had far wider interests than most of his contemporaries. His masters took it for granted that whatever college at Oxford or Cambridge he favoured would be grateful to receive him and would smooth his way with scholarships. The colleges proved to be less enthusiastic.
First, in 1934 he tried for music scholarships at St Catherine’s, Cambridge and Keble, Oxford. Both were denied him. Next he applied for a Modern Greats scholarship at Balliol. Charles Morris, the Tutor for Admissions, asked him what he wanted to do in life. Architecture was by now long forgotten; his most ardent wish, he replied, was to be a professional politician. ‘I don’t think I ever heard any other schoolboy answer a similar question in these terms,’ admitted the Tutor. He was rejected on other grounds. Though his economics were close to being of Exhibition standard, his general work was not so good and his French was lamentable. ‘You will understand,’ the Tutor wrote consolingly to Norman, ‘that it is not so much a question of a candidate being weak in some subjects as of his being sufficiently better than the other candidates.’ Balliol would be happy to accept him as a Commoner. He was still very young, however. If he were to stay on for another year at Chatham House, he might well get an Exhibition. Norman discussed the matter with Teddy’s parents and established that, though they were prepared to keep him at school for another year, they did not think they could possibly afford to send him to Oxford without some kind of scholarship. May 1935 was pencilled in for the next attempt.25
Teddy, however, grew restive. In January 1935 he wrote directly to the Tutor for Admissions at Balliol. The letter was cautiously phrased but suggested that he was well placed to win a scholarship worth £80 a year to Cambridge. If he was to get an Exhibition or scholarship to Balliol, how much would it be worth? If the purpose of the letter was to enhance his value in the eyes of Balliol, it was unsuccessful. The reply was discouraging. ‘It seems to me that you can hardly afford to take the risk of letting the possibilities at Cambridge go by in favour of an examination in May which (so far at any rate as this College is concerned) has only got one £100 award.’ If an Exhibition worth £40 would give Heath the support he needed, then his chances were obviously better, but even at that level an award was far from being a certainty.26
Teddy concluded that a bird in the hand was worth more than a – probably pretty speculative – bird in the bush, and decided to stick with Balliol. He duly tried again in May 1935. The bird turned out not to be in the hand after all. Perhaps his extracurricular activities had proved too distracting, perhaps he had grown stale. He did no better in economics and decidedly worse in literature: his essay earned a derisory gamma+. ‘On balance he does not appear to have made any marked advance,’ the Tutor for Admissions concluded depressingly.27 Once more his parents were consulted. In the intervening twelve months William Heath had grown slightly more prosperous, the acclaim for Teddy at Chatham House had become still more fervent: the Heaths decided that, whatever the sacrifice involved, their son must accept the place at Balliol which the college was still happy to offer him. The new term began in October 1935. ‘It will be my last letter to you before you go up,’ wrote his former schoolfriend, Ken Evans, on 1 October, ‘so take my warning. Don’t get drunk at the first dinner, it looks bad.’28 He was clearly joking. No one who knew Teddy Heath in 1935 could have believed that the advice was necessary.
Balliol in the 1930s was not quite the intellectual powerhouse which it had been before the First World War, but it was still one of Oxford’s leading colleges and as likely as any other to produce the next generation of political leaders. For Heath it had another salient advantage; it was not even slightly smart. Its uncompromisingly ugly architecture and the – by contemporary standards – unusually polyglot or at least polychrome nature of its student body meant that it was derided by the more conventionally snobbish of the undergraduates. The year Heath went up, Korda’s epic Sanders of the River was playing in Oxford cinemas. At one point a canoe-load of ferocious black warriors scudded furiously down the river in pursuit of the fleeing hero. It became a ritual that shouts of ‘Well rowed, Balliol!’ should ring round the auditorium at this point. Such mockery only enhanced the self-esteem of the members of Balliol, whose bland consciousness of their own superiority ensured that they would assume that any hostility was based on jealousy.
As well as being cosmopolitan, Balliol prided itself on being socially inclusive. Half the undergraduates came from public schools, a handful from patrician families. In some colleges this led to the formation of uneasy cliques; no doubt some such social divisions were to be found at Balliol but they were deplored by the great majority of the undergraduates and practised only surreptitiously. ‘What little snobbery there was tended to be intellectual rather than social,’ wrote Heath, ‘and, to my delight as well as my surprise, I soon found myself mixing easily with freshmen from almost every conceivable background.’1 Any undergraduate who let his snobbishness obtrude would have had to reckon with the formidable Master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay. Lindsay was a former Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow University whose resolute radicalism was tempered by openness of mind and a tolerance of almost any point of view except the bigoted and the stupid. He liked Heath from the start: ‘v.attractive chap’, he wrote in the ‘handshaking notes’ which he kept to remind himself of the salient points about all the undergraduates.2 ‘No background’ was a slightly cryptic additional comment; if it meant that Heath almost unconsciously distanced himself from his roots, it would have been justified. Heath never made a secret of his origins or in any way appeared ashamed of them, but he felt family and university to be two widely distant sectors of his life and saw no reason to mix them. Throughout his life he tended rigidly to compartmentalise his interests, his activities and his personal relationships. During his four years at university his parents visited him only once or twice, his brother John seems never to have come. He was not ashamed of his family; it was just that it had no place in his Oxford life.
‘The College is delightful,’ Heath told his old headmaster. ‘Of course, not an architectural wonder, but it has its own, to me, very pleasing atmosphere. The dons are very nice…Here too everybody mixes very well, unfortunately not always the case.’3 Heath did not strive consciously to adapt to his new surroundings but, in the words of his tutor, the future Lord Fulton, he was not one of those working-class undergraduates who remained ‘conspicuously loyal to their social background’.4 It was while he was at Oxford that his accent evolved into the slightly uneasy compound which endured until his death: plummy upper-middle-class varied by disconcerting vowel sounds that betrayed a more plebeian background. When Nigel Nicolson, an Oxford contemporary, referred to his ‘cockney accent’, Heath remarked indignantly that he had not a trace of London blood in his make-up. ‘I think it is a mixture of rural Kent and Wodehousean Oxford,’ suggested his sister-in-law. Whatever its origins, Heath was aware of the fact that his accent was noticeably different from that of most of those with whom he consorted. Either he was unable to change it or, more probably, had no wish to do so. More than most politicians, he genuinely disdained cheap popularity and eschewed anything that might be interpreted as an attempt to win favour by pretending to be something other than what he was. He would not ostentatiously parade his social origins but nor would he excuse them or conceal them. Nicolson said he thought Heath’s accent ‘counted against him a little’. Given the progress that lay ahead, it can not have counted much.5
Not that everything was easy. Heath was certainly one of the poorest undergraduates at Balliol. A few came from similarly humble homes but most of those had scholarships or grants to help them. Heath had a small loan from the Kent Education Committee and another from Royalton Kisch, but beyond that every penny that he spent was an extra burden on his hard-pressed parents. He had