A century ago this month, on 13 October 1925, Margaret Roberts was born above a grocer’s shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire. She died as Baroness Thatcher in a suite at The Ritz in London 87 years later.
In the weeks ahead, much will be written about the Britain she left behind. But Britain is not one story. Its places, and its people, bear her legacy in different ways.
Over the past fortnight, I travelled across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to meet those who lived on the front lines of Thatcher’s Britain — and to see how their communities fare today.
I spoke with an IRA bomber, a Scottish miner who toasted her death, a rioter in Toxteth and others whose lives and memories represent Britain past and present.
You can read their stories below.
The Bomber (Co. Down)
“I’m not a rough and tough IRA man,” Colm insists, and he has the online reviews to prove it. His farmhouse boasts a 4.98 rating on Airbnb. “Colm is living history,” writes Jennifer from Wisconsin. “If you want to understand Ireland, he is the man to talk to,” adds Amy from California.
She may be right.
In the village of Bellaghy, County Derry, everyone has a Troubles story, but few have as many as Colm Scullion, 68. Bomber, blanketman, cellmate of Bobby Sands — quite a résumé for the gentle figure pouring tea across the table. These days, Colm caters to American tourists and spends afternoons at a nearby arts centre named after Seamus Heaney. His greatest nemesis now is the ticket machine at Belfast train station: “It’s a nightmare getting one and finding the platform.”
Through a hedge, up a winding track and inside Colm’s house, memories of past battles hint at a more turbulent life. There’s the signed poem by Gerry Adams on the wall, the photographs of fallen comrades, the slight limp that follows him from room to room. The latter was gifted by a blast that hurled him out of a car and into a hunger strike that would shake Thatcher’s government and the Union itself.
A bookish teenager with dreams of studying archaeology, Colm was accepted into the IRA aged 16. “We looked around us and saw unemployment and discrimination,” he recalls, when I ask why he joined. “In Derry, people were marching for something as basic as one man, one vote.” There was also a run-in with the British Army: on the way to a local dance, he was pinned to the floor by a rifle shoved down his throat. “Peaceful protest was tried,” he says, “but it didn’t work.”
Colm was sent for “basic training” and returned a bombmaker. He won’t speak on the record about his “missions”, except for the one that landed him in hospital, then prison. He had just parked up in Ballymena, a predominantly Protestant town, when a bomb went off prematurely. He doesn’t remember whether the flash or a bang came first, only the impact. “I think about that explosion every day. I had another bomb between my legs and one beside me.” They didn’t detonate.
There were two others in the car with him that day, including Thomas McElwee, who would later die on hunger strike. When Colm finally stumbled out of the car, he had a hole in his thigh and several toes missing.
From hospital he was taken to Crumlin Road prison, where Bobby Sands, who had been arrested for weapons possession, was the Officer Commanding (OC) who “debriefed” him. “We became friends right then.” Soon after, both men were attacked by Loyalist prisoners and ended up in the same ambulance.
In 1977, Colm — “Skull” to his comrades — was sentenced and sent to the notorious H-Blocks of the Maze: “a living hell” where IRA prisoners refused uniforms, instead choosing to wear blankets in protest at the removal of their political status. Later came the “no-wash” protest, and the hunger strikes of 1981.
Cells held two men — “four steps by four and a half” — and Colm was paired with Sands. “The first day he arrived, he refused to speak in English,” Colm recalls. Sands insisted on Irish, partly to keep guards from listening, partly to keep the language alive. “To be honest, I wasn’t very good,” Colm admits. “But what little Irish I had grew fast.”
Evenings were spent whispering down the wing in Irish: news from illicit radios, plans for the next protest. It was during these conversations that Sands proposed a second hunger strike, after another was called off earlier that year. A list was drawn up of those who would see it through to the death. Colm’s name wasn’t on it. “I just hadn’t the balls to do it,” he says. “We all agreed the injured couldn’t go on it — but that sounds like an excuse. I just couldn’t face death. Bobby and Frank Hughes [who also died on the hunger strike] were never going to back down.”
In his last letter home before the strike, Sands wrote that he believed he would die. Colm didn’t — especially not when Sands, after 41 days on strike and in prison hospital, was elected to Parliament in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election.
Soon after Sands died, after 66 days on strike, Colm was released and rejoined the IRA. “I never got caught again,” he says, refusing to reveal how many bombs he planted and whether, and how many, people were killed. He regrets little. A united Ireland, he believes, will come in his children’s lifetime. “I’m just proud to have played a minuscule role in the movement and the struggle.”
