Far from accepting the rigid class divisions of pre-war Britain, Heath was to study them, learn the manners and language of his social superiors – ape them – then ruthlessly exploit them.
In the various books and articles written about Heath over the past six decades, several cite uncorroborated incidents from his school days that identify embryonic sadistic behaviour. Gerald Byrne in Borstal Boy reports the instance of a girl in Heath’s class at school being beaten by him so hard with a ruler that she had to be sent home in a taxi. If true, this must have taken place before the age of twelve, as Rutlish was a school for boys only. Certainly, Bessie Heath denied that this incident ever took place: ‘I do not know of this incident [and] neither does his headmaster, who has nothing but good to say of him. Surely I, his mother, would have heard of this, if it had happened?’38
This may well be the opinion of a mother blind to the faults of a much-loved son. But, in the wake of the huge publicity surrounding Heath at the time of his arrest, many of the tales about him may well be apocryphal. Like this story, none are verifiable by any sources. Borstal Boy was published immediately after the trial in 1946, written in great haste and with a tabloid audience in mind. Its author, Gerald Byrne, was a journalist with the Sunday newspaper, Empire News. He had met Heath casually in various pubs and during the trial had talked to many of Heath’s associates. Though he doesn’t cite any sources, some of the incidents he describes do have the ring of truth. He quotes one young woman, a friend from Heath’s schooldays:
Even at the age of fifteen Neville Heath started to show his sway over girls. The girls at the local school I attended used to take turns arranging regular little parties at their various homes and we wouldn’t have dreamt of having a party without Neville – it wouldn’t have been complete. He was an unmitigated liar, show-off swank-pot and all the things that usually go to make an unpopular character, yet although all the girls knew his faults, he somehow managed to blend them into an unusual and charming personality, and we all liked him.39
Heath was to develop this persona as the likeable rogue, the young dandy, throughout his adolescence to such an extent that by the time he reached borstal, he was a self-confessed ‘Raffles’.
Byrne cites another incident, uncorroborated at the time, but verified a decade later by Giles Playfair and Derrick Sington in their study of psychopathy, The Offenders. Having read of the incident in Byrne’s book and uneasy about quoting unverifiable sources, they had tracked down many of the individuals involved.
One winter night, when he was about fifteen, the young Heath and a boy called ‘Howard’ attended a party at the home of a mutual friend, Elizabeth, in Wimbledon High Street. The two boys, who were in the habit of drinking quarts of beer together in the garage behind Howard’s house, had purchased a considerable amount of alcohol from the off-licence in Sutton High Street. As well as the boys, Elizabeth had invited five of her female friends. Her parents were out for the evening and the young people were left to their own devices. After a while, it was suggested that they play ‘Murders’ and the group dispersed to various parts of the house. They successfully played the game twice. The third time, Heath and Howard persuaded a girl called ‘Jeanette’ to accompany them in their search for clues. The three young people climbed to the top of the house and entered a bedroom. Suddenly, Heath grabbed Jeanette and threw her on the bed, calling to Howard to help him.
‘Come on Howard, let’s make real love to her!’ Neville held Jeanette down as she violently kicked and struggled. The two boys first tried to kiss her face but she moved her head from side to side to avoid their lips. Then – ‘We’ll soon show her what love really is!’ said Neville.
Jeanette screamed, alerting the other girls in the house. She returned home, deeply shocked, ‘with deep blue finger marks on both sides of her throat’.40
Gerald Byrne interviewed both Jeanette’s father and Howard in 1946. Then, in 1956, Playfair and Sington attempted to have the assault verified by Jeanette’s father, a former MP.41 He confirmed that the story was true. After the incident, he had gone off in search of the two boys and caught up with them outside Howard’s house. He reprimanded Heath and warned him that not only might he be expelled from school for such behaviour, but he might also be reported to the authorities. This, after all, was a violent attempted sexual assault and not merely adolescent ‘horseplay’ as Byrne has Heath refer to it. Heath was ‘disarmingly apologetic, courteous and contrite’ and managed to persuade Jeanette’s father not to report him to Varnish or the police. This was to become a well-rehearsed strategy in Heath’s life. Having committed offences, he would rely on his innate charm and good manners to side-step difficult situations. Together with the appearance of sincere contrition this usually led to Heath being let off the hook. Not only did this allow him to refine his skill in petty offences, but it also began to cement his attitude to those in authority.42
This incident is the first evidence of violence in Heath’s life, and it’s worth bearing in mind that he stated to a prison psychiatrist in 1946 that he had no knowledge of sex until the age of eighteen,43 some years after this attack. But it’s also significant that Heath had been drinking before the assault – the marriage of sexual aggression and alcohol already fused, even before he had lost his virginity.
