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Up to then he had been an administrator. He hadn’t done any fighting worth speaking of…But I think it’s right to say that within a fortnight or three weeks he exercised such a persuading influence…that one found Heath was first class. So far as administration was concerned, he was perfect. The other reason he was first class – and this was to my surprise – was that he rapidly understood the men and their reactions…Within a month or two it was Heath’s battery. The men liked him because they thought he was a fair man.13
He became adjutant of his regiment in March 1942. ‘I imagine life as an Adjutant must suit you down to the ground,’ wrote Kay Raven. She wrote to him regularly throughout the war; letters beginning ‘Darling Teddy’ but rarely venturing beyond the chatty or the gossipy. She was now an officer in the WAAF and in 1944 Heath sent her a photograph. ‘My batwoman asked me if “that was my steady – he looks just like a film star”! Knowing her tastes, you must be a cross between Charles Boyer and Bob Hope. So now you reside on my mantelpiece and greet me in my waking and sleeping.’14 Whether he was her steady was a question which even he would have found it hard to answer. In a letter to Tim Bligh, a Balliol friend who was later to become principal private secretary to Harold Macmillan, he had evidently envisaged the possibility of marriage. ‘I would like to point out,’ replied Bligh, ‘that there are more convenient methods of experiencing the grand passion, and as you should know we can justly claim the title of lady-killers par excellence.’15 The reputation of lady-killer was not one to which Heath aspired, but even if he had considered marrying Kay it would have been a long-term project, not to be contemplated until the war was over. They met rarely, and when they did the meetings, for Kay, generally ended in frustration. ‘I’m awfully sorry about spoiling it the other night,’ she wrote after their leaves had for once coincided. ‘It was the horror of months of going by and hearing nothing of you…Perhaps it won’t be so long before you are back again.’16
By that time Heath had already spent nearly a year in Europe. His last months in England had been marred by a gangrenous appendix, which should have been operated on months before and nearly cost him his life. By the time it was removed he was convinced he was going to die. He wrote, in high emotion, to his parents, ‘It is not possible to thank you for all you have done, for your love, for my schooling, my career, and for the sacrifices which you have all the time made. Everything I have done I have owed largely to my early training and the standards you taught me.’ The tribute was most sincerely meant. Fortunately it never needed to be dispatched. The appendix was successfully removed, though its condition was so revolting that the hospital had it pickled and put on exhibition as a reminder of what should never happen.17
Heath and his regiment crossed the Channel a month after D-Day and fought their way towards Belgium, taking part, on the way, in the bombardment of Caen and the battle of the Falaise Gap. For a time they lingered in Antwerp, then in September 1944 moved on to support the allied forces trying to relieve the airborne troops at Arnhem. Their most serious action, wrote John Campbell in his biography, was keeping open the vital bridge at Nijmegen. ‘Nonsense!’ Heath scrawled in the margin; it is hard to understand why he took exception to the comment, because the action was indeed both bloody and of critical importance.18 The level of casualties among the gunners is usually lower than that in the infantry, but in the advance into Germany Heath frequently saw men die within a few yards of him and was constantly in danger. He never wavered. This officer, said his citation, ‘showed outstanding initiative and devotion to duty…His work was of a very high order and contributed largely to the success achieved.’
His last year as a soldier was spent in Germany. For three months he was in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp near Hanover. ‘I hope my experience and knowledge of the German people helped me to run the show with understanding and fairness,’ he told Professor Winckler.19 He was put in charge of the reconstruction of the city and gave the rebuilding of the opera house top priority. Whether the German population was entirely in accord with his scale of values is uncertain. Since the Brigade Commander was equally insistent that the racecourse should be reopened rapidly it is possible that they felt their housing needs were being unreasonably overlooked.
In his memoirs Heath records in moving detail the execution by firing squad of a Pole found guilty by court martial of aggravated rape and murder. He was in charge and had to give the order to fire. ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘this made a mark on my mind which later crystallised the view to which I have adhered for nearly four decades of my political career, as to the justification for abolishing the death penalty in peace time.’ He is never known to have referred to this incident until work on the memoirs was almost completed. Rupert Allason in his as yet unpublished biography of Heath casts doubt on the story. He points out that no record of such an execution exists in the files kept by the Court Martial Centre. Since the war was four months over when the incident is alleged to have taken place, the guilty man would have been hanged rather than shot. A major would not normally have commanded a firing squad. The situation is not as clear-cut as Allason suggests. A few executions by firing squad did in fact take place after the end of the war. There are no records of executions of soldiers of Polish origin serving in the British Army at the time in question but, given the situation in Germany at the time, the Ministry of Defence believes that the victim could have been a member of the Polish land forces serving under allied command. Another possibility is that the executed Pole was incorrectly described as a soldier. One Polish national, Piotr Kuczerawy, was executed in Hanover at a time when Heath’s regiment was based in the city and it is possible that he found himself charged with this grisly task. Heath was in general a scrupulously truthful man and he had nothing to gain by inventing such a story. On the whole it seems likely that his story is substantially correct. Certainly the result was as he indicated; in the course of his political career he was consistent in his opposition to the death penalty.20
He might have been in a position to vote on the issue even before the supposed incident took place. Early in 1945 an Army Council Instruction invited anyone interested in fighting the anticipated general election to fill in a form requesting the necessary three weeks’ leave. Heath applied for a copy of the form. Andrew Roth, one of Heath’s biographers, suggests that he hoped to be adopted as Conservative candidate for the Isle of Thanet. He does not seem to have made any serious effort to press his candidature. In his memoirs he writes that he decided not to stand in the 1945 general election ‘because I did not feel that I could abandon my colleagues in the regiment at such a time’. This is certainly part of the story: Heath was conspicuously loyal to those with whom he served and in the post-war years did much to help any former fellow servicemen who had got into trouble or needed a leg-up in their career. But there may have been another contributory factor; that in the circumstances of 1945, he was not sure he wanted the Conservatives to win.21
He never seriously contemplated joining any other party. The nearest he came to it – and that was not very near – had arisen from a chance encounter early in 1945 when he was on leave in England. Late at night, while waiting for a train at a provincial station, he went into the tea room. There he found Arthur Jenkins, father of Roy and a pps to Clement Attlee, whom he had met several times at Oxford before the war. Jenkins, it turned out, was waiting for Attlee and when the Deputy Prime Minister arrived Heath joined them. Jenkins explained who he was. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘He’s now commanding a battery in Germany,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘From what he’s been saying he’s obviously still interested in politics.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think he’ll make a damn good politician.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think we ought to try to grab him as one of our candidates.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. At this point Heath’s train was announced. ‘This’, he concluded, ‘was the nearest I ever came to becoming a Labour candidate.’22
Though he is said to have told his old acquaintance and future opponent, Ashley Bramall, that he was still uncertain whether he wanted to take up politics,23 he never doubted that if he did so it would be as a Tory. But in 1945 the disillusionment which he had expressed on the journey back from the United States still lingered. He believed that the old Conservative Party survived unregenerate, governed, as it had been before the war, by ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions’. If, as almost everyone assumed would be the case, they were returned to power on the coat-tails of Churchill’s popularity, then these attitudes would survive unchanged. A period of opposition would give the modernisers a chance to take control of the party and reshape its thinking and its principles. He did not expect, still less hope for, the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but there was some comfort to be drawn from it. Certainly he rejoiced that he had not personally been involved in the debacle.
He had one last searing experience before he returned to England and civilian life. In February 1946 he drove across a shattered Germany to Nuremberg, where the trial of the Nazi war criminals was in progress. In the dock were those leaders whom he had seen or even shaken hands with eight years before. Then they had been rulers of Germany, soon to be rulers of the continent; now they were reviled and tragic figures. In the meantime, Europe had been almost destroyed. Somehow it must be made impossible for this to happen again. ‘My generation did not have the option of living in the past: we had to work for the future…Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation.’ Heath’s vision of a united Europe had been formed before the war but it was in Germany in 1945 that it found its full realisation.24
FOUR In Waiting for Westminster
‘I now so often have the feeling’, Heath had written on the way back from the United States at the beginning of 1940, ‘that I’ve a lot of energy, power, ambition, and so on, and yet nothing to which to harness it. Is this, I wonder, because I’ve got so many things I haven’t thought out and that, when I’ve done that, I shall see the way to go? Or am I just blasé?’1 Blasé was certainly not something which Heath could have been accused of being at any point in his life. To most people in 1940 he had appeared impressively clear-headed and decisive. His inner uncertainty, his doubt as to where he should go and how he should get there, were largely kept to himself: unconfiding by nature, he was least of all inclined to expose his weaknesses, even to those few whom he trusted fully. By 1946, to a large extent, those doubts had been resolved. He knew that he wished his long-term future to lie in politics; that the Conservative Party, for all its imperfections, was the only institution that offered him a chance to realise this ambition; that within that party his loyalties would lie with the left, reforming wing. The war had confirmed his belief in his own powers and helped him decide where those powers were to take him. He was tougher and more effective in 1946 than he had been six years before. It was perhaps symbolic of his evolution that the cosy ‘Teddy’ of pre-war years had now become a starker, sterner ‘Ted’. Not all his old friends made the change, even among new acquaintances some still preferred the earlier form, but by 1946 ‘Ted Heath’ had established itself as the address most usually employed. It was to remain so until his death.
His family never fully recognised the change. It was Teddy Heath who returned to the family home in Broadstairs. Even more than before the war he was the centre of attention. William Heath’s business was prospering in the post-war building boom and it was no longer necessary to take in paying guests. For the first time, Teddy and his brother, John, had separate rooms. But John had slipped still further from centre stage. To his father’s disappointment he had refused to join the family firm and had instead taken a job in a local radio shop. Within a year he had become engaged and was moving out.
The marriage lasted only a few years. John’s wife, Marian, maintained that Teddy Heath was the be-all and end-all of his mother’s and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, his father’s life. There were only two comfortable chairs in the kitchen/living room: Teddy would commandeer one while his mother sat knitting socks in the other. ‘She was always knitting socks.’ William and John helped with the washing-up; Teddy was never expected to join in. Everyone had to dress for breakfast except Teddy, who was allowed to come down in his dressing gown. His mother waited on him hand and foot: ‘I’ve seen her sitting there cracking nuts for him so that he wouldn’t have to crack them himself.’2
Teddy was ‘very clannish’ and expected the family to do things together, wrote Marian. It was always he who had the final choice as to what was to be done. On one occasion she revolted and, even though Teddy favoured a family picnic, insisted that she and John should go on the river with some cousins. ‘When I say we quarrelled, it was a case of Teddy and I crossing swords while the rest of the family sat around in awe-struck silence.’ He did not share the same circle of friends as John and Marian and was often to be seen striding along the cliffs or seafront immersed in thought. Such friends as he had in the neighbourhood were noticeably more mature – except for an occasional game of tennis he had little to do with the young. ‘My father was once invited to lunch with the Heaths,’ wrote Marian, ‘and was astounded to find Teddy walking in and out of the room without seemingly seeing anyone. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts and plans for the future.’ He was not ungenerous – more often than not he paid if they went to the cinema or on some similar outing – but Marian was told by Mrs Heath to make nothing of it: ‘Teddy hates to be thanked, he gets embarrassed,’ she explained.
When John and Marian were married, Teddy was best man and made what Marian remembered as a ‘most amusing speech’. There were no bridesmaids, so, he said, he felt in no way committed: ‘I might add that he was the only one not to kiss the bride.’ Kay Raven would certainly have been among the family friends at the wedding. ‘She was looked on by all as Teddy’s girlfriend,’ wrote Marian. ‘It was a strange relationship. Teddy never seemed very attentive, yet she didn’t seem to mind.’ She minded more than appeared but she had to put up with what she could get. John Heath never believed that there was any serious romance between his brother and Kay; so far as Teddy, at least, was concerned, it was ‘a bit of a smoke screen’ which provided him with a convincing reason for not forming a relationship with any other woman.