During that struggle, he claims to have celebrated only two deaths. The first was in 1985, when the IRA executed Patrick Kerr, an off-duty prison officer who Colm claims “would personally beat” him and those on his wing.
The second was in 2013, when Margaret Thatcher died of a stroke. “Even outside the Irish context, we loathed her,” he says. “Her treatment of the miners, her friendship with Pinochet, the Belgrano. How she treated her own people was despicable.”
Then he softens. He talks of extending the hand of friendship to the Unionist community. He mentions close Protestant friends. And he describes his guests — Americans eager for stories, who leave glowing reviews. “I love the Airbnb,” he says, smiling. “You should check out the comments.”
The Miner (Danderhall, Scotland)
On 17 April 2013, as Margaret Thatcher’s funeral procession wound its way to St Paul’s Cathedral, the former miners of Monktonhall Colliery gathered at the village graveyard. As the rain lashed down, they laid four wreaths for the ten local men killed underground since the ‘60s. Then came whisky from silver hip flasks and a stream of morbid jokes. “Maggie’s in hell and she’s shut down three furnaces already,” one said.
Soaked through, they squelched back to the Danderhall Miners’ Club, seven miles south-east of Edinburgh. It was time for a party. Country and western ricocheted through the hall; by midnight, 300 people had come through the doors.
“It was all very organised,” recalls Paddy Duggan, a former engineer at Monktonhall Colliery. “We let the journalists in early to look around at the start. That was it. When they tried to come back later, when everyone was drunk, we turned them away. The party was for us — about solidarity, and about paying our respects to those who’d died.”
Tam Bennett was 22 during the Miners’ Strike of 1984, and was one of 4,400 men who lost their jobs at the pits of Monktonhall and nearby Bilston Glen. Now 66 and weakened by a recent stroke, he struggles to form full sentences. Still, when Thatcher’s name is mentioned, he delivers his verdict like gunfire: “Fuck her.”
After the strike, Tam joined the Royal Scots Guards, then retrained as a cook in a local pub, The Cockatoo. It closed more than a decade ago. Beyond a few rows of miners’ houses and the club itself, little remains of the old village. Around it, a ring of housing developments is gradually taking shape.
“We call it Spam Valley,” says one local. “Anyone who coughs up enough to move in has to live off spam to survive.”
Earlier this year, members of the miners’ club walked through Spam Valley, delivering leaflets and inviting newcomers for a pint. Few responded. Tonight, there are three of us in the bar, with £3.85 pints of Tennent’s. Dog racing flickers on the telly. The main hall is given over to a children’s judo class.
To survive, the club relies on functions — weddings, birthdays, funerals. There’s always at least one a week. The same faces turn up. A member of the same pipe band normally plays. There’s also a bowling green, and a women’s football team, though they prefer to drink in Danderhall’s other pub.
Most of the club’s regulars come for a few pints a week, with the promise of a lift home from Nicky the barmaid if the roads are icy. Tam comes every day. “Fuck her,” he says again when someone mentions Thatcher again. And yet, he remembers the strike fondly. He describes how the club transformed into a soup kitchen. He carefully pronounces each syllable of “cam-a-ra-de-rie”.
The conversation turns to scabs. Is there still tension? “Oh aye,” says Tam, before nodding towards a lonely man in the corner. “He’s one.” He had only broken the strike for a week. “Doesn’t fucking matter,” Tam growls.
He then fetches a bundle of framed old photos and clippings and spreads them across a pool table. One shows the men at the Durham Miners’ Gala. Paddy explains how they and their wives still go every year, and how each October they lay a wreath to commemorate the Aberfan disaster.
By this point, though, Tam says he’s had too many pints, gets up and says goodbye. We watch him go. The scab had slunk out long before.
The Loiterer, (Merthyr Tydfil, Wales)
The police car passes twice before pulling over. “What are you up to?” an officer asks. Just looking around. “Why?” I’m a journalist. “You should be careful then. It’s dangerous around here.”
He’s not the first to disparage Merthyr Tydfil. Over the past decade, it’s been variously dismissed as “sick-note city”, Britain’s “ugliest“ town, and the “capital of blank-faced, chip-fed loitering”.
Locals think these labels are unfair, and you can see why. Collective struggle, not blank faces, used to define this corner of the Valleys. In 1831, the town’s workers rose against poor pay and working conditions in what became known as the Merthyr Rising. It was the first time the red flag was used as a symbol of working-class rebellion in the United Kingdom. “Caws a bara,” they cried. Cheese and bread. But after the Rising came the fall.