Though adept at sport – especially at rugby, cricket and athletics – Heath did not excel at school, mathematics being the only subject he felt confident in. He sat the matriculation exam but failed. He refused to take it again, despite appeals from his mother and Mr Varnish. Without matriculating, neither university nor a commission as an officer in the services were options for him. At the age of sixteen, on 9 March 1934, he started work as a warehouseman in the silk department of Pawson and Leaf, an established textile importer at St Paul’s Churchyard in the City of London, which had been trading since the eighteenth century.44 The building still remains situated directly opposite the cathedral. This job had probably been arranged for Heath through his father’s connections in the textile business and William Heath may well have worked for Pawson and Leaf at some point himself. Heath earned 25s. a week for general menial duties and though the job was dull, he was buoyed by the social life.45 In the City, he made friends with several other young men who were in the Territorial Army, specifically the Artists Rifles whose ranks were generally filled with young businessmen and public schoolboys. On 30 October, Heath enlisted as a rifleman ‘terrier’ in the 28th London Regiment Territorial Army at the Drill Hall, Duke’s Road, just off the Euston Road. By now, Heath had specifically set his sights on a uniformed service career, commenting to a friend at the time that ‘it is the uniform I want’.46
The appeal of the uniform was fundamental to Heath’s psychology. For him it became a complex symbol which accumulated power and significance as his career progressed from peacetime to war – at once a signifier of status and class as well as an indicator of bravery and heroism. From the mid-1930s onwards, Heath would adopt various uniforms, only some of which he was entitled to wear. When he was on active service in Palestine in 1940, he lamented the fact that his division did not wear uniform and were allowed to wear ‘civvies’.47 By a conspiracy of historical events, Heath would reach his maturity when the world would be suddenly – and rapidly – flooded with uniforms as it launched headlong into the Second World War.
Heath’s ultimate aim was to be a Royal Air Force pilot. His tenure with the RAF was the apotheosis of his life – the fulfilment of a Boy’s Own dream. His relationship with flight and flying was intense and he was later to state: ‘I have always been crazy on flying. All my successes, and all my failures, are bound up with my history as a flyer.’48
The RAF had only been a force independent of the army or the navy as recently as 1918 and throughout the 1930s, with Germany re-arming and investing in her defences, they launched an extensive campaign to expand the service. From 1935, forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built throughout the British Isles, most of which were op
erational by 1939.49 This was accompanied by huge investment in new aircraft designs with up-to-the-minute technology and a mass recruitment drive. The RAF increased in strength from 31,000 personnel in 1934 to 118,000 in 1939, backed by 45,000 reserves; an increase in manpower of 500 per cent in five years.50 With extraordinary speed, the RAF had transformed from a small and exclusive elite into an ultra-modern combat service with the manpower and technology to lead the Allies in the new frontier of warfare; the air.51
Throughout the 1930s, the priority for the RAF was to publicize their fledgling service and to find a way of engaging a generation of boys who would become the core of the force during the Second World War. It was essential for them to explain to the public who they were, what they did and what they stood for, per ardua ad astra (‘through adversity to the stars’) – a suitably aspirational motto for the boy from suburban Wimbledon. From 1920 to 1937, an air pageant was held every summer at Hendon Aerodrome, which included races, mock battles and aerobatics. These events – later named the Royal Air Force Air Display – attracted huge crowds and were reported throughout the media. At the same time there was huge popular interest in the Schneider Trophy, an international air race that encouraged advances in aerodynamics. The 1930s became very much the age of the plane – fast, glamorous and modern. Aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Amy Johnson were as famous as film stars and stories of their record-breaking achievements filled the newspapers. Consequently a whole generation of boys became fascinated with the mystery, romance and power of flight. As Patrick Bishop points out in his study of Fighter Command, Fighter Boys, many of these boys’ first encounters with aeroplanes and airmen took on a dream-like or mythic aura and many of those that are recorded have a sense of a meeting with Destiny.52
This generation had been brought up on illustrated papers like The Magnet, The Gem and The Modern Boy, which celebrated the heroism of the fighter aces from the First World War like Captain W. E. Johns. In 1932 Johns himself made a huge impact when he published the first of his Biggles stories. Captain James Bigglesworth was both a figure fit to hero-worship as well as a role model that a generation of schoolboys – including ‘Dam Buster’ Guy Gibson – would follow into the air in less than a decade. Crucially, Johns didn’t depict a hardened and experienced flyer – but a boy, just like them.
[Biggles was a] slight, fair-haired good-looking lad still in his teens but [already] an acting flight commander . . . his deep-set eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and the sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines . . . he had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? What did it matter anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it.53
The Air Ministry even appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in flying magazines and newspapers. One front-page advertisement from the Daily Express stated that though the basic educational qualification was a school certificate, ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’. What the service required was not qualifications but a particular sort of character, as the RAF, even in its embryonic stage, had begun to establish its own identity, attracting a very specific type of recruit distinctly different from the other services. They tended to be louche and eccentric about their dress, hence the iconic look of pencil moustache, flying jacket and silk scarf, now the stuff of easy parody but at the time very much regarded as a fashion of dissent. RAF officers treated the army and navy (the ‘senior’ services) and their traditions flippantly, priding themselves, for instance, on their lack of knowledge of horses.
