PUBLIC
SERVANT,
SECRET
AGENT
The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave
Paul Routledge

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

1 The Price of Liberty

2 Origins

3 King and Country

4 Capture

5 Colditz

6 Escape

7 Operation Ratline

8 Secret Service Beckons

9 Enemy Territory

10 Nuremberg

11 Lawyer Candidate

12 The Greasy Pole

13 Locust Years

14 A Very Spooky Coup

15 In the Shadows

16 Plotting the Kill

17 Pursuit and Retribution

18 The End of the Trail

References

Index

About the Author

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

A gun lay unobtrusively on the settee beside my polite host, and the heavily-built man sitting on an armchair in the corner wore a tight-fitting black mask with tiny holes for his eyes and mouth. He was on edge and there was a tension in the room. I had come a long way, physically and in time, to see the killers of Airey Neave, and here I was, face to face. Not with the men who planted the bomb on 30 March 1979, almost twenty-two years ago to the day, but with ‘someone connected with the Neave operation’ who belonged to the small but highly dangerous Irish National Liberation Army.

The trail started five years earlier, when I was writing a biography of John Hume, leader of the SDLP, a shrewd nationalist and a rock for thirty years in the maelstrom of Irish – and British – politics. Hume crossed paths with Neave, the Conservatives’ Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, many times during the late 1970s. It was not a profitable relationship. Hume found Neave’s traditional Tory attitudes towards Ulster Unionism and his militarist stance on the Troubles short-sighted and unsophisticated. Neave probably thought the former trainee priest slippery and threatening. He had, after all, engineered the short-lived exercise in political power-sharing that the Tory spokesman on Ulster utterly rejected.

Neave’s impact on policy towards Northern Ireland during the four years he held the Shadow portfolio was limited, but his death at the hands of terrorist assassins in the precincts of the House of Commons convulsed politics and prompted the question in my mind: ‘Who was this man?’ There was no biography of Airey Neave, yet he had lived an eventful life. Eton, Oxford and the Inns of Court were followed by capture in the siege of Calais, prison camps, escape from Colditz and service in military intelligence. He had served the indictments on Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg and entered Parliament at his third attempt in a by-election. A promising ministerial career was cut short by a heart attack, and he seemed destined to live out his political career in back-bench obscurity until the social upheavals of the 1970s propelled him into history as the man who gave us Margaret Thatcher.

It was a remarkable story, but no one had written it. I therefore resolved to do so and began collecting material. It was clear from the outset that Neave’s family (his daughter Marigold and two sons, Patrick and William) were apprehensive about the project. Neave had not wanted a biography, beyond the books he had written about his life, nor did his widow, Diana, who died in 1992. Other approaches, I knew, had been rebuffed and I was hardly the writer of choice. Yet I persisted and the family finally agreed to cooperate, though not on a lavish scale.

Much more difficult was ‘the other side’ – the perpetrators of the murder. Over the years reporting from Ulster, through a republican contact I will not name, I had learned something of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of INLA. After an initial social meeting in a Belfast bar, at which I outlined my intentions, I let the seeds germinate. Then, in the autumn of 2000, I approached the IRSP directly, and arranged to visit the party’s headquarters in the Falls Road, the heart of republican Belfast. The taxi driver who took me there on 17 November advised against going into the pub opposite. ‘Not with your accent [Yorkshire],’ he grinned. Seamus Costello House, a large red-brick villa (allegedly bought with the proceeds of a bank robbery) is protected by steel mesh fortifications. A photographic tableau of the dead hunger strikers stands outside. Inside, the atmosphere is more homely, reminiscent of an old-fashioned trade union branch office, with people asking for advice and children playing about their mothers’ knees. Banners and framed slogans decorate the walls. The furniture is utilitarian. Everyone smokes.

Paul Lyttle, the IRSP’s spokesman, listened courteously to my pitch. It was clear from the first that my credentials had already been thoroughly checked. They knew who I was and where I was coming from before I opened my mouth. So, indeed, did the security services. This visit was known in London before I returned the following day. I told Lyttle that I wanted to write an account of Neave’s death that was as authentic as possible. To that end, I wished to meet the killers, if possible; and if that could not be arranged, then to talk to INLA ‘volunteers’ involved in the operation. There had been many accounts of the assassination, mostly conflicting. Was it not now time for the truth?

