In my first term as a fellow of Balliol, Harold Macmillan was the guest of honour at the college’s annual feast on St Catherine’s Day, 25 November. He gave an eloquent speech, finely balanced between comedy and tragedy. Beginning with reminiscences of his undergraduate days, he recalled that his Greats tutor had told him, ‘Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in life – save only this – that if you work hard and diligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.’ He would then enlarge the subject beyond the college walls, quoting the words of Ronnie Knox: ‘We in Balliol should never take a narrow and provincial view of the universe. We should imitate the genial tolerance of the sun which rises over Wadham and sets over Worcester.’ Then there came the solemn part of the speech, when he recalled that for years after the war ended in 1918, he did not dare to set foot in Oxford because it was a city only of ghosts, so many of his contemporaries having been killed in battle.
It was an oration I was to hear many times in the years to come. I continued to admire it, and to find it both amusing and moving. As I moved up high table and came to sit close to the great man, I was astonished to find how nervous he became as the moment for his speech approached: he would fall silent, toy with his food, and become oblivious to the remarks of his neighbours. But once launched into speaking he would regain confidence and once again deliver a most professional performance.
I got to know Macmillan after I became Master of Balliol. As Chancellor of Oxford University, he often had to attend functions in various colleges. For many years, he had stayed on these occasions at All Souls with the Warden, John Sparrow, but he did not find those lodgings congenial after Sparrow’s departure: ‘Can’t move anywhere without meeting young ladies with tennis rackets’, he complained, referring to the daughters of Warden Neill, whom he nicknamed, rather unfairly, Mr Quiverful. Henceforth, when he had to spend a night in Oxford he would stay in the guest room of the old Master’s lodgings in Balliol, and though I now lived with my family in a different house, the King’s Mound, I always spent the night in the next room when he was there.
If he took dinner in Balliol, he used to sit on for hours in the senior common room surrounded by dons, students and old members. At midnight or one, he used to progress across the quad to the drawing room in the lodgings, and he and I would gossip alone for another hour or two over a glass of Scotch. We were both admirers of Anthony Trollope and Ronald Knox, and as the night drew on he often spoke as if I too could remember the golden Edwardian years of Balliol. We did not much discuss present-day politics. I once ventured to ask him what was the truth about his alleged responsibility for handing over Cossack prisoners to be massacred by the Russians at the end of the war. He put his hand over his eyes and said, ‘I can’t recall anything about it. It was all so long ago.’
In 1981, I joined Macmillan in performing a somewhat bizarre duty. When the Prince of Wales became engaged to Lady Diana Spencer, we learned that Oxford University was one of half a dozen Privileged Bodies with the right to present a loyal address to the sovereign on the occasion of the marriage of the heir to the throne. The chancellor, vice chancellor and other senior academics were deputed to do so: I was included in the deputation on the grounds that I happened to then be the chair of the Association of University Teachers, the academic staff’s trade union. When the ceremony took place in Buckingham Palace, I was the last to be presented to Her Majesty by Chancellor Macmillan. Scorning any briefing that I was there as a trade unionist, he said, ‘And now, Ma’am, I have the honour to present the head of the finest college in Oxford – my own college of Balliol.’
In 1985, there came the day when the dons of Oxford University voted down a proposal to give Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree. Roy Jenkins used to relate the story that when the news of the refusal broke, Macmillan buttonholed him in a corridor in the Commons and said, ‘How embarrassing that our university should insult the prime minister in this way! How disgraceful!’ At this point, according to Jenkins, Macmillan’s tone changed and his eyes sharpened: ‘You know, it’s all really a matter of class. The dons are upper middle class and the prime minister is lower middle class. But you and I, Roy, with our working-class backgrounds, are above that kind of thing.’
Of all the Macmillan dinners in Balliol, the most memorable took place in 1986. During an official visit to Britain, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Yaobang, expressed a wish to visit Oxford. It was decided that he should be entertained in Balliol as the guest of the chancellor. Our bursar and staff were quite experienced at laying on dinners for grand guests, but the Foreign Office decided that food and drink were not enough. There must also be a display of British culture, and they laid on a team of actors and musicians to entertain the guests for an hour after dinner, with a celebration of 11 ages of man.
The occasion was not a happy one. The chancellor seemed to get on well enough with the aged Hu Yaobang, but I found myself next to Li Peng, the Chinese premier. My feeble jokes over dinner went down badly, even after heavy editing by the interpreter. After dinner, by the time we got to the third age of man, our guests were visibly impatient. Macmillan leaned behind his neighbour to whisper to me, ‘Can we not summon the proctors’ men and eject these strolling players?’ A hapless university official was sent to negotiate with the entertainers. They agreed to cut the 11 ages to six. Jeremy Irons, the lead actor, bounded down the steps saying he had never been so insulted. The Chinese guests leaped into their official cars the instant the actors disappeared.
When, later in the year, Macmillan became terminally ill, I was one of the last of his Oxford friends to visit him on his deathbed in Birch Grove, Sussex. I represented Oxford at his funeral, and read the lesson from First Corinthians at his memorial service in the university church. But the memory of him which I most cherish dates from an earlier period. Normally Macmillan was an early riser, even after a long midnight session over whisky. But one day he decided to stay in bed in the lodgings until noon. As it happened, on that day I was giving a pre-lunch party in honour of the musician George Malcolm, an honorary fellow of the college. Halfway through the party Macmillan appeared in a dressing gown, and quickly became the centre of attraction. As the guests began to depart, he looked around the room with sober satisfaction. ‘What a magnificent scene of debauchery’, he said, ‘Master – chancellor all unbraced – empty champagne bottles as far as the eye can see.’
When Ted Heath became prime minister in 1970, there was much excitement in Balliol. Heath had been an organ scholar in the college, and had remained a loyal alumnus, often persuading his friends among first-rate musicians to perform at Balliol Sunday night concerts. But the then Master of the college, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, was guarded in his approach to the new prime minister. He sent a telegram from the senior common room: ‘Political congratulations from some of us, personal congratulations from all of us.’ While Hill was in charge, Heath received no invitation to the college.
Shortly afterwards, however, Hill went on sabbatical, leaving in charge a South African mathematician, Jack de Wet, who had been a contemporary of Heath’s at Balliol. Jack seized the opportunity to invite Heath to dine with the fellows in the SCR. Between the issuing of the invitation and the actual dinner, the Conservative government signed an agreement for strategic cooperation with South Africa, thereby making Heath a target for anti-apartheid demonstrators. On the morning of the prime minister’s visit, it was discovered that graffiti had been painted on several college walls, and the great plate glass windows of the SCR had been inscribed with ‘Fuck Heath’ in large letters. The bursar and his staff worked hard to clean everything up in time for the dinner, but it was clear that the meal was likely to be disrupted. The dean of the college had to summon 20 police from the Special Branch to escort the guest of honour across the quadrangle from the Master’s lodgings, where we had taken sherry, to the SCR, where we were to dine.
It was while we were crossing the quad, amid violent scuffles between police and demonstrators, that I had my first encounter with Heath. We found ourselves walking side by side: ‘This is a new experience for us’, I said, ‘but I expect you’re quite used to this kind of thing.’ ‘Never seen anything like it before in my life’, was his reply. But during dinner, he chatted urbanely and energetically, as if nothing untoward had happened. Rather sententiously, I explained to him that many of the fellows were not supportive of his policies, but that one could enjoy dinner with someone with whom one strongly disagreed. ‘Of course there are limits’, I went on to say: ‘I wouldn’t have accepted an invitation to a meal with Hitler.’ ‘Oh, wouldn’t you?’, said Heath: ‘I once did, in the 1930s.’
I cannot recall any further meetings with Heath during the mastership of Christopher Hill, but when I became Master myself he displayed a lot of affection for the college, and in my first year established a Heath Junior Research Fellowship. During the Thatcher administration, ten years after the ‘Fuck Heath’ demonstration, the demonstrators returned to the college for their first gaudy. The fellow who welcomed them back remarked in his speech that the sentiments they had painted on the windows were now more often to be heard within 10 Downing Street.
On his visits to the college, Heath made no secret of his antipathy to Mrs Thatcher. Arriving on one occasion, he barked: ‘D’you know what that woman wants to do now? She is trying to remove my bodyguard!’ At the time, the IRA did indeed present a threat to senior politicians, but I felt that what outraged Heath was less the loss of security than the loss of dignity. I was reminded of Lear’s lament when his daughters strip him of his hundred knights.
