The name Thatcher is in the news again but few would be aware of the late Iron Lady's link to Wanganui.
Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first and only female Prime Minister, died in London yesterday (NZ time). Although Baroness Thatcher visited New Zealand only twice, she had a strong link with the country through her husband.
Denis Thatcher, who died in 2003, was the grandson of early Wanganui resident Thomas Thatcher, who was born in the UK in 1848 and emigrated to Wanganui in 1878. He was chairman of the Wanganui County Council in 1882 and 1883 and a board member until 1895. He served as chair again from 1891 to 1895.
Thatcher married twice - his English wife Elizabeth died of tuberculosis in 1881, and he later remarried to a Wanganui woman with Northern Irish parents, Margaret Ann Reid.
In 1885, he and Margaret had a son named Thomas Herbert, known as Jack, who would later spend three years boarding at Wanganui Collegiate School. In 1897, the family returned to the UK and Thatcher set up a branch of his company Atlas Preservatives at Deptford. In 1911, Wanganui-born Jack took over as managing director there. Jack Thatcher married Kathleen Bird, a secretary at Atlas, and three years after their marriage, Denis was born. Denis served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War and despite seeing no combat, was twice mentioned in dispatches and made an MBE. In 1942, he married Margaret Kempson, however, they later divorced. He married a second time in 1951 to Margaret Roberts, a chemist who two years before was selected as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative Party.