John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
to one side or the other. Probably inadvertently, my father had joined the rebellious Blancos in their failed challenge to the Colorado party.
Their revolutionary phase behind them, Tom and Kitty returned to England in April 1904 to a thriving career. A fortnight after docking they were on stage in Blackpool, and they toured the country continually until the outbreak of war in 1914. They must have appeared in almost every big theatre in Britain, but life was not easy for music-hall performers. Contracts were cancelled without notice; shows were moved from theatre to theatre without compensation; and some theatres demanded that artistes play daily matinees but take payment only for evening shows. Individually, most performers were at the mercy of management. Collectively they believed they could protect themselves, and decided to do so.
A conference was called of leading stage figures, which Tom and Kitty attended, and on 18 February 1906 the Variety Artistes Federation was formed at the Vaudeville Club in London. Everyone present joined that same evening, and queued to pay the subscription of two shillings and sixpence. Tom and Kitty were Founder Members Numbers 97 and 98; my sister Pat still has our father’s white-and-green membership badge. I cannot recall, however, mentioning to the Huntingdonshire Conservative selection committee that my father was a pioneer trade unionist.
By 1914 Tom and Kitty were running a successful touring company. Tom had developed a heart condition which disqualified him from active service in the First World War, but they continued to appear on stage, their entertainments doubling as recruiting drives. My family still has an autograph book in which Tom collected the signatures of soldiers in the audience who had been decorated for their valour.
The end of the war saw the music-hall business return to normal. Throughout 1920 and 1921 Tom and Kitty travelled Britain, never stopping anywhere for more than a month, performing sketches and revues such as ‘Stop Press’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘After the Overture’.
And now, as I found out to my astonishment while researching this book, a surprise half-sister joins the family troupe. At about this time my father had an affair with one Alice Maude Frankland. She became pregnant, and a daughter, Kathleen, my father’s second child, was born in October 1923. Alice soon disappeared from the scene, but Tom and Kitty adopted Kathleen just a month after her birth. While they criss-crossed the country with their shows, the baby was boarded with a foster-couple. In about 1927 or 1928, they decided to bring her home. ‘The Majors want to take Kath away,’ her foster-parents were told – a heartbreaking moment. Sense prevailed, and Kathleen stayed where she was, though my father continued to provide financial support.
I have yet to reach 1930 in my family’s story, and already we have stumbled across an unrelated ‘uncle’, a wayward father, illiteracy, adultery, remarriage and two previously unknown half-siblings. Childhood memories have left me with a rock-solid respect for the traditional basics of family life and family duty; but if, unlike some Conservative colleagues and supporters, I have always taken with a pinch of salt the myth of a past golden age of conventional families, splendid education and national virtue, then I, and millions of my compatriots, have reason to. Life in Britain has never been simple, and never will be.
Kathleen was not to enter my life until after I had left Downing Street. Although she always knew of my family, I was not aware of her, and she was startled when in 1990 her half-brother became prime minister. She could have sold her story to the press for a small fortune. Instead, she kept the secret. Only after the 1997 general election did I learn that I had a half-sister, alive, well and living in England.
It was lucky for young Kathleen that she stayed with her foster-family, for a catastrophe would soon cost Kitty her life. While she was rehearsing on stage, a steel girder from the safety curtain came loose, fell, and struck her on the head. She was terribly injured, and though she lingered on for months with her mind impaired, she died in June 1928, perhaps mercifully for so vibrant a woman, and was buried at Prees Cemetery in Shropshire. Kitty and my father had been together for over twenty-five years. When she died my father was deluged with sympathetic letters, from everyone from theatre managers to call-boys. She was much loved.
After the accident Kitty had been comforted and nursed by a young dancer who had joined my father’s show six years earlier, at the age of seventeen. She was one half of ‘Glade and Glen’, a speciality act – and a cheeky, teasing, self-willed girl, often in trouble for misbehaviour and pranks. But she charmed her way out of every scrape, and had been a favourite of Kitty’s. A year after Kitty’s death, she married her boss, Tom, twenty-six years her senior, and cared for him for the rest of his life. Her name was Gwen, and she was my mother.
Gwen’s past held surprises for me, too. In 1991, one of my constituents with an interest in family history wrote a letter to me in which he suggested that I might have shared more than my job with Margaret Thatcher. My mother’s family had roots in the Boston district of Lincolnshire, not far from Margaret Thatcher’s home town of Grantham, and research suggests that it is likely – though not certain – that through my mother Margaret Thatcher and I have common ancestors in eighteenth-century Lincolnshire.
As the 1920s ended and music halls gave way to cinemas, my father left show business. It was the right decision, for his profession was dying, but it must have hurt. His 1929 marriage certificate shows his occupation as ‘builder’, but I have no reason to believe he ever was one – though he may have financed the building of bungalows. Certainly he was soon in a different trade, modelling animals and garden ornaments. My parents moved from Shropshire to a bungalow in Worcester Park, and children soon came along. A son, Thomas Aston, was born in 1929, but sadly lived only a few days. Then came Pat, born in 1930, and Terry, in 1932.
In the course of his life, my father once told me, he had made and lost fortunes several times over. What he meant by a fortune I don’t know, but for him the 1930s were good times. He became the first car-owner in the area; Pat and Terry were sent to fee-paying schools; and my mother had domestic help while she worked to build up my father’s business. All this changed with the outbreak of the Second World War. My father was sixty. His workforce joined the services and, as he had foreseen, the market for his ornaments collapsed. The car went. Pat and Terry were withdrawn from their private schools. Pat, the more academic of the two, won a scholarship to Nonsuch Grammar School for Girls, but Terry went to the local state school. My father became a Senior Air Raid Warden, and my mother began work in the local library, supplementing the family income by giving dancing lessons at home.
She had hoped for another child, but did not expect one. In late 1942 she began to suffer persistent heartburn and went to her doctor, a salty-tongued medic with a sharp bedside manner. ‘Don’t be bloody silly, woman,’ he boomed at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’ It was not an easy pregnancy, and my birth was dramatic. My mother collapsed in the kitchen with double pneumonia and pleurisy, and was rushed to St Helier Hospital, Carshalton, where she nearly died. I was born a few hours later, on 29 March 1943. Within days I, too, was perilously ill with a virulent infection. I only just survived, and to this day bear scarred ankles from the many blood transfusions.
My mother returned to her job in the library, taking me with her in my pram. When a German flying bomb landed in a nearby street, it killed ten people and shattered hundreds of windows. Glass splinters fell into my cot which, mercifully, was empty. Forty-seven years later I was to hear the sound of breaking glass when the IRA launched a mortar at Downing Street. For my mother, the flying bomb was too much. The family moved to Saham Toney in Norfolk for the rest of the war, returning to Worcester Park in 1945.
My first memories are of a small bungalow with four rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Our garden was long and narrow, dotted with sheds in which my father worked. We had a lawn just large enough for ball games, and two ponds: one shallow with a few goldfish, the other a deep iron tank sunk into the ground. There were rockeries, fruit trees to plunder and larger trees to climb.
Money, though, was an irregular commodity. Mostly we were comfortable but not well-off. Our neighbours were friendly and we were relaxed and at ease in our community, but I soon realised my parents were more exotic than those of my friends. For a start they were much older – when I was born my father was nearly sixty-four and my mother a few weeks short of thirty-eight. Gwen, clad in straight-up-and-down 1930s sports garb, raised eyebrows