Heath managed to retain his bodyguard, but he was not always well served by it. To mark the centenary of the Balliol Musical Society he persuaded Yehudi Menuhin, Janet Baker, George Malcolm and the Lindsay String Quartet to give a special concert in the college hall. He and Menuhin occupied adjacent rooms in the lodgings on the occasion. The close protection officer confused the two men’s suitcases, and only by making a last-minute dash to Heath’s car did I save Menuhin from having to perform without trousers.
As part of the memorial concert, Heath himself conducted a chorus of Balliol students – the chapel choir, reinforced by a number of volunteers. They did not seem to have enjoyed the experience. Can it possibly be true that he conducted the Liebeslieder Waltzes four beats to the bar?
While my wife and I were glad to welcome Heath back to college, he was notoriously difficult to entertain. The conventions of placement meant that, at dinners, he often sat next to Nancy rather than to me, and she found conversation quite a strain. Owing to some malady, Heath would fall asleep at table during a gap between sentences. Nancy, when first due to entertain him, had been warned by a senior hostess of her acquaintance, ‘I prepared three topics to discuss – sailing, music and politics. We had used them all up by the time we reached the soup.’
When Harold Macmillan died in 1986, there was much speculation in Oxford about possible successors to the chancellorship of the university. I was pleased to learn, early on, that Roy Jenkins was willing to stand – but shortly after that, I was told that Ted Heath also intended to let his name go forward. I was saddened by this; I had become fond of Ted, and admired the magnanimity he had shown to Balliol, but I was sure that he had no real chance of being elected, and did not want to see him wounded again after all he had suffered under Thatcher. I approached several of his close friends, urging them to dissuade him from standing, but to no avail.
Since Jenkins and Heath were both honorary fellows of the college, Balliol’s governing body decided to remain officially neutral between the two, and offer each of them, impartially, such assistance as they might require from the college office. The vice chancellor of the day, Patrick Neill, secured the nomination of a third candidate, Lord Blake, the Provost of Queen’s College, believing that he would be seen as a non-political academic. In fact, Blake was seen as the Thatcherite candidate, and was supported by those who had been outraged by the university’s refusal to give the prime minister an honorary degree.
Most of the fellows of Balliol, as individuals, were supporters of Heath. The Labour dons would naturally not vote for Blake, and many had not forgiven Jenkins for defecting from their party in 1981 to found the Social Democrats. In the final days of the election, instructions came from Downing Street that Conservatives should vote for Heath, rather than Blake; but despite this last-minute switch, Jenkins won easily.
When the result was declared, Ted was taking tea with his supporters in our lodgings. Our teenage son Charles was deputed to run from the Proctors’ Office to communicate the result as soon as the votes were counted, and it fell to him to announce the news of Ted’s defeat. Writing a day or two later, I tried to console Ted by telling him that if the electorate had been restricted to the fellows of Balliol, rather than to the Congregation of the university, he would have been chancellor by a large majority.
After I ceased to be Master and moved to Rhodes House I would meet Ted from time to time at Balliol functions, to which we were both invited as honorary fellows. Ted continued to call me ‘Master’ for years after I had ceased to hold the job. One day in the buttery I said, ‘Ted, please call me “Tony”. If you keep on calling me “Master” I’ll have to start calling you “Prime Minister”.’ ‘Oh, I would like that!’, was his reply.
During our time at Rhodes House, Nancy and I used to invite Rhodes Scholars to dinner, a dozen or so at a time, where they would be addressed by a specially invited guest of honour. Ted agreed to fill this role on a day in 1991, which turned out to be just after George Bush senior launched the first Gulf War. The Scholars had been addressed the week before by Sir Patrick Mayhew, the attorney general who had advised the government on the legality of the war. Heath spoke out strongly against the decision to go to war – Kuwait was not a proper nation, he maintained, and did not deserve to have us put our troops in harm’s way: ‘And I ought to know’, he said, ‘because I helped set it up.’
