JOHN MAJOR EPUB ED NOT AU, EB

John Major

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780006530749
• eBook ISBN: 9780007400461
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'The best memoir by a senior politician for years.' Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times

John Major's autobiography is one of the most personal and revealing ever written by a former British Prime Minister. The account of his childhood, rise and fall is candid, scrupulous and unsparing.

Major's early life was extraordinary; his rise through Parliament meteoric. Soon a favourite of Margaret Thatcher, he became Foreign Secretary and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Thatcher fell, he fought and won a shrewd campaign to succeed her, and went on to win a remarkable general election victory in 1992. He brought down inflation and ushered in a solid economic recovery, yet within months of the 1992 election, his government was in troubled waters. John Major is candid about his fight to keep sterling in the ERM and his reactions to 'Black Wednesday'. He is frank about the civil war within his party over Britain's relationship with the EU. He is honest about what he won and what he lost, about friends and foes within his party as well as outside.

CHAPTER ONE

The Search for Tom Major

I KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT my antecedents until I began writing this book. The search for my family provided many surprises.

As a boy, I soaked up the atmosphere of my parents’ unconventional life. When my father, Tom, was old and ill he would entertain me for hours with stories of the extraordinary things he had done. He painted vivid pictures of his boyhood in nineteenth-century America and of his own father, a master builder. He spoke of his years in show business and brought great entertainers like Harry Houdini and Marie Lloyd to life for me. He had a tireless fund of evocative stories and a formidable memory that stretched back well into the last century. He was a wonderful raconteur and I learned to be a good listener at his bedside.

No doubt my father could embroider for effect, but I never knew him to lie. Much was left out, as I was to discover, but whenever he exaggerated or embellished my mother hurried in to try to damp the story down. I grew up with his tales and accepted them without question, though his wayward life left little evidence for us to confirm what he said. After I joined the Cabinet in 1987 and the press began to delve into my past, an impression was sometimes given that I was withholding information. Not at all. I knew so little myself. But at that time my family, too, began to delve. The burden initially fell on my brother Terry. Later, when I started this book, we worked together. We had to piece together a life without documents that had begun 120 years before. It was a fascinating adventure. In the search for Tom Major, we unearthed a remarkable, idiosyncratic life.

His roots lay in the West Midlands. My great-great grandfather, Joseph Ball, was a prosperous Willenhall locksmith; his son, John Ball, born at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was licensee of the Bridge Tavern, just outside Walsall. It still exists today. John and his wife Caroline had six children, of whom the second, Abraham Ball, born in January 1848, was my grandfather. He married a young Irish girl, Sarah Anne Marrah; illiterate, my grandmother signed my father’s birth certificate with an ‘X’. I never met her, of course, but I still have a photograph, taken not long before she died in 1919, of her feeding chickens at my father’s house in Shropshire. She looks a formidable lady, a not improbable mother of an adventurous and restless son. And my father certainly was that.

He was born in 1879, and christened Abraham Thomas Ball. But he was always known as Tom, and never Abraham. ‘Major’ was the stage name he adopted as a young man. Had he not done so, I would have been John Ball, sharing the name of the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt against the poll tax.

Tom was Abraham and Sarah’s only natural child, and I had always believed he had been brought up alone. He was not. In one of the many surprises I had while researching this book, I learned of an older adopted son, Alfred, born to a destitute bridle-bit maker. My grandparents, his neighbours, took Alfred in, and it was only when he married that he learned he was adopted. My father never spoke of him to me.

Brought up as brothers, Tom and Alfred did not spend long in the Midlands. When my father was about five my grandparents emigrated to America, and settled in Pittsburgh. They must have hoped for a better life. They sailed on the SS Indiana from Liverpool to Philadelphia, and were appalled by conditions on board. The Indiana was a primitive two-masted steamship belonging to the American Line, built for stability rather than speed or comfort. The journey took three weeks; poorer migrants, travelling as deck passengers, were fed, so my father told me, with salted herrings from a barrel – much like sea lions in a zoo. He was lucky, and travelled in better circumstances. In America, my grandfather soon found work as a master bricklayer, building blast furnaces for the Andrew Carnegie Steel Works in Philadelphia.

I know little about my family’s time across the Atlantic. No photographs or records survive. If they wrote or received letters, they are lost. But Abraham apparently prospered, and my father had a happy and comfortable American upbringing. Perhaps something of his classless, independent background was to rub off on me.

My father often spoke of living in Fall Hollow, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania. He used to tell me he had found Indian arrowheads in the woods behind his house. I could find no place named ‘Fall Hollow’. Panic. Was his – and my – story true? Terry, with the aid of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette came to the rescue. Fall Hollow, near Braddock, did once exist, just as my father said.

I would know more if I still had the dented travelling trunk in which he kept old documents and cuttings about his time in America and his work as a trapeze artist. The trunk ended up in a dusty alcove in the cellar at 80 Burton Road, Brixton, my parents’ last home, and was left there when my sister Pat and her husband Peter moved out. I remember investigating it as a child. I saw the oversize evening suit and top hat my father wore in his publicity postcards, photographs (including one of him wearing his trapeze costume), and scores for a music-hall band.

