Margaret Thatcher's surprising relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin

A new play explores one of the most intriguing friendships in the history of science and politics: Margaret Thatcher and Dorothy Hodgkin. Alice Bell spoke to playwright Adam Ganz

1982. Margaret Thatcher seated in the history classroom at her old school in Grantham.
1982. Margaret Thatcher seated in the history classroom at her old school in Grantham. Photograph: PA

Margaret Thatcher's surprising relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin





It’s called The Chemistry Between Them, and it’s about Margaret Thatcher and her tutor in chemistry at Somerville College, Dorothy Hodgkin, who was both a scientist and on the left. Dorothy’s husband was in the Communist party and she was banned from travelling to the states for some time in the 1950s, and she was a peace activist, a member of CND and president of Pugwash. And they stayed friends throughout Dorothy’s life. Margaret Thatcher apparently had a photo of Dorothy Hodgkin in Downing Street, and they maintained a kind of warm relationship. The play happens in two timescales – one is a meeting in 1983 in Chequers where Dorothy came to plead with Margaret to take nuclear disarmament more seriously at a time when Cruise missiles and SS20s were being stationed in Europe. In fact I’ve set it – I’m not sure of the exact date – shortly after the Korean airliner was shot down, when the Russians feared Nato were possibly planning a first strike. And that is intercut with the time when Margaret is studying chemistry and looking at her journey; what she learned at Somerville, but especially what she learned from Dorothy.

What there anything in particular that drew you to this story, that made you think “I have to turn this into a play”?

It began because I’d been commissioned to write a drama about Thatcher by ITV, and this was a detail of the story I found completely fascinating and which seemed to be a fresh point of view. Something else really struck me; both Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher studied science, and yet there isn’t a single male PM, or chancellor, in either country who did. And it was recently pointed out to me that the next most successful female politician – at least in the UK – Margaret Beckett, studied metallurgy. So I was curious, and remain curious – even if it’s not big enough for a sample.

It sounds a bit like the play has Hodgkin being a politician – as she goes to lobby on peace – while also reflecting on Thatcher as a scientist. Is that a fair description, or am I being simplistic?

There are elements of both of those things, and maybe thinking about how each understands the world. I found myself thinking about what Dorothy Hodgkin did – look at lots of two dimensional images and try to conceive the three dimensional structure. Whereas, possibly, you could say that Thatcher saw a lot of things in two dimensions, in terms of binary thinking. But Thatcher was always very proud of her scientific training and describes herself not only as a chemist, but proudly as a crystallographer and extremely proudly as Dorothy Hodgkin’s pupil.

Is there anything more broadly on the question of the relationship between science in politics which you found in your research, or is in the play?

I suppose in some ways it’s all science. In the sense if you are thinking why one thing happens because of another, if you are trying to understand how the world works and how you are going to modify it, then something like science or engineering seems directly important. There is a bit of speech in the play which I’ve given Thatcher where she says “the only time I was a better scientist than you was in politics because you thought people wanted to live by their better nature, you see them as part of the lattice, but they want to see themselves as free. The one thing I learned was that if you want to change the relationships, you have to change the environment in which those relationships occur.”

Another way of looking at Thatcher as scientist would be Jon Agar’s argument that her ideology was a product of science’s connections to the economy. Is that something you saw, or was the point Thatcher and Hodgkin met too early in Thatcher’s scientific career, before she joined industry?

I suppose I fictionalised it, and I thought that one of the things that Dorothy Hodgkin represented for Thatcher was a worldview, and a place where great things could happen. I imagined her father suggesting she might go back to the family business and make jam, (as Frank Cooper had done), to dramatise the idea of science as useful knowledge. But Hodgkin was taught by JD Bernal, who also features in the play, and he was also famous for his writings about science in society. I think Margaret wanted to be a scientist. I was told she revised very hard before Dorothy Hodgkin came to visit at Chequers, she’d revise for days so she could be at the top of her game. Again, it’s fiction, but I suggest in the play that Thatcher was influenced by Hodgkin because she saw a woman who was at the top of her field, who had children, who was running a marriage that was perhaps not as traditional as some you might have come across, and yet seemed to be able to thrive. She was a role model, an inspiring example. And also she was just incredibly nice, everybody adored Hodgkin. Everywhere you go, people say how approachable she was so I’m sure that was important for somebody, like Thatcher, who was a long way from home in all kinds of ways.

Finally, to pull out the question of women in science, and if you thought that was part of it? You said that Thatcher had been able to have an example of a woman succeeding at work, that must have been rather rare at the time. For all that science is, in many ways, terrible for women in science, it also has some history of making spaces for them. Or were there other issues to do with women in science that you think are relevant to the story?

One very interesting thing that was said to me when I was researching the first Thatcher project was I interviewed Nina Bawden who studied at Somerville with Margaret and she said that Oxford was a fantastic place for women during the war, because the whole institution existed but there weren’t so many male students around. As a woman you had the run of the place. It was much easier to get access, and there weren’t people driving you out. So Margaret became president of the Conservative Association. Everyone at Somerville was a woman of course, and it was relatively progressive. Dorothy Hodgkin was the first woman to get paid maternity leave at Oxford University. I was also told there were a lot of women crystallographers, because it was a new field, and that the Braggs were not prejudiced and because it didn’t have a lot of kit, it wasn’t an area people were possessive about. And I was reading, it was really friendly, there was only 200 crystallographers, and they all knew each other, and it was an incredibly generous place for anyone who wanted to get involved.

Well, there are stories about Bernal and Hodgkin being friendly …

Ah, that also features in the play. I have him visiting her lab and he says “who is that attractive girl outside?” and Dorothy says “she’s one of my fourth years, you wouldn’t be interested, she’s not going to be a crystallographer” and he says “I don’t just sleep with crystallographers” and she says “that’s good, because there can’t be many left.”

If you want to hear more, listen in to BBC Radio 4, 2.15pm on 20 August. The play stars Catherine Skinner as Margaret Thatcher and Jane Slavin as Dorothy Hodgkin and is directed for the BBC by Nandita Ghose. Somerville College will also be holding an event to mark the 50th anniversary of Hodgkin’s Nobel Prize this October.