The door seemed to be ajar. The IRSP man dwelt on the dangers that Neave presented to militant republicanism, being one of the few British politicians who (as an ex-POW) knew just how critical was the morale and organisation of ‘the men behind the wire’. However, those men had virtually all been released under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and yes, the organisation might be willing to brief me. A decision would have to be taken by ‘the executive’, and this process would take some time. It was also plain that the IRSP/INLA felt that the assassinations of four of their top people in the aftermath of Neave’s death should receive the same kind of public scrutiny currently being given by the Savile Enquiry to the killings on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in January 1972. I said I had no difficulty in understanding their desire to get to the bottom of these high-profile murders, which were widely laid at the feet of the security services working through loyalist proxies. And I would say as much, though I fear the party’s demands for a similar public enquiry will fall on deaf ears.

Weeks passed, and after Christmas I wrote again to the IRSP, pointing out my approaching deadline for completion of the book. I also telephoned regularly, not a simple procedure. Seamus Costello House is not Millbank or Central Office. Finally, I was given a number to contact in the Irish Republic. It was a mobile, not reachable from London. Further frustrating delays followed before I got through to a man I will refer to as Eoin. He told me to go to Belfast on the weekend of 24 March, and get in touch again on Friday 23rd. On Thursday, I received a message to call him again, and was redirected to Cork, hundreds of miles to the south in the Republic. It was too late to book a direct flight, so I continued via Belfast on the 23rd. Foot and mouth disease had just broken out in County Louth, slowing the train journey to Dublin, but I reached Cork in the early evening.

My instructions were to book into the Silver Springs Hotel, a modern establishment a few miles south of the city, and to await a call the following day. It was a bright, clear morning and the telephone rang at 9.30 a.m. I was to take a taxi to a country pub about five miles away, where I would be met. I waited in the lobby, self-consciously British in a dark suit and university tie. Just after 10.00 a.m., two men entered and motioned me into the bar. One was young, in his twenties, powerfully-built and dressed in waxed jacket and jeans. The other was much older, with white hair. Waxed-jacket said: ‘We will take you in the car. You will not look at the number plate. You will look down at the floor, not where we are going. Understand?’ I did. He then asked if I had a mobile phone, and I fished mine from a travel bag thinking he wished to use it. He confiscated the instrument.

Outside, he stood guard so I could not see the number plate. The older man drove, through various country lanes. It was difficult to obey the injunction to stare at the floor, but since I had no idea where we were it seemed superfluous anyway. We stopped outside an isolated house, quite high up, with hills around. I was escorted into the front room, where the thick curtains were drawn. Eoin, now that I saw him, looked like a schoolteacher in his late thirties: neat, spare and casually but well dressed. He introduced the man in the mask as ‘someone directly involved in the Neave operation’. I asked if I could take a shorthand note and he nodded. ‘You’re not wired?’ he interjected suddenly. ‘Open your shirt.’ I unbuttoned my shirt to the waist to show there was no hidden microphone. He frisked me, arms, back, front and legs. The tension eased somewhat, though I then spotted the handgun next to him. Had I done anything silly, I think it would have been used.

However, coffee and biscuits were served, as though we were discussing details of the Easter holidays rather than the brutal murder of a British politician two decades earlier. We spoke for two and a half hours, a mixture of questions and volunteered statements. The man in the mask, who displayed a very detailed knowledge of bomb-making and the modus operandi of the assassination, occasionally tugged at his uncomfortable camouflage. Eoin, the more intellectual of the two, ranged across the whole subject of INLA, the armed struggle and prospects for the future. It was a fascinating, if eerie, dialogue. What follows in Chapter 18 is a distillation of that briefing. I believe it to be the most authentic account yet of the circumstances of Airey Neave’s death. I expect that others may contest this assessment, but I am convinced that the IRSP/INLA deliberately gave this briefing to ensure that the truth is established, not least because they want the truth about the killing of their own.

At the close of the meeting, my mobile phone was returned, with the SIM card disabled so I could not be traced. The white-haired driver took me to a shopping centre, where I took a taxi back into Cork city to take the train to Dublin and Belfast. I drank a pint of Guinness at the station and pondered my experience. Instead of a reporter’s elation at finding my quarry, I felt a curious unease, as though I had discovered something I would rather not have known. Yet there was no going back, and I turned for home with a determination to get all this out. I hope the succeeding pages will demonstrate the virtue of seeking the truth, unpalatable though it may be. The Irish Question is never going to be solved by meek acceptance of the official line.

It should be added that this biography is not authorised, nor did I seek authorisation. Neave had written much about his own life, but his widow Diana rejected writers’ advances to sanction a biography of her husband. Patrick Cosgrave, a family friend, said she had asked him ‘to spread the word among the writing classes that she would, in no circumstances, countenance such a project’. Plainly, we do not move among the same writing classes because no such word reached these quarters.

However, I was able to speak to Neave’s children, Marigold, Patrick and William, for which I am grateful. I would also like to thank his cousin Julius Neave, of Mill Green House, Ingatestone. My gratitude also goes to Toni Luteyn, Neave’s co-escaper from Colditz, still alive and well in The Hague; to Frau Lipmann, curator of Colditz Museum; to the dedicated staff at the unrivalled political history collection at the Linen Hall Library for their help and advice; to the librarians at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford; to my colleagues in Westminster, especially Desmond McCartan, formerly of the Belfast Telegraph and David Healy of Bloomberg Agency; to Colin Wallace, Brian Crozier, Gerald James, Michael Elliott, Kevin Cahill, Roger Bolton, Richard Dumbreck, Sir Edward du Cann, Sir William Shelton, Tam Dalyell, Lord Lawton, Lord Campbell of Alloway, Ken Lockwood of the Colditz Association, Steven Norris, Kevin Macnamara MP, and those in London and Belfast who would be embarrassed (or worse) if identified; to Clive Priddle, Mitzi Angel and Kate Balmforth at Fourth Estate for their patience, and Richard Collins for his professional copy-editing; to my agent Jane Bradish-Ellames and finally to my wife Lynne for living with a political murder for too many years.

Walworth, south London

November 2001

1 The Price of Liberty

At 2.58 p.m. on 30 March 1979 an enormous explosion shook New Palace Yard in the precincts of the Palace of Westminster. Seconds later, smoke was seen billowing from the wreckage of a saloon car on the ramp leading up from the MPs’ car park into the cobbled courtyard just below Big Ben.

The blast was heard in the Commons chamber, where parliament was about to be dissolved for a General Election that would sweep Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street. Policemen and parliamentary journalists rushed to the scene and found an unidentifiable man, dressed in the black coat and striped trousers of an old-fashioned style still worn by Conservative MPs. David Healy, political correspondent of the Press Association news agency, was in the third-floor Press Gallery bar, whose back windows look down on New Palace Yard. A veteran reporter of the Irish Troubles, Healy recognised the familiar noise. ‘I knew it was a bomb,’ he said. ‘I looked out of the window and saw smoke, and rushed downstairs. The car was burning, the windows all broken. And this guy was almost blown into a standing position behind the wheel. A cop shouted, “He’s still alive! Clear the area!” I didn’t think there was much life left in him. I couldn’t tell who it was, though I had been having a drink with him only two nights earlier.’¹ Another Westminster lobby correspondent, Desmond McCartan of the Belfast Telegraph, who knew the victim well, wrote: ‘The blackened, bleeding features amid the tangled wreckage of his Vauxhall car concealed his identity, but the pain of his dying was clear.’²

Ambulancemen who arrived within minutes found the still unidentified figure slumped over the driving wheel, his face blackened, his hair and clothing charred from the blast. His right leg was blown off below the knee, and his left leg was almost completely severed. One ambulanceman, Brian Craggs, tried to give him oxygen: ‘He was still breathing, but was very badly injured. He never regained consciousness.’ A doctor and nurse also attended, before he was freed after half an hour of frantic effort by firefighters.

Others had also recognised the noise. In Margaret Thatcher’s office, Chris Patten, a future Northern Ireland minister, exclaimed ‘That was a bomb!’ Thatcher’s entourage witnessed the grim scene from an upstairs window and Guinevere Tilney, wife of a former Tory MP and adviser to the Conservative leader, was the first to discover the identity of the victim. In the car, dying, lay Airey Neave, Conservative MP for Abingdon, war hero and habitué of the murky world where the politics of democracy and the secret state intertwine, the man who had engineered Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power. Mrs Tilney immediately went to the Neave family flat in Marsham Street to tell his wife Diana, and took her to Westminster Hospital where Neave was undergoing emergency surgery. The surgeons could do little. His heart stopped on the operating table and he died eight minutes after arriving at the hospital. His devoted wife was too late to see him alive.

It was a bloody end to a long career in public life, one marked in turn by disappointment and triumph ultimately crowned by Neave’s brilliant campaign to secure the Conservative Party leadership for Margaret Thatcher, an event that would radically change British – and international – politics. For his key role in that crusade, Neave was rewarded with the Shadow Cabinet portfolio that he coveted: Northern Ireland. It was a strange post to covet. Ulster has traditionally been regarded by pundits as a graveyard for political ambition, and Neave was fifty-nine when he took on the job in February 1975, having hitherto shown no serious public interest in the issue.

Nor did Neave look the part. Usually described as a slightly-built, red-faced man, with thinning hair, sharp features and a broad smile that rarely gave way to laughter, he moved with an almost feline grace, seeming to drift along rather than walk. He listened much, said little and when he did speak, he did so quietly. At a party given by Alan Clark, Thatcherite minister and diarist, George Gardiner, a right-wing Tory MP of the 1974 intake, listened to Neave ‘gently sounding out opinions in a voice you had to strain to hear’. Ian Aitken, political editor of the Guardian, found him ‘slightly sinister’. He was not particularly clubbable at Westminster though he was a member of the Special Services Club, tucked away in a side street behind Harrods where former and serving ‘spooks’ debated the follies of the world over cocktails.

The Troubles had been in full spate for several years by the time of his appointment, and showed no sign of abating. Shootings and bombings in the province were commonplace, and by taking Shadow Cabinet responsibility for British government policy he placed himself in the front line. It was almost as if the decorated war hero was inviting the bomb that prematurely ended his life. He told the journalist Patrick Cosgrave: ‘If they come for me, the one thing we can be sure of is that they will not face me. They’re not soldier enough for that.’³ His parliamentary agent Les Brown also claimed that Neave always knew he was on a death list, but realised it went with the territory. The writer Rebecca West had many years previously observed: ‘It is, I think, against his principles to care much about danger.’

Margaret Thatcher had no doubt that Neave was the right man for the job. ‘His intelligence contacts, proven physical courage and shrewdness amply qualified him for this testing and largely thankless task,’ she calculated.⁴ Her choice of priorities in this assessment is illuminating. She thought of him first as an expert in the field of military intelligence and only then as a man of nerve and astuteness. She did not immediately identify him as a politician with an agenda for bringing peace to the benighted province, where more than 247 people had died in the first year he was responsible for Opposition policy on Ulster. Her judgement was shared by Sir John Tilney, author of Neave’s entry in The Dictionary of National Biography. Working from ‘private information’, Tilney pointedly describes Neave as an ‘intelligence officer and politician’.

That Thatcher and Tilney should independently have come to the same conclusion should surprise no one, for Airey Neave was an intelligence officer who became a public servant. Like many who have trodden the same path, he did not slough off his first persona when he entered public life. The values of what has become known as ‘the secret state’, as well as the lessons of his wartime experiences, informed his outlook as a politician. He had many contacts among former security service officers and high-ranking army officers, and sympathised with the aims of the ultra-right groups that prepared for ‘civil breakdown’ in the 1970s. He was a public servant who never really stopped being a secret agent.

Neave’s background helped. His was a conformist, upper middle-class upbringing – prep school, Eton and Oxford, with a career at the Bar beckoning as the Second World War broke out. The son of a prominent entomologist and scion of an Essex county family whose lineage stretched back several hundred years (and included a Governor of the Bank of England), it was only to be expected that he would possess a relatively orthodox outlook on life. In Neave’s case, that sense of being British and right so endemic in his class was reinforced in his mid-teens when he was sent to Germany in 1933 to live with a local family and learn the language. He saw Fascism in practice, and formed a lifelong antipathy, amounting to an obsession, towards authoritarianism. Some of that feeling came from his pre-war and wartime adventures and filtered through a pessimistic fear of the spread of Communism that would harden during the Cold War and the civil unrest in Britain.

His initial links with the military were conventional enough, beginning when he enlisted in the Territorial Army as an undergraduate at Merton College. If Neave was swimming against the prevailing intellectual tide of leftism at university. His interest in the secretive world of Tory clubland politics also began at this period. He was a member of the Castlereagh Club, a political dining club that met in St James’s, Piccadilly, usually once a fortnight, to hear the views of a Tory dignitary. Donald Hamilton-Hill, later second in command of Special Operations Executive (SOE), the wartime resistance organisation, was also a member. In pre-war days he was chairman of public relations and head of recruiting for the Young Conservatives’ Union, and shared with Neave a predilection for the social contacts which ultimately led them into ‘politically informative circles’. Confidentiality, if not mystery, was the order of the day. Hamilton-Hill recorded that members of the Castlereagh Club held ‘off the record and interesting discussions – with no reporters present and members sworn to secrecy’. After a ‘splendid dinner’ they formed an easy and appreciative friendship over port, brandy and cigars.⁵ For the young Neave, it was heady and exciting stuff, and plainly a taste for secrecy and subterfuge was being acquired early. One of their mentors was Ronnie Cartland, a Tory MP who would be killed at Dunkirk; Peter Wilkinson, who went on to General de Wiart’s staff of the British Military Mission to Poland in 1939, was also a member. He later became Chief of Administration of the Diplomatic Service, and retired in 1976 as Coordinator of Intelligence and Security in the Cabinet Office. Val Duncan, subsequently knighted and chairman of the Rio Tinto Zinc Corporation, was also to be found at the Castlereagh table. In the late sixties, he would head an enquiry into the Foreign Office at Wilkinson’s behest.

