Edward Heath

They travelled to suit Heath’s budget rather than Seligman’s, which meant that discomfort was added to their other woes. The train from Berlin to Danzig was filled with drunken Austrians and they had to try to sleep in the luggage rack: when they had a meal with the consul next day, according to Seligman, Heath was half asleep and ‘didn’t utter a word the whole way through lunch except to say how bad the food was’. By the time they reached Warsaw it was obvious that war was imminent; they were sped on their way and hitch-hiked towards the frontier with the Polish army as it moved up to defend its country. Once in Germany things were still worse; the – far more formidable – German army was moving the other way and they had to battle against the tide. Suspicion of foreigners, particularly English-speaking foreigners, was even worse than it had been on the way out and several times they thought they were on the point of being arrested or beaten up. Eventually they arrived at Paris and called at the Embassy, to be told: ‘Unless you get out now you will never get out at all!’ The advice was perhaps unduly alarmist but the situation was indeed dire: Heath got back to Dover a week before war broke out.30

His Oxford career was over. He had reason to feel proud of his achievements. He had attained heroic status within the university – ‘That’s Teddy Heath. He’s going to be prime minister one day’, a new arrival among the women undergraduates – the future Mrs Anthony Barber – was excitedly informed. More important, his name was known in Westminster; visiting politicians had noticed him as a potential recruit to their ranks. Only in one way was he disappointed. He had read Modern Greats (PPE) and he would have liked to crown his triumphs with first-class honours. He knew that the time and effort which he had devoted to the Union, the OUCA, the Balliol JCR and his musical duties had made his task doubly difficult. ‘He would have done even better had he not been a man of wide and very active interests,’ wrote Lindsay. ‘I have the greatest admiration for Mr Heath’s energy, initiative and sense of responsibility.’ Such praise from Lindsay was most welcome but Heath had still hoped for more. ‘You seem to have got a very nice Second in the Schools, and I dare say that all things considered you are quite satisfied,’ wrote one of his tutors at Balliol consolingly. Heath did not think his Second was very nice and he was far from satisfied. He believed that, with just a little more application, he could have gained the coveted First.31

In this he was probably wrong. The notes which Lindsay made on the undergraduates, based on the reports of the various tutors, show that Heath was not felt to be distinguished academically. One don was ‘not impressed, uninspired work’, others contributed ‘fairly intelligent, decent, slow mind’; ‘No outstanding work; second class’; and even ‘stupid, lacks thought’. This was not the whole picture; some said that he was ‘v. intelligent’ or ‘can do v. good work’; but the overall picture was not that of a student for whom first-class honours could be expected.32 The economist Redvers Opie taught both Harold Wilson and Heath at Oxford and left notes on his pupils. Wilson had ‘exceptional intellectual ability and a remarkably comprehensive mind’; Heath, on the other hand, ‘was usually given a beta mark and criticised for trundling out run-of-the-mill views’.33 When he was writing his memoirs Heath got hold of Harold Wilson’s marks in Finals so that he could compare them with his own. He found that he had one beta+ while the rest were betas or beta–. Wilson got one beta+ and the rest alphas. The figures were not quoted in Heath’s memoirs.

If Heath had achieved all he did at Oxford and nevertheless gained first-class honours it would indeed have been a triumph. If, though, he had failed to become President of the Union and, in spite of the extra effort put into his work, had still gained only a Second, it would have been a sad waste. No one can doubt that he made the right decision and put his energies where they counted most.

THREE War

New graduates leaving Oxford at the end of the summer term of 1939 must have been aware that whatever career they planned was likely to be interrupted. It was still possible, however, that war would not come. If it did, it might last only a few months. The only sensible thing to do was to prepare for a peacetime future with a tacit awareness that all such plans would probably come to nothing.

For Heath the first and most important decision was whether he should pursue music as a career. As organ scholar at Balliol he had put in a more than adequate performance in college chapel; as a pianist too he was competent beyond the standards of the talented amateur. He had no illusions, however, that he would ever achieve greatness as an instrumentalist. To choose as his life work something – however enjoyable – in which he knew he would never progress beyond the second-rate would have been unacceptable to Heath. If music was to be his career it would have to be as a conductor. Heath already had more experience in this field than most musicians of his age. He had been largely responsible for conducting the Balliol Choral Society, one of the oldest and most distinguished of Oxford choirs. Since childhood, too, he had been involved with the Broadstairs carol singers and, even though less than twenty years old, he had taken over the running of their annual carol concert in the mid-1930s. The Mayor of Oxford’s Christmas Carol concert, conducted by Dr Armstrong, seemed to him a model of its kind and, despite the far smaller resources available, he decided that Broadstairs could do something similar. He conducted his first carol concert there in 1936; it was judged a great success and the tradition was established of an annual concert under Heath’s baton, which continued for some forty years. But did such modest achievements provide a base from which a professional career could be mounted? Heath consulted Sir Hugh Allen, Heather Professor of Music at Oxford and a man of vast influence in musical circles. If Heath made some money and went into politics, the possibilities were limitless, judged Allen. Probably he would end up as prime minister. If instead he became a conductor he would have to dedicate himself totally to it, and even then it would be a fierce struggle to get to the top. ‘I believe you can do it, but if so you must be prepared to be just as big a shit as Malcolm Sargent.’1

Heath might not have been put off by the thought of having to emulate Malcolm Sargent’s shittishness but the need to dedicate himself exclusively to the task was a serious deterrent. He knew that his heart was in politics. If a career in music would rule out politics for ever, it could not be right for him. It would have taken more encouragement than Allen was prepared to offer to make him reach a different conclusion. Thomas Armstrong, himself an organist of great repute and one-time Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, many years later heard Heath’s recording of the Beethoven Triple Concerto. ‘I sometimes wonder’, he wrote, ‘whether HPA[llen] was right, after all, and in spite of all you’ve done, to steer you away from a professional career in music.’2 Heath may sometimes have wondered the same thing, but he can never seriously have doubted that he had reached the best, the only possible conclusion.

A life in politics, therefore, was his firm objective. But the concept of the professional politician, without private means, who lived on his salary as an MP or worked his way up through the party organisation, was almost unknown in 1939. Heath would have to make his name, and with luck his fortune, in some other walk of life before he could begin to look for a seat in the House of Commons. The two safest professions for people of a musical bent, one friend told him, were ‘the BBC and school teaching’. The BBC would require ‘submission to an intolerable bureaucracy’, teaching was ill-paid and probably involved severing one’s ties with London.3 Neither appealed to Heath. A more attractive possibility, which offered a better chance of making money quickly, was the Bar. Heath had an excellent memory, a clear mind well adjusted to grasping the essential points in any problem, a well-honed capacity for debate and argument: all qualities required of a successful barrister. If he went to the Bar and prospered he could reasonably expect to have established himself within ten or, at the most, fifteen years; the route from the Bar to the House of Commons was a well-trodden one. Before he had left Oxford he had begun on the essential preliminary of eating his dinners at Gray’s Inn.

Even that course, however, posed financial problems. To spend another two years in study, unless supported by a scholarship, would have placed an unfair additional burden on the parents who had sacrificed so much for him. He had already been summoned to Gray’s Inn for an interview and had been led to believe that, if he turned up and made a good impression, a scholarship would probably be his for the asking. Before anything could be clinched, however, an opportunity arose to go to the United States on a debating tour. The chance was too good to miss, but it meant that he had to forgo the all-important interview. At the end of 1939, he heard that the scholarship had been awarded to someone else. ‘I had been relying on this to enable me to finish being called to the bar,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Of course, it would have been wonderful to think that after the war this money would have been waiting for me…Now this is impossible. I may have to give up the whole idea of law and go into something else…The temptation to get into politics in an era of reconstruction will be enormous.’ At least one of his friends thought that his loss of the scholarship was a blessing in disguise. ‘You have done very well for a C[hatham] H[ouse] S[chool] boy, something out of the usual,’ wrote A. C. Tickner. ‘The bar seems rather too conventional a finish for you. Hence my disappointment.’ If Heath had envisaged a spell at the Bar as anything more than a stepping stone on the way to a life in politics, Tickner’s disappointment might have been justified; as it was, the main cause for Heath’s chagrin at the loss of the scholarship was that it seemed to make more remote the time when he could hope to make his move into the House of Commons.4

The trip to the United States which cost him his scholarship had been arranged under a scheme by which two debaters from English universities crossed the Atlantic each year to go on a tour of American universities. Heath was to have been accompanied by his Balliol contemporary Hugh Fraser. When war broke out both young men volunteered for military service. Fraser, who had been training as a territorial, was at once called up. Heath was told that he would not be wanted for several months. The way was open, therefore, for him to go as planned to America. Instead of Fraser he was to share the platform with Peter Street, a former treasurer of the Oxford Union.

One Balliol contemporary doubted whether this was a good idea:

Were I you I would go to the war rather than to the USA, because, while the propaganda in America might be a more valuable contribution to Britain, there might be a number of people who would place an uncharitable construction on your absence from this country. After all, it is more important to do what the public think right than what you might think right! That sounds cynical, but it is true in politics. A good war record is of great assistance to a politician…

If ‘going to war’ had been a possible alternative Heath would certainly have taken it but there seemed little point in hanging around awaiting call-up when a far more interesting and potentially valuable way of using the time presented itself. If people chose to suggest that he was in some way running away or shirking his duty then they were welcome to do so. He and Street consulted the Foreign Office, were encouraged to go ahead with the tour and did so with alacrity.5

The Foreign Office did, however, issue one caveat. Public opinion in the United States was in a delicate state and there were many people who would be quick to resent what they might see as an attempt to push them into the war. Two brash students, holding forth about the duty of the Americans to join the British and the French in defence of Poland, might do considerable harm. Any such debate was to be avoided: like Basil in Fawlty Towers, they were not to mention the war. The difficulty about this was that the American students with whom they were to debate thought that the war by far the most interesting topic. The University of Pittsburgh dismissed the twelve possible subjects proposed by the British team and announced that the debate would be on the motion: ‘That the United States should immediately enter the war on the side of the allies.’ When Heath and Street demurred they were told that this was the published motion and that nothing else would be accepted. To refuse to appear would seem both churlish and chicken-hearted, to speak would be to brave the wrath of the Foreign Office and perhaps to provoke an international incident. In dismay, Heath appealed to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian. Not for nothing was Lothian known as one of the most ingeniously devious of politicians: they should agree to speak, he ruled, but only on condition that one proposed and one opposed the motion. That way nobody could claim that the visitors were trying to manoeuvre America into the war. The fact that the more eloquent and well-briefed of the speakers seemed always to be the one who favoured intervention could in no way be blamed on the British representatives.

Heath did not delude himself that his efforts had any marked impact on American public opinion. The most usual question – not easily answered – was why, if the war was being waged in support of Poland, Britain and France were not also at war with the other aggressor, Russia. They met very little out-and-out pacifism but did not feel that they had done much to shake ‘the final and all-compelling assumption that America must stay out of the war’.6 Some universities were content to abide by the choice of subject made by the visitors. At Brooklyn College the debate turned on what should be done after the war to secure a lasting peace. This was a topic on which Heath had already thought deeply and which had preoccupied him during his recent trip to Europe. In the debate he envisaged various possibilities, not mutually exclusive, but inclined to the view that the best hope was a federal Europe, a ‘United States of Europe…in which states will have to give up some of their national rights…There seems to be a better view for the future if we lean towards a federalism that can be secured either by joining with a small national group and/or big group, because this seems to be the most foolproof sort of thing you can get.’7 It was the first public airing of a view which, though from time to time modified, was to dominate his thinking for the rest of his life.

On his way back to England he mused on the differences between the New World which he had just visited and tired old Europe. America was a new country and ‘though it lacks dignity is filled with pulsating life’. Britain’s rulers, on the other hand, were ‘out of touch, uninspired, content to deal with new problems in an old way. The opposition is just as lifeless and tied to dogmas and formulae of which everyone is heartily sick.’ What was needed was a new breeze which would sweep away ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions, all those things which paralyse our national and individual life’. But it would not be enough to produce some prophet who would ‘talk in vague generalisations’; he must be able to conjure up visions in other people’s minds, but also ‘to think things through right to the bitter end, a leader who is practical and strong’. Who that leader might be and where he would spring from, he did not surmise. Given the astonishing self-confidence that was already so apparent it would be surprising if, at the back of his mind, he did not cherish a hope that it might one day be him. At the moment the Tory Party seemed a spent force. Could it be revived? Was he right in thinking that his future lay with its left wing rather than with ‘the Liberals, whose practical policy and mode of thought is much more in keeping with my own than those of many Conservatives; or the Socialists, most of whom are from my own “class” and are perhaps more concerned than many Conservatives with domestic problems?’ It was the issue that he had faced when he joined the Conservative Association at Oxford, and he reached the same conclusion. But the question still was how they were ‘to secure greater equality of opportunity and of wealth and abolish class distinction’. The Socialist recipes – confiscation of wealth, high taxation, nationalisation – repelled him: ‘If one has government control and planning it becomes national socialism and political control too often follows.’ But what was the alternative: spending to make work, deficit spending, the American New Deal? Such a policy would be risky but at least it would be positive and would offer the possibility of fruitful advance.8

He knew that such speculation was largely academic. Political activity would be at a low ebb until the end of the war and, anyway, he expected that he would quickly be called up and would have many more immediate preoccupations. His younger brother, John, was already with the infantry in France, yet Heath was kept hanging about. ‘I’m horribly bored,’ he told a Balliol friend some time in the early summer of 1940.

I’ve been waiting now since February…without anything really to do. Each time I’ve heard from them or pressed them I’ve been told I should be wanted in only a couple of weeks, with the result that it was impossible for me to get a temporary job to pass the time. I was called up once actually for the Buffs [John’s regiment] but two days before I had to report I received another notice saying ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ my calling-up notice was cancelled…I’m rather anxious to get in and get on with it…There is so much to do and, as ever, so little time to do it. What a struggle it will have to be, but what a magnificent opportunity.9

From Balliol, Lindsay had promised to do what he could to get Heath into military Intelligence, but either his attempt aborted or he forgot about it. When Heath finally came before the Board he found that he had been assigned to the Royal Artillery. He had every hope that he would be commissioned as an officer within a few months, but the basic training that had to be undergone by every gunner lay ahead of him. ‘I don’t think I regret what’s coming,’ he told his diary resignedly. ‘It may well be for the best.’ There would be hardships, of course: uncomfortable clothes, lack of privacy, gruelling hard work, difficult hours, ‘bad food served absolutely revoltingly’, but there would be good things too: fitness, discipline, relief from responsibility for a while. Living cheek-by-jowl with ‘people of whom he knew nothing, unintelligent people, uneducated people, unstimulating and unstimulatable’, was the thing that frightened him most. Yet he recognised that ‘if I could feel at the end that I knew them and what they expected from life it would be a good thing’. He prayed that there would be at least a few men ‘reasonably like people I’m accustomed to’; but at the same time he told himself that he should welcome the chance to escape from his background and the class with which he had been assimilated: ‘I have a desire, perhaps when analysed not very rational or even sane, to get “hard” like other men; to take the knocks they can take, to go wining and whoring with them. Yet whenever I meet them I feel repelled by their lack of intelligence and concern only with things like pay, leave and food. Perhaps my nature’s different.’10

When the call-up did eventually come in August 1940 Heath found that his nature was not so very different after all, or at least that physical exhaustion and a common resentment of the iniquities of the lance-bombardier in charge of his barrack room produced a sense of camaraderie and mutual tolerance among the recruits. By good fortune he found a fellow music-lover, a future director of the New York City Ballet, among the other novice gunners at the training camp near Storrington in Sussex; still more remarkably they found that the composer Sir Arnold Bax was a habitué of the local pub. Even without such resources, however, Heath would have found life at Storrington tolerable, almost enjoyable. It was comforting for him to know where he stood in relation to other people, exactly where his duties began and ended. He could not have endured for long his lowly status, the total absence of responsibility, but for the three months of basic training it suited him very well. Given his record, he would have had to do something badly wrong not to be selected for a commission; he made no such blunder and was duly sent as an officer cadet to Shrivenham in Wiltshire. His training there was as straightforward and as uneventful as at Storrington. In March 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and posted to a Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment at Chester. For the next three years and two months he shuttled around the United Kingdom, occasionally helping defend Britain’s cities against air attack, more often sitting around waiting for something to happen.

What quickly became evident was that Heath was a good soldier. Whether he had the qualities necessary for success at the highest level was never to be tested, but as a regimental officer he showed himself impressively calm, clear-headed, resolute and with marked organisational skills. One of his few faults, indeed, was a tendency to over-organise. When his battery was to move from the north prior to embarkation for France, for instance, he worked out every detail, even down to the seats the individual men would occupy, and produced a set of instructions so comprehensive that nobody could be bothered to read, let alone implement them. The results, as he ruefully admitted, were ‘completely catastrophic’.11 On this occasion he recognised his failing and resolved to correct it. But he never altogether conquered his conviction that every eventuality had to be prepared for, every problem foreseen. Time and again he was to be disappointed when things did not turn out as he had expected; each time it came as a disagreeable surprise.

At his level at least it was a fault generally on the right side: better too much organisation than too little or none at all. Successive commanding officers paid tribute to his talents. ‘I consider E. R. G. Heath to be the most capable officer I met in any department during the four years in which I had command,’ wrote Major Tyrell, when recommending Heath for a military MBE. ‘He had personality, drive and ability of the highest order. He was quick to grasp essentials and to formulate plans and his determination, energy and enthusiasm guarantee that they shall not miscarry. I find it difficult to present a fair picture of a man in whom I could detect no weakness of character, whose intellectual scope and integrity I could but admire and for whom I feel nothing but respect and affection.’ Colonel Chadd, who was to become a lifelong friend and make Heath godfather to his son, was equally complimentary. ‘At his interview,’ Chadd wrote, Heath told him that after the war, ‘he hoped to go into politics. Within a very short space of time Ted was held in the highest possible esteem by all of us – officers and other ranks alike – and we were quite sure that one day he could be prime minister.’ (Given that this was written in 1946 the officers and other ranks in question were remarkably perceptive.)12

Not everyone was so ecstatic. Tony Race, his site commander when he was posted near Liverpool, found him ‘mature and confident’ and admired his ‘stamina and efficiency’, but felt him to be ‘a little withdrawn. He hadn’t a warm personality.’ But even this accusation – which was to become all too familiar over the years – was denied by his admirers. ‘The men liked him,’ claimed Chadd. ‘He was never impatient with dullards or arrogant to people not so bright as himself.’ When he took over a battery from a major who had commanded it for several years, he was viewed with some suspicion. ‘We were none too happy,’ remembered the orderly room sergeant, James Hyde: