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In part this remoteness from the preoccupations of his contemporaries must have been fostered by the fact that music was his favoured pastime, and that the instrument he chose inevitably took him away from his fellow schoolboys. But he did not exclusively practise on the organ, and music also brought him further into the life of Chatham House. He won the Belasco Prize for the piano and increasingly began to experiment with conducting. By the time he left he had established a unique position as a leader among the school’s musicians. ‘I cannot speak too highly of the tremendous amount of work he has done,’ recorded an awe-struck music master. ‘He has been a help to me and an inspiration to the boys. As a conductor of choirs he has been outstanding…I am grateful to him for all he has done for me.’ This note, giving the impression that the master viewed Teddy more as a collaborator than a pupil, marked all his reports during his triumphant last year at Chatham House. In their eyes – and not only in their eyes; in the last year he won a prize for character awarded by the votes of all the boys of the fifth and sixth forms – he was a remarkable force for good in the school. ‘It will be long before his ability, character, personality and leadership have failed to leave their mark on Coleman’s,’ testified a grateful housemaster. The headmaster was still more lavish in his panegyric: ‘The purity of his ideals, his loyalty to them, and his sense of duty have made him outstanding among boys who have helped build the School. That his mental and moral worth may have the reward they deserve is my wish for him.’
It would be easy to assume from all this that Teddy Heath was a ghastly little prig, who should have been shunned by any boy of spirit. He was not: on the contrary, the recollections of contemporaries make it clear that he was on the whole well-liked as well as respected. Inevitably he was prominent among the school prefects: he was ‘a bit of a stickler’, one master remembered. ‘He was very down on kids who had their hands in their trouser pockets, or weren’t behaving well in the street in their school cap and blazer. He thought that breaking a school rule amounted to disloyalty to the school.’19 But though he was allowed to use a gym-shoe to beat recalcitrant schoolboys, he rarely availed himself of the opportunity. ‘Discipline and organisation,’ he told a television interviewer in 1998, were of paramount importance, but need not involve harsh rule. ‘I carried out my responsibilities, of course,’ he replied loftily, when asked if he had often resorted to physical punishment. His popularity was established when the school held a mock election in January 1935 to choose one of the boys as prime minister. Teddy stood as the national government candidate and fought an enterprising campaign: persuading the local MP to write a letter in his support and taking advantage of a sudden snow storm to arrive early at school and tramp out a gigantic ‘VOTE FOR HEATH’ on the lawn in front of the main entrance. He won a landslide victory.20
The energy he spent on enterprises of this kind slightly alarmed the headmaster. ‘He must not jeopardise his own interests by giving too much time to sidelines – either in or out of school,’ warned Mr Norman. As well as music, Teddy in his last two or three years proved an enthusiastic actor, playing important roles in most of the school’s productions and featuring as the Archangel Gabriel in the annual nativity play. He also took eagerly to debating, proposing successfully, at various times, that sweepstakes, Sunday cinemas and capital punishment should be abolished and that the House would, in defiance of the recent vote in the Oxford Union, be prepared to fight for King and Country. ‘Its present flourishing condition is largely due to his efforts,’ the master in charge of the Debating Society appreciatively recorded.
Another extramural activity which profoundly influenced his thinking was a school trip to Paris in the spring of 1931. ‘It was the most exciting event of my life so far,’ wrote Heath some forty years later. ‘It was this which embedded in me a lifelong curiosity about every other part of the world and a determination to see for myself before I formed judgments about other people’s customs, traditions and way of life.’21 This somewhat portentous declaration perhaps overrates the significance for a fifteen-year-old schoolboy of a brief shuffle round the more obvious sights of Paris leavened by a furtive escapade to the Folies Bergère. In fact the expedition was more memorable for Teddy because it included his first visit to an opera, Carmen at the Opéra Comique. This experience heralded an addiction to opera-going which persisted throughout his life. The Parisian trip, however, failed to herald any similar addiction to the French language; Heath’s French remained appalling, in accent, syntax and vocabulary, and some of the most important conversations of his life had to be conducted through an interpreter.
