by Maurice Headlam, rev. , Ivor Thomas, rev. , and Alan Booth
© Oxford University Press 2004 All rights reserved
Heath, Sir Thomas Little (1861-1940), civil servant and authority on ancient mathematics, was born on 5 October 1861 at Barnetby-le-Wold, Lincolnshire, the third and youngest son of Samuel Heath, of Thornton Curtis, Ulceby, Lincolnshire, a butcher whose hobby was the classics, and his wife, Mary, daughter of Thomas Little, of Hibaldstowe in the same county. He was one of six children, all musically as well as intellectually gifted; his elder brother Robert Samuel Heath (1858-1931) became professor of mathematics at Birmingham University. After a period at Caistor grammar school he went to Clifton College and thence, with a foundation scholarship, to Trinity College, Cambridge. He obtained a first class in both parts of the classical tripos (1881 and 1883); he was bracketed twelfth wrangler in 1882; and he was elected a fellow of Trinity in 1885 and an honorary fellow in 1920. He married on 2 June 1914 Ada Mary, daughter of Major Edward Charles Thomas, of Wandsworth Common; they had a son and a daughter.
Heath passed first into the civil service in 1884 and entered the Treasury, where, after only three years' service, he became private secretary to Sir Reginald Earle, then permanent secretary. From 1891 to 1894 he was private secretary to successive financial secretaries and he became assistant secretary to the Treasury in 1907.
In 1913 Heath was appointed permanent secretary to the Treasury, jointly with Sir John Bradbury, and auditor of the civil list. Heath took control of the administrative side of the Treasury while finance work fell to Bradbury. In 1919, however, when Bradbury retired from the civil service and the government decided to reorganize the Treasury on a much larger scale than before the war, Heath became comptroller-general and secretary to the commissioners for the reduction of the national debt. His great knowledge of Irish land finance was valuable to the National Debt Office which dealt inter alia with this matter, for he had been closely concerned with the financial details of the various Irish land bills which guaranteed loans to Irish farmers in order to enable them to purchase their holdings. He was appointed CB in 1903, KCB in 1909, and KCVO in 1916. He retired from the civil service in 1926.
Heath was an excellent civil servant in the Victorian mould. He was quick, accurate, neat, painstaking, and thorough in all his written work, in which these qualities, together with his technical knowledge and his power of marshalling facts clearly and accurately for ministers, were of the greatest value. His courage and honesty were also beyond question. These strengths were, however, also his weaknesses because the climate of policy making and administration began to change after 1900. Heath was very much in the candle-saving school of Treasury officialdom. He used his considerable skills to pare down expenditure plans by other departments, but in a very negative fashion. His approach created strain between the Treasury and spending departments even before the great Edwardian expansion of social reform. Some departments regarded Heath as the special incarnation of all that was most angular and pedantic in Treasury traditions and practices. He also embodied the stuffy formality of the Treasury's internal organization, which was increasingly out of touch with the wider and changing administrative machine. Heath's emphasis on perfect prose prompted him to oppose the introduction of telephones to the Treasury on the ground that they would impair the ability of officials to write concisely. He also had deep-seated reservations about employing women in government departments. Heath did not adapt well to the demands of Lloyd George for oral briefings, and his rather ominous resistance to change convinced many politicians and administrators that fundamental reform of the civil service, proposed in 1914 but rendered essential by the chaotic expansion and dislocation of the wartime public service, implied major changes in the Treasury itself. Thus when administrative reform occurred in 1919, Heath was rather ignominiously pushed aside to an inferior position and away from the task of recasting Treasury control in a more positive light.
After retiring in 1926 Heath, who had served as one of the Cambridge commissioners under the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act (1923), served from 1927 to 1929 on the royal commission on national museums and galleries. In 1927 he published an interesting and lucid monograph, The Treasury, in the Whitehall series, which contains a clear and accurate account of the British financial system. It was, however, to his unofficial work on Greek mathematics that Heath owed his earlier fellowship of the Royal Society (1912), on the council of which he served two terms; his presidency of the Mathematical Association (1922-3); and his fellowship of the British Academy (1932).
