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.
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