Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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.

      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