Broadstairs provided a convenient base to which he could retreat, but there was no question of Heath seeking a job in the neighbourhood. Politics were his long-term ambition and he hoped the wait would not be very long. His plan was to have found a seat before the next general election. By that time he would be 35 or thereabouts. But in the meantime he had to earn a living, ideally a living in a career which he could continue part-time when he had become a Member and which would pay enough to enable him to make some savings. Though he says in his memoirs that the scholarship to read law at Gray’s Inn which he had nearly secured before the war was still available, it does not seem that any specific promise had been made. Even if it had been, he had decided that the law was ‘rather dry’ and that it would take him five or six years to earn a modest salary.3 Academic life, even if he had been suited to it, was hardly the ideal jumping-off ground for politics. The Master of Balliol tried to fix him up with a job as personal assistant to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; Heath had his doubts about this, the Professor had still more and looked elsewhere. One problem was that Heath made no secret of his political ambitions and this discouraged possible employers who were looking for a longer-term commitment. He could have been Meetings Secretary at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House – a post which would have brought him into close contact with many leading politicians – but when they realised that they might only have the benefit of his services for a few years, they lost interest.
The same was true when he looked to business and industry. ‘At the moment I have six irons in the fire; two of them certainties if I want them and I hope to get them sorted out this month,’ he told a friend in November 1946. One of the certainties was ICI, but when Heath told them that he hoped to be standing for parliament at the next election the certainty became unstuck and he was told he could not be considered. Another certainty or near-certainty was the North Central Wagon and Finance Company. This job would have carried with it alluring prospects of promotion to chairman within three years, but though this would have been lucrative it would have involved a move to Rotherham, unacceptably far from the political power centre. Unilever seemed more promising but here there appears to have been some misunderstanding. Heath thought that they were not disturbed by his wish to enter parliament, but the report on his application said that he had abandoned his political ideas without regret: ‘Provided he really can subordinate his interests in politics as a career, I believe he would be very well suited to business.’ The man who interviewed him could hardly have been more flattering. Heath, he said, was ‘one of those rare men who is extremely competent intellectually yet a normal, pleasant, honest person…I found him very likeable’. Under the heading ‘Quality of Social Relations’ the interviewer said: ‘I rate this man very high. He strikes me as a well-balanced, human sort of person whom others would willingly work for and with.’ He was offered a management traineeship. Possibly the true position about his political ambitions now came to light; certainly he turned the offer down.4
There remained the civil service. Heath knew that if he became a parliamentary candidate he would not be able to continue to work in Whitehall but that he would be free to pursue his career until that point was reached. If he never succeeded in finding a winnable seat he would at least have a respectable profession on which to fall back; if he did escape to politics he would have gained valuable experience of the workings of the civil service. He appeared before the Final Selection Board in August 1947. Just over 200 applicants survived to face this ultimate hurdle. Twenty-two passed in, and of these Heath was top. With this glittering success he could reasonably have expected to be able to choose his department. He was told that the Foreign Office was his for the asking (whether the Foreign Office had been consulted over this is unclear; they were a law unto themselves when it came to selecting future diplomats). The idea was appealing in many ways, but Heath realised that the long periods of exile which the career would involve would be incompatible or at least hard to reconcile with a move into politics. His wish was to join the Treasury, which he felt carried the greatest prestige and wielded power over all the Whitehall departments. Peter Masefield, his eventual boss in the civil service, thought that possibly his avowed political ambitions, though no bar to entry into the civil service, counted against him when it came to the choice of a department. Heath openly admitted that his main concern was to gain experience which would be of use to him when an MP; to the Treasury this may have seemed lèse-majesté. Whatever the reason, to his chagrin he was consigned to the fledgling Ministry of Civil Aviation. His first task was to work with the future Dame Alison Munro, deciding which of the 700 mainly grass airfields dotted around the country should be retained for future development. Heath was responsible for the airfields near London, Alison Munro for the rest of the United Kingdom.5
