on these but the book was still in his possession when he died.9
Different though they were, both physically and psychologically, William and Edith Heath were happy in their marriage. Edith may have been the stronger character and certainly it was her standards that prevailed at home, but she was wise enough to ensure that her husband never felt himself excluded or ignored. ‘In a marriage, nobody’s boss – I don’t believe in that,’ he told one of Heath’s biographers, and everything suggests he approved heartily of the way his wife was bringing up his children. They started life in St Peter’s-in-Thanet, a village now absorbed into the Kentish holiday resort of Broadstairs. Teddy – the use of ‘Ted’ seems to have become habitual during the Second World War, he was never known as ‘Edward’ – was born on Sunday, 9 July 1916. His middle names were Richard and George. Almost immediately the family abandoned St Peter’s to move inland to Crayford, where William Heath had been assigned to war work at the Vickers aircraft factory. Only a few months old, Teddy was spared the worst rigours of what must have been a miserable winter. Wartime privations were at their worst. ‘We had a ramshackle house,’ William Heath remembered, ‘and the wind used to whistle round it like a pack of wolves. I remember begging in the street for coal and potatoes…It was a terrible time.’ ‘Begging’, presumably, involved asking for an additional ration from under-supplied shopkeepers rather than soliciting from passers-by. William Heath was never unemployed and quite well paid – but the last two years of the war were exceptionally difficult. It may have been these problems which deterred the Heaths from adding to their family; at all events it was four years before Teddy acquired a brother, John.10
The difference between the two boys was quickly apparent. By the time he was eight or nine Teddy was conspicuously diligent and hardworking, with formidable powers of concentration and a distaste for anything bordering on frivolity. John, on the other hand, was amiable, messy, easygoing and almost entirely without ambition. He viewed his elder brother with a mixture of awe, incredulity and derision. Many years later the journalist John Junor had a conversation with John at a party and found him ‘a very dull chap indeed. Pleasant but commonplace.’ This was the general verdict. Ted Heath always denied hotly that he had been his mother’s favourite or had been given any special treatment. The evidence of those who knew the family well – Nancy-Joan Seligman, Araminta Aldington – is that, on the contrary, Edith Heath, without ever being consciously unkind to her younger son, lavished most of her loving attention on Teddy. She always put his needs first, said John’s widow, Muriel; it was taken for granted in the household that the normal rules of conduct were suspended for his benefit. ‘She spoiled Teddy rotten,’ recalled Margaret Chadd; whenever he came to stay with the Chadds he left his pyjamas all over the floor and assumed that somebody else would pick them up. The inevitable result was that John, finding that nothing was expected of him, responded by achieving nothing. At school one day he overheard two masters extolling Teddy’s virtues: ‘Of course his brother is nothing like…’ one of them added. John accepted without undue dismay the fact that he was ‘nothing like…’; Teddy took it for granted that he too was ‘nothing like…’; nothing like John nor like the generality of his schoolfellows. He grew in confidence while John resigned himself to rubbing along in contented obscurity.11
Teddy began his schooling at a dingy little church school in Crayford. He learned enough to be well able to cope with the next stage of his education but his life did not really take off until the family returned to Broadstairs in 1923. Broadstairs then as now was an amiable little seaside resort, busy in summer, under-occupied in winter, with few buildings of distinction but many of quiet attractiveness. It prided itself on its connections with Charles Dickens: a suitably bleak Bleak House still looms over the seafront; plaques abound asserting that the author wrote this or that book while in residence; Heath’s favourite was a discreet notice proclaiming ‘Charles Dickens did not live here’. Though neighbouring Margate and Ramsgate were better equipped to handle yachts of any size, Broadstairs was rich in boats. In spite of their maritime antecedents, however, the Heaths were neither rich nor enthusiastic enough to own a boat themselves.
Once back in Broadstairs Teddy began to attend St Peter’s Church of England School. James Bird, the assistant headmaster, described how he presented himself ‘neatly dressed and completely self-possessed’ and handed over a transfer form from his school in Crayford which lauded his attainments in reading and arithmetic. John’s first wife, Marian, who wrote a mildly malicious account of her brother-in-law after her marriage broke up, quotes Mr Bird as saying that Teddy ‘was not a good mixer. He was inclined to be aloof.’ It was not her intention to paint a sympathetic portrait of her former husband’s family but in this case she seems to have been recording faithfully. To another biographer Bird spoke of Teddy’s ‘general cleanliness and wholesomeness and a certain aloofness – even as a small boy he was self-contained and purposeful’. It is not an entirely attractive picture. The headmaster’s report that he was ‘a good boy…earnest, painstaking and thoroughly well-behaved’ is almost equally daunting. That Teddy was a good influence at St Peter’s can be taken for granted; whether he got much fun out of it or gave much fun to others is more doubtful. Once his mother went up to his room and suggested that he was working too hard and should come down to join the family. ‘Mother,’ Teddy replied severely, ‘sometimes I think you don’t want me to get on.’ Self-discipline and a conscious distrust of emotional display were as evident at the age of ten as sixty or seventy years later. On a radio programme his interviewer Mavis Nicholson once asked him whether the Heaths had been demonstrative as a family. ‘As we were by nature a close-knit family it wasn’t necessary to demonstrate great emotion towards each other,’ he replied. ‘If people are demonstrating their emotions, there must be something lacking in the background.’12
Emotional austerity did not preclude an early and intense love of music. A cousin of his mother’s first introduced him to the piano, he began to take lessons, and his parents, at what must have been considerable financial sacrifice, invested in an instrument for him to play on. He was not the most amenable of pupils. ‘I was always in too much of a hurry,’ he confessed, and he was irritated by his teacher’s insistence that he should master one piece before moving on to another. ‘What I was after was the musical experience, the opportunity to express feeling and emotion in pieces of different kinds, according to my moods.’ It would be an over-simplification to say that in music Heath found expression for the emotion of which he had deprived himself in his everyday life, but even at the age often or eleven he was indulging on the piano a freedom which he would not have allowed himself in personal relationships. It was his father who encouraged him most vigorously. If Teddy got bored of practising, William would urge him to fresh efforts: ‘Stick to it! Once you’ve mastered it, nobody can ever take it away from you. Your music will be a joy for life.’ His brother at one point also began to play the piano but, according to his first wife at least, was switched to the violin on the grounds that it would be nice for Teddy to have somebody to play duets with. John got no pleasure out of either instrument and renounced them at the first opportunity.13
The local church of St Peter’s-in-Thanet had a large choir of twenty-four boys and twelve men, and Teddy, who had a good if not outstanding treble voice, joined it and was soon singing solos. After a few years he began to take an interest in the organ and before long was assisting the regular organist and understudying Miss Price, the lady who habitually played at the children’s services. ‘He is a great worker, very quick to learn, conscientious, and for his years a very capable musician,’ wrote the vicar, Alfred Tatham. Teddy was ‘thoroughly dependable; I have always found him a very present help in trouble’. Much later, Tatham’s widow remembered Teddy sitting beside Miss Price: she ‘was a very poor performer on the organ and I always thought you kept her straight’. For those oppressed by the vision of Heath’s unwavering rectitude it is only fair to say that he seems to have been a genuinely kind and helpful child. Mrs Matthews, the widow of a former vicar, remembered him as being ‘one of the nicest boys I have known’. When Mrs Matthews, by then aged 86 and wavering in her mind, invited him to a party to celebrate the return of her son, who in fact had been killed in action thirty years before, Heath scrapped the run-of-the-mill letter submitted by a secretary, wrote a long and friendly letter in his own hand and also wrote to Mrs Matthews’ surviving son to express his sympathy.14
It