The trip to Paris was organised by a Dr Woolf, who included Teddy in the party even though all the other boys were from another school. Teddy – keen, cheerful, friendly, intelligent, deferential without being obsequious – had a capacity for gaining the interest of older men in a way which even the most prurient would have agreed was free of any undertone of sexuality. Another such patron was Alec Martin, a future chairman of the auctioneers Christie’s and a considerable authority on painting. Martin owned a large house in the neighbourhood for whose upkeep William Heath was responsible. He met Teddy, decided the boy was worth cultivating and took to asking him over when there were guests. He remained a friend until he died in 1971. From him Teddy learned to look at and enjoy pictures; he was never to be an expert but he had a good eye and a shrewd collector’s instinct. Martin advised him on his purchases and left him two valuable paintings by Sargent. Through Martin, Teddy met several distinguished painters. One of whom he missed out on, though, was Walter Sickert. In 1934 Sickert bought a home in St Peter’s-in-Thanet. Teddy used to bicycle regularly past his house and often saw paintings hanging on the clothes line to dry, including the celebrated if artistically insignificant portrait of King Edward VIII, painted from a photograph. In this case, though, his charms failed to prevail. Once he took a group of carol singers to Sickert’s house and, after the singers had done their bit, rang hopefully at the front door. After a long pause the door opened a crack. ‘Go away!’ said Sickert.22
Another elderly admirer brought into his life by his father’s building activities was the rich Jewish solicitor, Royalton Kisch. Kisch was an expert on roses and a considerable amateur musicologist. From the start he decided that Teddy had limitless potential and he was accustomed to say from time to time: ‘That boy will one day be prime minister.’ Arnold Goodman was a frequent visitor who well remembered the youthful Heath as a feature of Kisch’s home. ‘Although he was clearly a very intelligent boy and intensely interested in politics,’ wrote Goodman, ‘I never shared Kisch’s view about his future.’ He told one of Heath’s biographers that he thought Teddy ‘an eager, questing person who was looking for founts of experience; founts of sophistication, founts of knowledge…He was not at all a man on the make.’ What most impressed Goodman was that, when Kisch was a very old man and Heath had become a public figure, Heath went on regularly visiting his old benefactor. ‘Seemingly he never forgot a friend,’ wrote Goodman, adding dryly that this was a quality ‘complemented, some critics may say, by too firm a recollection of his adversaries’.23
Musical, interested in painting and politics, religiously minded, reasonably well read: by most standards Teddy, when the time came to move on from Chatham House, was a formidably well-rounded individual. He had his limitations. ‘You were always a poor judge of a good film,’ wrote a friend in 1935. ‘Mickey Mouse seems to be the only “actor” who interests you.’24 He was intellectually unambitious and of limited imagination. Though his essay on Keats was judged to be ‘fairly well done’ there is no evidence that poetry held any joys for him. He paid little attention to the appearance of the buildings or countryside around him. But he was still better informed and had far wider interests than most of his contemporaries. His masters took it for granted that whatever college at Oxford or Cambridge he favoured would be grateful to receive him and would smooth his way with scholarships. The colleges proved to be less enthusiastic.
