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 suggests that he recoiled nervously even from those intense but sexless emotional relationships which were so often to be found among the undergraduates. In August 1939, an unidentified ‘Freddy’ wrote to remonstrate. ‘Now, Teddie, I am going to be very frank,’ he began. ‘Please tell me what it is you don’t like about me. I hate being on anything but really friendly terms with people, especially when as nice as you. Your attitude towards me last term was obvious…It upset me quite a bit…I remember you behaved in the same way last year about Michael…If it is just jealousy, you have no justification for it…we all want to be your friends.’ Without the context it is impossible to say how much or how little such letters mean, but it seems clear that Freddy was demanding a greater and more demonstrative commitment than Heath was willing, or perhaps able, to give.9
Nicko Henderson recalled that, brightly though Heath had shone at parties, he could not remember ever seeing him talking to a girl. In Oxford in the 1930s there were not many girls to talk to, but there are enough anecdotes from this period, indeed from every period of his life, to show that he was ill at ease with women. An old acquaintance from Chatham House urged him to venture into the brave new world of feminine society. ‘I think it very doubtful if one can make friends of the old schoolboy type if one has left school,’ he chided his backward friend. ‘I am certain that female friendship is the natural thing to take its place. I think that it’s unnatural for adults to form new friendships of the previous type: it obviously has had for part of its basis an emotional admiration which is transferred to one’s opposite sex.’10 Heath had never been strong on ‘emotional admiration’; certainly he had no intention of transferring it to the opposite sex.
He did not actually dislike women, indeed he was happy to consort with them if they were attractive and intelligent, but his appreciation of their attractiveness was purely aesthetic and his expectation was that they would not have much to say that was worth listening to. The consorting, if it took place, had to be at arms’ length; he shrank from physical contact with both men and women, but whereas an effusive gesture from a man would have been distasteful, from a woman it was repugnant. Nigel Nicolson remembered walking with Heath along the banks of the Cherwell and arriving at the spot known as Parsons’ Pleasure where undergraduates traditionally bathed in the nude. Heath was shocked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘anyone might come along. Girls might come along.’ Denis Healey mentioned to Heath that a mutual friend was spending the weekend with his girlfriend in Bibury. ‘You don’t mean to say that they are sleeping together?’ asked a dismayed Heath. Healey replied that he had no idea but thought it probable. ‘Good heavens,’ said Heath. ‘I can’t imagine anyone in the Conservative Association doing that!’ Certainly he felt no inclination to allow women into those sanctums of Oxford life from which they were still excluded. When the admission of women to the Union was debated in 1938 Heath declared: ‘Women have no original contribution to make to our debates and I believe that, if they are admitted to the floor of this House, a large number of members will leave.’11
Most young men, even if little preoccupied by sex, find it desirable to affect more enthusiasm than they actually feel. Heath was not wholly above such posturing. ‘I hope you enjoyed the Carnival,’ wrote a friend, ‘and did not run after young ladies like you did last year, and call to them from windows.’ He was alleged to have taken a fancy to a pretty young blonde, Joan Stuart, though he ‘never got his arm beyond her shoulder – not even around her waist’.12 The limits which he imposed on his relationships with women were well exemplified by the case of Kay Raven. Kay was the friendly and attractive daughter of a Broadstairs doctor, socially a notch or two above the Heaths but by no means in another world. From Heath’s point of view, indeed, she was alarmingly accessible. He felt at home with her, enjoyed their games of tennis, talked to her about music, but that was that. To his family she seemed the perfect match; Mrs Heath talked confidently of her son’s eventual engagement. Kay would happily have concurred. When Heath went up to Balliol she missed him greatly and began to bombard him with letters; ‘quite honestly, though I don’t mean to be sentimental, it does help to write and makes Oxford seem as though it was not really on another planet’. The response was not what she had hoped for – Heath’s replies seem to have been friendly but distancing. ‘I have a feeling you may be fed up with me and my wretched correspondence,’ she wrote a fortnight later. ‘That is what is on my mind, Teddy. I may just be rather depressed.’ She was rather depressed; her father noticed it and cross-examined her, and Kay evidently admitted that she was in love. She had promised Heath