More than once, Ted invited Nancy and me to Sunday lunch in his beautiful house in the Cathedral Close at Salisbury, whose gardens backed on to rivers on both sides. One of the guests we met there was Sara Morrison, with whom I had worked years earlier on a committee to discuss Anglo-Irish affairs (see Chapter 15). She was, I believe, Ted’s closest woman friend, and he would accept criticism and advice from her that he would not have taken from anyone else. When Ted died, I wondered for a while where I should direct a letter of condolence. I decided that Sara would be the most appropriate person, and in her reply she said that I had probably guessed rightly.
Ted’s death left me with one puzzle. For many years, each summer, two hundred pounds would mysteriously appear in my bank account. I could never discover where it came from, or for what purpose it was supposed to be used. All I could discover was that it was paid through Brown Shipley. The payment ceased the year after Ted died; and when his biography appeared, I learned that Brown Shipley was his private bank. I continue to wonder whether, among his other eccentricities, it was his habit to send anonymously holiday money to his friends.
Oxford University has traditionally offered an honorary degree to those of its alumni who have become prime minister. But, notoriously, in 1986, Congregation, the university’s parliament, refused to honour Margaret Thatcher. It is often said that the proposal for an honorary degree would have been uncontroversial if it had been put forward by Oxford’s Hebdomadal Council when she first became prime minister in 1979. Not so. I was a member of that Council in 1979. When Thatcher became prime minister, there was immediately consideration of the award of an honorary degree. After keen discussion, Council decided not to put a proposal forward: she had made herself too unpopular because of the recent increase in fees for overseas students. It would be dangerous to put her name forward and then have it rejected by the university’s Congregation: that would be the worst of all possible worlds.
We decided to wait until the prime minister became more popular. We waited, and we waited, and then at last the time seemed ripe. Those of us who had previously opposed the proposal were converted by Thatcher’s behaviour during and after the Brighton bombing. We admired her personal courage at the time, and the magnanimity she showed by continuing the quest for peace in Northern Ireland. In Council, I proposed that the university should send her a message of congratulation on her escape, and I was among those members who, late in 1984, voted to put her name forward for the degree.
However, between Council’s proposal and the decisive vote in Congregation, two things happened. First, it was proposed to abolish free tuition for British undergraduates. When that measure was withdrawn because of pressure from backbenchers, the loss to the Treasury was made up by raiding the science budget. Hence, between October 1984 and January 1985, two new constituencies of anti-Thatcherites were recruited, who combined to vote down the proposal for an honorary degree.
I have been told – I know not on what authority – that Thatcher was so incensed by Balliol’s part in the campaign against the honorary degree, that she blocked a proposal to award me a knighthood. Certainly, it was only after John Major became prime minister that I received the honour that normally comes up with the rations when a commoner is elected as President of the British Academy. But on the rare occasions when I met her personally, she was always friendly and charming.
The first such occasion was at the time of the official visit of Hu Yaobang. I was invited to Downing Street on the Tuesday before he came to Balliol, no doubt so that I could learn how to entertain the august guests. I took the opportunity to consult Denis Thatcher about the Foreign Office proposal for an evening of cultural entertainment. ‘Get it stopped’, he said. ‘I have done this job for seven bloodstained years, and I can tell you that the last thing you want is an hour of culture late at night in a language you don’t understand.’ Next day, I telephoned the Foreign Office to tell them that their proposal had been countermanded in Downing Street – but it did not take them long to see through the ruse.
Several years later, when Thatcher was no longer prime minister, and I had left Balliol for Rhodes House, I hosted a dinner there to celebrate the opening of the Saïd Business School in Oxford. I was placed next to her, and we had a lively discussion about the Rhodes Scholarships. While prime minister, she had worried that the Marshall Scholarships, funded by the British government, were less well regarded than the Rhodes Scholarships, funded from the will of Cecil Rhodes. Ambassadors had tried to reassure her that, in intellectual terms, the Marshall Scholarships were superior to the Rhodes Scholarships. ‘You mean to tell me’, she said, ‘that we are spending all this money to produce a bunch of academics?’
So, on that evening in Rhodes House, she sent me off from the dinner table to fetch a copy of Cecil’s will. I presented it to her, and watched in silence while she read through it. When she got to the point where the will specified that the Scholars were not to be mere bookworms, her eyes lit up. ‘How right he was!’, she said.