02/11/2009

Carol Thatcher visits Maggie's Grantham

Writer and journalist Carol Thatcher has been exploring her mother's roots in Grantham. Inside Out filmed her special journey to the small town that is credited with having a big impact on her mother's political beliefs.

It is 30 years since Lady Thatcher swept to power as Britain's first woman Prime Minister. On the steps of Downing Street the newly elected Prime Minister paid tribute the Lincolnshire town where she grew up;

"I just owe almost everything to my own father. I really do. He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe and they're just the values on which I've fought the election.

"And it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election." (Margaret Thatcher - 4 May 1979 - Downing Street)

Carol starts with a visit to the former grocery store where Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 and lived above the shop.

Today it's a health and beauty treatment centre called Living Health. The owner Sandra Good told Carol the shop is on the Maggie tourist trail.

"Most definitely we have a lot of people coming to have their photographs taken outside and we had a man from America last year.

"He came in and we took him upstairs he was really pleased. I thought he was going to kiss the carpet," she recalls.

Carol also visited her mother's former schools Huntingtower Primary and Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School.

There she might have met a future Iron Lady - one of the head girls told her she has ambitions herself to be in Number 10 one day.

Carol Thatcher says, "Grantham has always had presence in my life but I'd rarely been there. So to visit my mother's old haunts and speaking to some of her school friends was fascinating. It has helped me fill in some of the gaps."