• By Freddie Whittaker, Elizabeth Culliford and Thomas Burrows

 

PEOPLE who met and knew Baroness Thatcher have talked of their feelings of “loss” following her death.

To the British public, her supporters and critics, she was known as the “Iron Lady”, but many others have spoken of her kindness.

After leaving office, she remained an avid supporter of organisations which supported veterans of the Falklands War, an issue which dominated her premiership.

Former naval officer and past chairman of the South Atlantic Medal Association Martin Reed, 69, of Chinnor, said he was sad to hear of her death.

He said: “I’ve kept in touch with her over the years, but recently she’s not been at all well.

“We’ve missed her from public life very much for some time now. She used to keep in touch and came to see us off on a pilgrimage in 2003.”

On one of many trips to Oxford, Baroness Thatcher met Phillip Addison, a worker at the Cowley car plant. Mr Addison, 55, now the landlord of The Three Tuns in King’s Sutton, near Banbury, said: “It was all over quickly, but meeting her was a big thing and a very enjoyable experience – you don’t get to meet the prime minister every day of the week at work.”

Perhaps one of the most iconic pictures published in the Oxford Mail was in August 1984 of the Iron Lady with Baroness Airey of Abingdon, the widow of the Abingdon MP and one of her closest political allies Airey Neave, who was assassinated by a car bomb planted by Irish terrorists as he left the House of Commons car park in 1979. The two women were photographed together leaving St Margaret’s Church in Hinton Waldrist after attending a service to dedicate a stained glass window in the church to his memory.

For former Oxfordshire County Council leader Keith Mitchell, Lady Thatcher was as much a personal hero as a political one.

He said: “I felt a real sense of personal loss when a text message told me of her death. She was my role model, the greatest peacetime Prime Minister of the last century.

“Love her or loathe her, she changed this country and all of its political parties for ever. She made Britain great again, able to hold its head high across the Atlantic and across the English Channel.

“I’m proud to have met her. My condolences to Carol and to Mark and my thanks for what she did for this country. May she rest in peace.”

Chris Anstey, now 61, owner of Oakapple Farm in Marsh Gibbon, near Bicester, clashed with Thatcher, along with other farmers. He too said that he was sad to hear of her death. He said: “The farm is still here, although the herd is gone and I am now a land agent, rather than a farmer.

“At the time it was easy to target Mrs Thatcher as she was a politician and farming was being grossly targeted. But I think it was the EU which caused the most damage to farming. In hindsight Thatcher was easy to criticise, but we could do with some strong-minded politicians now.”

 

MARGARET Thatcher even faced criticism from children. During a visit to Banbury stockyard in May 1984, three-year-old Holly Anstey picketed the PM with a sign saying: “Save my Dad’s cows.”
Holly’s father Chris was buying the 130-acre Oak Apple Farm at Marsh Gibbon at the time, but during his first 18 months of farming had lost £10,000 because of EU milk quotas reducing milk production by nine per cent.  He was among dozens of farmers who lobbied Mrs Thatcher that day.
Mr Anstey, now 56, still owns Oak Apple Farm.
He said: “Holly was with me that day because she was recuperating from treatment for a brain tumour at the JR. Her older sister Lizzie came up with the idea for the banner and even wrote it. But as you can see from the photograph, Mrs Thatcher made a very good job of ignoring us!”
He added: “I found this picture a year or so ago and showed it to Holly. She thought it was very amusing.”

 

Timeline:

