was ‘running along a passage in which running is forbidden’. His penalty was self-inflicted; he banged his head so hard against a projecting pipe that he had to have several stitches in the resultant wound. ‘I cannot discover that anyone was to blame but the boy himself,’ wrote the headmaster severely, presumably fearing that, even in 1929, an indignant parent might sue the school for negligence. Why Teddy was running is not explained: it is depressingly likely that it was merely to ensure that he was in good time for the next class.
In part this remoteness from the preoccupations of his contemporaries must have been fostered by the fact that music was his favoured pastime, and that the instrument he chose inevitably took him away from his fellow schoolboys. But he did not exclusively practise on the organ, and music also brought him further into the life of Chatham House. He won the Belasco Prize for the piano and increasingly began to experiment with conducting. By the time he left he had established a unique position as a leader among the school’s musicians. ‘I cannot speak too highly of the tremendous amount of work he has done,’ recorded an awe-struck music master. ‘He has been a help to me and an inspiration to the boys. As a conductor of choirs he has been outstanding…I am grateful to him for all he has done for me.’ This note, giving the impression that the master viewed Teddy more as a collaborator than a pupil, marked all his reports during his triumphant last year at Chatham House. In their eyes – and not only in their eyes; in the last year he won a prize for character awarded by the votes of all the boys of the fifth and sixth forms – he was a remarkable force for good in the school. ‘It will be long before his ability, character, personality and leadership have failed to leave their mark on Coleman’s,’ testified a grateful housemaster. The headmaster was still more lavish in his panegyric: ‘The purity of his ideals, his loyalty to them, and his sense of duty have made him outstanding among boys who have helped build the School. That his mental and moral worth may have the reward they deserve is my wish for him.’
It would be easy to assume from all this that Teddy Heath was a ghastly little prig, who should have been shunned by any boy of spirit. He was not: on the contrary, the recollections of contemporaries make it clear that he was on the whole well-liked as well as respected. Inevitably he was prominent among the school prefects: he was ‘a bit of a stickler’, one master remembered. ‘He was very down on kids who had their hands in their trouser pockets, or weren’t behaving well in the street in their school cap and blazer. He thought that breaking a school rule amounted to disloyalty to the school.’19 But though he was allowed to use a gym-shoe to beat recalcitrant schoolboys, he rarely availed himself of the opportunity. ‘Discipline and organisation,’ he told a television interviewer in 1998, were of paramount importance, but need not involve harsh rule. ‘I carried out my responsibilities, of course,’ he replied loftily, when asked if he had often resorted to physical punishment. His popularity was established when the school held a mock election in January 1935 to choose one of the boys as prime minister. Teddy stood as the national government candidate and fought an enterprising campaign: persuading the local MP to write a letter in his support and taking advantage of a sudden snow storm to arrive early at school and tramp out a gigantic ‘VOTE FOR HEATH’ on the lawn in front of the main entrance. He won a landslide victory.20
The energy he spent on enterprises of this kind slightly alarmed the headmaster. ‘He must not jeopardise his own interests by giving too much time to sidelines – either in or out of school,’ warned Mr Norman. As well as music, Teddy in his last two or three years proved an enthusiastic actor, playing important roles in most of the school’s productions and featuring as the Archangel Gabriel in the annual nativity play. He also took eagerly to debating, proposing successfully, at various times, that sweepstakes, Sunday cinemas and capital punishment should be abolished and that the House would, in defiance of the recent vote in the Oxford Union, be prepared to fight for King and Country. ‘Its present flourishing condition is largely due to his efforts,’ the master in charge of the Debating Society appreciatively recorded.
Another extramural activity which profoundly influenced his thinking was a school trip to Paris in the spring of 1931. ‘It was the most exciting event of my life so far,’ wrote Heath some forty years later. ‘It was this which embedded in me a lifelong curiosity about every other part of the world and a determination to see for myself before I formed judgments about other people’s customs, traditions and way of life.’21 This somewhat portentous declaration perhaps overrates the significance for a fifteen-year-old schoolboy of a brief shuffle round the more obvious sights of Paris leavened by a furtive escapade to the Folies Bergère. In fact the expedition was more memorable for Teddy because it included his first visit to an opera, Carmen at the Opéra Comique. This experience heralded an addiction to opera-going which persisted throughout his life. The Parisian trip, however, failed to herald any similar addiction to the French language; Heath’s French remained appalling, in accent, syntax and vocabulary, and some of the most important conversations of his life had to be conducted through an interpreter.
The trip to Paris was organised by a Dr Woolf, who included Teddy in the party even though all the other boys were from another school. Teddy – keen, cheerful, friendly, intelligent, deferential without being obsequious – had a capacity for gaining the interest of older men in a way which even the most prurient would have agreed was free of any undertone of sexuality. Another such patron was Alec Martin, a future chairman of the auctioneers Christie’s and a considerable authority on painting. Martin owned a large house in the neighbourhood for whose upkeep William Heath was responsible. He met Teddy, decided the boy was worth cultivating and took to asking him over when there were guests. He remained a friend until he died in 1971. From him Teddy learned to look at and enjoy pictures; he was never to be an expert but he had a good eye and a shrewd collector’s instinct. Martin advised him on his purchases and left him two valuable paintings by Sargent. Through Martin, Teddy met several distinguished painters. One of whom he missed out on, though, was Walter Sickert. In 1934 Sickert bought a home in St Peter’s-in-Thanet. Teddy used to bicycle regularly past his house and often saw paintings hanging on the clothes line to dry, including the celebrated if artistically insignificant portrait of King Edward VIII, painted from a photograph. In this case, though, his charms failed to prevail. Once he took a group of carol singers to Sickert’s house and, after the singers had done their bit, rang hopefully at the front door. After a long pause the door opened a crack. ‘Go away!’ said Sickert.22
Another elderly admirer brought into his life by his father’s building activities was the rich Jewish solicitor, Royalton Kisch. Kisch was an expert on roses and a considerable amateur musicologist. From the start he decided that Teddy had limitless potential and he was accustomed to say from time to time: ‘That boy will one day be prime minister.’ Arnold Goodman was a frequent visitor who well remembered the youthful Heath as a feature of Kisch’s home. ‘Although he was clearly a very intelligent boy and intensely interested in politics,’ wrote Goodman, ‘I never shared Kisch’s view about his future.’ He told one of Heath’s biographers that he thought Teddy ‘an eager, questing person who was looking for founts of experience; founts of sophistication, founts of knowledge…He was not at all a man on the make.’ What most impressed Goodman was that, when Kisch was a very old man and Heath had become a public figure, Heath went on regularly visiting his old benefactor. ‘Seemingly he never forgot a friend,’ wrote Goodman, adding dryly that this was a quality ‘complemented, some critics may say, by too firm a recollection of his adversaries’.23
Musical, interested in painting and politics, religiously minded, reasonably well read: by most standards Teddy, when the time came to move on from Chatham House, was a formidably well-rounded individual. He had his limitations. ‘You were always a poor judge of a good film,’ wrote a friend in 1935. ‘Mickey Mouse seems to be the only “actor” who interests you.’24 He was intellectually unambitious and of limited imagination. Though his essay on Keats was judged to be ‘fairly well done’ there is no evidence that poetry held any joys for him. He paid little attention