First, in 1934 he tried for music scholarships at St Catherine’s, Cambridge and Keble, Oxford. Both were denied him. Next he applied for a Modern Greats scholarship at Balliol. Charles Morris, the Tutor for Admissions, asked him what he wanted to do in life. Architecture was by now long forgotten; his most ardent wish, he replied, was to be a professional politician. ‘I don’t think I ever heard any other schoolboy answer a similar question in these terms,’ admitted the Tutor. He was rejected on other grounds. Though his economics were close to being of Exhibition standard, his general work was not so good and his French was lamentable. ‘You will understand,’ the Tutor wrote consolingly to Norman, ‘that it is not so much a question of a candidate being weak in some subjects as of his being sufficiently better than the other candidates.’ Balliol would be happy to accept him as a Commoner. He was still very young, however. If he were to stay on for another year at Chatham House, he might well get an Exhibition. Norman discussed the matter with Teddy’s parents and established that, though they were prepared to keep him at school for another year, they did not think they could possibly afford to send him to Oxford without some kind of scholarship. May 1935 was pencilled in for the next attempt.25
Teddy, however, grew restive. In January 1935 he wrote directly to the Tutor for Admissions at Balliol. The letter was cautiously phrased but suggested that he was well placed to win a scholarship worth £80 a year to Cambridge. If he was to get an Exhibition or scholarship to Balliol, how much would it be worth? If the purpose of the letter was to enhance his value in the eyes of Balliol, it was unsuccessful. The reply was discouraging. ‘It seems to me that you can hardly afford to take the risk of letting the possibilities at Cambridge go by in favour of an examination in May which (so far at any rate as this College is concerned) has only got one £100 award.’ If an Exhibition worth £40 would give Heath the support he needed, then his chances were obviously better, but even at that level an award was far from being a certainty.26
Teddy concluded that a bird in the hand was worth more than a – probably pretty speculative – bird in the bush, and decided to stick with Balliol. He duly tried again in May 1935. The bird turned out not to be in the hand after all. Perhaps his extracurricular activities had proved too distracting, perhaps he had grown stale. He did no better in economics and decidedly worse in literature: his essay earned a derisory gamma+. ‘On balance he does not appear to have made any marked advance,’ the Tutor for Admissions concluded depressingly.27 Once more his parents were consulted. In the intervening twelve months William Heath had grown slightly more prosperous, the acclaim for Teddy at Chatham House had become still more fervent: the Heaths decided that, whatever the sacrifice involved, their son must accept the place at Balliol which the college was still happy to offer him. The new term began in October 1935. ‘It will be my last letter to you before you go up,’ wrote his former schoolfriend, Ken Evans, on 1 October, ‘so take my warning. Don’t get drunk at the first dinner, it looks bad.’28 He was clearly joking. No one who knew Teddy Heath in 1935 could have believed that the advice was necessary.
TWO Balliol
Balliol in the 1930s was not quite the intellectual powerhouse which it had been before the First World War, but it was still one of Oxford’s leading colleges and as likely as any other to produce the next generation of political leaders. For Heath it had another salient advantage; it was not even slightly smart. Its uncompromisingly ugly architecture and the – by contemporary standards – unusually polyglot or at least polychrome nature of its student body meant that it was derided by the more conventionally snobbish of the undergraduates. The year Heath went up, Korda’s epic Sanders of the River was playing in Oxford cinemas. At one point a canoe-load of ferocious black warriors scudded furiously down the river in pursuit of the fleeing hero. It became a ritual that shouts of ‘Well rowed, Balliol!’ should ring round the auditorium at this point. Such mockery only enhanced the self-esteem of the members of Balliol, whose bland consciousness of their own superiority ensured that they would assume that any hostility was based on jealousy.
As well as being cosmopolitan, Balliol prided itself on being socially inclusive. Half the undergraduates came from public schools, a handful from patrician families. In some colleges this led to the formation of uneasy cliques; no doubt some such social divisions were to be found at Balliol but they were deplored by the great majority of the undergraduates and practised only surreptitiously. ‘What little snobbery there was tended to be intellectual rather than social,’ wrote Heath, ‘and, to my delight as well as my surprise, I soon found myself mixing easily with freshmen from almost every conceivable background.’1 Any undergraduate who let his snobbishness obtrude would have had to reckon with the formidable Master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay. Lindsay was a former Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow University whose resolute radicalism was tempered by openness of mind and a tolerance of almost any point of view except the bigoted and the stupid. He liked Heath from the start: ‘v.attractive chap’, he wrote in the ‘handshaking notes’ which he kept to remind himself of the salient points about all the undergraduates.2 ‘No background’ was a slightly cryptic additional comment; if it meant that Heath almost unconsciously distanced himself from his roots, it would have been justified. Heath never made a secret of his origins or in any way appeared ashamed of them, but he felt family and university to be two widely distant sectors of his life and saw no reason to mix them. Throughout his life he tended rigidly to compartmentalise his interests, his activities and his personal relationships. During his four years at university his parents visited him only once or twice, his brother John seems never to have come. He was not ashamed of his family; it was just that it had no place in his Oxford life.
