17 December 2015
Feuding Twins
Lady Thatcher’s legacy
by Lynda Goetz
So, Carol Thatcher is auctioning her mother’s effects. On this occasion her brother Mark is apparently “on the side of the angels,” in the words of a Tory source quoted in the Mail on Sunday: “His only concern is to protect his mother’s legacy and he thinks this sale is simply abhorrent”. The thought of Mark Thatcher being “on the side of the angels” is an interesting one, but more interesting is why he finds the sale “abhorrent”.
For most of us when our parents die, we are left, at the very least, with a number of personal effects, of the sort Carol Thatcher is apparently proposing to auction – handbags, shoes and ‘mementoes’ of various sorts. Given that most of us do not have famous parents and no-one else is interested in their personal effects, family members are obviously left to decide what to do with these items. Some, if they have the room, may possibly decide to hang on to a few of these for the sake of memory or because someone considers they may, perhaps, be of interest to future generations, but the fact of the matter is that an awful lot of this stuff ends up either in land fill or donated to charity shops to be purchased (or not, as the case may be) for a few pounds by someone who has no idea of their provenance.
Given that we, in the West at least, live in an age where nearly all of us own far too much ‘stuff’; that most of us do not live in mansions where we can relegate items collected over a lifetime to the east wing or some dusty attic and we are all living increasingly lengthy lives, it is almost impossible to add our parents belongings to our own. If the average lifespan of both men and women in the UK is now over 80, it follows that their children, like Mark and Carol Thatcher, will themselves be in their 50s,or 60s when those parents die. Those children will have accumulated their own collection of ‘stuff’ which their children, in turn, will undoubtedly not want either. The inevitable outcome is that, in many instances, when old people die very few additional items are retained by their families. In some ways it is sad that possessions which were meaningful to one generation are no longer passed down to the next, but the days when a person’s most cherished item was a goose feather bed are long gone and one’s mother’s shoes (invariably in the wrong size even in the unlikely event you did share her taste) are not generally what most of us wish to have cluttering up our wardrobe after she has passed on.
Official papers are another matter entirely and in the case of Margaret Thatcher there is an archive at Churchill College, Cambridge for the Thatcher Papers. Any such papers which have, for whatever reason, been retained by the family should probably not be included in a sale of Thatcher memorabilia. Sir Mark might well have a point here, but one cannot help wondering how it has come about that Carol is in the position to be taking a lone decision on this. If the items going to auction were bequeathed to her in her Mother’s will, then it is presumably up to her what she chooses to do with them. If that is not the case, then how can the auction house be authorised to sell?
On the whole, my sympathies are entirely with Carol. I am of course envious, not only that she is hoping to make £500,000 from recycling her mother’s belongings, but also that she will know that whoever buys those shoes, handbags and mementoes will be purchasing them knowing exactly who owned them before and that each time they use, or simply look at, those items they will be remembering the lady to whom they used to belong. The living are benefitting from the deceased’s legacy and that legacy is giving pleasure (and potentially future profit, of course) to an admirer outside the family. What is not to like? Possibly the rather sad and unedifying sight of twins squabbling over their parent’s estate.