A few miles out lies the site of the Merthyr Vale colliery, remembered for the 1966 Aberfan disaster. During the Miners’ Strike, another tragedy unfolded after two miners dropped a concrete slab on a taxi carrying a “scab” to work. The driver was killed and the cause never recovered.
Over the following decades, neither did Merthyr’s industry. The mines went, then the steelworks, the Hoover plant, the toy factory, a women’s underwear factory. When pressed about unemployment in towns like Merthyr, Thatcher could only tell reporters to “cheer up”.
Last summer, Nigel Farage tried to cheer up locals by coming to Merthyr to launch his party’s pre-election “contract” with voters. It didn’t work. Labour still won twice as many votes as Reform, and turnout slumped below 50% for the first time. Months later, a 50-foot sinkhole opened up on a housing estate. It was filled within ten days, but a vacuum remains.
When the police stop me, I’m in Gurnos, an estate routinely branded the worst in Wales. It doesn’t feel it. A three-legged stray patters about outside Greggs, but otherwise it is quiet. Anthony, 45, has lived here all his life. Things, he says, have calmed since the ‘90s. When I put this to the officers, they try not to smirk.
“Go up to Second Avenue [in the neighbouring Galon Uchaf estate] if you want to see how rough it is,” one tells me, excitedly. “It’s proper dangerous up there.” A strange way to describe the community he serves, but I do as I’m told.
“Yeah, there’s always trouble,” says a woman on Second Avenue, cradling a can of Madrí outside her front door. Does she get dragged in? “I suppose so.” Then with a laugh: “It’s often the men — but you know, I like the men.”
A few doors down, a group of twentysomethings watch builders repair a roof. They don’t want to talk. “The media is always shitting on us,” one explains. But when asked about the officer’s comments, they open up. “Of course it’s bad here — but it’s bad everywhere,” says another. His girlfriend adds: “We know everyone here. Even when there is trouble, we sort it out.” None of them work, or expect to. “What would we do?”
On the neighbouring streets, men hobble on crutches up steep roads; young women smoke weed in their dressing gowns. “What do you expect?” says a man in his mid-twenties. “There’s nothing for them.”
He’d been sacked just that morning from a nearby meat factory after injuring his back. As an agency worker, he couldn’t do anything about it. “That’s life, though, isn’t it? I’ll look for something else.” There are a few jobs going on a construction site near the hospital, he says, though he won’t get one with his back. And there are rumours of a McDonald’s drive-thru opening next year.
What about becoming a police officer? “You must be having a laugh.”
The Rioter, (Toxteth, Liverpool)
The first thing Jimi wants you to know about the Toxteth Riots is that there wasn’t a riot. “It wasn’t criminally motivated, as the word 'riot' infers,” he insists. “It was an uprising.”
Riot or uprising, the carnage that consumed this corner of Merseyside in July 1981 — weeks after similar disturbances in Bristol and Brixton — was the worst Britain had seen in decades.
After a black motorcyclist crashed while being pursued by police, years of discrimination in the deprived district of Toxteth boiled over: locals hurled bricks and stones, and the clashes quickly escalated. The following day, barricades were built and petrol bombs lit. Young men commandeered milk floats, a fire engine, even a cement mixer, and drove them straight into police lines. They fought with scaffolding poles, jousting like knights against riot shields.
The skirmishes left 460 officers hospitalised and 70 buildings demolished. For the first time, police used tear gas on the British mainland. “To think this is England,” read the front page of The Sun, above a photo of a cowering policeman. When Thatcher visited Liverpool the following week, she was pelted with tomatoes and toilet roll.
Jimi Jagne, now 61, was among those who clashed with police. “We actually managed to free the motorcyclist on the first night,” he recalls. “It felt like we’d won. But the police weren’t used to being pushed around. That’s why they came in so hard the next day.”
Born to a Gambian father and an Irish-Chinese mother, Jimi describes ‘80s Toxteth as a ghetto. “Without knowing why, you found yourself up against a wall of racism, whether it was with housing or jobs or anything. And poverty made it worse. If you were white, you might escape it. If you were black, you couldn’t.” Some estimates put unemployment among young black men in Toxteth at 80%.
Although routinely stopped by police, Jimi was not a natural rioter. He was studious, with seven O-Levels and plans for A-Levels and perhaps university. On the evening after the initial incident, he went to a club near Princes Park — usually busy with friends — only to find it empty. “It was just me and the DJ, looking bemused.”
When he left, he found a night sky glowing orange, and the echo of shouts and crashes in the distance. “I remember walking over to the estate, standing on a mound with a few others, watching police officers who were literally on fire.” He was urged by locals to join in: “Why aren’t you getting involved? Why are you standing with the mums? This will keep happening unless we do something. And we will remember the ones who didn’t try.”