As well as dress, pilots adopted, by army and navy standards, an extremely casual attitude towards drill and saluting as well as a tendency to hard drinking and prank-playing. This carefree culture was more reminiscent of a private flying club than a focused fighting service. Many of these young men, were, like Heath, barely out of school or university; immature, high-spirited and literally, care-less. They brought with them in-jokes and slang from English public schools and American movies which was soon to develop into a specific language of understatement, bravura and cheek, all of which contributed to a great sense of camaraderie and belonging. Cecil Beaton, who was hugely impressed by the ‘matchless team spirit’ he found within the RAF, attributed this to the service being ‘surprisingly free from conventions’.54 Junior officers addressed their squadron superiors as ‘sir’ on the initial meeting of the day, after which they always used first names.
Something about this ambience, the culture, the uniform, this sense of belonging to a new type of defence force based on up-to-the-minute technology completely entranced the young Neville Heath.
On 25 November 1935, Heath attended the RAF Training School at Desford in Leicestershire where he was given ab initio training – the very first stage of flying instruction. For many young pilots, first flights left an indelible impression, akin, as some would remember, to their first encounter with sex. And it is perhaps significant that Heath lost his virginity in the same year that he started to fly. One young pilot from this period, remembering his first flight years later, was still moved by the intensity of the experience:
I still find it hard to find the words to describe my sheer delight and sense of freedom as the little biplane, seeming to strain every nerve, accelerated across the grass and suddenly became airborne.55
Heath was taught to fly by George E. Lowell and Sergeant Bulman in a De Havilland D.H. 82, a ‘Tiger Moth’ – the RAF’s primary training aircraft at the time. Now that he had completed his flying training and with a very strong recommendation from his superior officers in the Territorial Army, Heath left his job at Pawson and Leaf on 10 February 1936 and was granted a short service commission for four years in the General Duties branch of the RAF. He had had to pass a written test and a strict medical and was questioned by a panel of officers who were looking for technical knowledge as well as some evidence of enthusiasm. An aptitude for sports was usually taken as a strong indication of the latter and Heath had distinguished himself as an athlete at school, if nothing else. On 22 March he started at No. 11 Flying Training School at RAF Wittering in Northamptonshire as an acting pilot officer.
At Wittering, Heath spent three months flying biplanes – the Hawker Hart and Hawker Audax – followed by three months in the Advanced Training Squadron flying Hawker Furies. Trainee pilots went through twenty-two exercises, beginning with ‘air experience’ – the first flip – through to aerobatics. These were actively encouraged by flying instructors in order to increase the young pilots’ confidence – but also to prepare them for the realities and unexpected dangers of aerial combat.56 Heath was then sent to the RAF Depot at Uxbridge for two weeks of drilling, training and familiarization with mess protocol. The young recruits would be measured for their uniforms and mess kit and given £50 to cover everything – not enough if, like Neville Heath, they preferred the better outfitters. Student pilots would live in the mess and dress for dinner every night except on Saturdays, a ‘dress-down’ day when blazer, flannels and tie were permitted.57
After successfully completing the first half of the course, pilots received their ‘wings’ – a badge sewn over their tunic pocket, ‘the most momentous occasion in any young pilot’s career’.58 The chief instructor would then assess each trainee pilot’s qualities and abilities and whether he should go on to train as a fighter or bomber pilot.59 Heath was assessed as ‘above average’, displaying the necessary discipline and audacity to become one of the most glamorous figures in the mid-1930s – a modern-day hero at the helm of a Rolls-Royce engine; a fighter pilot.60
On 24 August 1936, Heath was posted to 19 Squadron at RAF Duxford, near Cambridge. He was sent on parachute and armaments courses as well as given instruction in night flying. He was paid 14s. a day, from which 6s. went on mess costs covering food, lodging, laundry and a personal batman. The rest went on cars and alcohol, the two being inextricably linked in the social liv
es of young pilots on air bases. Cars were often bought collectively by a squadron and groups of young pilots would club together the £10 to £25 needed to buy one. These would be used to get to local country pubs or occasionally on trips to London where they would call in at Shepherd’s in Shepherd Market – a favoured haunt for RAF servicemen, also popular with high-class prostitutes. But drink and petrol were both expensive, with fuel costing 1s. a gallon and a pint of beer costing 8d.61
19 Squadron was the first to be equipped with the fighter plane, the Gloster Gauntlet, the fastest aircraft in the RAF from 1935 to 1937. They were also the first to fly the Supermarine Spitfire, which was to play a pivotal role in the Battle of Britain and thereafter became the backbone of Fighter Command. Heath was training at an extraordinary time in a force at the forefront of modern technology. He was promoted to pilot officer on 25 November 1936, the lowest commissioned rank in the RAF. At this time, he genuinely seemed to prosper – his commanding officer remarking that ‘this man has the makings of a first-class pilot and should prove himself an officer of outstanding abilities’.62 Technology, history, opportunity – Heath was in exactly the right place at the right time, one of the young men of the moment with huge possibilities, as well as challenges, ahead of him.
Around this time Heath got engaged to Arlene Blakely, a Wimbledon girl who lived with her parents Alan and Grace at 15 Manor Gardens, just off the southern end of Merton Hall Road. At last his life and career seemed to be fulfilling his great promise – and yet this is when his RAF career started to go awry.
Handsome Brute: The True Story of a Ladykiller Page 13