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