FEATURES: ROYAL FAMILY AND A PRESIDENT OF USA... THE LIFE OF A CHAUFFEUR
As she prepares to turn 100 next month, Millie Forster reflects on a fascinating life behind the wheel involving Royals, Prime Ministers, and a US President. Chris Burn reports.
I got a phone call from the police to say there is a demonstration and it wasn’t safe for either of us to be in the car so we will take her. There were people there shouting ‘Thatcher, the milk snatcher’. Millie Forster, on the day she was supposed to drive Margaret Thatcher in the North-East.
WHEN MILLIE Forster and her husband Reg were courting, cars were such a rare commodity that he was well-known in their village as the only person to own one. But it was Millie who ended up making a career out of life in an automobile – working as a driver in cavalcades that chauffeured royalty, Prime Ministers, and a US President.
As Millie, who lives in the picturesque North Yorkshire village of Melsonby and was born in Dipton in County Durham, prepares to turn 100 on March 21 she is taking the opportunity to look back on her unusual and often-secretive job as a member of the Government Car Service.
Millie spent 16 years in the role until her retirement in 1980, but almost lost the job after just six weeks. One of her first assignments was being part of a cavalcade taking Princess Margaret to Gateshead for the opening of a hotel and she made the mistake of talking to a reporter about the visit – she had wrongly assumed he was part of the royal delegation.
Millie, who had to sign the Official Secrets Act before starting work, was quoted in the press saying: “I only joined the service six weeks ago and this is my first Royal visit. Usually I have to drive Inland Revenue tax inspectors about.”
She said of Margaret’s visit: “I was rather bothered about it all at first. But didn’t she look nice in her blue suit?”
Millie, who still has the newspaper clipping, says today: “I nearly got the sack because I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
But after a somewhat inauspicious start, Millie was happily kept on and she went on to spend years driving senior politicians and civil servants around the North-East and being involved in regional visits by the Queen, President Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher among many other illustrious people.
She says after the chastening Princess Margaret experience, she kept her counsel about the things she heard being discussed. “I used to hear lots of conversations but never dared to even tell my husband, I used to just forget about it.”
Millie is one of three sisters. Her father delivered coal by horse and cart but died when she was just five after getting badly injured when his horse bolted. Her mother had to raise the girls alone, working in a shop to help pay the bills. Millie left school at 15 and moved to London in the mid1930s where a cousin was working in domestic service and arranged a job for her.
She returned up North once it became clear war with Germany was on the horizon, but life in the NorthEast was not entirely safe as the shipyards of nearby Newcastle were targeted in German bombing raids. Almost 400 people in the local area were killed in raids in 1940 and 1941.
Millie recalls: “We got to know the different sounds of the German planes and our planes. We spent a lot of time in air raid shelters. At first, it seemed a bit of fun. We had a gramophone in there and would take music with us. But we learnt to be frightened of moonlit nights because the planes seemed to follow the rivers to do their raids.”
Millie got what was to prove to be the first of several transport-related jobs – working as a bus conductor, which involved taking miners who were exempt from military service to their pits.
Midway through the war and at the age of 22, she married Reg Forster who worked in the steel trade and their son Keith was born in 1944. After the war ended, she got a job as a van driver for a pram shop in Darlington, travelling sometimes as far as Scotland to make deliveries.
“Just after the war, I learnt to drive and passed my test. I didn’t ask Reg and did it all on the quiet,” Millie explains. “During the war women had taken over men’s jobs and even in a butcher’s shop, you would see women running it. We all became independent and liked mixing with people. I loved driving and I had always wanted to drive. My instructor said to me ‘You are a born driver’ because I didn’t need so many lessons.”
She stayed in the job at the pram shop until she was 44 but a friend told her about a vacancy with a regional branch of the Government Car Service.
After travelling down to Leeds for an interview, she got the job.
Millie was part of a chauffeur service for a royal delegation when the Queen opened the Tyne tunnel in 1967 and in 1977 had a key role to play when US President Jimmy Carter, accompanied by Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, was met by 20,000 people in Newcastle and famously greeted the crowd with “Howay the lads!”
She was part of the cavalcade on the day and also had the responsibility in the run-up to the event of delivering by hand the VIP invites to local grandees and collecting their responses a week later.
She says Margaret Thatcher received an altogether less-friendly reception when the then-education secretary – who had caused controversy by abolishing free school milk for children aged seven to 11 – visited Darlington. Millie, who had been originally designated as her driver, recalls: “I got a phone call from the police to say there is a demonstration and a lot of people at the station and it wasn’t safe for either of us to be in the car so we will take her. There were people there shouting ‘Thatcher, the milk snatcher’.”
One of her most regular passengers was the North West Durham MP and Government minister Ernest Armstrong, who she used to take to the train station on Sunday nights so he could go down to Parliament. She says they often used to share fish and chips and still has a letter he wrote to her thanking her for her help with organising President Carter’s visit.
But Millie says not all of her passengers were such gentlemen. “There was one man who was a person of no real importance who put his hand on my leg when I was driving. It was the days before seatbelts. I put on the brake and he nearly shot through the window. I said, ‘What did you do that for?’
“One MP I had to drop off at a hotel asked me to come up for a nightcap. I had a couple of questions like that but I always had an answer ready and would say something like ‘I’m going to dinner with friends’.”
Shortly after retiring in 1980, Millie and Reg moved to Melsonby after making friends with people in the village. Their son Keith was living in America with his young family and in 1992, Millie and Reg moved out there for five years before returning to Melsonby. The couple celebrated their diamond anniversary in 2003 but Reg died in 2005.
Millie painted her front room herself last year and says she can’t believe she is coming up to 100. “I don’t feel 99 but I don’t know what I am supposed to feel like. I have done everything I really wanted to do and I have had a really good life.”