the way for the all-conquering march of the supermarket and transformed every high street in the country. By securing Britain’s entry into Europe he reversed almost a thousand years of history and embarked on a course that would inevitably lead to the legal, political, economic and social transformation of his country. Both these reforms he forced through by a combination of determination, patience and persuasive powers, against the inertia or active hostility of a large part of the British population, including many of his own party. There may have been others who could have done as much, there may have been others who desired to do so, but it is hard to conceive of any other individual in the second half of the twentieth century who would both have been able and have wished to achieve this transformation.
Yet Heath today is largely forgotten: a meaner beauty of the night eclipsed by the refulgent moon of Margaret Thatcher. This is because, in spite of all he did, he was seen by others, indeed portrayed himself, as a disgruntled loser. Lady Thatcher, though she too was shipwrecked in the end, is remembered as a winner. It is the winners who remain prominent in people’s minds. Heath brought it on himself, but the importance of his contribution to British history deserves greater attention. Opinions may differ as to whether what he did was right; the immensity of his achievement in doing it is open to no question.
Two future British prime ministers were born in 1916. Both belonged to what may loosely be called the lower-middle class and found their way by scholarships to grammar school and Oxford, where both were strikingly successful. Both served at one time in the civil service and took a precocious interest in politics. Both prided themselves on their knowledge of economics and were endowed by nature with prodigious memories. One was prime minister from October 1964 to June 1970 and from February 1974 to March 1976; the other occupied 10 Downing Street for the intervening years. In all other ways, few men can have been less similar than Harold Wilson and Edward Richard George Heath.
In fact, for those who take an interest in such arcane distinctions, the Wilsons were in origin slightly grander – or at least less humble – than the Heaths. They had been lower-middle class for several generations; the Heaths had only recently taken their first steps from the working classes. Ted Heath’s first identifiable ancestor, his four times great-grandfather, Richard, had been a fisherman living in Cockington in Devonshire at the end of the eighteenth century. His son William followed the same calling but with scant success. By 1819, when William was 56 and presumably too old for an active seafaring life, he found himself with fourteen children and no job and was forced to lodge a petition with Trinity House as having ‘no property or income whatever’. Undiscomfited, his son, Richard, also took to the sea, joined the Coastguard Service and, in 1831, was transferred to the new coastguard station in Ramsgate, Kent. Before migrating he had married a Somerset girl. Their son, George, Ted’s great-grandfather, was the last of the seafaring Heaths; he served with the merchant navy and ended his working days in charge of Ramsgate pier.1
George married a local girl. Their son, Stephen, the first terrestrial Heath, did not notably improve the family’s prosperity. He went into the dairy business and at first did well, but then, according to his son William, ‘lost all his money and went on the railway’,2 with the unglamorous task of moving passengers’ luggage between the station and the hotels. He survived this setback with equanimity and lived to the age of seventy-seven, invariably genial, frequently inebriated and loved by his grandson, Ted. He too married a Kentish girl, as did William, Ted’s father. Ted, therefore, was of solidly Devonshire and Kentish stock, with no tincture of more exotic blood in the five generations before his birth. In 1962 Iain Macleod, seeking Heath’s endorsement when a candidate for the Rectorship of Glasgow University, asked hopefully whether he could not scrape up some Scottish connection, however tenuous. His only claim, Heath replied, was that he had been educated at Balliol, a college which owed its existence to John de Balliol and Dervorguilla of Galway: ‘I do not know whether on this somewhat flimsy basis you will be able to build up a case which will secure the Nationalist vote.’3
William Heath was far more like his exuberant and outgoing father than his more unapproachable son. He was a ‘quiet and unassuming’ man, said Heath in his memoirs,4 but this does not correspond with the testimony of many of those who knew him well. He was ‘a dear man’, said Nancy-Joan Seligman; ‘heaven’, said Mary Lou de Zulueta; ‘a great hugger and kisser, even a bottom-pincher, to the occasional embarrassment of his son’, recalled Margaret Chadd.5 He loved parties: other people’s would do but it was best of all to be at the centre of his own. His jollity was not allowed to interfere with his work, however: he was enterprising, energetic and conscientious. By training he was a carpenter; he ended up as a builder with his own firm, small but still employing several workmen. Ted Heath took considerable pride in his father’s advance into the middle classes. In his biography, John Campbell mentioned that Heath had had to be dissuaded from suing Isis for describing his father as ‘a jobbing builder’. Heath scrawled angry denials against several of Campbell’s assertions but here he merely noted that it was the Sunday Express and not Isis which had used the phrase.6 William had all the fierce conservatism so often to be found in the small and struggling businessman. During the First World War he had been assigned to the Vickers armaments factory at Croydon and forced to join a union. ‘It was terrible,’ he remembered. ‘The union was all right, it was the way it was run. There was a clique of people in control and unless you were in the clique you couldn’t get anything past.’7 In his own life as a builder he resolved to have as little to do with unions as could be contrived, and he inculcated in his son a conviction that, whilst unions as an institution were acceptable, even desirable, they should never be allowed to run riot or to consider themselves above the law.
William Heath was a man of intelligence, common sense and limited education. The few letters to his son which survive in the archive at Arundells, Heath’s house in Salisbury, are sound in content but wayward in grammar and spelling; in one short letter we have ‘emportant people’, ‘busness’, ‘we planed our week’, ‘untill’, ‘they have wrote to him’ and a dearth of question marks and apostrophes. Possibly he suffered from what would now be diagnosed as dyslexia; certainly he left school at the age of twelve and never had time to continue his formal education. He never doubted its value, however, and was resolved that his children should have a better start than he did. In this ambition his wife wholeheartedly supported him.
Without Edith Heath, indeed, it is unlikely that Ted would have been launched so successfully on his vertiginous career. She was a Pantony, another Kentish family, and her father had been gardener in a big house a few miles from Broadstairs. She became lady’s maid to a rich, exacting but benevolent mistress and absorbed uncritically the values of propriety, decorum and unostentatious good-living which she found in the home of her employer. In his description of Edith Heath, John Campbell used the phrase ‘strait-laced’;8 Heath underlined it, usually an indication of disagreement. It seems apt enough. Certainly she tolerated, if perhaps silently deplored, her husband’s conviviality, but she kept a house that was resolutely clean and well ordered and dedicated herself, to an extent for which William had neither the time nor the inclination, to instilling in her elder son the habit of hard work and a burning hunger to succeed. ‘She was the driving spirit,’ a childhood friend of Heath’s remarked. ‘His father was a nice guy but without the drive his mother had. She was the one who encouraged…the ambitions.’ Heath felt her to be beyond reproach. ‘My mother was a wonderful woman,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘My lasting memory is of her beauty and calmness…At home we adored her for these traits and also because she was so supportive of us.’ Some felt her resolution verged on the implacable and detected in her not so much tolerance as contempt for the looser standards of her husband. Certainly she was strong-minded and convinced that her values could not be questioned, but she was sensitive and generous, ready to endure the shortcomings of anyone except herself and her beloved son. She missed no opportunity to inculcate her most cherished values in her children. As a Christmas present when he was eight Ted was given a leather commonplace book in which various improving thoughts had already been inscribed. The first was: