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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2019

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Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008309046

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008309060

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Dedication

TO MARY JO, THOMAS AND MARTHA ROSE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Maps

Preface

Prologue: ‘Some Devils Got Him’

1 A Question of Upbringing

2 Blooded

3 ‘In the Bag’

4 The Escaping Club

5 Home Run

6 Room 900

7 From Normandy to Nuremberg

8 The Long March

9 Darkest Hour

10 ‘A Perfect Woman, Nobly Planned’

11 The Arithmetic of Victory

12 Warrior in a Dark Blue Suit

13 ‘The Perfect Target’

Epilogue: Hinton Waldrist

Acknowledgements

Notes

Picture Section

Index

Also by Patrick Bishop

About the Author

About the Publisher

Maps

The siege of Calais

Plan of Colditz Castle

AN’s unsuccessful and successful escapes through Germany, Poland and Switzerland

Escape lines operated by Pat O’Leary and Comet in France and the Low Countries

Arnhem showing Pegasus operations

Preface

Biography masquerades as history but is often a species of fiction. That is not necessarily the fault of the biographer. Establishing the external facts of a public life in modern, well-documented times is fairly straightforward. It is charting the inner landscape that is the problem. How can we know what someone really thought, what drove him or her to do this or that? Letters and diaries open a window on these processes, of course, but can we be sure the motives and feelings they reveal are genuine, and not retouched with an eye to the good opinion of posterity?

In tackling the life of Airey Neave I have leaned on two versions of who he was. The public one is laid out in the several memoirs he published based on his service in the Second World War. The other is contained in the voluminous diaries he kept covering crucial years in the last period of his political career. The frequent introspective and unsparing passages make it hard to believe they were written for anyone but himself. Thus I felt I had the basis for something like a reasonably authentic portrait: Neave as he would like to be seen – and Neave as he saw himself.

There is another very important viewpoint – Neave as he appeared to everyone else. Neave struck many of his contemporaries as inscrutable. The face he presented to the world was conventional and confident. This was to some extent an act. Behind the bland mask lay a very different personality: racked by insecurities, plagued by doubts and depressions and haunted by a sense of failure and underachievement. Studying his life confirmed for me the truth of the words of the country priest whom André Malraux met when serving with the Maquis in the mountains of south-eastern France. Asked what he had learned about humanity from the many confessions he had heard over the years, he gave the answer ‘The fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person.’

I find that answer moving and heartening. It is said to be a hazard of writing biography that familiarity breeds contempt and in the course of the research the author comes to loathe the relative stranger they blithely shacked up with at the start of the project. I am happy to say that for me the experience had the opposite effect. I came to like Neave a lot. He had his faults: vanity, touchiness, a dissatisfied nature. But they are greatly outweighed by his virtues: physical bravery – not in short supply among his generation – but also moral courage, quiet patriotism and a basic decency.

All came to an end in a shocking death at the hands of the forces he had been opposing in one way or another all his life. He led an interesting one, and his story has a satisfying curve. The adventures and achievements of his early career seemed to promise a glowing future. Instead, there followed years of frustration that sometimes brought him close to despair. Then, unexpectedly, the stars aligned to deliver a success that was all the more satisfying for its late arrival. He lived through a period of history which, though fairly recent, now feels curiously remote. What follows is an attempt to reanimate both him and his time.

Prologue

‘Some Devils Got Him’

On Friday, 30 March 1979, change was in the air. For much of the month the weather had been cold and wet, but lately it had warmed up and in London the trees were in bud. The change of season matched a great political climacteric. Two days before, the Labour administration of James Callaghan had finally stumbled to an end after months of public-service strikes, already notorious as the ‘Winter of Discontent’. In five weeks, a general election would in all probability elect a Conservative government with, for the first time in British history, a woman at its head.

When Airey Neave woke up that morning he had every reason to savour the atmosphere of promise and renewal. As the man who had engineered Margaret Thatcher’s accession to the Conservative leadership, he had played a crucial part in great events. At the age of sixty-three, after a long wait and many disappointments, he was about to taste real power.

As a reward for his services, Mrs Thatcher had offered him any shadow portfolio he wanted. To the bafflement of many, he picked Northern Ireland. Political progress in Ulster was at a standstill and political violence a fact of everyday life. It seemed a masochistic choice. Neave saw it as a challenge – a last chance to bring off an achievement that would leave his mark in history. Since adolescence he had been opposing those he saw as the enemies of democracy – as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Colditz escapee and an intelligence officer. The position of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would put him in command of the latest phase of the struggle – Britain’s war against Irish terrorism. The thought gave him great satisfaction.

A pleasant weekend lay ahead. He would be spending it in his Abingdon constituency with his wife Diana in the Oxfordshire village of Hinton Waldrist, where they rented a wing of the Old Rectory. Before leaving, he had some business to attend to at his office in the House of Commons. At 9.30 a.m., he left the family flat at 32 Westminster Gardens, in Marsham Street SW1, telling Diana he would be back to collect her at 3.30 p.m. The big nine-storey block was built in the 1930s and the apartments were spacious and comfortable, an ideal London base for politicians and senior civil servants.

It was half a mile from the House, but Neave chose to drive. He had long since given up smoking and drinking, following a heart attack, but was notoriously averse to exercise and his health had given his wife and children frequent cause for concern. The car, a modest Vauxhall Cavalier supplied by the engineering firm whose interests he represented in parliament, was parked in a lot beside the flats.

The journey took a few minutes. He drove through the gates of New Palace Yard, next to Big Ben, then down the entry ramp to the underground car park. Having found a space, he took the lift to the ground floor and made his way to the offices of the Leader of the Opposition, a collection of cramped rooms in a corridor behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, for a 10 a.m. meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. At 11.40 a.m. he went back to his room together with Richard Ryder, the young de facto head of Mrs Thatcher’s private office, and they spent some time discussing the election campaign.* Ryder left, and for an hour and a half Neave and his secretary, Joy Robilliard, ‘discussed constituency weekend business, Saturday morning surgery, diary dates for the next month’.1 Then Neave asked her to inform the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police that ‘he would be leaving town at 3.30 p.m. for Hinton Waldrist.’ The Special Branch were kept informed of all his movements. However, that was the extent of his personal security arrangements, and he had turned down the offer of a police bodyguard.

At 1.30 he ‘announced that he would have something to eat in the House and then take a cab to his tailor.’ This was Tom Brown in Princes Street, Mayfair, where he had a 2 p.m. appointment. Neave had been getting his suits from the same venerable establishment since his schooldays at Eton, where the original shop sits in the High Street. Today he was having the first fitting for two suits he had ordered a few weeks before.

The measuring over, he took a taxi back to the House, then descended to the underground car park to collect his car. Miss Robilliard’s evidence to the police suggests it was unlikely that he inspected it before getting in, because although he was ‘fairly good about security of the vehicle’, he would ‘not be troubled by anything lying on the floor of the car. He never checked the exterior of the vehicle.’

He climbed behind the wheel of the light-blue company Cavalier, switched on the ignition and moved off towards the ramp that led up to the cobbles of New Palace Yard. At 2.58 p.m., the Palace of Westminster was shaken by a great explosion. Richard Ryder ran to the window of Mrs Thatcher’s office. Immediately below lay the smoking remnants of Neave’s Vauxhall, ‘just blown to smithereens’.2

Policemen and parliamentary journalists ran to the wreckage. Neave was lying back in the driver’s seat. His face was blackened and his clothing charred. The explosion had removed his right leg below the knee and shattered the left leg. His face was well known in the Westminster village. One of the journalists had been with him only the night before. Neave’s injuries were so bad that for a while no one recognised him. It took almost half an hour to free him from the debris and load him into an ambulance, which took him to Westminster Hospital, a mile away. He died eight minutes after getting there, just before Diana arrived.

The other woman in his life was at an event in her Finchley constituency when the bomb went off. It was a while before she learned the identity of the victim. As dusk fell, London looked wintry again. Returning to her home in Flood Street, Chelsea, with grief and shock still etched on her face, she paid her first tributes to her friend. ‘He was one of freedom’s warriors,’ she told one camera crew. ‘No one knew what a great man he was … except those nearest to him. He was staunch, brave, true, strong. But he was very gentle and kind and loyal.’ To another she vented her feelings about those who had killed him. ‘Some devils got him,’ she said. ‘And they must never, never, never be allowed to triumph. They must never prevail. Those of us who believe in the things that Airey fought for must see that our views are the ones which continue to live on in this country.’

For those of a certain age, the death of Airey Neave was a JFK moment. They can remember where they were and how they felt when the news reached them. This author was a young newspaper reporter and heard it on the radio while driving up from the West Country, where he was covering the Jeremy Thorpe affair. At that time political assassinations were scarcely unusual. Killing British public figures was a major part of Irish Republican strategy. There were two reasons, though, why Neave’s death felt different. One was where it had happened. If the House of Commons car park wasn’t safe from Irish terrorists, where was? The other concerned who he was. Neave was known as a right-hand man of the woman who seemed likely to be the next prime minister. The message the killers wanted to send was clear. Nowhere and no one was beyond their reach.

For all the shock of the killing, most people outside politics would have found it difficult to put a personality or even a face to the dead man. His name stuck in the mind because it was unusual. Older people might have remembered him as a war hero, the first British officer to escape from Colditz. Even inside the Westminster stockade, he was seen as rather enigmatic, detached and unknowable.

To Jonathan Aitken,† then a young backbencher, he was ‘the cat who walks alone … a sphinx’.3 Aitken’s first impression of him was of a man who ‘shimmered’ and ‘seemed to hover around the edge of corridors, as though he were trying to vanish. If you tried to guess what his occupation might have been, you might have said “spook” or “ghost”, because he moved in a funny way … He was unobtrusive … I think he cultivated an air of mystery and spookiness … I remember being struck by his air of ghostliness or secretiveness.’

It is a sentiment echoed by several people I interviewed. ‘I can see him walking along,’ recalled Tom King.‡4 ‘He seemed to make no sound and leave no impression as he went by. I always thought he was a natural conspirator … I don’t mean in an unkind sense. But he was quite a schemer, and clever.’

At first glance he looked completely conventional. He was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed fourteen stone. He looked very English. His face was round and rosy, his pouched eyes a hazy blue, his skin smooth and his light hair sparse. The new Tom Brown suits he was measured up for that afternoon were just like those he had always ordered: both grey worsted, one with a faint check, the other with a discreet stripe and each with an extra pair of trousers.5 Even in 1979 such garments looked old-fashioned.

They marked him out as a member of the wartime generation. There were still plenty of them around on both sides of the House, but the world they were familiar with had changed. To some, it seemed that informality was becoming the norm, thrift had fallen to mass consumerism, and lingering wartime-era notions of a communal investment in shared goals and ideals had given way to the pursuit of individual and sectional interests. Older Britons complained that the rising generation seemed to believe that what to them were almost decadent luxuries were a natural right: cars, washing machines, restaurant meals, foreign holidays. And they did not expect to have to work very hard to get them.

Looking back, these aspirations seem modest and notions of what constituted a good time or a treat touchingly simple. In 1979, no one had heard of prosecco. In that morning’s Daily Mail, the Victoria Wine company advertised Easter bargains including Martini Bianco at £1.39 a bottle and Olé medium sherry at £1.47. The television page carried the schedule for the three national channels. At 8 p.m. – prime time – viewers could choose between half an hour of the comedian Les Dawson (BBC1), a documentary on the Bengali community of Brick Lane (BBC2), or Flambards, a country-house mini-series set in the early years of the century (ITV). If you missed a programme, you might capture it on the new video recorders that were now in the shops. It meant a significant investment. A Philips N1700 carried by Currys cost £499, the equivalent of the monthly average wage.

Even for trendy, well-heeled Londoners looking for a sophisticated meal out, choices were, to today’s eyes, either circumscribed or unappetising. At Bumbles, in Buckingham Palace Road, a short stroll from the Neaves’ flat, the choices included cold lettuce soup, kidneys in champagne with saffron rice, and mushrooms stuffed with prawns and grilled with Stilton.

Neave was sometimes irritated by modern life and could get furious at displays of modern bad manners. But he was in many ways a progressive, far from the popular notion of an Eton and Oxford Tory. His voice was not loud and assertive but soft, sometimes almost inaudible. He hated country pursuits and, when compelled to stay with his wife’s family at their Palladian mansion in Staffordshire, preferred to sit in an armchair reading rather than going shooting or riding to hounds.

He went to gentlemen’s clubs but was not ‘clubbable’. He no longer drank, and he breathed the atmosphere of cigar smoke, brandy and leather armchairs out of duty rather than pleasure. He preferred the company of clever women to pompous men. His experience of running female agents in occupied Europe in the war could be said to have turned him into a quasi-feminist, convinced that women were just as quick, resourceful and physically and mentally courageous as males. The one person he was truly himself with was Diana, who came equipped with all that he admired in a woman: intelligence, energy and good looks. Their marriage was a partnership and his story is to a considerable extent also hers.

The circumstances of his death gave a military quality to his funeral. It took place eight days after the explosion, in the church of St Mary at Longworth, near the Neaves’ home in Hinton Waldrist. Margaret and Denis Thatcher led the mourners, hemmed in by a phalanx of armed police. The narrow nave and old oak pews were far too small for the hundreds who had turned up, and the service had to be relayed by loudspeaker to the crowd outside. Standing among the gravestones in the April sunshine, they heard the rector, Jim Smith, praise a ‘supremely loyal subject of the Queen, a true patriot, and a good citizen of the world’.6

Given Neave’s prominence and the shocking way in which he had been killed, interest in the story faded remarkably quickly. The election campaign, followed by Margaret Thatcher’s victory, dominated the media agenda. Coverage of the hunt for his killers soon moved to the inside pages and then disappeared. There was nothing much to report. A number of suspects were rounded up, only to be released. Photofit images of possible perpetrators appeared in the press, but the faces they showed could have fitted half the young males in the British Isles. Over the years, there were a few minor flurries of excitement when arrests seemed to promise a possible prosecution. They came to nothing and, eight years after the killing, a Home Office minister told the House of Commons, ‘I very much regret to say that nobody has been charged in connection with the murder and it would be misleading for me to say that I have any information to suggest that a charge is likely to be made in the immediate or near future.’7

Today, the situation remains the same. Nothing more has been revealed by the authorities about who killed Airey Neave or how they did it. Despite the passing of forty years and an official policy of peace and reconciliation, the relevant Home Office and Metropolitan Police files remain closed. All of my attempts to gain access to them by making use of the Freedom of Information Act have been refused, on among other grounds, those of ‘national security’.

Through private and unofficial sources it has, however, been possible to put together a picture of the circumstances behind the murder. The killers saw themselves as motivated by the same ideals that sustained Airey Neave in his military and political career. By a curious coincidence, one of the suspects had, like the victim, pulled off a daring and minutely planned escape from captivity, tunnelling out of the Maze prison near Belfast.

The mystery around Airey Neave’s death is perhaps in keeping with the air of secrecy that attached to him in life and would continue to hang around for decades after he departed it. Forty years on, it is time he stepped out of the penumbra and into the light.

* Richard Ryder (1949–), educated Radley and Magdalene College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk, 1983–97; Government Chief Whip, 1990–95; created Lord Ryder of Wensum, 1997.

† Jonathan Aitken (1942–), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; Conservative MP for Thanet East, 1974–83; Minister for Defence Procurement, 1992–94; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 1994–95; imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice, 1999.

‡ Tom King (1933–), educated Rugby and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Bridgwater, 1970–2001; from 1983, successively Secretary of State for Environment, Transport, Employment, Northern Ireland and Defence; created Lord King of Bridgwater, 2001.

1

A Question of Upbringing

British boys at school in the 1920s grew up in the shadow of death. This is not a metaphor but a fact. During the decade, memorials went up at every school, ancient or modern, bearing the details of former pupils who had gone off to the Great War and not come back. Eton already had a major memorial, built to honour the fallen of the ‘Second Boer War’ of 1899–1902. It was on a grand scale and included a library and an assembly hall. One hundred and twenty-nine names were listed on stone tablets. When the time came to consider another memorial, the scale of the loss was very different.

Between 1914 and 1918, the trenches of the Western Front, the grey wastes of the North Sea, the heights of Gallipoli and the baked earth of Palestine and Mesopotamia swallowed 1,157 Old Etonians. Various grand schemes were examined, including a tower in the style of the era of the school’s founder, Henry VI. In the end, the enormity of the loss defeated imagination. The death toll amounted to more than the number of boys at the school when war broke out (in 1914 there were 1,028 pupils). The authorities settled on a frieze of plain bronze plaques listing name, rank and date of departure. It runs the entire length of the cloisters along the western wall of School Yard.

When Airey Neave arrived at Eton in 1929 the bronze tablets were still shiny. In addition, grieving parents had commissioned their own small plaques commemorating their lost sons. So it was that Neave and his classmates passed their days moving between house, classroom, library and refectory, constantly overlooked by reminders of war and death, sacrifice and duty.

In the first years of his school career, this burden of expectation seems to have weighed lightly, if at all, on his concerns. We can glimpse his thoughts in a surviving diary from 1931, when he was fifteen. The pages are full of the routine preoccupations of a boy of his class and time, with little that hints of the extraordinary life to come. The overall tone is assured, befitting his membership of an elite which had, until recently, taken its continued power, status and prosperity for granted. Both his father and grandfather had been at Eton before him. Among his forebears were two governors of the Bank of England and a number of high-ranking soldiers. His father was descended from a baronet.

The Neaves, and the women they married, seemed the warp and weft of the British Establishment, comfortably off, confident and used to exercising authority and receiving automatic respect. However, they also had an inquiring streak, lively minds and a history of striking out down unconventional paths. One female ancestor, Caroline Neave (1781–1863), was a philanthropist and prison reformer. His grandfather, Sheffield Henry Morier Neave (1853–1936), inherited a fortune while at Eton, and after Balliol College, Oxford, seemed set on a life of pleasure. A trip to Africa in pursuit of big game brought about a conversion to seriousness. He became interested in the eradication of the tsetse fly, which carried sleeping sickness and malaria. In middle age, he trained as a doctor and he ended up Physician of the Queen’s Hospital for Children in the East End of London.

His interests were inherited by his son, Sheffield Airey Neave, born in 1879. After Eton, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. His speciality was entomology, the study of insects, the importance of which to public health and agriculture in the British Empire was starting to be appreciated.1 In the early years of the century, he worked for the Colonial Office on scientific surveys in Northern Rhodesia and served as an entomologist on a commission investigating sleeping sickness in the Congolese province of Katanga. In 1913, he was appointed assistant director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, and stayed in the post for thirty years before taking over as director.

Sheffield married Dorothy Middleton, a colonel’s daughter, and on 23 January 1916, at 24 De Vere Gardens, a tall London brick house in Knightsbridge, she gave birth to a son. In keeping with Neave tradition, he was christened with a basket of surnames plucked from the family tree. In his youth, Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave hated the handle he had been lumbered with. For a period in the Second World War, he took to referring to himself as ‘Tony’. But the name on the birth certificate stuck, and with it all the jokey and embarrassing permutations that schoolboy and service wit could devise.

Shortly after the birth, the family moved to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Their new home, Bishop’s House, was large and comfortable, with steep-pitched red-tile roofs and mullioned windows, surrounded by lawns and flower beds, and only a short walk from the station, where there were regular services to Sheffield’s work in London. Airey went to the local Montessori school, an enlightened choice at a time when the Italian educationalist’s ideas were just taking hold in Britain. Then, aged nine, he was sent away to St Ronan’s, an academically inclined prep school on the coast at Worthing, before arriving at Eton in the spring of 1929.

The school was undergoing the same painful transformation as the rest of the country as it adjusted to the post-war world. However, the curriculum would have been familiar to a boy from the previous century. Classics still ruled and an extraordinary amount of the boys’ time was spent construing Greek and Latin poetry and prose. Games were exalted and the stars of the river and cricket pitch were gilded demigods. Outside the classroom and the playing field, though, the atmosphere was stimulating, and independent thought was encouraged under the leadership of the lively and well-connected headmaster, Dr Cyril Alington, who as well as hymns wrote detective novels.

Neave had just turned fifteen when the surviving pages of his diary open. He comes across as earnest and hard-working, recording in detail all the homework he is set and the marks he receives. Mostly he was in the top half of the class, but his efforts seem to have been conscientious rather than inspired. It was the same story at games. He spent the afternoons kicking and knocking balls around, panting along muddy paths on cross-country runs or heaving an oar on the river.

All this effort brought little reward, not even the ephemeral pleasure of ‘a ribboned coat’ or ‘a season’s fame’. In one cricket match, he struggled for seventy-five minutes to make nine runs. Though fairly robust, he seems to have been ill frequently. He suffered from a skin complaint and some other unspecified ailment which required regular physiotherapy sessions with a nurse called Miss Dempster, who ‘weighed and measured me and made various uncomplimentary remarks about the shape of my figure’.2

He showed an early interest in soldiering and joined the Eton army cadet corps, but found the drill a challenge. ‘I am rather vague about bayonets still,’3 he recorded a few months after joining up. Then, a day later, ‘We learned field signals etc of which I understood little.’4 Thus, an early pattern was established. Young Airey’s zeal was not matched by natural aptitude, and much as he would have liked to, he did not cut a very convincing martial figure. He left school with the rank of lance corporal.

Eton encouraged a strong interaction with the world outside its walls, hosting a stream of distinguished visitors who came to address the boys. Many were former pupils. Others, such as Mohandas Gandhi, were internationally famous. By the time he visited in October 1931, he was well embarked on his campaign to liberate India from British rule. The invitation had come from the Political Society run by the boys, an initiative of Jo Grimond, who went on to lead the Liberal Party.* He wrote that when the school authorities learned of it, they were ‘vexed … However, they soon recovered their poise and fended off the indignant letters fired by blimpish Old Etonians.’ Gandhi, who wore his familiar loincloth as protection against the dank October Thames Valley weather, was ‘only a modified success. Mr Gandhi was long-winded and shuffled round all direct questions. He did not impress the boys.’5 Airey Neave noted in his diary that the Mahatma rose from his bed in the headmaster’s house long before dawn and ‘prayed from 4–5 a.m. in the garden’.6

That is as far as the entry goes. Politics barely get a mention in the diary at this stage. There is a reference to the political crisis of August 1931. It resulted in a new National Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, which saw taxes rise. As far as Neave was concerned, the main consequence was the economies that resulted at Bishop’s House. ‘The new budget has made Daddy sack John,’ he wrote, a reference to the gardener Airey sometimes helped with his chores, washing the car and rolling the lawn.7 It is an interesting choice of words. The suggestion is that it is the Prime Minister’s fault that John has lost his job, rather than a failure on his father’s part to make the economies necessary to keep the gardener on.

The only hint of interest in another realm that would later absorb so much of his energy comes when he mentions borrowing a book called Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service from the college library. The author was Henri Le Caron, the pseudonym of Thomas Miller Beach, born in Colchester in 1841, who as a young man emigrated first to Paris and then the United States. The story he told combined two themes that would come to play a large part in the destiny of Airey Neave. One was the secret intelligence world. The other was violent Irish Republicanism. While living in Illinois, Beach saw the first stirrings of the Fenian movement. In 1866, the Brotherhood launched raids across the nearby border of Canada, the closest piece of British territory within reach. The rebels, some of them veterans of the Civil War, carried a banner declaring themselves to be the ‘Irish Republican Army’. They were easily defeated but the episode set in train the long campaign against British rule at home and abroad that continued with only temporary interruptions until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Beach wrote about these events in letters home. His father notified his MP, who contacted the authorities. When Beach returned to England on a visit in 1867, he received ‘an official communication requesting me to attend at 50 Harley Street’. There it was agreed that ‘I should become a paid agent of the Government, and that on my return to the United States I should ally myself to the Fenian organisation, in order to play the role of spy in the rebel ranks.’8

According to his account, Beach wormed his way into the heart of the movement, rising to the post of Inspector General of the Fenian Brotherhood. He sent back a stream of reports on funding, operations and political lobbying – then, as later, a source of alarm to the British government. Beach’s view of the Irish rebels was very English, a mixture of alarm and amused condescension. ‘What a sight!’ he wrote, describing a whiskey-fuelled gathering in Chicago in 1881. ‘What a babel of voices and a world of smoke … as for hearing, your ears are deafened by the din and clatter of many tongues and stamping feet [assembled] to clamour for dynamite as the only means of achieving their patriotic ends.’9 Yet the rhetoric, he told his readers, was not to be taken entirely seriously: ‘Always you must remember that you are dealing with Irishmen, who in their wildest and most ferocious of fights still retain [a] substratum of childishness of character and playfulness of mood, with its attendant elements of exaggeration and romance.’10

Neave did not record his reaction to Beach’s book. He was, though, greatly impressed by Within Four Walls, published in 1930, a personal account of the exploits of Colonel Henry Antrobus Cartwright, who had been captured by the Germans in the 1914–18 war and succeeded in escaping at his fifth attempt. ‘I greatly respected him,’ he wrote. ‘His book was a classic … As a small boy, I had read it with romantic pleasure, and it played a great part in forming my philosophy of escape.’11

Judged by the 1931 diary, Neave at fifteen was an unremarkable boy, an adolescent apparently free of angst. He seems cool and disengaged. There are no close friendships in evidence, no extracurricular enthusiasms except for an interest in collecting old books (‘I went to Mrs Browns and bought a very nice prayer book, 1811, with good plates for 4s 6d. I think it was worth it.’)12 When the odd emphatic remark does pop up, it is often about school meals. He enjoyed his food and noted the menus with as much detail as his performance in class. The fare was not to his liking. ‘Lunch at 1.30,’ he wrote on 6 July, ‘veal and ham pie and jam sponge and custard. Awful.’ On 26 September, they were offered ‘for boys’ dinner the usual type of cat’s meat’. In this respect, school was a preparation for the prison-camp privations that would follow.

Neave’s education also provided another lesson in how to cope with incarceration. The boys had a complicated relationship with authority. From the outside, the regime seemed strictly hierarchical, with the masters and seniors giving orders which those under them obeyed or suffered the consequences. The reality was more subtle and interesting. Neave’s eagerness to do well did not preclude a bolshie streak. By now, he was well used to English institutional life and aware of its absurdities and injustices. Like his peers, he enjoyed finding ways to get round irritating restrictions. He also liked to challenge authority when the chance arose and the odds of getting away with it were favourable. It was good for morale, a reminder that those who ruled the school did not have it all their own way.

There are frequent references in the diary to ‘mobbing’: semi-spontaneous outbreaks of high jinks which could erupt at mealtimes and even in chapel. ‘After tea there was a great mob which m’tutor came up and stopped,’ he wrote on 26 September. ‘M’tutor’ was his housemaster, John Foster Crace, a classicist who had been at the school since 1901 and had married late and recently become father to a girl. Then, a few hours later, ‘the captain of house got mobbed at supper.’ According to Neave, when Crace appeared to break it up again the boys ran off, but after prayers the housemaster’s tone was almost apologetic, telling them, ‘“I lose my temper sometimes [titters] but I am not really so bad as you may think” [laughter]. He did not see anything wrong with the mobs but they were rather near his family.’ Crace’s cautious reaction to the shenanigans was perhaps a recognition of the truth that, as in prisons, without recourse to brute force, order in school essentially depended on the consent of the inmates. Imposing authority was a tricky business. The boys could spot – and instantly exploit – any perceived chink in the armour. When the class was assigned a new master called Mr Kitchen Smith, Neave’s first impression was that he was ‘quite nice but rather weak’.13 This assessment must have been shared by the others, because when asked, they assured the teacher that they had no outstanding homework to do. It was a fib that was soon discovered, but it had been worth a try.

It is an insignificant episode in itself, yet indicative of the spirit that prevailed among a section of the British prisoners held in German camps in the war to come. The camp guards were uniformed versions of the beaks and prefects they had known at school, and their instinct was to defy them, test them, rag them and keep them off balance whenever possible.

Neave’s school and home life meshed easily. Beaconsfield was only eleven miles from Eton and his mother often visited him at weekends, turning up to chapel or dropping off treats such as baskets of eggs. Neave seems to have been close to her, and sympathetic to her frequent indispositions, when she would retreat to bed with unexplained illnesses. Family lore represents Sheffield Neave as a Victorian father, large and imposing, but absorbed in his work, neglectful of his wife and distant towards his children. By the summer of 1931 there were four of them. After Airey came Iris Averil, 13, Rosamund, 10, Viola, 6, and a brother, Digby, 3. According to Airey’s eldest child, Marigold, ‘He didn’t have a great relationship with his father … He was not a very warm man, I think. This was his problem. He was quite difficult to warm to, quite frightening to look at – he had rather prominent, stern features.’14 As for the other children, ‘They were all girls except for little Digby, who was so little no one hardly bothered with him. And the girls were just considered as girls, and in those days that’s all they were. Nobody paid any attention to them. They were not very important. It was rather a dysfunctional family I always felt.’