‘The College is delightful,’ Heath told his old headmaster. ‘Of course, not an architectural wonder, but it has its own, to me, very pleasing atmosphere. The dons are very nice…Here too everybody mixes very well, unfortunately not always the case.’3 Heath did not strive consciously to adapt to his new surroundings but, in the words of his tutor, the future Lord Fulton, he was not one of those working-class undergraduates who remained ‘conspicuously loyal to their social background’.4 It was while he was at Oxford that his accent evolved into the slightly uneasy compound which endured until his death: plummy upper-middle-class varied by disconcerting vowel sounds that betrayed a more plebeian background. When Nigel Nicolson, an Oxford contemporary, referred to his ‘cockney accent’, Heath remarked indignantly that he had not a trace of London blood in his make-up. ‘I think it is a mixture of rural Kent and Wodehousean Oxford,’ suggested his sister-in-law. Whatever its origins, Heath was aware of the fact that his accent was noticeably different from that of most of those with whom he consorted. Either he was unable to change it or, more probably, had no wish to do so. More than most politicians, he genuinely disdained cheap popularity and eschewed anything that might be interpreted as an attempt to win favour by pretending to be something other than what he was. He would not ostentatiously parade his social origins but nor would he excuse them or conceal them. Nicolson said he thought Heath’s accent ‘counted against him a little’. Given the progress that lay ahead, it can not have counted much.5
Not that everything was easy. Heath was certainly one of the poorest undergraduates at Balliol. A few came from similarly humble homes but most of those had scholarships or grants to help them. Heath had a small loan from the Kent Education Committee and another from Royalton Kisch, but beyond that every penny that he spent was an extra burden on his hard-pressed parents. He had no car and could not afford the train fare, so he never went home during the term; he bought no books unless they were essential for his work; he did not get a single gramophone record or anything on which to play it until his second year. ‘I like to have things of my own,’ he told a Guardian interviewer in 1970, ‘pictures of my own, even if they are poor pictures.’6 The hunger to acquire, which became so marked later in his life, must have been fuelled during that bleak first term at Balliol.
Relief came soon. He had barely installed himself before he learnt that an organ scholarship worth £80 a year would be coming free in December. He was encouraged to apply. ‘I feel you may think it strange that somebody already up here should compete for an award which would allow someone else to come up,’ he wrote apologetically to Mr Norman, ‘but I feel from the financial point of view that I must.’ He duly won the scholarship and was installed as organ scholar by the first term in 1936. The award made all the difference between penury and modest comfort. The duties – playing the organ at evensong on Sundays and at the 8 a.m. morning service on weekdays – might have seemed oppressive to an undergraduate used to late nights and heavy drinking, but neither Heath’s finances nor his inclinations led him into such excesses. According to David Willcocks, the eminent organist and conductor, who heard him play the organ in Salisbury Cathedral shortly after the war, he was ‘an intellectual rather than a musician’ but played ‘reasonably fluently’. The praise is hardly ecstatic, but Heath was quite good enough to get pleasure out of it and to satisfy the dons of Balliol. He enjoyed still more his involvement in the Balliol concerts, which were held in Hall every other Sunday evening, and with the Balliol Players. For the latter, he composed the music for their production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs. The performance was directed by an American Rhodes Scholar called Walt Rostow, who was to attain fame, or perhaps notoriety, as foreign affairs adviser to Lyndon Johnson. Heath was ‘one of the two or three most promising men I met at Oxford’, Rostow remembered: ‘a rare example of purposefulness, amiability and reserve’.7
The reserve was a characteristic noted by several of his contemporaries. Another American Rhodes Scholar, the future ambassador, Philip Kaiser, found him ‘agreeable and congenial’ but ‘not a gladhander…there was a little bit of a quality which comes out more prominently in the person presented today [1970] – essentially self-protective, in a certain obliqueness about him which came through in a rather charming way in those days’. He was ‘somebody one noticed’, remembered another contemporary, Julian Amery. ‘One found him in all kinds of groups, but he was in a way rather detached from any of them.’ But his presence in those groups was more generally noticed than his remoteness from them. Denis Healey, who knew him well and was secretary to the Junior Common Room when Heath was president, found him affable and companionable, well-liked by every element of the college. Hugh Fraser, who was one day to stand against Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party, thought him ‘extremely nice, agreeable, friendly’ though he noted a certain lack of ebullience: ‘There was nothing madcap about him.’ Nicholas Henderson, another future ambassador, denied even the lack of ebullience; Heath was ‘as gregarious, as boisterous, as friendly as anyone at Oxford’. Henderson’s father had a house in Oxford where his son held occasional parties. Heath was their ‘life and soul’, one of the most popular and sought-after of the undergraduate guests.8
