The Iron Lady was forged in a grocer’s shop, but Theresa was made in a vicarage in this idyllic Cotswolds village
87-year-old family friend provides the lowdown on David Cameron's successor's childhood and rise to politics
FOR a Prime Minister who would later favour killer kitten heels, they’re perhaps surprising childhood toys.
The red tin-plate Tri-ang Puff Puff steam engine and little flat-bed lorries would have been seen very much as boy’s toys in the late Fifties and early Sixties of Mrs May’s early years.
Wiping cobwebs off the rusting toys in his cluttered garage, John Watts remembers the little girl who would become Britain’s second woman PM as reserved and well-mannered.
The ex-car factory worker, 87, said: “Her parents brought the toys down for my two boys in the 1960s after she had outgrown them.
“Theresa was a very pleasant and polite girl. As the daughter of the village’s vicar she had a lot to live up to.”
If Margaret Thatcher’s politics were hewn in her father’s Grantham grocer’s shop then Mrs May’s were forged here in the vicarage of the idyllic thatched Cotswolds hamlet of Church Enstone.
The Reverend Hubert Brasier, his wife Zaidee and their only child, three-year-old Theresa Mary, arrived in the medieval village surrounded by poppy-strewn cornfields and beech copses in 1959.
Amid the Sunday services, village fetes and WI meetings, it was observing her father’s selfless devotion to his flock here for the next 12 years that her brand of compassionate Conservatism blossomed.
“You’re supposed to behave in a particular way,” she once said of being a clergyman’s child.
Church Enstone was a world of country squires - one of England’s grandest fox hunts the Heythrop are kennelled nearby - and poor farm labourers.
Yet the Mays were hardly gentry. Both Theresa’s grand mothers had worked ‘in service’ below stairs. Her great grandfather was a butler from Scotland.
In an astonishing twist of fate this enchanting corner of Oxfordshire could boast two Prime Ministers this week.
David Cameron’s £1.3million constituency home in the neighbouring village of Dean is a little more than four miles away.
Today Church Enstone is at the heart of Cotswolds’ moneyed society. The Renault Sport Formula One teamis based close by and private members retreat Soho Farm offers sanctuary to the trendy elite.
Yet life for the Mays in the Sixties revolved around the country vicarage of pale Cotswolds stone that backs onto a patchwork of open fields.
St Kenelm’s Church – parts of which date from Saxon times - was a short stroll away through a little wooden gate leading into its peaceful churchyard.
At first glance little seems to have changed in Church Enstone since the Rev May preached here.
But retired engineer John Sword, 73, explained: “It was a more remote area when Mrs May was growing up. It was rural but not backward.
“It’s now a fashionable place to live. There has been an invasion of city money invested into a lot of property.”
Mr Watts, who says many locals have now been priced out of the hamlet, remembers a village bobby patrolling the parish – population 1,139. But says today “you’re lucky if you see a police car whizz through”.
In a mark of changed times, locals report in horror how an attempt by thieves to steal slate from St Kenelm’s roof was only thwarted by a burglar alarm last week. Others churches nearby have been successfully targeted.
Life in Sixties Church Enstone was hardly swinging.
Mrs May’s was a daddy’s girl who would listen to cricket on the radio with the reverend.
Her unlikely hero was obstinate former Yorkshire and England batsman Geoff Boycott famed for his dogged hours spent at the crease.
Meanwhile mum Zaidee – whose name comes from the Old Testament — taught Theresa how to make scones.
It helped kick off a lifelong passion for cooking, with the PM currently the proud owner of more than 100 cookbooks.
Earl Grey tea fan Mrs May, who is still a churchgoer today, says of vicarage life: “You didn’t think about yourself. The emphasis was on others.”
Villagers remember her father as a serious and devout man doing his rounds of parishioners in the village by foot.
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Retired salesman David Bates, 80, who has lived in Enstone for 50 years, remembers Rev Brasier as a “tall fellow who walked with a bit of a stoop” who was very “pious”.
A cousin of Mrs May’s told us: “The impression I got as child was that Uncle Hubert was more concerned about looking after his parishioners than he was himself.
“He was more interested in their welfare and spiritual wellbeing than he was in day-to-day things like, for example, cutting the lawn.
“He was very clever. He had a very quick mind and whenever I was in conversation with him, he seemed to be extremely knowledgeable. I’m guessing that’s where Theresa got it from.”
Mrs May was sent to the now-closed Heythrop Primary School nearby.
She revealed of her first day there: “I remember arriving at school screaming my head off because I didn’t want to leave my mother.
“So I had to be carried into the class in the arms of the headmistress who announced to the rest of the class: ‘Look what a silly little girl we’ve got here’.
“Heythrop Primary was a very small school with only 27 children in the whole school, and when I left there were only 11 children.
“Mrs Williams, the headmistress was the only teacher.
“I also remember that when the sun shone we used to take our desks outside, and sometimes when the ice cream van came we all got an ice cream if we had been very good.”
Her father’s public service shaped young Theresa’s desire to enter politics.
The new Prime Minister once said: “Working with people and speaking were embodied by my father. It was a natural environment to seek a political future.
“He didn’t sit you down and give you a lecture, it was more by conversation generally.”
Mrs May decided to become an MP aged 12. A friend says it was “a calling, a vocation - she doesn’t think of it as work.”
The world outside the conservative confines Church Enstone beckoned.
Theresa attended the now-closed private school St. Juliana’s Convent School for Girls in Begbroke, ten miles down the road.
Then in 1970 the Reverend Brasier was made vicar of Wheatley, a large village east of Oxford.
Then, aged 13, she won a place at Holton Girls’ Grammar School and was a pupil there when it became the comprehensive Wheatley Park School in 1971.
The Rev Brasier had become priest at Wheatley that year with the family moving into the vicarage around the corner from the school in London Road.
The school’s head teacher today, Kate Curtis, says: There’s is a story about the school running an election and Mrs May standing as the Tory candidate.
“Apparently, she stood at the entrance to the old school house and gave a speech which was very impressive. I don’t know how she did.”
She went up to Oxford University – where she met husband Phillip - before a career in the City and then Westminster beckoned.
Yet her beloved father Hubert and mother Zaidee wouldn’t live to see her glittering rise.
In 1981 Hubert, then 64, was driving his Morris Marina from Wheatley to an evensong service at nearby Forest Hill.
His inquest heard how he edged forward from the central reservation of the busy A40 trunk road “into the path of a Range Rover”.
The Range Rover, with a driver and two passengers, attempted to brake but smashed at high speed with the Marina’s front wing.
Hubert was rushed to hospital but died a few hours later from head and spine injuries.
A few months later, Zaidee, wheel-chair bound with multiple sclerosis, also died. At the age of 25, Theresa was an orphan.
Back in the musty garage in Church Enstone, Mr Watts said: “They’ve put barriers up at the crossing where Mr Brasier died so it can’t happen again.
“He was a the reason she went into politics. He would have been incredibly proud of what she’s achieved.”