October 13 1925: Margaret Hilda Roberts is born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the second child of Beatrice Stephenson Roberts and grocer and Alderman Alfred Roberts.
October 1936: Starts at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School.
1943: Begins her degree in chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford.
October 1946: Elected as first female president of the Oxford University Conservative Association.
June 1947: Completes her degree. Graduates with second-class honours.
December 13 1951: Marries Denis Thatcher
August 15 1953: Twins Carol and Mark Thatcher are born.
October 8 1959: Elected as MP for Finchley
October 10 1967: Appointed as Shadow Fuel and Power spokesman.
June 18 1970: Conservatives win the general election and she is appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science.
October 30 1971: As Secretary of State for Education and Science, opens £85k boarding house and science exhibition at Bloxham School.
February 11 1975: Thatcher is elected as the Conservative leader
January 1976 : Dubbed the “Iron Lady” by Russian ministry newspaper.
November 11 1977: Visited the Cowley car plant
March 29 1979: Thatcher’s friend and former leadership campaign organiser, Abingdon MP Airey Neave, is murdered by Irish terrorists
May 4 1979: Becomes the country’s first female Prime Minister after winning the general election.
July 9 1979: First visit to old college since she became Prime Minister.
1980: Implements manifesto vow of the “right to buy” for council tenants.
April 2 1982: Argentina invades British Falklands. Thatcher sends a naval force and in just over 2 months the islands are taken back.
Feb 5 1983: Hundreds of students chant “Maggie Out” as the PM visited Somerville College.
March 17 1983: Eight students from Brasenose College try to steal Lady Thatcher’s bust during a midnight raid on Somerville College.
June 9 1983: Returns to power with a landslide majority
March 1984: Miners’ strike goes on for a year.
August 6 1984: Visited Abingdon for a private church service to honour Airey Neave MP, the Shadow Secretary for Northern Ireland, who was murdered by an Irish terrorist car bomb
October 12 1984: An IRA bomb goes off at the Grand Hotel in Brighton at Conservative Party conference. Five are killed but Thatcher is unharmed.
December 7 1984: 2,000 students riot outside All Souls College during Thatcher’s visit. Thirty-four arrested and charged for public order offences.
January 30 1985: Became the first Oxford-educated PM to be refused an honorary degree.
21 March 1985: Tours Oxfordshire and visits Witney’s hi-tech firm H.R. Smith and the Home Farm Trust residential home for mentally handicapped at Milton Heights, before a Guildhall lunch in Abingdon.
October 1 1985: Opens a major international centre for science research at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Didcot.
June 11 1987: Re-elected for an historic third term.
March 31 1990: Community charge, or ‘poll tax’ riot in Trafalgar Square.
November 4 1990: Michael Heseltine stands for Conservative leadership.
November 27 1990: John Major becomes party leader after Thatcher announces her decision not to contest the second ballot.
November 28 1990: Thatcher resigns as PM and is replaced by Major.
May 10 1991: Returns to Somerville College, Oxford, with a warning that nobody should yet write her off as a political force.
June 30 1992: Thatcher enters the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher.
May 13 1997: Snubs Oxford by handing over her political and personal papers to Cambridge.
March 8 1999: In a speech at Blenheim Palace, attacks communist leaders who were never called to account for the abuses of their years in power.
June 26 2003: Denis Thatcher dies at the age of 88.
October 13 2005: Celebrates her 80th birthday with a dinner in a London Hotel, attended by 650 guests.
January 6 2012: The Iron Lady released.

 

School visit

IN OCTOBER 1971, Mrs Thatcher, then Education Minister, visited Bloxham School to open
the school’s new boarding house.
Jean Willy, three, and her brother Mark, five, were asked to give her a bouquet.”
Unfortunately, when it came to handing over the flowers, young Jean was overcome by nerves. Her mother, Jennifer, now 68, said: “When Jean refused, Mrs Thatcher simply grabbed the flowers from my hand and thrust them at my son Mark saying: “Why don’t you give them to me instead?
“I thought Mrs Thatcher was lovely, although the children weren’t probably that impressed by her visit – they were just doing something their mother told them to do. And they probably think it's all pretty amusing now.”

 

 

Missiles in Oxford...

MRS Thatcher wasn’t always welcomed – sometimes her aides were forced to shelter her from missiles with an umbrella.
In 1983, the Oxford Mail reported a police car crashed into a limousine carrying Mrs Thatcher and her daughter Carol in Woodstock Road, Oxford, after anti-nuclear protesters broke through a cordon and threw themselves in front of Mrs Thatcher’s three-car convoy. The vehicles braked to miss the protesters.