Neave’s diary presents a warmer picture of Sheffield. On 11 July, they went to the Eton–Harrow cricket match together, which Eton won handsomely by an innings and 16 runs. ‘After breakfast Mummy took some photographs of Dad and I. We went by the 10.00 to Paddington and then took the underground to St John’s Wood. We got to Lord’s about 11.10, when play had just started. We had quite good seats in Stand G. Harrow were all out for 230 by about 12.45 and by the lunch interval were 59 for 0 [having been forced to follow on]. We went to a tent at the back of the grandstand for lunch … Sandwiches, cider cup, strawberries and cream, cake and iced coffee … After lunch we walked about and watched the match. We met on the field a friend of Daddy’s …’

In the summer holidays that followed, father and son pursued a Betjemanesque routine, playing golf and tennis together, making family visits to friends and relations in their Home Counties residences. One day, Sheffield took him off to Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire, to check on the progress of a population of rare Large Copper butterflies that had been introduced a few years before. The diary entries are light and natural, with no hint of tensions or conflict. They contrast with the references to childhood that appear in the diaries Neave kept towards the end of his life, which do not suggest cloudless happiness or any great affection for the patriarchs of the family. His paternal grandfather was ‘a selfish shit’.15 As for the rest, ‘they were a sad quarrelsome family. No one was happy. I suffered from them in my time.’16

Beyond the security and comfort of Eton and Bishop’s House, the world was swept by confusion and conflict. The early 1930s were a tumultuous time at home and abroad. Britain was sunk in an economic depression that brought misery and despair, not just to the industrial North but to the mellow towns and villages of the Home Counties. In Europe, it was clear that the recent war had settled nothing and old hatreds burned as fiercely as ever. Late in 1932, a speech by Stanley Baldwin raised the spectre of a new war in which ‘the bomber will always get through.’

It was in this baleful atmosphere that Airey Neave made his first visit to Germany, in 1933, at the age of seventeen. The trip would be a turning point, jolting him into political awareness and fixing him on a moral bearing that he would follow for the rest of his life. Later, he would refer to the experience often, presenting it as an awakening: to the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of civilisation.

His parents had decided he would benefit from a spell in Berlin to improve his grasp of German.17 Eton, like most British schools, took an academic rather than a practical approach to language teaching, with the result that, according to Jo Grimond, ‘no boy who had spent hundreds of hours … of classes could carry on the simplest conversation in French.’18 He arrived in late summer to lodge with a family who lived at Nikolassee, a lakeside suburb west of Berlin. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor on 30 January that year and the Nazis were tightening their grip on German society.

Neave attended classes at the local school with one of the sons, who was a member of the Hitler Youth. ‘At the entry of the teacher each morning we were expected to give the Hitler salute, but as a foreigner I was excused,’ he remembered many years later. ‘I was an unconventional pupil and at first an object of derision. I sat at the back of the class. My hair was much longer than that of the German boys and I wore a decadent yellow tie with black spots.’19

Neave soon learned that it did not do to mock Germany’s new masters. Dietrich, the elder son of the family, who was at university in Berlin, was not a party member and admired the young guest’s independent spirit but warned him that it could be dangerous. One day, waiting for the train at Nikolassee, Neave sniggered at the sight of a ‘fat, brown-booted storm-trooper’. He recalled that Dietrich ‘hastily manoeuvred me out of sight. I can remember the bloodshot pig-eyes of the storm-trooper glaring towards us.’20

The climax of the visit came when Neave went with Dietrich to a rally one warm evening in the first week of September in the centre of Berlin. Neave had signed up as a temporary member of a sports club in Charlottenburg to which Dietrich belonged, and although no great athlete, he was good enough to get into the relay team. When the Nazis announced a Festival of Sport in the capital, the club was advised to take part. It began with a classic piece of totalitarian theatre. At ten o’clock a vast procession of sports organisations set off from the Lustgarten, in the centre of the city, and marched to a rally near the Brandenburg Gate. These were the early days of Nazism and, although the signs of repression were everywhere, in Berlin there were still many who did not disguise their scepticism. Among some of the athletes, participation in the festival was ‘seen as something of a joke’.

The sportsmen wore civilian suits and ‘marched off with light hearts’. However, when they were joined by a band in Nazi uniform, ‘our mood changed. I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex. The young men beside me who, minutes before, had been joking, started singing. Suddenly the Festival of Sport had become religious and the marchers expectant.’ His friend was as susceptible to the mood as everybody else, because when Airey broke step with the others, ‘There was an angry shout from Dietrich, “Can’t you march in step?”’21

With bands blaring and banners flying, they tramped past the Brandenburg Gate, which ‘floodlit, and adorned with Nazi pennants … looked like the gateway to some theatrical Valhalla.’ The left- and right-hand marcher in each rank held a flaming torch. In the flickering light, the faces of the silent crowds lining the streets ‘glowed … with excitement and pride’. As they neared the rostrum where the speeches would begin, the band struck up the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. To Neave, the half-hour speech that followed from Reichssportführer von Tschammer was tedious. But then he looked round at his companions. ‘They were intellectuals, university students, writers and artists. To my amazement, they were listening to this bull-necked Prussian in his brown uniform with fixed attention.’ When von Tschammer at last stopped speaking, ‘the huge crowd sang “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” as the banners swayed in the breeze. The fervour of the women was breathtaking.’22

This was an extraordinary experience for a seventeen-year-old boy raised in a code of understatement and emotional restraint. The account he left of it was written in 1978 – that is, forty-five years after the event. Time and hindsight surely led Neave to lend a certain sophistication to the thoughts and reactions of his teenage self. Yet there is no doubt that exposure to the sights and sounds and passions of Nazism touched him and filled him with foreboding. It had given him an insight into the nature of Hitler’s rule that turned out to be more astute than that of many of his elders, who still regarded Hitler as a temporary phenomenon, or as someone who was subject to the normal laws of diplomacy and power politics.

Neave returned to Eton with a new maturity. He was convinced that war with Germany was inevitable. According to some accounts, he won a prize for an essay warning of the danger posed to peace by the rise of Hitler, but no trace of it remains in the school archives.23 His new interest in Germany was demonstrated in a paper he delivered to the Essay Society in 1933 on Walter Rathenau, the German liberal statesman murdered by ultra-nationalists eleven years before.

In the summer of 1934, he wrote an essay called ‘The case against pacifism’, in which he took a fatalistic view of Europe’s future and lamented the ‘illogical theories of selfish, muddle-headed … people who are trying to alter the vices of civilisation by talking about them and doing nothing’.24 The ‘horrible fact’ was ‘that man is still a very quarrelsome animal.’ The tendency was currently on display in Germany, where ‘nationalism … is both inevitable and dangerous because it always foments and bursts out when a nation is aggrieved and oppressed.’ It was ‘very unfortunate that a nation should be in such a condition but that is all the more reason for strengthening our defences by land, air and sea.’

Neave believed that war was ‘regrettable but inevitable’ and that the pacifist mood then current would evaporate when the first bombs dropped. ‘No one really doubts that the Oxford Union [which the year before had voted ‘in no circumstances to fight for its King and Country’] would go with the others when the time came.’ While he believed that ‘there are few people in this country who would not fight for England … I hope there are none who will fight for France.’ Six years later he would do just that.

The essay appeared in a magazine called Sixpenny: Stories and Poems by Etonians. It had been started by Robin Maugham, nephew of the famous author, Somerset, and by the second issue Neave’s initials appear as a co-editor. The two had similar backgrounds. Maugham came from an Establishment family and his father was a high court judge. Their temperaments and their school careers, though, were quite different. Maugham’s autobiography reveals another side of Eton whose existence could never be guessed from Neave’s diary. Maugham was bisexual and had a long liaison with a precocious boy he calls ‘Drew’. Bullying, sexual predation and misery feature strongly in this account. At the same time, he acknowledges his debt to some inspirational teachers and concludes that much of his unhappiness was due to the house he had been assigned to.

Which house you belonged to was important, indeed crucial, to the experience of Eton. It was where you slept and ate, and the teacher in charge of it disciplined you, directed your education and acted in loco parentis. In Maugham’s mind, Neave’s house, presided over by John Foster Crace, was a haven of civilisation. It was only in upper school that boys could visit houses other than their own. Maugham was introduced to Crace’s by Michael Isaacs, whose family were friends of his parents. Isaacs was Jewish, the son of the Marquess of Reading. He became Neave’s lifelong friend. Maugham wrote glowingly of the coterie that he soon joined: ‘Marcus Rueff, Patrick Gibson, Ben Astley, David Parsons, and Airey Neave. They talked about Suetonius and Mozart, Michael Arlen and Adler, and though they were all good at games they never discussed them.’ He concluded wistfully, ‘I am certain that if I had been in Mr Crace’s house I would not have been persecuted. On the contrary, I would have enjoyed each term and my outlook would have been wider.’25

They were indeed a colourful and adventurous crew. Rueff was a talented musician who, while serving in the Rifles, was mortally wounded in a German ambush at Derna in Libya in April 1941. Patrick Gibson was captured in the same action, then later escaped, walking five hundred miles over the Apennines and crossing German lines to rejoin the Allies. He went on to serve in the Special Operations Executive, waging war in occupied territory. David Parsons would become better known as the actor David Tree, the handsome lead in thirteen British films. He lost a hand in a training accident and also joined SOE.26

Politically, Maugham and Neave took different paths. Maugham reacted to the rise of Fascism by becoming a socialist. When war came, he declined a commission in the Hussars and joined up as a trooper in an armoured regiment, serving in the Western Desert. What they shared was bravery, patriotism and a sense of duty. Maugham was credited with risking his life repeatedly to pull as many as forty men from stricken tanks. They also shared an association with the world of intelligence and espionage. After being rendered unfit for active service by a severe head wound sustained in the summer of 1942, Maugham became an intelligence officer and went on to play an important part in founding the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, initially based in Jerusalem, a training centre for British spies and diplomats. After the war, he became a successful writer, best known for his novella The Servant, which was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. He struggled with a drink problem and his sexuality. Despite their contrasting outlooks and personalities, Neave and Maugham remained in touch and Robin stood as godfather to Airey’s youngest boy, William.

Neave left school in the summer of 1934, bound for Oxford, twenty miles further up the Thames, where he had a place at Merton to read jurisprudence. His schooldays had seen only modest success. In the words of Michael Isaacs, ‘I cannot say that Airey stood out among his contemporaries as likely to make any considerable impact upon public life. He was an agreeable and amusing companion, diligent in his work and quite tough physically.’27 Eton may have provided little in the way of practical learning. It did, however, inculcate a certain way of looking at and dealing with the world, summed up by Jo Grimond, who had left a few years previously: ‘Boys were taught that what they did there mattered. They were taught that responsibility rested with them and could not be sloughed off. They were taught to behave as members of a community and to have regard to the wider communities of their country and their fellow men.’28

Oxford was tinged with the same hostility to militarism and dread of another conflict that coloured the country at large. Among undergraduates, socialist and pacifist sympathies were unremarkable, even conventional. Neave remained impervious to the prevailing climate. The great RAF war hero and philanthropist Leonard Cheshire, who arrived at Merton two years after Airey, later claimed that, on arriving at Oxford, Airey had ‘bought and read the full works of Clausewitz, and when being asked why, answered that since war was coming it was only sensible to learn as much as possible about the art of waging it.’29

This seriousness sat alongside a determination to have fun. As the constraints of school and home fell away, Neave threw himself into what Oxford offered in the way of hedonism, drinking, dining and making friends, while not paying overmuch attention to his law studies. ‘I did little academic work for three years and then was obliged to work feverishly at the law in order to get a degree,’ he recalled fifteen years after his departure.30

With Isaacs, he revived a defunct political dining club, The Chatham, but it foundered after a few meetings. More durable were the Myrmidons, a Merton institution to which he was elected in the summer of 1935. The club was self-consciously exclusive, named after a warlike classical tribe, and entry was by invitation only. Its members dressed up in tailcoats with purple gold and silver facings and sat down to dinners at which the drink was more important than the food. Former members included Lord Randolph Churchill and Max Beerbohm. Compared to his Eton contemporaries, the Myrmidons of 1935 appear rather undistinguished, and none apart from Neave seems to have made a mark in later life. Their antics were an affront to the prevailing egalitarian mood. The group photographs taken before the dinners show them standing defiantly in Edwardian rig, as if daring the world to challenge them. For all their studied outrageousness, it was hardly Sodom and Gomorrah.

The club’s antics were part of a pattern of indulgence. Like ‘many of the upper class’, they ‘liked the sound of broken glass’. Neave recalled a ‘champagne party on top of my College tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below’.31 In his recollection, the authorities showed ‘great forbearance and even kindliness’ to this behaviour. The college archives, however, tell a different story. An entry in the Warden and Tutors Minute Book for 11 March 1936 records that Neave was one of a group of seven undergraduates gated for four weeks and fined three pounds each for ‘disorderly and scandalous conduct on the chapel tower, in that some bottles were … thrown from the tower by some members of the party’.32

On another occasion, he was fined for hosting a ‘noisy lunch party’. Leonard Cheshire, whose own university career was boisterous, remarked that Airey ‘would often do things that looked a little wild’, though ‘always in a rather nice way and never unkindly’. While this was a trait that ‘undoubtedly endeared him to his school and university friends it possibly had a different effect on his father who one has the impression did not always give him the encouragement which inwardly he needed.’33

It seems that as time passed, the companionship of the early years had faded, and father and son drifted apart. Sheffield Neave had almost no role in his grandchildren’s upbringing. Cheshire believed that his father’s disapproval profoundly affected Neave’s formation and that ‘at an early age he learned to conceal his inner disappointments.’

Neave stayed in touch with Cheshire throughout the rest of his life. In the post-war years, he and Diana were friends with Cheshire and his second wife, Sue Ryder, and supported their charities. This insight from a sensitive and spiritual man is important. Despite his privileges and abilities, there would be many disappointments in Neave’s life, and his way of dealing with them is essential to an understanding of his character.

But undergraduate life also brought satisfactions. His artistic streak found an outlet in the Merton Floats, the college drama group. In 1936, he served as secretary as well as acting the part of Smitty in a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill, In the Zone, and Pope Julius II in Max Beerbohm’s ‘Savonarola’ Brown.34 A vague sense of duty and seriousness stirred from time to time and he joined the Oxford Union. In his third year, he shared digs with Michael Isaacs and they went to debates together. According to Isaacs, they ‘occasionally made vocal contributions, none of which … had any marked impact upon the proceedings.’35 Neave remembered making three speeches at the Union, one of which was an inconsequential discussion of the merits of a motion debated the week before.36

The Union was a less impressive forum than its members liked to imagine. The tone was facetious and it was to some extent an arena for showing off. Nonetheless, it was a testing ground for young men, and later women, with political ambitions. In Neave’s time at Oxford, two men who loomed large in his later life, Edward Heath† and Hugh Fraser,‡ held the presidency. Margaret Thatcher joined when at Somerville less than a decade later, but as a woman could not seek office. Neave’s interest was casual, and raucous attendance at a debate seems to have been as much for entertainment as enlightenment. If he felt any political ambitions stirring at this time, they were not strong enough to propel him into the rough and tumble of Oxford politics.

In his later writings, Neave portrayed himself and his companions as odd fish, swimming against a tide of bien pensant leftism and pacifism. ‘My failure to understand the merits of the fashionable intellectual notions of Socialism was regarded as a sign of mental deficiency by the dons,’ he wrote. The mood of the times was defensive and self-deluding, for ‘This was an Oxford where a few brave spirits still tried to emulate the joyful irresponsibility of the ’twenties. In the ’thirties the shadows lengthened and the voice of Adolf Hitler threatened across the waters but it had little effect upon my undergraduate world.’37

This outlook was seized on by the Nazis as evidence of terminal decadence among the youth of Britain, who would have no stomach for another big war. It was, of course, a great mistake. Leonard Cheshire, who despite spending the summer of 1936 in Potsdam living with a militaristic family – an experience he thoroughly enjoyed – took virtually no interest in politics. ‘I don’t remember anything about Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts,’ he told his biographer Andrew Boyle after the war. ‘I’m sure politics meant nothing.’38 Yet this seemingly flippant, pleasure-seeking man about town joined the University Air Squadron as the landscape darkened, and went on to be one of the great figures of the British war.

After Neave went down, the young men and women he encountered in London were not very different: ‘Few cared about Hitler and even less about his ambassador von Ribbentrop. Debutantes “came out” and went their way. It was fashionable to be almost inarticulate on any serious subject.’39 Neave enjoyed the defiant sybaritism as much as anyone, but in one respect he was stubbornly himself. At the start of his second year he joined the Territorial Army. In everyone else’s view, it was an eccentric thing to do: ‘a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and far more tiresome’.40 In December 1935, the London Gazette announced his elevation from ‘Cadet Lance-Corporal, Eton College Contingent, Junior Division OTC’ to second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Neave wrote about his pre-war Territorial experiences in a tone of light satire over which an element of the ludicrous hovers. He described a large-scale exercise played out on the Wiltshire downs one summer: ‘The sun beat down upon my Platoon as we hid from the enemy behind the chalk hills and listened expectantly for the sound of blank cartridges. I lay on my back beside a wooden Lewis gun. God was in his heaven and the crickets chatted merrily in the dry grass.’41

The entomologist’s son picked out a ‘Small Copper, a Fritillary and even a Clouded Yellow’. The idyll was shattered by the arrival of a First World War vintage brigadier with eyeglasses that glinted menacingly and a bullying manner, who was refereeing the war games. ‘He began to speak, working himself slowly into a cold, terrifying anger at the conduct of my platoon. A position had been chosen that could be seen for miles around. He had seen the men in the chalk-pit with his own eyes from his imaginary headquarters … He declared that he had never seen such ridiculous positions. As for my platoon sergeant in the chalk-pit, his left flank was entirely unprotected …’ Neave got to his feet. ‘There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir,’ he said boldly. Even in the emptiness of Salisbury Plain, he claimed, ‘you could have heard a pin drop. My Colonel, white in the face, stared at the ground. The Brigadier gulped.’ The brass hat tried to bluster, ‘but the spell was broken. Congratulations rained on me in the Mess and the old songs were sung far into the night.’ Neave had triumphed with a classic bit of Eton cheek. It was immensely satisfying, but hardly a preparation for war.

He left Oxford in the summer of 1937 with a ‘gentleman’s degree’ (third class), a result that can have done little for his relationship with his father. In London he joined an old-fashioned firm of City solicitors, where he dressed in bowler hat and dark suit and learned his trade processing the legal leftovers. He was set on being a barrister and obtained a pupillage at chambers in Farrar’s Building in the Temple. By then his pessimism about the future of Europe was proving all too justified. On 12 March 1938, Hitler ordered the German army into Austria and the following day the country was declared part of the German Reich. Shortly afterwards, Neave transferred out of his Territorial regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and into the 22nd (Essex) Anti-Aircraft Battalion, a unit of the Royal Engineers. The move was presumably because its proximity to London would make it easier to meet his military commitments. At the same time, his interest in politics was growing. He joined the Castlereagh, a dining club which met in St James’s about once a fortnight while the House was sitting, to hear the candid and off-the-record views of a Tory politician. Michael Isaacs remembered a dinner in July 1939 when the guest of honour was Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary the previous year over Prime Minister Chamberlain’s handling of relations with Italy. He had since become a major in the Territorials. ‘He came on after drilling his [men] and spoke eloquently to us about the grim immediate outlook. We all realised that it was only a question of time …’42

* Joseph Grimond (1913–93), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; Liberal MP for Orkney and Shetland, 1950–83; leader of the Liberal Party, 1956–67; created Lord Grimond, 1983.

† Edward Heath (1916–2005), educated Chatham House School and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, 1950–83; Leader of the Conservative Party, 1965–75; Prime Minister, June 1970–March 1974.

‡ Hugh Fraser (1918–84), educated Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Stafford and Stone, 1945–84.

2

Blooded

In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the country’s politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the port’s burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.

Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldier’s calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack gunners. It was not for this that he had studied Clausewitz. As he admitted ruefully, it was hardly ‘a shining form of warfare’.1

The first six months of hostilities were spent in a field in Essex preparing for an invasion that never came. After a training stint in Hereford, he set off in February 1940 to Boulogne to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in charge of an advance party. The searchlight men ranked low in military esteem. A remark by a Guards officer that their equipment was ‘quite Christmassy’ rankled. Yet although he might have preferred a more dashing outfit, Neave liked his comrades, and his accounts of his service with them are affectionate and respectful. By the time he reached Calais he was a troop commander with the 2nd Searchlight Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment (RA), in charge of about eighty men. They included ‘a high proportion of older men with First World War experience. Most were industrial workers with a few clerks and professional men … All were vocal and democratic.’2

They ‘did not see themselves as front-line soldiers’, and with good reason. When they arrived in France they were virtually untrained in infantry tactics and were armed with rifles that most of them had never fired. Their other weapons were some old-fashioned Lewis machine guns and a few Bren guns for use against aircraft. As defence against the German armour that spearheaded the Blitzkrieg, they had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It fired slim, .55 calibre rounds at a rate of ten a minute that could penetrate a light tank at 100 yards but were little use against the Panzer IIIs in the divisions bearing down on the BEF. In any case, no one in the unit was qualified to operate it.

Nonetheless, what they lacked in regimental elan ‘they made up in willingness to fight’. Again and again in the four days of the siege they showed extraordinary guts. Unlike the previous generation of upper-class British men who had served in the war, Neave and his contemporaries had had few dealings with people outside their social level who were not servants or tradesmen. The army had given him his first intimate exposure to how other Britons thought and behaved. It taught him that patriotism, courage and gallantry were not the preserve of the privileged.

Even after months of anticipation, the end of the Phoney War came as a shock. On 10 May 1940, the German forces that had massed along the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg plunged west. The main thrust came where the least preparation had been made to meet it – through the Ardennes. In three days, forces spearheaded by the Panzer divisions of Heinz Guderian cleared the forest and crossed the Meuse. On 13 May, aided by pulverising attacks by the Luftwaffe, they broke the French defences at Sedan. The armoured columns moved at a speed that surprised the Germans themselves, sweeping round behind the Allied armies arrayed around the Belgian border. On 19 May, the three divisions of Guderian’s XIX Corps were in Amiens, less than fifty miles from the Channel. The following day they reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme, driving home a wedge that divided the Allied armies in the Pas de Calais and Belgium from the French forces to the south.

Utterly sure of his instincts and confident in his tactics, troops and tanks, Guderian was set on a move that, had it succeeded, might have brought Britain’s war to an end. His goal was the Channel ports, and in particular Dunkirk, which, once taken, would leave the BEF stranded and facing annihilation or surrender. Various factors combined to prevent him from maintaining the headlong pace. Not least was the caution of his superiors at Army High Command HQ, shared by Hitler himself, who feared the speed of the advance would expose XIX Corps to a devastating flank attack.

The Germans need not have worried. The Allied commanders were reluctant to credit the strength and extent of the breakthrough. The eventual move to counter it, a Franco-British drive south into the enemy flank around Arras on 21 May, achieved some initial success before being beaten off. However, it was to have important consequences. The action further reduced the appetite for risk in Berlin. Guderian was ordered to halt, dashing his hopes of a lightning victory.

On the day before the Allied counter-attack, the 2nd Searchlight Battery (2nd SL) was in Arras. That morning they received orders to move to Calais, seventy miles to the north-west. As they left, there was little sense of alarm in the British garrison. They drove off down long straight roads past Vimy Ridge and the flat fields that only twenty-two years before had been a vast killing zone. Neave travelled in the front seat of an old khaki-painted Austin Seven alongside his driver, Gunner Cooper. Cooper was large and eager to see action, frustrated at being diverted away from the defence of Arras to what looked like another spell of tedious duty. Neave was inclined to agree. He had heard that there were Germans around but he and his comrades did not believe ‘that [they] had broken through … We were confident that, at most, a few armoured cars, a few motor-cyclists or a few light tanks were threatening the Allied lines of communication.’3 In fact, the countryside to the east and west was filling up with Panzers.

They spent the night under the plane trees of the market square in the mediaeval town of Ardres, ten miles south of Calais, and arrived the following morning at their destination, a village called Coulogne on the south-eastern approach to the port. Neave set up his HQ in the Mairie. No bombs fell that night and he wrote later that on going to bed he ‘refused to believe that our role in Calais would be other than anti-aircraft defence’. But then he was ‘twenty-four, unmilitary, with opinions of my own’.

Neave was being a little hard on himself. He had tried his best at soldiering, the theory as well as the practice. His failure to predict what was about to unfold was unsurprising. He and everyone else deployed in the defence of Calais were the victims of the extraordinary complacency of those in overall charge of operations, an attitude that was matched by an incompetence and vacillation that was surprising even to those familiar with the British military’s capacity for deadly muddle. Years later, he made a detailed study of the episode using official papers and the accounts of participants. There will always be debate about what effect the siege of Calais had on the shape of the Battle of France. What has never been in doubt is that the direction of the defence from on high was a disgrace.

The German victory in the west has come to seem a preordained inevitability. That was not how it appeared at the time. The forces were evenly balanced. In the all-important realm of armour, the French had better tanks than the Germans and they had more of them. The Germans, though, made the maximum use of their resources. They were better organised and had better communications, exemplified by the radio links between individual tanks and from ground to air which could concentrate forces relatively swiftly to maximum effect. Most of all, they had a winning attitude. They were attuned to victory. Medium-level commanders were encouraged to initiate action without waiting for orders, and their men were eager to fight. These benefits on their own did not ensure success. But luck was on the Germans’ side, and their good fortune was compounded by the slow reactions and bad decisions of the Allied command. In Neave’s sector of the battle, both were on constant display.

He arrived as the scramble began to prevent catastrophe. Following the capture of Abbeville on the 20th, reinforcements were ordered across the water to the Channel ports. The 20th Guards Brigade was sent to Boulogne. Calais was to be defended by the 30th Infantry Brigade. Firepower against the Panzers would be provided by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and a Royal Artillery anti-tank battery (229th). However, there would be no field artillery and the huge demands placed on the RAF meant that air cover was sparse. The meagre existing garrison, which consisted of a platoon of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and some anti-aircraft batteries, was to be boosted by three infantry battalions of the newly formed 30th Infantry Brigade. The force was under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a thoughtful and determined forty-two-year-old, whose reputation among his peers was high.

This seemed like a healthy addition to the defences. However, as Neave judged in his post-war study, ‘Nicholson faced an impossible task … Many among the 3,000 British troops were untrained for battle. They had neither proper equipment, arms or ammunition … [he] had no field artillery and very few tanks. His only additional support were 800 French soldiers and sailors and a handful of Dutch and Belgians.’4 The first infantry battalion to embark was the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, a territorial motorcycle combination unit, which arrived with the 3rd RTR and 229 RA Anti-Tank Battery aboard the SS City of Canterbury in the early afternoon of 22 May. Confusion and miscalculation meant that the QVR arrived without their machines, transport or three-inch mortars. The two-inch mortars were stowed, but with only smoke bombs for ammunition. Four of the RA battery’s anti-tank guns were somehow left behind. Unloading the RTR’s forty-eight light and medium tanks was maddeningly slow, and the inefficient way that equipment had been stowed on embarkation meant the fast-moving Cruiser IIIs were the last to come off. The armament – three-pounder cannon and Vickers machine guns – had been packed in mineral jelly, which had to be laboriously cleaned off before a shot could be fired. The other two regular infantry battalions – the 1st Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, and the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) – arrived the next day. They were highly trained, but the Rifle Brigade had only half its ammunition and transport. Even when allowances were made for the inevitable balls-ups inherent in a last-minute embarkation, it was, as a young tanker officer remarked subsequently to Neave, ‘the most extraordinary way to go to war.’5

Nicholson was famously unflappable. However, Neave reckoned he ‘must have been deeply troubled’ by ‘a stream of contradictory orders’. In the course of the siege, from across the Channel came instructions to send his tanks first this way, then the other. At various times he was told to prepare to withdraw, then to stand and fight. The desperation of the situation was obvious to London, and Nicholson ‘asked repeatedly for artillery, ammunition and food: he had explained his situation and the enemy’s.’ In addition, he had been ‘visited by two generals, an admiral and a naval commodore’.

Neave wondered, ‘if they knew that they were so unfairly matched, why did they not send the reinforcements for which Nicholson pleaded?’ The answer was that from hour to hour events slipped further and further beyond the Allies’ control, so they were constantly reacting to situations that had already changed for the worse. As it finally became clear that the entire BEF was facing a choice between annihilation or evacuation, the fate of the Calais garrison became a secondary consideration. Instead, it was allotted a sacrificial role and the dubious honour of fighting to the death.

The halt order given to Guderian was rescinded late on the night of 21 May. He was to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais, fifty miles to the north and west. During 22 May, the fresh winds of the storm brewing on the horizon began to be felt by Neave and his battery, ensconced around Coulogne. The village began to fill up with refugees, seeking to escape from a German advance coming from they knew not where.

On that day his chief, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Goldney, who commanded 1st Searchlight Regiment, moved up from Lille to Ardres to take control of the air defences of Calais. Goldney ordered all searchlight detachments to concentrate on their troop headquarters – the Mairie at Coulogne in the case of Neave’s outfit. He would now be in charge of sixty or seventy men, armed with rifles, two Bren guns and one Boys anti-tank rifle, to defend the villages which had become the outer ring of the port’s defences. His men got to work digging trenches on the south and south-east approaches to the village and setting up roadblocks.

As the day wore on, the flow of refugees increased. Like many who endured the siege, Neave later came to believe that among them were a number of Fifth Columnists. By now the port was under attack from the Luftwaffe. The troops on the checkpoints blocked the refugees’ path to Calais, where bombing had wrecked electricity and water supplies. At the docks, in the lulls between bombardments, they struggled to disembark reinforcements and unload supplies, then fill up the returning ships with casualties and non-fighting servicemen deemed by London to be ‘useless mouths’ with nothing to contribute to the struggle.

That night, Neave ‘lay awake in my bedroom at the Mairie and heard the tramp of their feet as they were turned away to sleep in the fields. The red glow of the fires of Calais, started by the Luftwaffe, shone on the ceiling and there was the sharp crack of the anti-aircraft guns.’6 At dawn he was woken to deal with an emergency. A column of men, women and children, half a mile long and led by a young priest, was confronting the guards at the checkpoint at the Pont de Coulogne, which crossed the Canal de Calais. He arrived to find the priest trying to persuade the crowd to disperse to the fields, but they were determined to reach the port and a boat to imagined safety, and there were ugly shouts of treachery. They ‘seemed about to rush the roadblock,’ Neave recalled. ‘I drew my .38 Webley revolver of the First World War and asked for silence. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, mon lieutenant,” said several anxious voices.’ He managed to calm them down and persuade them to turn back to the countryside. It was the first episode in a dramatic day.

Though he did not know it, the Germans were closing in all round. The British garrison in Boulogne, twenty-two miles to the south, was already under siege by Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Division. A 1st Panzer Division battle group, under Oberst Walter Krüger, was only eighteen miles away from Calais. For the moment, Guderian was uninterested in Calais and still dead set on gaining Dunkirk. The troops were tired and operating on stretched lines. Their orders were to press forward and secure crossings over the Aa river to the east of Calais. They were to enter the port only if it was thought that it could be taken by surprise and a major battle avoided. That morning Guderian did not have control of the 10th Panzer Division, which had been held in reserve during the Allied counter-attack at Arras. At 10 o’clock it was restored to him. The decision was now taken to move them forward fast. They were given Calais as their next objective.

In the meantime Battle Group Krüger was advancing to the south of Calais, intent on capturing the bridgeheads that would allow Guderian’s forces to close on Dunkirk. To do so, they had to get across the Canal de Calais. As they moved forward in the early afternoon of Thursday 23 May, the defenders of Calais and the Germans clashed for the first time. As the Panzers moved between the hamlet of Hames-Boucres and the village of Guînes, they met with 3RTR tanks commanded by Colonel Ronald Keller, who against his better judgement was responding to an order from the BEF HQ to proceed to St-Omer. In the action that followed, up to a dozen British tanks were lost – about a quarter of the total strength.

They were forced to withdraw and the Germans pushed on to Les Attaques on the Canal de Calais, a few miles south of Coulogne. The news of their arrival reached the commander of the ‘C’ Troop of the 1st Searchlight Battery, 2nd Lieutenant R. J. Barr, whose headquarters were at Ferme Vendroux, just to the north of the German line of march. Barr rounded up fifty men and a lorry and set off across the canal to prevent the Germans crossing at Les Attaques. His force was beefed up by reinforcements from 2nd Searchlight Battery from Coulogne. Panzers began moving over the canal bridge at 2 p.m., to be met by fire from the Brens, rifles and Boys guns of Barr’s improvised force. The hot resistance lasted for three hours, but eventually the defenders were surrounded and forced to surrender.

While this was going on, Krüger’s infantry advanced on Orphanage Farm, less than a mile to the north of Coulogne, where the 1st Searchlight Regiment commander, Colonel Goldney, had set up his HQ. Goldney prepared to defend it with the padre, the medical officer and a handful of men, despatching a small force to hold a ridge on the southern approach to the farm against the attackers. When making his dispositions, Neave had posted Bren gunners on the south-eastern side of Coulogne, below the ridge held on the other side by Goldney’s advance guard. When the Germans arrived, they opened up on the farm’s defenders with ‘very heavy rifle and automatic fire’. Sited in the lee of the ridge, Neave’s men were unable to see the fray but nonetheless opened up in the direction of the fighting, ‘narrowly missing’ their comrades.7 The result was that a despatch rider ‘roared over the fields’ from Goldney’s farmhouse HQ ‘with a well-deserved “rocket” from the Colonel and the Brens were moved forward.’

This was not a good start to Neave’s fighting career and things were not about to improve. He had stationed himself at a barricade at the entrance to the village, constructed from the local undertaker’s hearse and a couple of carts. Refugees were still arriving, pleading to be allowed into Calais, among them a family of Austrian Jews. While he was trying to dissuade them, a mortar bomb crashed into the roof of the Mairie, showering them with broken tiles. It was followed by several others. Above the mayhem, a small Fieseler Storch reconnaissance aircraft droned unconcernedly across the clear blue sky. Neave ‘fired at it wildly’ but without effect.8 The barrage lasted a quarter of an hour, tearing up paving stones and starting fires. When it stopped, a young girl lay dead on the roadside. Neave watched a soldier pull her tartan skirt gently over her knees. His despatch rider was dead beside him on the pavement. He ‘took his papers and looked down at him. He had been a cheerful man. He still had a smile that even a mortar bomb could not efface.’

Neave’s account of these events is emotionally restrained and all the more effective for being so. The spare narrative gives a strong sense of what war is really like. Neave had learned in a few hours that it was formless. It was about confusion, frantic improvisation, sudden eruptions of indiscriminate violence and the body of an innocent girl in a village street. In the late afternoon, the defenders began to fall back against the Panzer onslaught. When tanks came up, the men on the ridge were forced back to Orphanage Farm, which then came under a sustained barrage from the Panzers’ recently arrived artillery. At 7 p.m., after five hours of fighting, Goldney abandoned his HQ and ordered everyone to fall back on Calais.

Neave sent his men off by lorry, but for the moment he would not be joining them. He had been given an important task to complete before he could leave Coulogne. Together with a ‘Sergeant Maginis’ and a sapper equipped with some gun cotton, he was ordered to destroy the ‘Cuckoo’, the code name for an experimental sound-location device which the Searchlights had brought with them. On no account was it to fall into enemy hands. It was sitting on a trailer in the middle of the village and for five tense minutes the sapper fiddled with the explosive, trying to blow up the apparatus. The situation was resolved when two large French tankers full of aviation spirit came thundering down the road, with German infantry close behind. The drivers abandoned the trucks and gamely set them ablaze. The fire spread to the Cuckoo, which ‘providentially’ exploded, and Neave and his comrades were able to escape under cover of a thick cloud of black smoke.9

For a second time that day, events had not played out in the way Neave would have liked. Who knows what would have happened had the tankers not appeared? Nonetheless, in his post-war account, Neave gave the episode a positive spin. Quoting the 1st Panzer Division war diary, he reports that after the hot reception they received, it was decided that Calais was too strongly defended for them to attempt an improvised attack and they were ordered to push on to Gravelines and Dunkirk, leaving the capture of the port to 10th Panzer Division. From the German point of view, he wrote, ‘a great chance was lost. Guderian’s First Panzer Division had been hampered on its left flank as it advanced to Dunkirk, by British tanks and searchlights. If Calais had fallen to this division on the afternoon of the 23rd, Guderian would surely have sent his Tenth Panzer Division straight to Dunkirk and captured it before the defences were organised. The German records show that it was Goldney’s stand at Orphanage Farm which made him change his plans.’10

Neave was in this sense an optimist. He had the happy ability to glimpse within the fog of apparent debacle ‘providential’ outcomes. It was a fortunate attitude that would sustain him in the many setbacks that assailed him in the months ahead and a key component in the resilience and determination to persist in unpromising circumstances that carried him through not only the war but much of the rest of his life.

After the scrambled departure from Coulogne, Neave set off to Calais by foot, arriving at the Porte de Marck, on the eastern ramparts of the city, at 10 p.m., ‘shaken by the bombing … and my narrow escape.’11 The geography of Calais was complicated. Calais-Nord was the dock area, a collection of basins and interlocking canals connected by bridges and overlooked by a massive sixteenth-century citadel. The southern half was Calais-St-Pierre, the modern centre dominated by the huge and florid Hôtel de Ville. The whole ensemble was protected by an enceinte, a defensive enclosure of walls and bastions designed by the great military engineer Vauban on Louis XIV’s orders and added to over the centuries. It was pierced in several places by railway lines leading to the docks, but these fortifications now had to do service as a bulwark against the latest German invasion.

On the three-mile trudge from his outpost, Neave managed to pick up some members of his troop. He was ‘nervous and footsore’ but ‘tried to appear unbowed’. The sector was held by the Rifle Brigade, the Green Jackets, whose renown derived from countless brave exploits in centuries of continental and imperial wars. Neave and his Searchlight comrades were now under the orders of Major John Taylor, commanding ‘A’ Company. He spent the night lying on top of the ramparts, facing eastward, rifle in hand, while shells whined overhead to crash into the docks behind him, where intermittent efforts were being made to unload the Green Jackets’ transport.

The fate of the defenders lay in the hands of London. Whitehall’s ignorance of the true picture, though, produced a succession of hasty and short-lived decisions. Late the previous evening, the War Office decided that, having sent reinforcements to Calais, they were now going to pull them out. The situation in the Channel ports was untenable. Down the road in Boulogne, the 20th Guards Brigade, who had been holding out against a siege by Guderian’s panzers, were already being disembarked, leaving French troops to hold on for another twenty-four hours. The War Office had apparently concluded that the situation in Calais was equally hopeless and that the highly trained troops of Nicholson’s brigade should be extracted while there was still time. At 3 o’clock that morning, he received an order: ‘Evacuation decided in principle. When you have finished unloading your two M.T. [Motor Transport] ships commence embarkation of all personnel except fighting personnel who remain to cover final evacuation.’ It was not long before Nicholson was issued with completely contradictory instructions.

Neave watched the dawn rise over Dunkirk, whose vital importance, if terminal catastrophe was to be averted, was becoming ever clearer. He had been unable to sleep, ‘so strong was the sense of danger’.12 On the roads leading into Calais, the tanks, carriers, trucks and mobile artillery of the 10th Panzer Division were rumbling forward and the siege of Calais proper was about to begin.

Nicholson planned a layered defence, starting at an outer perimeter from which the troops could make successive withdrawals into the town. There was a huge area to defend. The walls of the enceinte stretched for eight miles. He had no artillery and a depleted tank force. Yet morale among the troops was good and had improved further as word spread that they would soon be on their way back across the Channel. At dawn, the first blows of the German assault fell on the QVR, holding forward positions on the south and south-west of the town. They were forced to fall back to the enceinte, which by midday had become the main defensive line.

During the morning, Neave was ordered to move his men from the eastern ramparts and wait in the sand dunes half a mile to the north, where hundreds of non-combatant troops were sheltered. It was an unsettling time. They were in the battle but not of it. ‘Calais had become a city of doom and I was not in the least anxious to remain,’ he wrote candidly afterwards.13 He was tired and nervous. For something to do, he walked down to the Gare Maritime, where the railway met the port, in time to see one of the transport ships leaving harbour. The scene stayed with him. There were twenty dead bodies on the platform, victims of the night’s shelling, and ‘the sad corpses, covered in grey blankets, had begun to stink.’ It was a clear day and he could see the white cliffs of Dover, so near but yet so far. Throughout the afternoon, German infantry, supported by tanks, attacked on all three sides of the perimeter, while shells rained down on the harbour area. The defenders fought with a ferocity that won the Germans’ reluctant admiration. By the early evening, they had only managed to break into the southern side of the town in a few places, at a cost of heavy losses of equipment, men and tanks.

In the early afternoon, Neave got his chance to join the fray. Green Jacket officers called for volunteers from the crowd of unemployed soldiers sitting among the dunes. He rounded up fifty from the Searchlights and they formed up at the Gare Maritime, before heading south along the dock road to get their orders at the Hôtel de Ville. It was a proud moment for men designated ‘non-fighting soldiers’. Marching off under the gaze of the Green Jackets, ‘not a man faltered. It would never have done to be seen to be afraid even though the shells were coming in fast over the harbour.’14 In the shadow of the gigantic clock tower of the Hôtel de Ville, Neave was told that he and his men were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th Rifles, who were holding a position by the western ramparts of the enceinte, which was under heavy attack from tanks and troops pushing in along the Route de Boulogne. They were led there by a staff officer through the deserted shopping streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which ran east–west across the centre of Calais-St-Pierre. The enemy tanks and machine guns had a clear field of fire down the boulevard, so Neave’s group moved west in the hot afternoon sun along a narrow parallel street. At some point it seems they could get no closer, and Neave led his men into a side street and left them in a doorway while he ‘moved gingerly into the boulevard itself’.

Ahead lay the Pont Jourdan, which crossed a railway line coming in from the south. It was held by the 60th and it was there he would have to go to get his next orders. It was the greatest test of his courage that he had faced until now and he was not sure how he would fare. ‘A steady hail of tracer bullets and some tank shells came flying over the hump of the … railway bridge,’ he wrote later. ‘They bounced off the paving stones in all directions as I clung for life to the walls of houses on the south side of the boulevard and crept towards the bridge. This was my first experience of street fighting and I was acutely frightened. It was difficult to understand how others could remain so collected under fire. Throughout the battle, the noise was so great that if you were more than ten yards away it was impossible to understand what was said to you.’15

Eventually, he reached the cover of the railway embankment that ran either side of the bridge, where he found Major Poole, the ‘B’ Company commander. Poole was a veteran of the last war, had been wounded, taken prisoner and escaped. Despite his great experience, Neave heard the anxiety in his voice. ‘I am afraid they may break through,’ he told him. ‘Get your people in the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. You must fight like bloody hell.’

This account comes from Neave’s book The Flames of Calais, which appeared in 1972. It intersperses his personal story, told with much detail and verbatim dialogue like the above, with the full story of the episode at every level, from decision-making in London and Guderian’s headquarters to platoon actions. The broader narrative is well supported by official documentation and participants’ accounts. But it is worth asking how accurate was his recollection of his own part in the story, thirty-two years after the event. There is no mention that he was working from a diary or semi-contemporaneous notes. Nonetheless, his account has the ring of authenticity. The recollections of combatants who were taken prisoner often have a fine-grained quality and an immediacy that is not so often present in other post-factum testimony. When removed from the battlefield and plunged into the tedium of captivity, he had plenty of time to obsess over events while the memory was still fresh. If the temptation for self-justifying adjustments to the narrative was strong, Neave appears to have resisted it. At no point in the story does he attempt to present himself as anything other than a tiny actor in the great events, often confused, frightened and ineffective, but always desperately concerned to do the right thing.

The right thing now was to obey Major Poole’s instruction and fight like hell. He returned to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, with bullets ricocheting around him, and found his men, now joined by two sergeants, crouched in the shelter of an ivy-covered wall. They were armed with only two Brens and some rifles. He ordered the sergeants to take up positions in the windows of the first floor of houses on either side of the street, from where they could fire on the German positions half a mile away on the Route de Boulogne. There followed a surreal episode of the sort that occurs with surprising frequency in the middle of battles. A door opened and a group of civilians scuttled past carrying the corpse of an old woman. There were other civilians about. The patron of a café near the bridge, proudly wearing his Croix de Guerre, spurned the mortal danger he was in to remain open, handing out cognac to anyone within reach and exhorting the defenders with a defiant slogan from the last war: ‘On les aura!’ (We’ll have ’em!)

There was danger behind as well as in front. A single rifle shot behind was followed by a shout of ‘Fifth column!’ After the battle was over, there would be many stories of mysterious gunmen appearing out of nowhere, some in German uniform, sniping at the defenders. They would reinforce the impression growing among many of the British troops that the French made unreliable allies. ‘B’ Company were deployed ahead on the far side of the railway bridge around an improvised road-block and facing down the Route de Boulogne. The Searchlights Bren teams reached their first-floor positions, smashed the windows and began to lay down supporting fire. Their eagerness and inexperience soon brought shouts of protest from the 60th on the far side of the bridge. Crouched in a doorway, Neave ‘could hear hoarse shouts: “F---ing well look where you’re shooting!”’16

In a lull in the fighting, he dodged across the boulevard to the corner of the Rue Edgar Quinet, a side street next to the bridge. From here he could see that the company’s position was critical and the weight of enemy fire seemed certain to break the defenders soon if they did not drop back. The situation seemed to improve a little when, at 4 p.m., one of the British cruiser tanks arrived at the railway bridge and fired two or three rounds towards the attackers. The German response was furious: ‘Tank shells and machine-gun bullets came thick and fast for twenty minutes. Ricochets off the walls and flying glass made my situation in the Rue Edgar Quinet … rather exposed … It was now without a sign of life, save for a young girl’s white face at a cellar grating. The wall which sheltered me had ragged gaps where mortar bombs had flung bricks into the street. I began to look for a safer position.’

He could see nothing but clouds of smoke and dust, and the enemy felt horribly close. The Searchlight men were firing through the lace curtains, bravely but inexpertly, endangering defenders as much as attackers. One of the Brens began to fire fitfully, then jammed. He was acutely conscious of his lack of training and his impotence, able only to observe and offer encouragement. The sun beat down and the air throbbed with the heat from burning buildings. His thirst became unbearable. He had to get something to drink. He decided to make a dash for the café. He waited for a lull in the firing and was about to run when he ‘felt a sharp, bruising pain in my left side. I collapsed to the pavement, my rifle clattering.’ He tried to get up and found that he could still walk.

He staggered across to his original destination, the café on the corner, and took shelter in the side street, gratefully accepting a large cognac from the proprietor. A bespectacled medical orderly appeared, opened Neave’s battledress and examined the wound. He pronounced him lucky – the bullet had passed half an inch from his heart. The orderly’s cheerfulness and inclination to ‘talk professionally about the condition of the wound’ grated on Neave’s nerves. His great fear was ‘that the Germans would break through in the next few minutes, that I should be left behind and captured’. He swore at the medic and ordered him to take him to the next street. There they were joined by a Frenchman and between them they walked him away.

There was no sign of a regimental aid post (RAP), and he knew the nearest hospital was a mile away. He was calmed by the arrival of a scout car carrying a young officer of the 60th, Michael Sinclair, who like him was captured and ended up in Colditz, where he was shot dead while trying to escape in 1944. Sinclair ‘smilingly drew my attention to a van flying the Red Cross’. The improvised ambulance, ‘smelling strongly of stale vegetables’, carried him at high speed back into the centre to the Pont Georges Cinq, the central of three spans that connected Calais-St-Pierre to Calais-Nord. They halted by a group of soldiers seeking directions to the 60th’s RAP, but no one knew its whereabouts and an argument broke out as to which of the three hospitals in town he should be taken to.

Lying in the back, listening to the confused voices, Neave ‘was suffering more from anger than pain’. He was still tortured by the thought that he might be captured. ‘My chief interest,’ he admitted frankly, ‘was in evacuation by sea to England.’ Eventually it was decided to take him to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent only a few hundred yards away in the Rue Leveux, under the eastern wall of the Citadel. He was unloaded under the supervision of the 60th’s medical officer, Lieutenant A. F. Stallard, who after examination told him he had received a ‘penetrating flank wound’ that would require an operation. He was ‘carried, protesting, into the dark interior of the hospital where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloise cigarettes, awaited me’.

Beyond the ramparts of Calais, great strategic events had conspired to cancel all hope of evacuation. Throughout the day, the realisation had penetrated the heads of those directing events in London that the BEF was facing extinction. Unless it could be saved, Britain’s continuation in the war was seriously in doubt. Calais now assumed a new and different importance. It had become a key element in the struggle to bring the BEF home through the port of Dunkirk, thirty miles to the north-east. Their job was to drag the 10th Panzer Division into a fight to the last ditch, man and bullet, in order to delay it moving north and adding its weight to the enemy forces closing on the 200,000 beleaguered British troops.

Although the British did not know it, the threat of an armoured onslaught had temporarily subsided. That morning, Guderian had been ordered to halt his other Panzer divisions on a line on the river Aa, just to the east of Calais. Hitler had decided to give his exhausted soldiers a brief respite before moving against the French armies to the south. The British were beaten and he was prepared to allow Hermann Goering the chance to make good on his promise that the Luftwaffe would finish them off.

A further great decision settled the Calais garrison’s fate. Lord Gort, the BEF’s commander, came to the conclusion that the idea of attacking south to join up with the French army on the Somme was a fantasy. On the 25th, on his own initiative, he took what Neave described as ‘the most vital decision of the entire campaign’17 and ordered his army to fall back to the north and Dunkirk and prepare for evacuation. It was also one of the fateful decisions of the war. Had he prevaricated, the BEF would have been lost and with it perhaps any realistic hope that Britain could stay in the war and establish the conditions for eventual victory. But in order for the BEF to be saved, the Calais garrison had to be sacrificed. It became the tethered goat to distract the Panzers from the greater prize ahead.

The drastic change in thinking was signalled in orders which arrived late on the night of the 24th, crushing hope of an evacuation and telling Nicholson that he must fight on ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. This was a reference to the furious reaction of the French to the news that Calais, like Boulogne, was about to be abandoned, scuppering their plans to establish a bridgehead that could be supplied by sea and keep resistance alive in the north-east. The theme was repeated the following day in a message to Nicholson from Anthony Eden, which arrived at 2 p.m., stating ‘Defence of Calais to the utmost is of highest importance to our country as symbolising our continued co-operation with France. The eyes of the empire are upon the defence of Calais and HM Government are confident you and your gallant regiments will perform an exploit worthy of the British name.’

That day saw the launching of the evacuation plan, Operation Dynamo. There would be no further reference to Allied solidarity, and the signal drafted in London that night by Churchill, Anthony Eden and the Chief of the General Staff, Edmund Ironside, was stark. It read: ‘Every hour you continue to exist is of greatest help to BEF. Government has therefore decided you must continue to fight. Have greatest possible admiration for your splendid stand.’

Nicholson needed no exhortations to keep fighting. That morning, the attackers broke into Calais-St-Pierre and at 8 a.m. the swastika was flying from the Hôtel de Ville. Three hours later, the Germans sent the town mayor, André Gershell, to Nicholson at his headquarters in the Citadel to demand his surrender. His reply was that ‘If the Germans want Calais they will have to fight for it.’18 A German officer led a second deputation in the afternoon, which was similarly rebuffed.

Neave spent the night of the 24/25th recovering from his operation in a ward in the cellars of the Hôpital Militaire. In the next bed lay a young Hurricane pilot who knew he was dying. He ‘could still speak and begged me to keep talking to him’.19 As it grew light, ‘his body shuddered and his mouth fell open. The orderly saluted and, for a few minutes, the ward was very quiet.’ He passed the rest of the day there, with the sounds of the fight piercing the thick walls and the occasional shell bursting in the vicinity, one of which showered his bed with broken glass. Outside, the defenders were being forced back street by street. Much of the town was choked with smoke and fire. In the early evening, the town was shaken by a prolonged artillery bombardment. Above the crackle of burning houses, Neave heard the ‘groans and cries’ of the wounded as they were brought down to the cellars.

At 9.30 in the morning, Stuka dive-bombers descended on the town, and an hour later enemy troops began crossing the bridges to Calais-Nord. The bombs shook the hospital and in the basement ‘the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering.’ Just before 10 a.m., a bomb landed in front of the hospital, blowing in the main doors. Fear seized Neave. He was ‘terrified that with the next direct hit the wounded would be buried alive’. When the Stukas finally departed, he left his bed and found he could walk unaided. He decided to head for the Gare Maritime and find transport. He fixed on the hope that ‘it might still be possible to evacuate the wounded by sea. Anything was better for them than entombment in the ruins of the Hôpital Militaire.’20 He seems to have discussed the idea with an unnamed fellow patient, a corporal who volunteered to go with him. Dressed in what he could find – shirt, battledress trousers and steel helmet – he left the shelter. The hospital garden was a shambles of uprooted trees, with shattered masonry and glass lying around the graves dug for five riflemen who had died of their wounds in the cellar. The French military doctor commanding the hospital listened to his plan with amazement, telling him, ‘You are crazy, mon lieutenant. You do not know what is happening in the town.’ Neave repeated that the men would only be taken prisoner if they remained and insisted on his belief that it was still possible to get hospital ships in the harbour. ‘You are absolutely determined to sacrifice your life?’ the doctor asked. ‘I was not interested in anything of the kind,’ Neave recalled. ‘I was irrationally confident that I could get through.’

The two injured men picked their way through the shattered and burning streets, Neave doubled up from the wound in his side and his companion limping. Calais-Nord was deserted after the dive-bombing, but as they passed the old fisherman’s quarter called the Courgain which abuts the Gare Maritime, ‘without warning, shells whistled and burst near us … The corporal vanished in the blinding flash and dust.’ Neave fell to the ground unhurt and crawled to the side of the street where, miraculously, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac from a cellar window.21 He drank from it and staggered on until he reached the Pont Vétillard swing bridge which led to the Gare Maritime, where he could see British troops of the QVR in front of the station.

His ‘apparition caused a sensation’. However, the reception he got was cold. The rumours of spies and German agents were now treated as established fact and his identity card was inspected several times. His demand that transport should be sent to collect the wounded from the hospital cellar ‘was thought to be peculiar. Obviously I was either a fifth columnist or delirious.’ Neave’s pleas were ignored and he was packed off to another cellar, beneath the Gare Maritime, to join rows of wounded. The stay was short. The area came under intense mortar fire and he was soon moved to a tunnel under Bastion 1 of the enceinte, which had been transformed into a regimental aid post.

At 4 p.m. the Citadel where Nicholson made his final stand fell. Shortly before, the Rifle Brigade fought their last gallant action around the Gare Maritime, with some units fighting literally to the last round. Lying on his cot, Neave heard ‘the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung on the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came field-grey figures waving revolvers.’22 His war as a fighting soldier was over. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots, fired at a spotter plane.

3

‘In the Bag’

The adrenaline that had carried Neave through his ‘suicidal’ stagger to the docks soon dissolved. His injury was serious and he had no choice but to accept defeat. He lay on his stretcher in the pungent gloom of the cellar ward, listening to the groans of his comrades, depressed, and fearful of what might happen next. In the morning, the Germans moved them to a makeshift field hospital in the Calais-St-Pierre covered market.1 There was nothing to do but brood and endlessly go over the details of the battle. The siege of Calais had taught many brutal lessons. Neave’s schooldays and TA experiences had made him sceptical of authority and disinclined to give those who wielded it unquestioning respect. The debacle could only reinforce that attitude. The heartache felt by Churchill and Eden over the decision to sacrifice the garrison was genuine. Nonetheless, their grasp of the situation had been tenuous and their reactions clumsy and slow.

Neave looked and sounded like an Establishment stalwart, but his judgements were often robust when he delivered his verdict on events. ‘Churchill was often wrong about Calais,’ he wrote years later,2 citing as an example an intemperate memo the prime minister sent to his military assistant, General Ismay, on 24 May complaining of what he saw as the lack of enterprise in the defenders and the BEF in breaking the German siege. Churchill in time admitted the injustice of his remarks, but for Neave it was evidence of ‘the terrifying ignorance of those conducting this campaign from Whitehall’.3 If anything, the performance of the army chiefs had been worse. Calais was a ‘melancholy story of … hesitation and bad staff work’, exemplified by the shambles of departure. The manner in which the QVR had been rushed to war was ‘shameful’. Their embarkation recalled the black comedy that suffused the adventures of Evelyn Waugh’s hero Guy Crouchback ‘in which farce and tragedy are intimately combined’. The same went for the tank units, whose ‘orders were depressingly obscure and they had no idea what to expect on arrival at Calais.’

On the other hand, among those fighting on the ground there were more than enough examples of bravery and devotion to duty, carried out in a spirit of humanity and cheerfulness, to preserve the reputation of the British Army and sustain Neave’s belief in the nobility of the profession of arms. His admiration for Claude Nicholson – his spirit of defiance and loyal attempts to execute the confused orders arriving from across the Channel – bordered on hero worship. His devotion to his memory was intensified by the tragic nature of Nicholson’s end – dying in Rotenburg Castle, as a prisoner of war, in June 1943, at the age of forty-four.4

The defenders of Calais had much to feel proud about. They had accepted a hopeless situation without complaint and had fought with great effectiveness and determination. Once again, upper-class men were learning that gallantry was not the preserve of the privileged. Neave recalled how, at a corner of the Rue Edison, Captain Claude Bower of the 60th Rifles had defended a barricade of vehicles and sandbags for hours until he fell, mortally wounded. The street was lashed by machine-gun fire, which made it seemingly impossible for stretcher-bearers to bring him in. Then ‘Rifleman Matthews drove in a truck across the open street. He backed it into position to rescue Bower, but he was already dead. Matthews removed several others badly wounded, and got away unscathed. Those who witnessed this wonderful achievement never forgot it.’5

Six years before, in his school essay making the case against pacifism, Neave had expressed the hope that no Briton would fight for France. Now he and a host of his countrymen had done just that, giving their lives and liberty in defence of a French town. The same could not be said of many of the French troops. Hundreds sheltered in cellars while the battle raged. There was some redemption, though, in the performance of a hard core of patriots, who fought almost to the last man on the ramparts in defence of Bastion 11, determined to preserve ‘the honour of France’. Neave chose to see these men as the true representatives of their nation. He would come to rely on their sort – and their female counterparts – when organising escape and evasion networks on his return to the war.

With capture, Neave had his first encounter with Germans since his 1933 visit to Berlin. The soldiers who guarded him and the medical orderlies who tended his wound seemed civilised enough. But as he recuperated and thought about the future, ‘It was the Nazis I dreaded, not the front-line troops who behaved well to the wounded.’6 He claimed to have remembered the First World escape stories he read as a schoolboy and that his ‘thoughts turned quickly to the chances of avoiding the inevitable journey to a prison camp’. At this early stage, when German control had not yet set hard, escape was easier to pull off and less hazardous than it soon became. Some of the defenders did manage to get away. A group of forty-seven men who had taken shelter under a pier in the port were picked up under fire by the Royal Navy yacht Gulzar in the early hours of 27 May.7 A young Searchlights officer, Lieutenant W. H. Dothie, after leading a dogged resistance from the village of Marck, east of Calais, was finally captured, but escaped from a prisoner-of-war column and eventually made his way back to England after an epic journey by foot, bicycle and boat.8

The impulse to escape, and his adventures trying to do so, are a central part of Airey Neave’s story and identity, and he wrote about them extensively. However, the account was delivered in fits and starts, over a long period and in different forms. Thirteen years after he broke out of Colditz, he published They Have Their Exits, which became a bestseller. He returned to the subject again in 1969, with Saturday at MI9. The first book skates over the period between capture in Calais and arrival at his first proper prisoner-of-war camp, Oflag IX-A/H, in the castle of Spangenberg, deep in central Germany. In the second, though, he faces the episode squarely, owning to the low spirits and doubtful nerve he suffered in the months after Calais. Neave felt sharply the ignominy, not only of the debacle, but of his own insignificant role in the defence, and his recollections are tinged with a faint sense of shame. It was compounded by a feeling that he had not moved quickly enough to try and get away.

Initially, he was too weak to escape. While still recovering in a ward with four other officers in Calais, he was approached by a young French officer, Pierre d’Harcourt, working as a Red Cross orderly, who suggested substituting the live Neave for one of the dead patients who were regularly taken off for burial, but the plan came to nothing.9 Neave had ‘neither the nerve nor the physical strength to make the attempt’, but as his health improved he found that his morale remained low and his resolve weak. In June, he was moved with other wounded to Lille, where the Faculté Catholique had been turned into a POW hospital. The lorry carrying them broke down in the town of Bailleul, twenty miles short of their destination, presenting him with a golden opportunity. While the lorry was being repaired, ‘I wandered unguarded through the streets with other wounded survivors of Calais,’ he wrote. ‘We were welcomed at every door, food and wine was pressed on us, and many offered to hide us from the Germans.’ Lille would become a centre of resistance in Northern France and, had he accepted, there would have been a high chance of success. Instead, ‘At sunset, as the crowds waved and threw flowers in the main square … I suffered myself, to my shame, to be driven off to hospital in Lille.’

Why such meek acceptance? Writing in 1969, he declared that ‘though my thoughts had already turned to escape and its organisation, the weeks in hospital seemed to deprive me of all initiative.’ He also suggested that lack of ‘military training in such matters’ had played a part in his vacillation. He was man enough to admit that ‘this was not a heroic episode in my life.’ He went on to propose that his inaction had in a way been providential, for ‘had it not happened, I might never have escaped from Colditz to England and gained the experience which enabled me to plan the escape of others.’ Once again, amid the dark clouds, Neave could see the silver lining.

In the improvised hospital in the Faculté Catholique, a ‘sombre, red-brick affair with stone floors and a smell of wounds and disinfectant’, he met a man who would later become his partner in the great enterprise to get Allied servicemen out of occupied Europe.10 When they were reunited in London, he recalled how he had last seen him: a ‘pale and strained [figure], playing cards in one of the wards. I remembered his high forehead and bright eyes as he sat on his bed dressed in a tattered shirt and trousers.’ Captain Jimmy Langley of the Coldstream Guards fitted Neave’s romantic ideal of the British warrior. He was slim, intelligent and apparently without fear, and had been captured at Dunkirk.

The Coldstream’s orders were to hold up the Germans while the evacuation was under way. Langley was a platoon commander with ‘3’ Company, 2nd Battalion. The company was led, with what feels today like lunatic determination, by Major Angus McCorquodale, who gave orders for any officer who showed an inclination to retire to be shot. Langley described later how a captain commanding a unit on the company’s right came over to announce that he was planning to withdraw. The Germans were massing for an armoured assault on a bridgehead they were holding and his men were too exhausted to resist.11 McCorquodale ordered him to ‘stay put and fight it out’. The officer replied that his orders from the commanding officer were to retire as and when he saw fit. McCorquodale was having none of it. ‘You see that big poplar tree on the road with the white mile stone beside it?’ he told him. ‘The moment you or any of your men go back beyond that tree we will shoot you.’ The captain departed and McCorquodale picked up a rifle and ordered Langley to get one himself. ‘When I returned with mine he said “Sights at 250. You will shoot to kill the moment he passes that tree …” We had not long to wait before the captain appeared, followed by two men. They stood for a long time by the tree and then the captain walked on. Both our rifles went off simultaneously: he dropped out of sight and the two men ran back.’ This ruthlessness matched the determination with which the company did its duty. Langley was a marksman and accounted for many Germans before losing his arm to a shell. McCorquodale died at his post.

Langley did not let his injury delay his departure. While in Lille, he managed to contact local resisters who got him out of the hospital and took him to Paris. From there he crossed the demarcation line into the Unoccupied Zone. In spring 1941, the Vichy Armistice Commission passed him unfit for any further military service and he was escorted over the Spanish frontier to freedom. Neave and Langley teamed up again when serving in the secret escape and evasion organisation MI9. Though their backgrounds were similar, their characters were not, and their wars as fighting soldiers had taken very different forms.

There was a further contrast in the way they viewed their escapes. Langley claimed to dislike the fact that his return to fight another day ‘would be a matter of some congratulation’ and ‘regarded as an epic of courage and endurance’. He protested that ‘running away hardly came into the category of bravery … travelling by train and hiding in hotels did not call for much endurance.’12

For Neave, escape became his claim to fame, the thing he was most remembered for. He fostered its memory carefully through his books, and thirty years after the event was still giving regular talks to schools and clubs about his adventures. Writing in 1975, after a tour of army bases in Northern Ireland, he could not resist commenting that conditions in ‘one or two are worse than Colditz’.13 As well as his most memorable achievement, escape was also a turning point in his wartime life – the moment when he pulled off a private and bloodless victory over the Germans, restoring his self-respect and making up for his disappointing performance on the conventional battlefield.

The yearning to break free would become a ‘fever’ that mounted the longer he was behind bars.14 But the further he got from France, the harder escape became. While he was still in Lille, a young Frenchwoman who brought flowers and food to the wounded offered to help him and two others – an early example of the courage and patriotism shown by so many of the female resisters he encountered. When senior officers in the hospital heard about the plan, they were ‘lectured severely on the reprisals which might be visited on other wounded’.

It was too late anyway. In late July or early August, he was on the move again, on a ‘grim march through Belgium’, before embarking on a coal barge which chugged up the Scheldt and into the Waal, reaching the Rhine and the German frontier at Emmerich. Along with his belief in providence, Neave had an eye for the karmic re-adjustments that life sometimes delivers. He was pleased to note that his journey as a prisoner took him under the bridge at Nijmegen that he would cross four years later as a victor and see ‘the dead Germans on the sidewalks as we made all speed for Arnhem’.

Oflag – meaning ‘officers’ camp’ – IX-A/H was housed in a schloss overlooking Spangenberg, a small town in the heart of central Germany, 220 miles as the crow flies from the Dutch border, and further still from the French and Swiss frontiers. The castle, a Disneyish concoction with moat and drawbridge, had arched doorways and a clock tower which reminded him of school. The social hierarchy among the prisoners was also built on equally familiar lines, for there were ‘strict codes of behaviour designed for us by our senior officers, and social cliques appeared from the very first day.’

Nearly all prisoners’ memoirs speak of the desolation that descends when the journey is over, the destination is reached and the gates clang shut behind them. Neave’s portrayal of the ‘double tragedy’ of imprisonment was particularly eloquent: ‘First, there is the loss of freedom. Then, since there is no particular crime to expiate, unless it be personal folly, a sense of injustice scars the spirit … The prisoner of war is to himself an object of pity. He feels he is forgotten by those who flung him, so he thinks, into an unequal contest. He broods over the causes of his capture, and to himself and his friends he soon becomes a bore, endlessly relating the story of his last stand.’15

Neave, like many others, seems to have experienced a period of numb acceptance, trying to find a rhythm of life to ease the tight confines of a new universe. He had always felt the urge to write and he tried to alleviate the boredom by starting a novel ‘about the life after death of an eighteenth century peer’ and a ‘superficial’ study of Shakespeare’s sonnets.16 Essays on ‘eccentrics’ and other subjects for the camp publication, produced on a ‘jellygraph’, a gelatin duplicator used to run off school magazines and the like, did not go down well. They were ‘rapidly dismissed as unsuitable’ and Neave ceased his literary efforts. The lesson was that it was ‘dangerous to tamper with the literary views of the average British officer’ and that ‘any attempt at being funny’ in print was ‘doomed to failure and will very likely lead to ostracism’.17

In these first months in Spangenberg, the rather adolescent bolshiness that surfaced in his Oxford days was again to the fore. The mood did not last long. By December he started thinking seriously about escape. Since the camp had opened in October 1939 there had been several attempts by inmates. Flight Lieutenant Howard ‘Hank’ Wardle, a Canadian who joined the RAF shortly before the war, was shot down in his Fairey Battle bomber in April 1940 and was the only member of the three-man crew to survive. In August, just before Neave arrived, he was being taken with other prisoners to a gym outside the castle walls when he scaled a high barricade and slipped away.18 He was captured after twenty-four hours and sent to Colditz, already established as a prison for troublemakers.

Flying Officers Keith Milne and Donald Middleton, two more Canadians serving with the RAF, managed to get through the gates disguised as painters, complete with buckets of whitewash and a ladder. They too were soon recaptured and ended up in Colditz. If these exploits sounded light-hearted, there was a price to pay. According to Pat Reid, who later escaped from Colditz with Wardle, all three ‘suffered badly at the hands of their captors, being severely kicked and battered with rifle-butts’.19

Such efforts were initially seen by the senior British officers in the camp as a threat to good order, inviting reprisals on the rest of the prisoners. Neave wrote that the pioneer escapers were ‘often unpopular … They were considered a disturbing influence in the orderly life of the camp where the pre-war British military and class system was applied from the day of arrival.’20 He blamed the discouraging attitude on low morale, caused by Britain’s poor performance in the war and the debilitating effect of the meagre rations. In the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels started to arrive. With that, ‘health and spirits improved, and with it the attitude of senior officers, who no longer claimed that escape was hopeless.’

At some point, Neave was moved with others to a new camp in the woods beneath the castle. The rural setting was a relief after the cold walls of the schloss, and the laughter of children carried to the prisoners from a path that ran by the boundary. The winter of 1940 passed ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it be of the soul’. The main complaint was food, or the lack of it. The man who in his Eton diary had noted almost every meal he ate was reduced to a diet of bread, soup and root vegetables, cheered only by the occasional scrap of meat or treat from a food parcel. At Christmas, everyone was given a tin of steak-and-kidney pudding. His stomach had shrunk and he could not finish it.21

Early in 1941, there was another move which took him yet further from a friendly frontier. In February, the camp was temporarily closed and all the inmates moved by train to Stalag XX-A, a large prison complex based on a chain of fortresses surrounding the Polish city of Thorn, modern-day Torun, on the banks of the Vistula. Neave says the evacuation was a reprisal for the alleged ill-treatment of German POWs in Canada. The atmosphere and the attitude of the guards had certainly darkened. The new arrivals were met at the station by tanks, searchlights and Field Police with Alsatian dogs. Neave and his fellow officers were housed in semi-darkness in ‘damp, cold, vault-like rooms’, which had once served as ammunition bunkers in one of the forts, built in the nineteenth century to defend Prussia’s eastern borders. The prisoners were the flotsam of a string of British defeats. There were hundreds of survivors of the Norway debacle of May 1940 and many who had been captured at Dunkirk and St-Valery-en-Caux, where the 51st (Highland) Division were forced to surrender. In this ambience of failure Neave felt his resolve harden. ‘From this terrible futility,’ he wrote, ‘I determined to free myself.’22

Prisoners had two basic ways of dealing with incarceration. They could accept their fate and choose a settled existence, waiting for the end of the war and using the unmeasurable days of captivity killing time as best they could or engaging in self-improvement projects for a future that might never arrive. Or they could devote themselves to breaking free. Fatalists vastly outnumbered would-be escapers. An RAF report on Stalag Luft VI, the camp for NCO airmen at Heydekrug in East Prussia, estimated the proportion of escape-minded prisoners at only 5 per cent.23 One of the most determined ‘escapologists’ of the war, the American RAF fighter pilot William Ash, came to the same conclusion. ‘There cannot have been a single POW … who did not think about escaping,’ he wrote.24 In an average camp, about a third would be prepared to lend a helping hand to others’ attempts, by acting as lookouts, for example, forging fake documents or improvising digging implements. However, ‘maybe only 5 per cent were committed to getting outside the wire at all costs.’ And for most of those, one attempt was usually enough, leaving a handful for whom escaping was ‘a way of life’. Prisoners’ stories devote much time to analysing the elements that pushed a man into one group and not the other. They remain hard to define. There was little obvious connection with background, class, political outlook, nationality or even character. Ardent escapers could be introverts or extraverts, intellectuals or hearties.