The new owners of the bungalow in Worcester Park, Surrey, where I lived as a boy, found a number of remarkable items from my father’s life in their loft: a make-up box, a clown suit, shoes, wigs and scores of sheets of old music-hall songs, many signed by the composers. It was the residue of a music-hall life on the move.

My father began his career as a performer in America. He used to say that as a child he joined a local fife-and-drum band in Pennsylvania, became skilled at twirling a baton, and twice performed as a young drum major in front of President Grover Cleveland. I cannot prove this, but I do remember my mother swinging a baton of her own on our lawn at home (to the astonishment of our neighbours – it was not the sort of thing one did in Worcester Park) and telling me Father had taught her, so there is some circumstantial support for the story.

Soon my father was performing in the circus ring. He taught himself acrobatics in the cellar of his father’s building workshop, and by the age of eight, he claimed, he was the top man in a four-man pyramid. As a teenager, he said, he performed on the flying trapeze without a safety net – to attract a larger crowd and earn a bigger fee.

I can’t be certain exactly when or why my grandparents returned to England but by 1896, when Tom was seventeen, he and Alfred and their father were back in the West Midlands. The two young men were active members of the Walsall Swimming Club, and in the late 1890s their names appear repeatedly in local newspaper reports of swimming galas, taking part in an odd array of events, from canoe races in comic costume and aquatic ‘Derbys’ (with the swimmer as a horse carrying a ‘jockey’), to life-saving exhibitions, swimming races in fancy dress (Tom winning a prize as a ‘new woman’ in bloomers) and water-polo matches.

By the turn of the century, press mentions of my father cease. He may have moved away from Walsall; certainly less-newsworthy things now occupied his time. One of them became a family secret, unmentioned, something which again I did not discover until I was researching this book. As well as an adopted uncle, I had another brother.

In July 1901 a young dancer, Mary Moss, married to a musician named James Moss, gave birth to a son in Wigan. They called him Tom and registered his birth on 25 July, but the details they gave were untrue: the baby’s father was not James Moss but my father, Tom – then a twenty-two-year-old bachelor. James Moss brought the boy up as his own; indeed he may never have known he was not the father. But Tom Major did not lose touch with his son, and the child – my half-brother – was to enter my life many years later in Brixton, in circumstances no one could have imagined.

It is not hard to guess how my father met Mary and James Moss, for he was now a professional stage performer. The first of his variety shows that I can trace was ‘The Encore’, put on at the Grand Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees, in August 1902. Tom Major appeared on the bill as part of a double act, ‘Drum and Major’, with his future wife, Kitty.

Five years my father’s senior, Kitty was already married to a masseur, David Grant, when they met. The appeal of a life with a masseur must have worn off, for she soon formed a permanent professional partnership with my father which took her away from her husband, and she married Tom after Grant’s death, in 1910.

Kitty and Tom – ‘Drum and Major’ – were in regular work. September 1902 saw them on stage in Portsmouth; December took them to Hastings; and in the first half of 1903 they appeared in turn at Camberwell, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Bolton, Manchester, Birkenhead, Plymouth, Stockton and Wolverhampton. Only political party leaders perform in a more bewildering succession of venues.

It was a peripatetic existence, but they must have loved travelling because they did not stay long in Britain. In July 1903 the pair sailed from Southampton, and did not return for almost a year. An advertisement in the Stage announced that they were ‘Touring in South America’; which was brave of them, since neither spoke Spanish. While they were there, I learned from my father, they spent time on a cattle ranch in Argentina. He used to tell me tales of the gauchos and their way of life. He also claimed that in Buenos Aires he had worked in a millionaires’ club, looking out for card-sharpers and winning back their gains. As an old man he was still an avid card-player.

And he crossed the River Plate – at least according to family legend – stumbling into a civil war in Uruguay, and was forced to enlist briefly in a local militia. Perhaps the name ‘Major’ confused someone. Tom used to recount how he had a white band pinned to his arm and had been ordered to march a group of undesirables out of town. He claimed that the white band denoted his status as an officer, but in fact, as my brother has subsequently discovered, at the time of his visit Uruguay was hotly divided between two political clans, the Blancos and the Colorados – the Whites and the Reds. Even a small piece of clothing of either colour committed you 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 t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1: The Search for Tom Major
• 2: From Brixton to Westminster
• 3: Into the Commons
• 4: Climbing the Ladder
• 5: Into Cabinet
• 6: ‘What’s the Capital of Colombia?’
• 7: An Ambition Fulfilled
• 8: An Empress Falls
• 9: Prime Minister
• 10: The Gulf War
• 11: Raising the Standard
• 12: Maastricht
• 13: Winning a Mandate
• 14: Black Wednesday
• 15: The ‘Bastards’
• 16: Back to Basics
• 17: Protecting our Heritage
• 18: The Union at Risk
• 19: Into the Mists: Bright Hopes, Black Deeds
• 20: The Wider World
• 21: At the Summit
• 22: Hell’s Kitchen
• 23: Unparliamentary Behaviour
• 24: Faultline Europe
• 25: Put up or Shut up
• 26: Mad Cows and Europeans
• 27: The Economy: Rags to Riches
• 28: The Curtain Falls
• Aftermath
• The Empty House
• Keep Reading
• Appendix A: Brief Chronology
• Appendix B: The Cabinet, November 1990–May 1997
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher