Buch lesen: «Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography»

ONE The Child and the Boy

Two future British prime ministers were born in 1916. Both belonged to what may loosely be called the lower-middle class and found their way by scholarships to grammar school and Oxford, where both were strikingly successful. Both served at one time in the civil service and took a precocious interest in politics. Both prided themselves on their knowledge of economics and were endowed by nature with prodigious memories. One was prime minister from October 1964 to June 1970 and from February 1974 to March 1976; the other occupied 10 Downing Street for the intervening years. In all other ways, few men can have been less similar than Harold Wilson and Edward Richard George Heath.

In fact, for those who take an interest in such arcane distinctions, the Wilsons were in origin slightly grander – or at least less humble – than the Heaths. They had been lower-middle class for several generations; the Heaths had only recently taken their first steps from the working classes. Ted Heath’s first identifiable ancestor, his four times great-grandfather, Richard, had been a fisherman living in Cockington in Devonshire at the end of the eighteenth century. His son William followed the same calling but with scant success. By 1819, when William was 56 and presumably too old for an active seafaring life, he found himself with fourteen children and no job and was forced to lodge a petition with Trinity House as having ‘no property or income whatever’. Undiscomfited, his son, Richard, also took to the sea, joined the Coastguard Service and, in 1831, was transferred to the new coastguard station in Ramsgate, Kent. Before migrating he had married a Somerset girl. Their son, George, Ted’s great-grandfather, was the last of the seafaring Heaths; he served with the merchant navy and ended his working days in charge of Ramsgate pier.¹

George married a local girl. Their son, Stephen, the first terrestrial Heath, did not notably improve the family’s prosperity. He went into the dairy business and at first did well, but then, according to his son William, ‘lost all his money and went on the railway’,² with the unglamorous task of moving passengers’ luggage between the station and the hotels. He survived this setback with equanimity and lived to the age of seventy-seven, invariably genial, frequently inebriated and loved by his grandson, Ted. He too married a Kentish girl, as did William, Ted’s father. Ted, therefore, was of solidly Devonshire and Kentish stock, with no tincture of more exotic blood in the five generations before his birth. In 1962 Iain Macleod, seeking Heath’s endorsement when a candidate for the Rectorship of Glasgow University, asked hopefully whether he could not scrape up some Scottish connection, however tenuous. His only claim, Heath replied, was that he had been educated at Balliol, a college which owed its existence to John de Balliol and Dervorguilla of Galway: ‘I do not know whether on this somewhat flimsy basis you will be able to build up a case which will secure the Nationalist vote.’³

William Heath was far more like his exuberant and outgoing father than his more unapproachable son. He was a ‘quiet and unassuming’ man, said Heath in his memoirs,⁴ but this does not correspond with the testimony of many of those who knew him well. He was ‘a dear man’, said Nancy-Joan Seligman; ‘heaven’, said Mary Lou de Zulueta; ‘a great hugger and kisser, even a bottom-pincher, to the occasional embarrassment of his son’, recalled Margaret Chadd.⁵ He loved parties: other people’s would do but it was best of all to be at the centre of his own. His jollity was not allowed to interfere with his work, however: he was enterprising, energetic and conscientious. By training he was a carpenter; he ended up as a builder with his own firm, small but still employing several workmen. Ted Heath took considerable pride in his father’s advance into the middle classes. In his biography, John Campbell mentioned that Heath had had to be dissuaded from suing Isis for describing his father as ‘a jobbing builder’. Heath scrawled angry denials against several of Campbell’s assertions but here he merely noted that it was the Sunday Express and not Isis which had used the phrase.⁶ William had all the fierce conservatism so often to be found in the small and struggling businessman. During the First World War he had been assigned to the Vickers armaments factory at Croydon and forced to join a union. ‘It was terrible,’ he remembered. ‘The union was all right, it was the way it was run. There was a clique of people in control and unless you were in the clique you couldn’t get anything past.’⁷ In his own life as a builder he resolved to have as little to do with unions as could be contrived, and he inculcated in his son a conviction that, whilst unions as an institution were acceptable, even desirable, they should never be allowed to run riot or to consider themselves above the law.

William Heath was a man of intelligence, common sense and limited education. The few letters to his son which survive in the archive at Arundells, Heath’s house in Salisbury, are sound in content but wayward in grammar and spelling; in one short letter we have ‘emportant people’, ‘busness’, ‘we planed our week’, ‘untill’, ‘they have wrote to him’ and a dearth of question marks and apostrophes. Possibly he suffered from what would now be diagnosed as dyslexia; certainly he left school at the age of twelve and never had time to continue his formal education. He never doubted its value, however, and was resolved that his children should have a better start than he did. In this ambition his wife wholeheartedly supported him.

Without Edith Heath, indeed, it is unlikely that Ted would have been launched so successfully on his vertiginous career. She was a Pantony, another Kentish family, and her father had been gardener in a big house a few miles from Broadstairs. She became lady’s maid to a rich, exacting but benevolent mistress and absorbed uncritically the values of propriety, decorum and unostentatious good-living which she found in the home of her employer. In his description of Edith Heath, John Campbell used the phrase ‘strait-laced’;⁸ Heath underlined it, usually an indication of disagreement. It seems apt enough. Certainly she tolerated, if perhaps silently deplored, her husband’s conviviality, but she kept a house that was resolutely clean and well ordered and dedicated herself, to an extent for which William had neither the time nor the inclination, to instilling in her elder son the habit of hard work and a burning hunger to succeed. ‘She was the driving spirit,’ a childhood friend of Heath’s remarked. ‘His father was a nice guy but without the drive his mother had. She was the one who encouraged…the ambitions.’ Heath felt her to be beyond reproach. ‘My mother was a wonderful woman,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘My lasting memory is of her beauty and calmness…At home we adored her for these traits and also because she was so supportive of us.’ Some felt her resolution verged on the implacable and detected in her not so much tolerance as contempt for the looser standards of her husband. Certainly she was strong-minded and convinced that her values could not be questioned, but she was sensitive and generous, ready to endure the shortcomings of anyone except herself and her beloved son. She missed no opportunity to inculcate her most cherished values in her children. As a Christmas present when he was eight Ted was given a leather commonplace book in which various improving thoughts had already been inscribed. The first was: ‘To get you must give, but never give to get.’ Some time later she added: ‘Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.’ Ted made little effort to improve on these but the book was still in his possession when he died.⁹

Different though they were, both physically and psychologically, William and Edith Heath were happy in their marriage. Edith may have been the stronger character and certainly it was her standards that prevailed at home, but she was wise enough to ensure that her husband never felt himself excluded or ignored. ‘In a marriage, nobody’s boss – I don’t believe in that,’ he told one of Heath’s biographers, and everything suggests he approved heartily of the way his wife was bringing up his children. They started life in St Peter’s-in-Thanet, a village now absorbed into the Kentish holiday resort of Broadstairs. Teddy – the use of ‘Ted’ seems to have become habitual during the Second World War, he was never known as ‘Edward’ – was born on Sunday, 9 July 1916. His middle names were Richard and George. Almost immediately the family abandoned St Peter’s to move inland to Crayford, where William Heath had been assigned to war work at the Vickers aircraft factory. Only a few months old, Teddy was spared the worst rigours of what must have been a miserable winter. Wartime privations were at their worst. ‘We had a ramshackle house,’ William Heath remembered, ‘and the wind used to whistle round it like a pack of wolves. I remember begging in the street for coal and potatoes…It was a terrible time.’ ‘Begging’, presumably, involved asking for an additional ration from under-supplied shopkeepers rather than soliciting from passers-by. William Heath was never unemployed and quite well paid – but the last two years of the war were exceptionally difficult. It may have been these problems which deterred the Heaths from adding to their family; at all events it was four years before Teddy acquired a brother, John.¹⁰

The difference between the two boys was quickly apparent. By the time he was eight or nine Teddy was conspicuously diligent and hardworking, with formidable powers of concentration and a distaste for anything bordering on frivolity. John, on the other hand, was amiable, messy, easygoing and almost entirely without ambition. He viewed his elder brother with a mixture of awe, incredulity and derision. Many years later the journalist John Junor had a conversation with John at a party and found him ‘a very dull chap indeed. Pleasant but commonplace.’ This was the general verdict. Ted Heath always denied hotly that he had been his mother’s favourite or had been given any special treatment. The evidence of those who knew the family well – Nancy-Joan Seligman, Araminta Aldington – is that, on the contrary, Edith Heath, without ever being consciously unkind to her younger son, lavished most of her loving attention on Teddy. She always put his needs first, said John’s widow, Muriel; it was taken for granted in the household that the normal rules of conduct were suspended for his benefit. ‘She spoiled Teddy rotten,’ recalled Margaret Chadd; whenever he came to stay with the Chadds he left his pyjamas all over the floor and assumed that somebody else would pick them up. The inevitable result was that John, finding that nothing was expected of him, responded by achieving nothing. At school one day he overheard two masters extolling Teddy’s virtues: ‘Of course his brother is nothing like…’ one of them added. John accepted without undue dismay the fact that he was ‘nothing like…’; Teddy took it for granted that he too was ‘nothing like…’; nothing like John nor like the generality of his schoolfellows. He grew in confidence while John resigned himself to rubbing along in contented obscurity.¹¹

Teddy began his schooling at a dingy little church school in Crayford. He learned enough to be well able to cope with the next stage of his education but his life did not really take off until the family returned to Broadstairs in 1923. Broadstairs then as now was an amiable little seaside resort, busy in summer, under-occupied in winter, with few buildings of distinction but many of quiet attractiveness. It prided itself on its connections with Charles Dickens: a suitably bleak Bleak House still looms over the seafront; plaques abound asserting that the author wrote this or that book while in residence; Heath’s favourite was a discreet notice proclaiming ‘Charles Dickens did not live here’. Though neighbouring Margate and Ramsgate were better equipped to handle yachts of any size, Broadstairs was rich in boats. In spite of their maritime antecedents, however, the Heaths were neither rich nor enthusiastic enough to own a boat themselves.

Once back in Broadstairs Teddy began to attend St Peter’s Church of England School. James Bird, the assistant headmaster, described how he presented himself ‘neatly dressed and completely self-possessed’ and handed over a transfer form from his school in Crayford which lauded his attainments in reading and arithmetic. John’s first wife, Marian, who wrote a mildly malicious account of her brother-in-law after her marriage broke up, quotes Mr Bird as saying that Teddy ‘was not a good mixer. He was inclined to be aloof.’ It was not her intention to paint a sympathetic portrait of her former husband’s family but in this case she seems to have been recording faithfully. To another biographer Bird spoke of Teddy’s ‘general cleanliness and wholesomeness and a certain aloofness – even as a small boy he was self-contained and purposeful’. It is not an entirely attractive picture. The headmaster’s report that he was ‘a good boy…earnest, painstaking and thoroughly well-behaved’ is almost equally daunting. That Teddy was a good influence at St Peter’s can be taken for granted; whether he got much fun out of it or gave much fun to others is more doubtful. Once his mother went up to his room and suggested that he was working too hard and should come down to join the family. ‘Mother,’ Teddy replied severely, ‘sometimes I think you don’t want me to get on.’ Self-discipline and a conscious distrust of emotional display were as evident at the age of ten as sixty or seventy years later. On a radio programme his interviewer Mavis Nicholson once asked him whether the Heaths had been demonstrative as a family. ‘As we were by nature a close-knit family it wasn’t necessary to demonstrate great emotion towards each other,’ he replied. ‘If people are demonstrating their emotions, there must be something lacking in the background.’¹²

