The Denis Thatcher Society: The Hub Club

Wouldn't it be cool to be a member of a society? I don’t mean our broad community, rather a smaller selective group of people, the type with clubhouses or secret handshakes. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, and other legendary societies have always been shrouded in intriguing mystery, raising questions such as: WHO are their members? WHERE do they meet? WHAT do they do at their meetings? And WHY do they exist in the first place? 

 

Fast forwarding about 300 years to the 1980s, another society is born, one still worthy of curious admiration. It is named The Denis Thatcher Society. In this society, I happen to know one not only a member but the founder himself. He is Charles E. Horner, my grandpa.

 

Now, after suggesting that The Denis Thatcher Society is on par with the Illuminati, I’m going to walk that back a lot. Sadly, the group is not secretive and its members are nearly public figures. The word “Society” even exaggerates its true identity: a joking group of husbands whose wives are more successful than they are. While not for the secrecy, The Denis Thatcher Society remains legendary, at least in my family history, for its whimsicality.  

 

Denis Thatcher was the husband of Margaret Thatcher, the first woman elected as a member to the British parliament, and she served as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. Denis epitomized the role of a husband whose wife was more prominent, so he was fondly chosen as the namesake of the Society. While Denis was not a member of the Society himself, he met up with the group one time at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. when he was already abroad in America. Denis is now Sir Denis Thatcher, having been knighted, so his life must have not been too bland as a political spouse. Likewise, my grandfather was no sitting duck. He was the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of State and the Associate Director of the US Information Agency during Ronald Reagan’s administration, and he has published three books on Chinese history (with a fourth on the way). However, after she taught English in New York, Chicago, Taiwan, and Washington DC, my grandmother, Constance Horner, became the director of the Office of Personnel Management during the H.W. Bush and Reagan administrations, overseeing more than 2 million employees and outranking my grandfather. 

 

When my grandfather received a note addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Constance Horner, he fully realized my grandma’s greater influence. In a goofy act of retaliation, he banded together with the other “lesser” male spouses to form The Denis Thatcher Society. He founded the club with James Schroeder, the husband of Patricia Schroeder, who was a prominent US Representative from Colorado. Like I mentioned before, the club was an interesting band of men; although my grandpa said that it was not “exclusive,” there were some rules. As taken from the Los Angeles Times, in an interview with member “R. James Woosley, a Navy undersecretary in the Jimmy Carter administration: ‘ . . . your spouse had to be appointed to a job you wish you had.’” There was one husband, John Heckler, whose wife Margaret Heckler was America’s ambassador to Ireland, and one time the group brought in Martin Ginsberg, husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for lunch. The Society would mainly spend their time together over lunch, as my grandpa put it, “a bunch of silly guys.” A rule of their lunches, however, was that they would dine at a club at which the wife was a member, not the husband, so he could charge the food to her account. 

 

I asked my grandfather what my grandma thought of the gig, and to my surprise, he told me that she barely thought of the club at all. I’m sure her life was incredibly busy at the time, but my grandpa made especially clear: “Connie [knew] me… I wouldn’t attach any significance to [the Society], frankly.” There was no worry of my grandma thinking that my grandfather was jealous or oddly enthusiastic; she knew him, and that was that. All of a sudden, I was pleasantly struck by the simplicity of the Society. They did not worry about how the club was perceived, since they merely enjoyed the company of one another. In my grandfather’s words, “[The club] was so lighthearted, you see. It didn’t make any effort to be deep, sociological, interpretive…” As he points out, there was no statement to the club, no profound reason behind its creation, “just for fun” more than anything else. The simplicity of the Society highlights what our greater society lacks today. My grandpa said, “One of the problems of the modern age that everything needs to be interpretive.” Can things just be without analysis? Can men just have their lunch? Can wives just do their high-falutin jobs? To that, Sir Denis would say, in truly knightley fashion, hear, hear! And all the Freemasons and the Iluminatis would clank their mugs! 

 

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-24-mn-1577-story.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1989/oct/07/past.fromthearchive

Interview with Charles Horner, May 10th, 2020