The day of writing this article is the 16th May, which was the birthday of Bertram Edward Bennett (Bertie Bennett to all who knew him), who was my father. He was Born in the slums of Birmingham in 1915. As a young man and being a devoted socialist, he joined the Communist Party who promptly told him he should also join and infiltrate the Labour Party. However, when they wanted him to go to Spain and fight in the civil war that struck him as dangerous, so he gave up Communism and took up weight lifting instead. He organised a weight lifting club called the Samson's, sadly, as all the club members came from the slums they were all undernourished, the photo he had of them showed a weedy lot and nothing like the image of today's strong men
My dad remained a socialist and he and my mom would vote Labour in all elections, they were horrified when, as an eight year old I began giving my thoughts on a situation at the time and they realised their eldest son was a Tory.
Going into business in 1946 my dad tried to stick to his socialist principals but when he began employing people and trying to treat them as equals, they just thought he was soft and some stole from him, which hurt a lot when he found out. Coping with the daily problems of running a small business was a challenge and he soon realised socialism, even though its ideals were noble, did not work - he quickly became a Conservative voter.
The family business he started grew but was hit hard in the mid sixties as trends changed and as staff left he did not replace them, thus shrinking the business. When things began to pick up for his trade in the early seventies he kept the business small, I was shanghaied into the business in 1971 and we remained a small family business with just two other staff. We coped with the miners strike and the shorter working week, we coped with the power cuts and all the other daily disruptions created by over powerful trade unions and the steady collapse of the country as the Labour Government struggled with the ever increasing demands of the unions who were, by then, running rampant - people could not even bury their dead and the Labour Government had lost control.
Then in 1979 Margaret Thatcher stormed into number 10 Downing Street and immediately things began to change, she sent in the SAS to deal with the Iranian Embassy siege, she took on the unions bringing them under control, she helped people to own their own homes and she modernised Britain making it, once again, a strong trading nation respected globally. In the end it was the pro-EU fanatics in her own party that brought her down when she began to realise and challenge the power of the European Union.
My dear old dad passed away in 1999, by then he was a devoted Thatcherite and mourned her being turfed out of Downing Street by inferior politicians who had not an ounce of her greatness - the grey men had taken over.
Now a statue has been erected opposite what was her father's grocers shop in Grantham, a town that should be proud of the fact that one of its daughters not only became the nation's first female Prime Minister, but also, along with Winston Churchill, one of only two truly great Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. R.I.P Baroness Thatcher - the greatest. .