Quite why the enthusiastic diners chose an Irish grandee as the club’s eponymous hero is unclear, but in Neave’s case it was prophetic. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, was born in Dublin in 1769 and became Tory MP for County Down at the end of the eighteenth century. He was appointed Irish Secretary in 1797 and his name became a byword for cruelty, although he was venerated as a great British statesman. In ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ of 1819, Shelley was prompted to write: ‘I met Murder on the Way / He had a mask like Castlereagh’. Almost two hundred years later, his name was remembered in the British government’s Castlereagh interrogation centre in Belfast, itself the subject of an enquiry into Royal Ulster Constabulary brutality during Neave’s time as Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. Thus was Neave drawn early on into the demi-monde of clubland, where politics meets the secret state. Security and intelligence expert Stephen Dorril argues its relevance: ‘This is the key to the way these people operate. Their dining clubs go on for a long time. They are the networks of political power and advancement. They bring all the elements of the secret state together.’⁶

When the war rudely interrupted this agreeable scene, Neave was among the first to volunteer for active service. His experiences at Calais in 1940, his subsequent capture and imprisonment by the Germans, followed by escape from Colditz in 1942, brought him to the attention of British military intelligence on his arrival in neutral Switzerland, whence he was fast-tracked back to Britain and immediately recruited to MI9, the escape and evasion organisation for Allied servicemen. Nominally an independent section of the war effort, MI9 was in fact – and much to Neave’s delight – a wholly-owned subsidiary of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.

Neave worked in this clandestine operation for three years, training agents to be sent into the escape ‘ratlines’ of Occupied Europe and debriefing escapers before following hard on the heels of the invading Allies in July 1944. His service also took him to forward engagement areas in France, Belgium and Holland, where he successfully spirited out remnants of Operation Market Garden, the abortive Arnhem raid. He ended the war a DSO and an MC. The closing stages of the war found Neave in Paris and Brussels in 1944 running British operations to grant awards and medals to MI9 agents who had helped Allied servicemen to escape or evade the enemy. Such operations had a further, undisclosed objective: that of identifying agents who would continue to be valuable after the war in the context of a Cold War (or worse) between Western nations and the Soviet Union. The bureaux drew up lists of ‘reliable’ contacts who would be useful in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. It was sensitive work, not least because so many of the Resistance were Communists and at this stage still sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

This covert enterprise, known as Operation Gladio, brought together a wide range of skills, from those involving psychological warfare and sabotage to escape and evasion. Gladio’s purpose was to set up ‘stay-behind’ units that would be active in a Europe threatened or even occupied by the USSR. Their existence has never been officially recognised, nor disclosed. Stephen Dorril argues: ‘It appears that sections of MI6 were already thinking in terms of the next war, and part of that was a fear that the Red Army would continue from Berlin and go straight to the Channel coast. They wanted stay-behind units against the Red Army in the same way that they wanted them against the Germans. Some of these units put in place in 1944 were almost immediately being resurrected as anti-Communist units – ratlines for escape and evasion.’⁷ SOE would take on the sabotage role, while Neave’s old firm would carry on as before.

But in post-war austere Britain the climate was against such initiatives: money for secret operations was getting tight and it was difficult to sustain a continuity between wartime and post-war groups. The Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee disapproved of such activities and the emphasis shifted from formal policy to the unofficial but well-connected world of former intelligence operatives. The thread continued in dining clubs, the Special Services Club and in the part-time Territorial Army. MI9 was reborn as Intelligence School 9 (TA) and Neave was commanding officer from 1949 to 1951, at a time when he was seeking to enter public life as a Conservative MP. IS9 later became 23 SAS Regiment, based in the Midlands, with a role to counter domestic subversion.