Heath was one of a small band of British public servants who have enriched scholarship by the judicious use of their limited leisure. His training at Cambridge in classics and mathematics had led him to take an interest in Greek mathematics, a subject explored by few at that time despite the unique place occupied by Euclid for generations in British education; and even Euclid was known only through imperfect versions of the simpler books of the Elements. Heath's labours in this field won for him the reputation of being one of the world's leading authorities on Greek mathematics; and he made accessible in a notation readily understood by all competent mathematicians the works of their leading Greek precursors.
Heath first gave his attention to Diophantus, whose Arithmetica had not previously been edited in England. His essay Diophantus of Alexandria: a Study in the History of Greek Algebra, published in 1885, was revised in 1910 so as to give not only a faithful rendering of the difficult Greek but a thorough history of Greek algebra; and he vindicated the high esteem in which the Alexandrian 'father of algebra' was held by Fermat and Euler. In 1896 he performed a similar service for Apollonius of Perga, whose masterly treatise on the conic sections was a book sealed even for good Greek scholars by the prolixity of its rigid geometrical proofs. Heath successfully produced a work which was 'Apollonius and nothing but Apollonius' but which, thanks to skilful compression and the substitution of modern notation for literary proofs, occupied less than half the space of the original. It was prefaced by valuable essays on the previous history of conic sections among the Greeks. In 1897 Heath applied the same methods to editing the works of Archimedes; and a savant chiefly known through the picturesque stories of his leap from the bath and his death at the hands of a Roman soldier was recognized as one of the supreme mathematical geniuses of all time. The work was supplemented in 1912 by a translation of the Method of Archimedes, discovered a few years earlier by J. L. Heiberg. In the meantime Heath had turned his attention to Euclid, publishing in 1908 a monumental three-volume edition of the Elements in which he followed the same principles. In this edition the notable tenth book on irrational magnitudes was for the first time rendered into English in an intelligible form; and Heath justified against modern 'improvements' Euclid's rigidly logical choice of axioms and postulates and his order of proof. A second edition appeared in 1926. He hoped to be able to re-establish the teaching of Euclid in schools, and to this end he produced in 1920 an edition of book 1 of the Elements in Greek.
In 1913 Heath published with a translation and commentary the Greek text of the tract of Aristarchus of Samos, On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon. He prefaced it with a thorough study of the history of Greek astronomy before Aristarchus, justifying the title of this author as the 'Copernicus of antiquity'. He also wrote short popular works on Aristarchus and Archimedes in 1920.
In 1921 Heath crowned his separate studies with A History of Greek Mathematics in two volumes. Arranged partly according to chronology and partly according to subject matter, it immediately became the standard work on the subject, and has remained so into the early years of the twenty-first century. Ten years later he condensed it into A Manual of Greek Mathematics, and in 1932 he published under the title Greek Astronomy a collection of translations covering the same ground as the prefatory matter of his edition of Aristarchus. He also gave much help to the ninth edition of Liddell's and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, which had in earlier editions taken little notice of Greek mathematical terminology. At his death he was engaged on an edition (published in 1948) of the mathematical content of Aristotle's works.
Heath was a keen mountaineer and made ascents of most of the Dolomites; he was also an enthusiastic musician. He died at his home, Merry Hall, Agates Lane, Ashtead, Surrey, on 16 March 1940. Lady Heath, who survived him, was a musician of professional standing.
MAURICE HEADLAM, rev., IVOR THOMAS, rev., and ALAN BOOTH
Sources
The Times (18 March 1940)
M. F. Headlam, 'Sir Thomas Little Heath, 1861-1940', PBA, 26 (1940), 424-38
D. W. Thompson, Obits. FRS, 3 (1939-41), 409-26
private information (1949)
personal knowledge (1949)
treasury registered files, PRO
E. O'Halpin, Head of the civil service: a study of Sir Warren Fisher (1989)
G. C. Peden, The treasury and British public policy, 1906-1959 (2000)
Venn, Alum. Cant.
CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1940)
b. cert.
Archives
TCD, corresp. with William Starkie
Likenesses
T. M. Ronaldson, charcoal drawing, 1927, Trinity Cam.
W. Stoneman, photograph, 1931, NPG
photograph, repro. in Headlam, 'Sir Thomas Little Heath', 424
Wealth at death
£18,427 9s. 2d.: resworn probate, 25 April 1940, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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