Michael Heseltine - Early Life

Early Life

Michael Heseltine was born in Swansea in Wales and is a distant descendant of Charles Dibdin (from whom one of his middle names was taken). His mother, Eileen Ray (Pridmore), originated in West Wales. His father's ancestors were farm labourers in Pembrey. His maternal great-grandfather worked at the Swansea docks (as a result, Heseltine was latterly made an honorary member of the Swansea Dockers Club). His maternal grandfather, James Pridmore, founded West Glamorgan Collieries Ltd, a short-lived company that briefly worked two small mines on the outskirts of Swansea (1919–21).

Heseltine was brought up in relative luxury at No. 1, Uplands Crescent (now No. 5). He enjoyed angling in Brynmill Park and won a junior competition. He was educated at Shrewsbury School. He campaigned briefly as a volunteer in the October 1951 General Election before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in frustration at his inability to be elected to the committee of the Oxford University Conservative Association, he founded the breakaway Blue Ribbon Club. Julian Critchley recounts a story from his student days of how he plotted his future on the back of an envelope, a future that would culminate as Prime Minister in the 1990s.A more detailed apocryphal version has him writing down: 'millionaire 25, cabinet member 35, party leader 45, prime minister 55'. He became a millionaire and was a member of the shadow cabinet from the age of 41 but did not manage to become Party Leader or Prime Minister.

Heseltine's biographers Michael Crick and Julian Critchley recount how, despite not being a natural speaker, he became a strong orator through much practice which included speaking in front of a mirror, listening to tape recordings of the speeches of Charles Hill and taking speaking lessons from a vicar's wife. In the 1970s and 1980s Heseltine's conference speech was often to be the highlight of the Conservative Party Conference despite his views being well to the left of the then leader Margaret Thatcher.

He was eventually elected to the committee of the Oxford Union after five terms at the University. The following year (1953-4), having challenged unsuccessfully for the Presidency the previous summer, he served in top place on the committee, then as Secretary, and then Treasurer. During this last post he reopened the Union cellars for business and persuaded the visiting Sir Bernard and Lady Docker to contribute to the considerable cost. After graduating with a second-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, described by his own tutor as "a great and undeserved triumph", he was permitted to stay on for an extra term to serve as President of the Oxford Union for Michaelmas term 1954 having been elected with the assistance of leading Oxford socialists Anthony Howard and Jeremy Isaacs.

After graduating he built up a property business in partnership with his Oxford friend Ian Josephs. With financial support from both of their families they started with a boarding house in Clanricarde Gardens and progressed to various other properties in the Bayswater area. He trained as an accountant but after failing his accountancy exams in 1958 could no longer avoid conscription into National Service.

Heseltine later admitted to admiring the military as his father, who died in 1957, had been a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Engineers in the Second World War and active in the Territorial Army thereafter. Heseltine felt that his business career was too important to be disrupted although he and his father took the precaution of arranging interviews to increase his chances of attaining an officer's commission in case he had to serve. Heseltine had been lucky not to be called up for the Korean War in the early 1950s or the Suez Crisis in 1956 but in the final years of National Service, already due for abolition by 1960, an effort was made to call up men who had so far managed to postpone service. Despite having almost reached the newly reduced maximum call-up age of twenty-six, Heseltine was conscripted in January 1959, becoming a Second Lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. Heseltine left the Guards to contest the General Election that year; according to Ian Josephs this had been his plan from the start, and he was exempted on business grounds from the remaining sixteen months of service. During the 1980s his habit of wearing a Guards regimental tie, sometimes incorrectly tied with a red stripe across the knot, was the subject of much acerbic comment from military figures and from older MPs with extensive war records. Crick estimated that he must have worn the tie on more days than he actually served in the Guards.

Heseltine built a housing estate at Tenterden, Kent which failed to sell and was beset with repair problems until after his election to Parliament, founded the magazine publishing company Haymarket in collaboration with another Oxford friend Clive Labovitch and early in the 1960s acquired the famous (but unprofitable) magazine Man About Town whose title he shortened to About Town then simply Town. In 1962 he also briefly published a well-received weekly newspaper,Topic, which folded but whose journalists later became the Sunday Times Insight Team. Between 1960 and 1964 he also worked as a part-time interviewer for ITV.

After rapid expansion, Heseltine's businesses were badly hit by the Selwyn Lloyd credit squeeze of 1962 and, still not yet thirty years old, he would eventually owe £250,000 (over £3 million at 2007 prices). He claims to have been lent a badly needed £60,000 by a bank manager who retired the same day. Later, during the 1990s, Heseltine joked about how he had avoided bankruptcy by such stratagems as paying bills only when threatened with legal action or sending out insufficiently completed cheques although it has never been suggested that he did not pay off all his debts eventually. It was during this period of stress that he took up gardening as a serious hobby.

In 1967, Heseltine secured Haymarket's financial future by selling a majority stake to the British Printing Corporation retaining a large shareholding himself. Under the management of Lindsay Masters, the company grew publishing a series of profitable motoring, management and advertising journals and making Heseltine a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of pounds.