While his political career blossomed in the late 1950s, Neave’s links with the secret state necessarily became more obscure. It is known that sometime in 1955, he approved the appointment of British spy Greville Wynne as the representative in Eastern Europe of the pressure-vessel manufacturers John Thompson, of which Neave was a director. Like Neave, Wynne had worked for MI6 during the war. He returned to spying in the mid fifties and used his business trips behind the Iron Curtain to recruit the Soviet spymaster Oleg Penkovsky, before being unmasked and jailed. He was freed in exchange for Russian agent Gordon Lonsdale. Wynne confessed that ‘after a time, espionage is like a drug, you become to a greater or lesser extent addicted.’ It is inconceivable that Neave was unaware of Wynne’s MI6 role. Neave continued to meet with his old comrades, and to harbour fears of Communist subversion, but to the world at large he was a quiet, thoughtful man, assumed by commentators to be on the centre-left of his party. After his relatively brief, and not very glorious, ministerial career at the Transport and Air departments, he returned to the back benches in 1959. From there he campaigned successfully for compensation for British survivors of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but unsuccessfully for the release from Spandau prison of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess, whose flight to Scotland in May 1941 had delivered him into British hands. He sought to assuage the suffering of refugees through his voluntary work for the UN High Commission for Refugees. In addition, he became a governor of Imperial College, London, and chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology.

But behind the façade there still burned a sense of mission. He watched with apprehension the collectivist drift of Britain and the growing power of the trade unions. He believed the danger of expansionist Communism was both real and present and he believed fiercely in freedom. In the record of his wartime exploits, They Have Their Exits, he laid down his credo, ‘No one who has not known the pain of imprisonment understands the meaning of liberty’, a line that is engraved on the walls of the museum in Colditz castle as a testament to his dedication. The title of Neave’s book was taken from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.’ No quotation more satisfyingly expresses the different sides of Airey Neave. He was a man who played many parts but the drama was discreet and informal. He played many roles behind the scene. Given the nature and scale of his involvement with the security services, it may also be argued that Neave valued his own freedom and that of those around him so much that he was prepared to countenance extreme measures to safeguard his concept of liberty. Roger Bolton, a television producer who knew him and put together a documentary on his assassination, argues the paradox that Neave was a moral man willing to do things that immoral people were not: ‘If necessary, he took the gun out and there were difficult things to be done but for the most honourable of reasons.’⁸

Why did he imagine that he knew better than the rest? Neave was not a particularly gifted politician, and it seems unlikely that he would have risen to the ranks of a Conservative Cabinet in the ordinary way. And yet, of the Tory MPs of his generation, Neave left the most indelible mark on political history by riding an inner conviction that his grasp was somehow superior. He felt he should turn that comprehension to common advantage; he was a spook who believed he knew, and who acted on his beliefs and loyalties. He was not alone in such self-assurance, which is the stock in trade of the spy. Although he was not an orthodox MI6 officer, Neave shared the outlook of the security services and remained close to them. He may have been an elected politician in a democracy, but he shared the misgivings about the world around him expressed most cogently by George Kennedy Young, with whom Neave was actively acquainted.

While still deputy director of MI6, some time in the late 1950s, Young issued a circular to his staff on the role of the spy in the modern world. He noted scathingly the ‘ceaseless talk’ about the rule of law, civilised relations between nations, the spread of the democratic process, self-determination and national sovereignty, respect for the rights of man and human dignity to be found in the press, in Parliament, the United Nations and from the pulpit: ‘The reality, we all know perfectly well, is quite the opposite, and consists of an ever-increasing spread of lawlessness, disregard of international contract, cruelty and corruption. The nuclear stalemate is matched by a moral stalemate.’ Young further stated that ultimately it was the spy who was called upon to remedy situations created by the deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests, and that the spy found himself ‘the main guardian of intellectual integrity.’⁹ Neave’s nature is readily discernible here: the man who keeps himself to himself, but knows. The man who hates ostentation but goes about his dedicated business with a discreet energy, working for his Queen, country and traditions.

The Britain of the early 1970s, with its crippling strikes, inflation and civil war in all but name in Ulster, called forth men like him on a mission to save the country they loved. At least, that was the way they saw it. From the recesses of the security services, from the upper reaches of the City, from London’s clubland, and from the right of the Conservative Party, came volunteers eager to fight the good fight, Neave among them. But if his greatest contribution to politics was to mastermind the coup that dethroned Edward Heath (employing the ‘psy-ops’ skills he had acquired in his intelligence years) and brought the leadership of the Tory Party to Margaret Thatcher, it did not rob him of a taste for the covert. Soon after Thatcher took over, amid nervousness in the City as inflation soared to 25 per cent and with the pound at little more than 70 per cent of its 1971 value, Neave attended a reception of Tory MPs given by George Kennedy Young, by now the ex-deputy director of MI6. General Walter Walker, former Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Northern Command, was also there. In 1973, at the height of industrial unrest, he had set up Civil Assistance, a quasi-private army of ‘apprehensive patriots’ to give aid to the authorities.

