16 May 2010

Robert Armstrong (b. 1927) was Principal Private Secretary to Edward Heath, Prime Minister, 1970–5; he was knighted in 1978 and entered the House of Lords as Baron Armstrong of Ilminster in 1988.

[Extract]

Though there is no mention of it in Sir Edward Heath's autobiography, I have a clear recollection that Benjamin Britten came to see Mr Heath at Downing Street [on 5 May 1971], to discuss the restrictions placed by the Soviet authorities upon Slava Rostropovich's visits to this country for the Aldeburgh Festival and the possibility of an approach to Madame Furtseva, the Culture Minister in Moscow. I was the Private Secretary in attendance at the meeting. Mr. Heath was much given to sitting in the garden of 10 Downing Street when the weather was fine, and memory tells me that they talked in the garden. I also remember that there was some discussion of the possibility of Heath writing to Furtseva.

Edward Heath admired Benjamin Britten and his music, and he recognised and respected Britten's views about the social role and responsibilities of composers, and the way in which Britten fulfilled them.

He saw Britten and William Walton as the foremost British composers of their generation. He saw Britten's interest in Russia as primarily – I would think purely – musical: as a function of Britten's friendships with Rostropovich (whom Heath also counted as a friend) and his wife, with Richter, and with Shostakovich, whom Victor Hochhauser brought to see Heath at No. 10 on another occasion [on 12 July 1972], and of Britten's intense pleasure in making music with them. Of course he was well aware of the political background to those relationships, in the context of British–Soviet relations at that time. He would have liked the musical relationships to be as close as the politics would permit; but he would not have expected the musical relationships to affect the political and diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union unless the Soviet authorities wanted them to.