In the end it came down to an impulse – something that had to be done. Pat Reid, who first wrote the story of Colditz, portrayed it as a supremely intoxicating pursuit on a par with winning the Grand National at Aintree. ‘I can think of no sport that is the peer of escape,’ he wrote, ‘where freedom, life, and loved ones are the price of victory, and death the possible though by no means inevitable price of failure.’25 It was echoed by Ash, who described the urge as something almost beyond his control. ‘Escaping is quite addictive,’ he wrote, ‘and, like all addictive drugs, extremely dangerous.’26

Others cited more elevated motives. Aidan Crawley was a pre-war journalist and intelligence officer who joined the RAF. He was shot down and taken prisoner in North Africa in 1941. He later wrote the official history of escape attempts by airmen, in which he judged that ‘no one could blame those who decided escape was not worthwhile.’27 However, Crawley believed ‘the arguments in favour of trying … were overwhelming.’ It was a self-imposed duty, ‘because the return of a prisoner had considerable military value’. At the very least, he might bring back valuable intelligence about enemy dispositions or the details of potentially useful underground networks. If he was an airman, he could go back into action and his very expensive training would not have gone to waste. This latter argument was often wielded by Neave when justifying the existence of MI9 in its frequent turf wars with other intelligence organisations.

A few weeks after arriving at Thorn, Neave hatched his first serious, thought-out and well-resourced escape plan. Stalag XXa was like a small penitentiary town, with outposts and suburbs and a labour force made up of NCO and ‘other ranks’ prisoners, who the Germans put to work building roads and infrastructure and clearing land for the ever-expanding complex. The practice was within the terms of the Geneva Conventions, though officers were exempted. However, what might at first have seemed to the officers a privilege came by many to be regarded as a curse. Work, however menial, was a distraction from the long empty hours of brooding.

The main compound for non-commissioned prisoners was about four miles from Neave’s cell in the fort. Inside it, there was a wooden hut where a British dentist had his surgery. The Germans allowed British officers to visit every Thursday. It was Neave’s good luck to suffer from inflamed gums, a result of poor diet and his run-down condition, which required regular treatment. The dentist’s hut would be the springboard for his dive for freedom. On his trips back and forth he worked up a plan. Even though Germany and the Soviet Union were still at that time uneasy allies, he reckoned that if he managed to make it to the frontier at Brest-Litovsk, the Russians would treat him well and ‘I should swiftly be ushered into the presence of the British ambassador [in Moscow], Sir Stafford Cripps.’28 It was a fantastic proposition. It meant a journey, via Warsaw, of 300 miles over heavily occupied territory, with a very uncertain reception at the end of it.

As it turned out, breaking out of Thorn was the relatively easy part. But to succeed he still needed help. There was plenty on hand among the soldiers in the work camp. Their ingenuity and selflessness left a deep impression. Every day a party of about a dozen made the four-mile journey from the compound to the fort to carry out maintenance work. Among them were two men who had belonged to Neave’s battery at Calais. Through the messages that they carried back and forth each day, he was able to establish a team of helpers in the work camp to put the operation into action. He planned a phased departure from Stalag XXa. The idea was that he would slip away during a trip to the dentist and get into the compound. There, protected by the inmates, he would lie low until the hue and cry following the discovery that he was missing had died down. Then he would walk out with one of the work parties and hide at the end of the shift. When the coast was clear, he would strike out eastwards, disguised as a workman – Polish or German, depending on who challenged him.

The scheme was bold and ambitious. It needed considerable organisation, precise timing and significant resources in the form of clothing, food, money and documentation. At least a dozen accomplices were needed for it to work. Protocol required that the Senior British Officer, Brigadier N. F. Somerset, was kept informed as the plan matured. Neave had decided that he did not want to travel alone. He was unable to persuade any of his room-mates, who ‘regarded my plans with friendly derision and few could be found who would even discuss them seriously.’ He asked Somerset if he could suggest a companion – one who, like him, spoke some German. Flying Officer Norman Forbes, a Hurricane pilot with 605 Squadron who had been shot down just south of Calais on 27 May 1940 while Neave was spending his first day in captivity, was an excellent candidate. He was a ‘tall, slender man with fair hair’, quick, determined and shrewd. He had also been brought up a Christian Scientist and ‘had faith in the success of our plan’.

By the second week in April everything was in place. Using barter and persuasion, he had assembled an impressive escape kit. His workman’s coat and painter’s trousers he obtained from a British officer who had ‘decided to abandon escaping to read for a degree in Law’. He was one of many who took advantage of the system, operated under the Red Cross, which offered correspondence courses resulting in valid professional qualifications. Neave procured some reichsmarks by selling Player’s cigarettes (tobacco was usually available to prisoners and a universal currency) to a Polish glazier. Rations in the shape of tinned sardines and condensed milk and chocolate came from the food parcels. All were smuggled out of the fort and down to the work camp.

Why had Neave chosen discomfort and danger over acceptance and making the most of a bad situation? Lying on his bunk bed at night as the hours to the escape bid ticked away, he struggled to explain it to himself. ‘I desired only to be free from the terrible monotony of the fort and once outside under the stars I cared little what happened to me,’ he wrote. ‘I dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest alone in the world. I felt that once outside the camp I should be happy if I were only free for a while.’

On the morning of 16 April 1941, he and Forbes set off under guard for the dentist’s hut, just outside the British prisoners’ compound, four miles from the fort. Under their overcoats, badges had been removed from their battledress tunics so they could pass as ‘other ranks’. Neave left a detailed description of the events of the morning, embellished with literary touches.29 Looking through the waiting room for his turn in the chair, he could ‘see small groups of British prisoners among the pine trees pushing carts of wood, and from the distance came the strains of “Roll Out the Barrel” as a working party set off into the forest … A light breeze blew among the pines.’ The account was written twelve years after the event and it might be asked how he could remember so much. Some moments in our lives embed themselves in our memories, leaving the indelible trace of a smell, a voice, a colour. For Neave, this was surely one of them. His first escape was a landmark of his existence, the point when he at last seized control of his own destiny, in the process scoring a small but immensely pleasing victory over the enemy.

Everything went swimmingly. After his session in the chair, he made way for Forbes. In the waiting room he told the guard he wanted to use the ‘Abort’ and was allowed to go unescorted to the latrine next door. Inside, he stowed his overcoat and retrieved some lengths of wood hidden in the ceiling by his helpers to be used as props in the next phase of the escape. He was soon joined by Forbes and, at a signal from a sergeant who was keeping watch outside, they stepped out, carrying the timber, ostensibly just two ordinary soldiers engaged in some errand. It was a short walk to the main gate of the compound, where the sentry’s attention was distracted by a corporal detailed to engage him in chat, and they passed through, mingling with the other POWs. At the door of a long hut housing warrant officers, Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards, immaculately turned out in spruce uniform and shining boots, grinned and shook their hands. They were left to rest for a bit until Thornborough returned, telling them there was a sight waiting that was not to be missed.

Picking up brushes and buckets so as to look like orderlies off on a fatigue, they followed him across the parade ground. Their escape had been discovered and the guards were angry and indignant. ‘Around us a crowd of British soldiers were laughing and shouting sallies at the Germans,’ he wrote. ‘Furious Germans stamped around … Down the steps of the Kommandantur [administrative headquarters] came agitated German officers gesticulating at the crestfallen sentries.’ They were joined by Field Police with dogs, who set off on the hunt in the opposite direction to where their quarry had gone to earth. The satisfaction was enormous. For the first time since the start of the war, Neave had put one over on the Germans. They spent the next three days hidden in the warrant officers’ hut. There was one scare when they had to hide under their cots while the Germans conducted a search. Neave wondered why they now suspected they might still be in the camp. Thornborough had warned him there were ‘one or two stool pigeons in the camp’. It was an early lesson that in the escape business it was wise to say the minimum and trust nobody, a policy that Neave’s critics would later say he followed closely in his political life.

At six o’clock on the morning of 19 April, after a cup of ersatz coffee, he and Forbes left the camp in the middle of a party of 150 men. They spent the day at a farm, where they were put to work in a barn stuffing mattress covers with straw. During the afternoon, on a signal that the coast was clear, they climbed into the loft and burrowed into the hay. Earlier, their helpers had smuggled in two extra men on the ration lorry. When the guards counted the work party out they matched the number who had marched in. It was the final touch in a superb performance by the NCOs and men, and Neave never forgot these ‘staunch and kindly people’. They ‘ran greater risks of punishment than we did, but not one spoke of the consequences … During my stay there had been no feeling of class or rank among us, only a mutual desire to defy the Germans.’

When night fell, they climbed down from the hayloft and went to the back door of the barn, where one of the helpers had loosened the wire holding it shut. They stepped out into the starlit night and, for the first time in two years, breathed the air as free men. For the next four days, dressed in their rough clothes, they trudged eastwards. Since devising his original plan, he and Forbes had hatched an alternative. There was a German aerodrome at Graudenz, north of Warsaw. The Poles in the camp had provided enough information about it to sketch a map. Forbes was a pilot. Perhaps they could steal an aeroplane and fly to neutral Sweden. It had been tried before by two RAF inmates of Thorn, who had got as far as climbing into an aircraft disguised as Luftwaffe aircrew before being rumbled because they could not understand the instructions from the control tower.30

The trek started well, matching the fantasies he had entertained while day-dreaming on his bunk. It was ‘like walking on air’. The language is telling, a further sign of the quasi-mystical importance Neave gave to the act of escaping. Relating the story of this first attempt, he stated that ‘no one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of Liberty.’31 The capital letter is his. For Neave this was more than a simple act of duty or defiance. It had an almost religious significance. ‘The real escaper,’ he wrote, ‘is more than a man equipped with compass, maps, papers, disguise and a plan. He has an inner confidence, a serenity of spirit which make him a Pilgrim.’

After a few hours, the intoxication of freedom began to wear off. His sack of rations – tins of sardines and condensed milk and Red Cross parcel chocolate – cut into his shoulder, he was soaked in sweat and his feet swelled up painfully inside his army boots. In the morning it rained for hours. The countryside, carved through by the wide, muddy Vistula and dotted with small farms and orchards, was filled with ominous landmarks. They were following the river to Warsaw, taking the same route that the Germans had followed twenty months before, and the scars of the fighting were fresh. There were graveyards where Polish army helmets sat on white crosses, charred buildings and a smashed-up chapel with half a crucifix hanging over the doorway. Almost every farmhouse, no matter how small and mean, had new owners. The Poles had been turned out of their homes and German settlers put in. The pair were anxious to avoid all human encounters, but it was impossible not to feel the presence of the new masters.

Late that first morning, they were passed by a ‘a four-wheeled open carriage … driven by a German farmer in a flat cap, smoking a short cigar.’ He turned back to examine them and ‘his arrogant, fleshy face … bore an expression of savage contempt … and he fingered the stock of his long whip.’ Neave had been exposed to Germans frequently in his short life, as a schoolboy visitor, as a patient in the care of the military and as a captive. Until now, these experiences had suggested that, despite the repellent philosophy of the new order, the population had its fair share of decent human beings. On this journey, the Germans seemed wholly bad.

A little later, skirting a farm, they met a Polish man who recognised that they were fugitives. He wished them good luck in English but warned them to move on quickly as the German farmer was ‘very bad’. As they left they spotted him, ‘thick-set with an evil-tempered red face like the man who had driven past us. He too carried a long black whip and smoked a short cigar. We hurried away from him down a slippery path into the valley and heard him shouting to the Pole as if to a dog.’

The cruelty of the German occupation made an ineradicable impression on Neave and these memories bubbled to the surface when, four years later at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, he served the indictment on the Gauleiter overlord of conquered Poland, Hans Frank. At the same time, he was profoundly moved by the stoicism of the Poles and the sacrificial generosity they were prepared to offer to those they identified as friends. Again, it was something he never forgot. Long afterwards, in the face of Foreign Office opposition, he campaigned doggedly for a memorial to the thousands of Poles murdered by their Soviet oppressors in 1940.

At dusk on their second day of freedom, they were too exhausted to face another night in the open. They approached a whitewashed house and knocked. The door was opened by a young Polish woman, who summoned her father, a farmer who had somehow avoided eviction. He made them welcome and gave Neave a pair of corduroy trousers to replace the thin, torn ones he arrived in. Their only drawback was that they lacked fly buttons. There was shy giggling as the girls of the house removed the buttons from the old trousers and sewed them onto the new pair.

But after this interlude the smiling stopped. Neave sensed that ‘the room was heavy with their fear … I knew that the girls were watching for a glimpse of field-grey … at the window.’ There was a crash of heavy boots and a loud knock and he and Forbes scuttled to the kitchen. The visitor was a young Polish man who held an urgent conversation with the farmer. Even though Neave knew not a word of the language, there was no mistaking the tone of disquiet. He wrote later that ‘a great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror. Was it to destroy these simple lives that I escaped? Was it not better to endure the bitter frustrations of the Fort … all the degradation of being a prisoner? What did it matter whether I escaped or not if others were to die?’

This dilemma would confront every man who managed to get away from a German camp. As the war progressed, they were increasingly sited in Poland. Many – perhaps most – attempts required the assistance of Poles. Polish workers smuggled escape materials into camps and provided vital intelligence. Polish families gave food and shelter. All risked death by doing so and many paid the price. Most of the helpers were ‘ordinary’ people. Their fundamental motivation was decency and humanity. The question of whether these humble heroes and heroines should be put in mortal danger by the imperatives of the escapees was one that even the most thoughtful were never able to resolve. In the end, they could only comfort themselves with the thought that the assistance was freely given, in full knowledge of the deadly consequences.

Neave and Forbes were spared further agonising when the Polish farmer told them to sleep in the barn, asking them to be gone before dawn. The visitor had warned him that the local German settlers were looking out for them. The next afternoon they reached the large town of Wloclawek on the banks of the Vistula, about a hundred miles north-west of Warsaw. It was the day after Hitler’s birthday and swastikas and bunting fluttered over the streets. As they slunk along, Neave saw an old man with the Star of David ‘painted in yellow on his back’ walking slowly along the pavement. At the same time, a small detachment of SS men came marching by. They were singing, ‘their arrogant young faces scorning all around them’. Poles and Germans alike raised their hands obediently in the Nazi salute and Neave and Forbes quickly followed suit. The old man failed to see the Germans in time and ‘a fair young thug stepped from the ranks and struck him on the head. His hat spun in the wind and rolled across the road.’ The SS man pushed him off the pavement and he stumbled in the gutter and lay there moaning. No one dared to go to his aid.

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