Emotional austerity did not preclude an early and intense love of music. A cousin of his mother’s first introduced him to the piano, he began to take lessons, and his parents, at what must have been considerable financial sacrifice, invested in an instrument for him to play on. He was not the most amenable of pupils. ‘I was always in too much of a hurry,’ he confessed, and he was irritated by his teacher’s insistence that he should master one piece before moving on to another. ‘What I was after was the musical experience, the opportunity to express feeling and emotion in pieces of different kinds, according to my moods.’ It would be an over-simplification to say that in music Heath found expression for the emotion of which he had deprived himself in his everyday life, but even at the age often or eleven he was indulging on the piano a freedom which he would not have allowed himself in personal relationships. It was his father who encouraged him most vigorously. If Teddy got bored of practising, William would urge him to fresh efforts: ‘Stick to it! Once you’ve mastered it, nobody can ever take it away from you. Your music will be a joy for life.’ His brother at one point also began to play the piano but, according to his first wife at least, was switched to the violin on the grounds that it would be nice for Teddy to have somebody to play duets with. John got no pleasure out of either instrument and renounced them at the first opportunity.¹³

The local church of St Peter’s-in-Thanet had a large choir of twenty-four boys and twelve men, and Teddy, who had a good if not outstanding treble voice, joined it and was soon singing solos. After a few years he began to take an interest in the organ and before long was assisting the regular organist and understudying Miss Price, the lady who habitually played at the children’s services. ‘He is a great worker, very quick to learn, conscientious, and for his years a very capable musician,’ wrote the vicar, Alfred Tatham. Teddy was ‘thoroughly dependable; I have always found him a very present help in trouble’. Much later, Tatham’s widow remembered Teddy sitting beside Miss Price: she ‘was a very poor performer on the organ and I always thought you kept her straight’. For those oppressed by the vision of Heath’s unwavering rectitude it is only fair to say that he seems to have been a genuinely kind and helpful child. Mrs Matthews, the widow of a former vicar, remembered him as being ‘one of the nicest boys I have known’. When Mrs Matthews, by then aged 86 and wavering in her mind, invited him to a party to celebrate the return of her son, who in fact had been killed in action thirty years before, Heath scrapped the run-of-the-mill letter submitted by a secretary, wrote a long and friendly letter in his own hand and also wrote to Mrs Matthews’ surviving son to express his sympathy.¹⁴

It was Mr Tatham who prepared Teddy for confirmation. His schoolfriend Ronald Whittall, who underwent the same ordeal, said that Tatham was the first man to have had a serious influence on either of the boys: ‘He opened our eyes to religion, to Christianity, and from that point on Teddy took his religion very seriously. I believe that it’s a deep-seated sense of religion which may – rightly or wrongly – make him think he’s a man of destiny.’ Extravagant though it may seem, the evidence suggests that Heath saw himself as a man of destiny several years before his confirmation; certainly, from the age of nine or ten he was hoarding every scrap of paper with the zeal of someone who is well aware that one day a momentous tale would need to be told. His religion did mean a great deal to him, however: partly because the Church and music were in his experience so closely related, more because the Christian faith and Christian values had been deeply inculcated in him when he was a child and he rarely saw cause to question them. The same interviewer who had asked him whether the Heaths were demonstrative as a family asked him whether he prayed. ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it very helpful to you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it is a spiritual communion.’ To an unbeliever such an answer might not seem to take matters much further but to Heath it was wholly satisfactory. He never doubted that, through prayer, he was in direct communication with God, and though religious problems did not preoccupy him, his faith provided a bedrock on which he believed he could construct his life. His mother at one time hoped he might enter the Church, then discovered how badly clergymen were paid and changed her mind. Even if she had not done so he would never have taken holy orders: he ‘did not feel a true calling’, he wrote in his memoirs and – a somewhat vainglorious reflection for a young man on the brink of life – such work would not have given him an opportunity ‘to shape the affairs of my country’.¹⁵

By the time Teddy was confirmed he had already moved on to Chatham House Grammar School, a Local Education Authority school in the heart of Ramsgate. Chatham House was built of an aggressively red brick and from outside was entirely charmless. Its interior was little, if at all, more prepossessing. It was, however, an excellent school. It was geared to equip its pupils to make a living in a competitive world: accountancy was an optional subject and the emphasis in economics was on the practical rather than the theoretic. At the same time, however, it encouraged an interest in literature, regularly put on plays in which a high proportion of the boys performed some part, and organised vigorous debates, both within the school and against other schools in the vicinity. The fees were twelve guineas a year but about half the boys were on scholarships. Teddy sat for one of these and was successful. At the final interview the headmaster, H. C. Norman, asked him what he wished to be in later life. ‘An architect,’ said Teddy; an ambition which he had never admitted to his parents and which seems to have passed rapidly from his mind. The Kent Education Committee provided a further grant to cover travel and the cost of lunch, so the only expense left for the family was a guinea a year for music. William Heath was happy to provide for this, though making it a condition that Teddy would not take up music as a career.¹⁶

Teddy went to Chatham House in the autumn of 1926. A combination of precocity and the date on which his birthday fell meant that he was far younger than the average age of his class: ten years five months, against thirteen years one month. In spite of this he managed to come eighth out of twenty-eight – ‘most promising’, said the headmaster.¹⁷ At no point in his time at Chatham House did he excel academically, though the occasional complaints – geography: ‘He must work very much harder’; French: ‘Much lacking in accuracy’ – were outweighed by enthusiastic comments or references to his comparative youth. His performance in general seems to have been creditable but somewhat graceless; in 1931 the English master remarked gloomily: ‘He must remember that he writes to be read and that the Examiner is, after all, only a human being.’ Being too young for his class proved a problem when most of his fellow pupils were about to take School Certificate. The headmaster noted that, though his work had been ‘most promising’ (a formula which he invoked seven or eight times during Teddy’s career at Chatham House), it would still be ‘tempting providence to let him sit this year. He is too immature for an exam of this standard.’ This evoked a protest from William Heath – inspired, one suspects, and possibly even written, by Teddy’s mother. Teddy, wrote William, was ‘most depressed at the thought of not being allowed to sit…He is young, I agree, but even the young sometimes exceed our expectations.’ He would undertake to have Teddy coached in French – his weakest subject – during the holidays. The headmaster gave way and Teddy did exceed expectations though not extravagantly so; he gained his School Certificate but had to wait another year for the Matriculation which opened the way to university.

Throughout these years it is clear that Teddy was considered by his parents, and up to a point by the boys and masters as well, as being outside the common run. Only rarely were these pretensions slapped down. Shortly after he arrived at Chatham House his father – once again, no doubt, put up to it by Mrs Heath – wrote to say that the school food did not agree with him. Could he please take his dinner at a nearby café? Only if he had a doctor’s certificate saying he needed a special diet, ruled the headmaster: ‘There is nothing in the school dinners which should be unsuitable for a boy in ordinary health.’ He was, however, excused football and cricket, on the grounds that such games might damage his hands and thus impair his music. He got on perfectly well with the other boys and was never bullied or ostracised, but he does not seem to have made close friends or to have spent much time visiting their houses. He led a ‘one-dimensional life’, recalled his contemporary, Keith Hunt. ‘He took no interest in games and played as rarely as possible. He often had special classes just for himself.’¹⁸ His behaviour was almost always immaculate. Only once in his first three years did he suffer a detention, for some unspecified but, no doubt, innocuous crime. He was invariably punctual. Almost his only recorded offence was ‘running along a passage in which running is forbidden’. His penalty was self-inflicted; he banged his head so hard against a projecting pipe that he had to have several stitches in the resultant wound. ‘I cannot discover that anyone was to blame but the boy himself,’ wrote the headmaster severely, presumably fearing that, even in 1929, an indignant parent might sue the school for negligence. Why Teddy was running is not explained: it is depressingly likely that it was merely to ensure that he was in good time for the next class.