After he saw a friend get arrested, Jimi stepped forward.
“I wasn’t prepared to throw [Molotov] cocktails,” he says, “but I did throw stones and rocks. I threw bricks and used scaffolding. I hurt officers. We were all hurting each other.” He says this flatly, without drama. “I was young and impressionable, and I took ideas about race very seriously.” He still does.
Now an author and community activist, Jimi describes how policing in Liverpool has changed. “It’s more about surveillance now,” he says, noting how Toxteth’s estates have been redesigned — with their alleyways blocked and roads widened for patrol cars.
The bigger shift, though, is demographic. Once a largely Afro-Caribbean neighbourhood, Toxteth today is overwhelmingly Muslim. Granby Street, where the disorder was sparked, is now lined with Lebanese grocers, a Somali café and a Kurdish bakery. “Some people think it’s been stripped of what made it black,” Jimi says, though he disagrees.
After 1981, much of Toxteth was demolished, with rows of houses bulldozed or left derelict. When a Mirror journalist visited in 1984, she found a desolate community and concluded: “There isn’t any anger left in Toxteth.”
Later attempts at regeneration — including one Turner Prize-winning project in 2015 — have been halting. Toxteth today is calm and friendly, though trouble occasionally returns. Outside a police station, a poster pleads for information about the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old, still unsolved after seven years.
Around the corner, an entire street — Ducie Street — still lies derelict, the result of a bungled sell-off in which the council transferred houses to a developer “for nil value” in 2017. Ivy curls through shattered windows. Two homeless men linger outside, swapping prison stories. After five minutes, they leap up and pose for a photograph, grinning like children.
A few streets away, a church sold two decades ago for £1 now sits roofless and vandalised. Its walls carry the fresh graffiti of a new, more cynical generation: “It’s great,” the scrawl sardonically reads.
The Grocer’s Daughter (Grantham)
Two statues watch over St Peter’s Hill Green, in the centre of Grantham. The most dominant depicts the town’s favourite child: Isaac Newton. Surrounded by benches and flowerbeds, it’s a stone’s throw from the shopping centre that also bears his name.
The second shows Margaret Thatcher. And she is lucky to be there. She was installed without ceremony three years ago, after Westminster council refused to house her in London for fear of vandalism. Within hours of her homecoming, she was pelted with eggs.
Today, the statue is roped off, ringed by a muddy trench. Two council workers dig beneath her, planting bushes ahead of her centenary. They take the job seriously. “She was the best bloody prime minister we ever had,” says one.
It is a rare show of pride. Despite rumours of a “Thatcher Fest”, the town’s centenary celebrations will be modest: a guided walk, a night of punk poetry, and a drag show imagining Maggie as a cabaret star. Later in the week, Gyles Brandreth will appear to celebrate “three British icons”: Thatcher, Elizabeth II and Winnie the Pooh.
Around the corner, at Grantham’s Conservative Club, her only portrait is being reframed, ready to be hung on the centenary — and taken down the next day. “We’re not very political,” says Mike, the club secretary. The regulars prefer it that way.
“They’re useless,” Mike adds of Thatcher’s successors. “The Conservative Party will be a non-entity in a few years.” From across the bar, Jonathan, who lives upstairs, calls out: “Good luck to Farage, I say.”
Thatcher herself was never allowed to be a member — the club only started admitting women after she stepped down — so perhaps it felt wrong for the official Thatcher Walk to stop here. Instead it will head five minutes up the high street, to the corner of North Parade where she was born above her father’s grocery shop.
Outside, a plaque commemorates “the first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. Inside, Roberts Food Stores has turned into a natural wellness centre.
The waiting room is all soft light and balms. Leaflets advertise an autumn special: a lava shell back massage followed by a crystal facial, £60. A paper sign on the window warns of a bee infestation: “Please take care.”
Tourists still come from as far away as Japan, says the receptionist. But most only take photos. Since I’ve bothered to step inside, she agrees to show me Thatcher’s childhood bedroom.
Up two flights of stairs, the attic now goes by “Treatment Room 5”. “Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen,” pleads a sign on a bookshelf. A canvas of poppies waves from another.
What would Thatcher think? In 1989, a Vanity Fair profile described her fondness for “electrical underwater stimulation and Italian mud therapy”, administered by an Indian practitioner to keep her youthful. But there is no bathtub here. Just three armchairs.
One hundred years on, the room is now used for counselling.
Jacob Furedi is the editor of Dispatch
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