Soon he found himself working almost exclusively to the head of the Long-Range Planning Department, Peter Masefield. Masefield was a man of enterprise and imagination, a temporary civil servant who, in a couple of years, was to move on to take charge of British European Airways. Masefield took to Heath, pronouncing him ‘pleasant, sound and highly intelligent…And, with all, when you get to know him (which isn’t easy) he is a sensitive and warm-hearted chap who has a direct approach and an endearing sense of the ridiculous.’ Heath quickly found himself with a finger in a wide range of pies, from the development of the Comet to the planning of Heathrow (a name for which he accepted no responsibility). This last task was particularly stressful. ‘Every time I arrive at Heathrow,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I shudder to think that I was in any way involved in the creation of that monstrosity.’ But for his efforts, it might have been more monstrous still. The first plans provided for no parking areas and no aircraft piers to avoid the need for buses. Heath championed both causes and won the day. ‘He used to go and fight on the committee,’ Masefield remembered, ‘and come back and cry on my shoulder about all the spokes put in the wheel by bumbledom.’6 Another achievement with which Masefield credited him was persuading de Havillands, when the Comet was in the final stages of development, to substitute four-wheel undercarriage legs for the two-wheel version which they had been proposing to use. The ‘Heath modification’, as Masefield called it, made it possible for the Comet to land on many runways which would otherwise have been too weak to support the impact. ‘That change’, Masefield told Heath many years later, ‘enabled 77 Comets to be produced and used throughout the world.’7
Masefield quickly recognised that Heath was an invaluable member of his team. ‘But I fear I shall not have him here for long’, he wrote regretfully, ‘because, outside the office, he lives and dreams politics.’8 He was right. Heath’s first move was to try for a job in the Conservative Research Department, a body which, under Rab Butler, was busily rebuilding a new and more progressive Tory Party from the ruins left by the 1945 election. He knew that several of the cleverest and most ambitious of the young Conservatives – Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Reginald Maudling – were already at work there; he longed to be doing the same thing himself and was uneasily conscious of the fact that they were snatching a lead over him in the race up the greasy pole of political advancement. Michael Fraser, a wartime friend, was another rising star in the department; Heath appealed to him but was told there was no vacancy or any prospect of one in the near future. By then he was already embarked on the road which he knew he would one day have to travel: the quest for a constituency. Early in 1947 he added his name to the approved list of prospective candidates held by Central Office. He had high hopes that, with his talents and qualifications, he would quickly be selected. By the standards of some would-be candidates he did indeed have a relatively easy passage, but he still suffered some disconcerting setbacks along the way.
The first constituency to summon him for an interview was Ashford, in Kent. It went well, but when it came to the final selection the chairman said that they wanted a member who would apply himself wholeheartedly to the needs of the constituency. Would Heath promise that, if he was offered a job in any forthcoming Conservative government, he would turn it down? Heath would give no such undertaking; for him the main point of being in the House of Commons was the prospect it offered of serving in the government. Ashford rejected him, in favour of the Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes. Deedes later said that he had been selected for the seat because he wore a tweed jacket for his interview while Heath wore a city suit. To this Heath retorted that, at the time, he didn’t even own a city suit.9 There may nevertheless have been something in what Deedes said. Though the reformers might be busily at work in London, in the shires the Tory Party was still a highly traditional if not reactionary body. The selectors in a largely rural constituency like Ashford would have wished their member, if not actually drawn from the landed gentry, at least to look and sound as if he were. Heath, with his suspect accent and unabashed lower-middle-class origins, was far from this ideal. The fact that he got through to the final round shows that any such prejudice was not held too seriously, but there could well have been an element of snobbishness in the final selection.