea.’
Politics was never far away: ‘You remember that last year, Afghanistan happened on Boxing Day [a reference to the Soviet invasion on Christmas Eve 1979].
‘This year we keep a watchful eye on the hunger strike in the Maze prison [by Republican prisoners in Northern Ireland] and it looks as if those on it are going to continue until death – and that would be about Christmas time.’
During a later Christmas, and for the duration of my three-night stay I was allocated the Prison Room, right up in the rafters of the house. Lady Mary Grey had been imprisoned there on the orders of her cousin, Elizabeth I, after she had married a commoner in secret.
As I was writing a biography of American tennis star Chris Evert and her then British husband John Lloyd at the time, my mother obviously thought being locked up there might inspire me to type faster to meet the publisher’s deadline.
Maggie was an excellent tour guide when guests wanted to explore the treasures of Chequers, accumulated by the families who owned it prior to it becoming the prime minister’s official country residence in 1921.
In the Long Gallery on the first floor (chintz sofas with fringes and cushions dangling tassels) visitors could admire Elizabeth I’s dainty locket ring with portraits of her and her mother, Anne Boleyn, inside.
An octagonal table at the other end of the gallery has an inlaid brass plaque which tells us that it had previously belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte and had been constantly used by him in exile on St Helena.
One of my favourites among the weighty silver on display was an ewer apparently from the Spanish Armada. It was the dimensions of a sporting trophy and polished to a blinding gleam.
As the longest-serving prime minister of the last century, Maggie had a record run of Christmases at Chequers.
And I’ll never forget those I spent there, or the routines or the views over the sunken rose garden down to the fields and trees of the bucolic Chilterns countryside either side of Victory Drive to the main gate.
By the time we got back after our walk to the Bothy, Maggie would be anxious to escape back to her study. I remember, as she was saying goodbye to one of the guests one year, she asked him what his plans were for the rest of the day.
He mentioned something about spending time in an armchair with his eyes shut.
Her response was to tap a rather hefty government report she had picked up, and say she would be ploughing through that. And she click-clacked off back to work.
The document she read that Christmas afternoon? It was the 130-plus paged Franks Report on the Falklands War which she presented to Parliament on January 18, 1983.