Oxford was predominantly masculine; it was an inward-looking society in which Sebastian Flyte and Harold Acton flourished extravagantly while the rugger hearties threw stones through their windows or ducked them in Mercury. Heath was neither aesthete nor hearty. Such evidence as exists suggests that he recoiled nervously even from those intense but sexless emotional relationships which were so often to be found among the undergraduates. In August 1939, an unidentified ‘Freddy’ wrote to remonstrate. ‘Now, Teddie, I am going to be very frank,’ he began. ‘Please tell me what it is you don’t like about me. I hate being on anything but really friendly terms with people, especially when as nice as you. Your attitude towards me last term was obvious…It upset me quite a bit…I remember you behaved in the same way last year about Michael…If it is just jealousy, you have no justification for it…we all want to be your friends.’ Without the context it is impossible to say how much or how little such letters mean, but it seems clear that Freddy was demanding a greater and more demonstrative commitment than Heath was willing, or perhaps able, to give.9
Nicko Henderson recalled that, brightly though Heath had shone at parties, he could not remember ever seeing him talking to a girl. In Oxford in the 1930s there were not many girls to talk to, but there are enough anecdotes from this period, indeed from every period of his life, to show that he was ill at ease with women. An old acquaintance from Chatham House urged him to venture into the brave new world of feminine society. ‘I think it very doubtful if one can make friends of the old schoolboy type if one has left school,’ he chided his backward friend. ‘I am certain that female friendship is the natural thing to take its place. I think that it’s unnatural for adults to form new friendships of the previous type: it obviously has had for part of its basis an emotional admiration which is transferred to one’s opposite sex.’10 Heath had never been strong on ‘emotional admiration’; certainly he had no intention of transferring it to the opposite sex.
He did not actually dislike women, indeed he was happy to consort with them if they were attractive and intelligent, but his appreciation of their attractiveness was purely aesthetic and his expectation was that they would not have much to say that was worth listening to. The consorting, if it took place, had to be at arms’ length; he shrank from physical contact with both men and women, but whereas an effusive gesture from a man would have been distasteful, from a woman it was repugnant. Nigel Nicolson remembered walking with Heath along the banks of the Cherwell and arriving at the spot known as Parsons’ Pleasure where undergraduates traditionally bathed in the nude. Heath was shocked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘anyone might come along. Girls might come along.’ Denis Healey mentioned to Heath that a mutual friend was spending the weekend with his girlfriend in Bibury. ‘You don’t mean to say that they are sleeping together?’ asked a dismayed Heath. Healey replied that he had no idea but thought it probable. ‘Good heavens,’ said Heath. ‘I can’t imagine anyone in the Conservative Association doing that!’ Certainly he felt no inclination to allow women into those sanctums of Oxford life from which they were still excluded. When the admission of women to the Union was debated in 1938 Heath declared: ‘Women have no original contribution to make to our debates and I believe that, if they are admitted to the floor of this House, a large number of members will leave.’11
Most young men, even if little preoccupied by sex, find it desirable to affect more enthusiasm than they actually feel. Heath was not wholly above such posturing. ‘I hope you enjoyed the Carnival,’ wrote a friend, ‘and did not run after young ladies like you did last year, and call to them from windows.’ He was alleged to have taken a fancy to a pretty young blonde, Joan Stuart, though he ‘never got his arm beyond her shoulder – not even around her waist’.12 The limits which he imposed on his relationships with women were well exemplified by the case of Kay Raven. Kay was the friendly and attractive daughter of a Broadstairs doctor, socially a notch or two above the Heaths but by no means in another world. From Heath’s point of view, indeed, she was alarmingly accessible. He felt at home with her, enjoyed their games of tennis, talked to her about music, but that was that. To his family she seemed the perfect match; Mrs Heath talked confidently of her son’s eventual engagement. Kay would happily have concurred. When Heath went up to Balliol she missed him greatly and began to bombard him with letters; ‘quite honestly, though I don’t mean to be sentimental, it does help to write and makes Oxford seem as though it was not really on another planet’. The response was not what she had hoped for – Heath’s replies seem to have been friendly but distancing. ‘I have a feeling you may be fed up with me and my wretched correspondence,’ she wrote a fortnight later. ‘That is what is on my mind, Teddy. I may just be rather depressed.’ She was rather depressed; her father noticed it and cross-examined her, and Kay evidently admitted that she was in love. She had promised Heath that she would not talk to her parents about their relationship. ‘I am afraid that through this I have broken my word, but I told him that I didn’t want Mummy to know. I am awfully sorry that this has happened, the curse of living at home is that parents are so observant…it does not mean, of course, that we are committed to anything, that would be foolish seeing how young we both are. It is damnable your being so far away.’
Heath probably thought there were certain advantages in distance; he was genuinely fond of Kay, he got as close to loving her as he was ever to come with any woman except his mother, but at least once the war was over he seems never to have contemplated accepting the total commitment which is or should be involved in marriage. Perhaps he felt he had outgrown Kay, perhaps he did not feel financially secure, probably most of all he had a deep-seated preference for living his life on his own, without the responsibilities and distractions of matrimony. Kay continued to hope but the hopes grew increasingly more wistful; eventually she accepted that she would have to settle for friendship and that Heath was going to find it difficult to find time even for this in an increasingly crowded life.13
What most conspicuously filled that life was politics. Heath was a Conservative by nature almost from childhood. His father had taught him that the freedom of the individual was the highest goal and that socialism and liberty were incompatible. Heath found much that was appealing about the Liberal Party but, supremely practical in disposition, concluded that it had no real chance of capturing power and should therefore be avoided. That left the Conservatives. But though he never doubted that it was to the Tories that his allegiance was due, he found certain elements in the party snobbish, self-interested and out-of-date. The true Conservatives were ‘compassionate men who believed in opportunity, and a decent standard of living for all’. Baldwin, the then prime minister, he felt had the right instincts but was stuck in the past, slave of a class system which held the country back. Chamberlain was even worse: ‘infinitely boring’, a ‘small-time businessman’. His heroes were Churchill, Macmillan and most of all – if only because he held high office while the other two were in the wilderness – Anthony Eden. He heard of Eden’s resignation in early 1938 when he was in the rooms of Philip Kaiser. ‘I remember that Ted said very little that night,’ recalled Kaiser. ‘It affected him, Eden was important to him…a great thoughtfulness settled on him…He thanked me and then walked out.’ But he never thought of leaving the party. He had nowhere else to go. He would stay with the Conservatives and give his support to those of its leaders who wanted to change it. In the end, he had little doubt, he would contribute to that change himself.14
Lindsay’s Balliol was on the whole a left-wing college. Though Heath became president of the Junior Common Room, his immediate successor was Denis Healey; Kaiser followed Healey but the president after that was Roy Jenkins. When Heath joined the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), its membership in Balliol was so sparse that he was immediately appointed secretary of the college branch. He soon found that Balliol was not unusual in its politics; in the mid-1930s most of the more politically conscious undergraduates were to the left and a fair number of them, believing that no other effective force was combating the growth of fascism, were Communist as well. Heath therefore joined an organisation that, if not moribund, was at least unfashionable. His energy and persuasive powers were quickly recognised and in June 1937, against inconsiderable opposition, he was appointed president of the OUCA. His biographer George Hutchinson wrote that he built up its membership from 600 to around 1,500. The previous president, Ian Harvey, a Conservative politician whose career was prematurely ended when he was arrested cavorting with a guardsman in the bushes of St James’s Park, claimed that the achievement was really his, Heath was only moving further down a path that had already been prepared for him. There may be some truth in this, but Heath was rightly considered a president of outstanding ability, under whose leadership the OUCA prospered at a time when it might well have suffered an almost terminal decline. He canvassed vigorously when Professor Lindemann, the future Lord Cherwell, stood as Conservative candidate in a by-election in 1936 and, as a reward, was asked back to the Professor’s rooms when Churchill came down to support his friend and scientific adviser. It would have been surprising if Heath had not been impressed by the grand old warrior. ‘I was struck not only by the force and clarity of his arguments but by his sheer presence,’ wrote Heath in his memoirs. He ‘reinforced my determination to help articulate and later implement a new brand of Conservatism’.15