It was never called upon to carry out this function but the theme did not lose its attractions. Neave became involved in Tory Action, a right-wing pressure group within the party, and the National Association for Freedom (NAFF), set up in late 1975 to counter ‘Marxist subversion’. This organisation had more success than Civil Assistance, notably in the legal harrying of strikers. However, the most intriguing – and sinister – of Neave’s operations came in 1976 when he became involved with Colin Wallace, an army intelligence officer working for Army Information Policy in Northern Ireland. Operation Clockwork Orange, initially created to undermine republican terrorists through a disinformation machine to the media, would spread its tentacles into the higher echelons of British politics to probe and exploit the weaknesses of key figures. Aware of Wallace’s MI5 background and his disinformation programme, Neave would maintain his contacts with him when he was appointed Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary.

Neave’s connections with the secret state, past and present, gave rise to speculation that he could also be given the task of liaising between the government and the intelligence services – a job similar to that undertaken by Colonel George Wigg, Paymaster-General in Harold Wilson’s government.¹⁰ Wigg, known in Parliament as ‘the Bloodhound’, certainly admired Neave, describing him as ‘a smart operator who learned from me’. Plainly, the spooks’ mutual admiration society crossed boundaries. It also influenced intelligence policy. Neave’s high opinion of Maurice Oldfield was almost certainly instrumental in Thatcher’s decision to appoint the former head of MI6 as Coordinator of Security and Intelligence in Northern Ireland in October 1979. Oldfield, in charge of MI6 from 1965 to 1977, had survived a bomb attack on his London flat in 1975.

In parliament, Neave gave full support to Roy Mason, the hard-line Labour Ulster Secretary, urging him to go further and ‘pick off the gangsters’ of the IRA. Neave’s policy for Ireland, insofar as it was understood in London and Dublin, was a twin-track strategy of devolving some powers to local councils in Ulster, coupled with the toughest possible military crackdown on republican terrorism. He had no time for power-sharing between nationalists and Unionists, arguing that it had failed and should not be tried again. It was the agenda of a soldier rather than a politician who understood Ireland and the Irish. Nonetheless, his blood-curdling warnings of the wrath that was to come when the Conservatives took office made republicans sit up and take notice of him. They feared him. He believed he had a special insight into the guerrilla mind. ‘I know how the IRA should be dealt with because I was a terrorist myself once,’ he told an Irish journalist.¹¹

Neave would have had the British army at his disposal. Indeed, he still thought of himself as ‘one of them’. He believed that specially trained soldiers should be used to ‘get the godfathers of the IRA’ and rejected any suggestion of amnesty for convicted terrorists as part of a peace deal. It was quite clear that the price of liberty in Ulster could involve the annihilation of those engaged in violence for political ends. This Cromwellian solution was what Neave meant by liberty. The policy was to bring about his own death before it could be implemented.

Yet, for all the convulsions created by Neave’s death, the secret state has left his assassination in a limbo of oblivion. Apart from an (officially) abortive police enquiry, which also involved the security services, there has been no attempt to investigate Neave’s life and death. Sources as diverse as Enoch Powell and ex-collaborators with Neave believe that the authorities themselves may have had a hand in the bloody affair. Even his own daughter Marigold believes the facts have been suppressed. ‘I think there was a cover-up,’ she said across her kitchen table in deepest Worcestershire one cold January morning. ‘They only say “he died a soldier’s death”.’ ¹²

2 Origins

Airey Neave was born at 24 De Vere Gardens, Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace and just down the road from the Royal Albert Hall, on 23 January 1916. His father, Sheffield Airey Neave, continued an eccentric family tradition and burdened his son with family surnames, adding to his own that of his wife Dorothy Middleton. Thus, Neave was christened Airey Middleton Sheffield. As he grew up, Airey began to hate his whimsical collection of names, so much so that he rechristened himself Anthony during the war years and only reverted to Airey when he entered public life.

Airey must have quickly appreciated that his family was steeped in history. Of Flemish – Norman origin, the Neaves came to England in the wake of William the Conqueror and settled in Norfolk about 200 years before the earliest recorded member of the family, Robert le Neve, who lived in Tivetshall, Norfolk, in 1399. His forebears lived in villages around Norwich where they became landowners and sheep farmers. As they prospered in the wool trade, some le Neves struck out further afield, to Kent and Scotland, but they stayed chiefly in East Anglia, gaining social distinction. Sir William le Neve, a native of Norfolk, was Clarenceux King-of-Arms at the College of Heralds in London in 1660.

The failure of the wool trade in the mid-seventeenth century drove some enterprising members of the family to seek their fortunes in London, with mixed results. One generation was wiped out by the Black Death in the 1660s (the victims are reputedly buried under a church in Threadneedle Street) but Richard Neave, who lived from 1666 to 1741, fared better, establishing a prosperous business in London, with offices in the Minories. He made most of his wealth from the manufacture of soap, a new and very fashionable product for the period. He bought land east of London outside the city limits, where his sons began to establish what would become London docks. His business also expanded overseas, with estates in the West Indies, and he put his accumulated resources into his own bank in the City.

The business further prospered through judicious marriages and Richard’s grandson, bearing the same name, bought the Dagnam estate in Essex, so beginning the family’s long connection with the county which remains to this day. His grandson became Governor of the Bank of England in 1780 and a baronet in 1795. The family crest, a French fleur-de-lis, with a single lily growing out of a crown, long predates the adoption of the Neave motto, Sola Proba Quae Honesta, which translates literally as ‘Right Things Only Are Honourable’. Speculation about possible royal connections linked to the appearance of a crown on the crest, admits Airey’s cousin Julius Neave, has given rise to ‘some fanciful but quite unsubstantiated theories’ as to the family’s origins.

However, the family’s upward mobility was undeniable. Sheffield Neave, another Governor of the Bank of England (1857–9), gave his Christian name to succeeding generations (some noted for their longevity), one of whom was Airey’s grandfather, Sheffield Henry Morier Neave (1853–1936), well-known in Essex for his eccentricity. He inherited a fortune while still at Eton, and went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a degree but showed no inclination to pursue a profession thereafter. With plenty of money and no need to work, he indulged his passion for big game hunting, spending long periods in Africa, where he became convinced that control of the malarial tsetse fly was the only bar to great agricultural prosperity in sub-Saharan Africa. He returned to England and studied to become a doctor in middle age, eventually rising to become Physician of The Queen’s Hospital.

At the age of twenty-five, Sheffield Neave married Gertrude Charlotte, daughter of Julius Talbot Airey. They lived at Mill Green Park, Ingatestone, which was to become the family seat, and it was to Mill Green that Neave would return after his incarceration in Colditz. He dreamed vividly of the house during his captivity, and lyrically described its chestnut trees, its May blossom and the white entrance gates in his first book, They Have Their Exits.

Sheffield Neave had his own Essex stag hounds and was a legend in the field. Ever the eccentric, the stags he hunted were not wild but carted to the meet in the same vehicle as the hounds: ‘There was never any question of the hounds killing the stag, who was much too valuable to be lost in this way,’ Julius Neave has explained.¹ ‘They all came home to Mill Green at the end of the day and were stabled together.’ Sheffield gave up stag-hunting at the turn of the nineteenth century, complaining that ‘Essex is getting too built over’, but he rode to hounds until nearly eighty, when he took up golf instead. Long after his death a particularly vicious jump over a ditch and stream was still known as ‘Neave’s leap’.

Gertrude Neave, the epitome of a Victorian lady, was an accomplished pianist and also composed music. She came from a distinguished family, one of her relations being General Lord Airey, chief of staff to Lord Raglan, Commander-in-Chief of the British army in the Crimean War. He was, reputedly, the ‘someone who blundered’ over confused orders which led to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Gertrude and Sheffield had two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Sheffield Airey, born in 1879, was Airey Neave’s father; the younger, Richard, became a professional soldier and saw service in the Boer War, India and in Gallipoli in 1916. He also served in Ireland during the Troubles of 1920–22, and Airey may well have heard stories of ‘the Fenians’ from his uncle.

Airey’s father went to prep school in Churchstoke, in the Welsh Marches, and then (as befits the grandson of a Governor of the Bank of England) on to Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. He inherited his father’s fascination with Africa and the diseases spread by insects. In the years before the Great War, he travelled in 1904–5 on the Naturalist Geodetic Survey of Northern Rhodesia, and to Katanga as entomologist to the Sleeping Sickness Commission of 1906–8. On his return from Africa, he served in a similar capacity on the Entomological Research Committee for four years before being appointed Assistant Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology at the age of only thirty-four. He was to hold the post for thirty-three more years and then took over as director in 1942, the year Airey escaped from Colditz, before retiring in 1946.

A big, dominant man with a moustache, Sheffield Neave was a distant figure, immersed in his scientific work and given to a Victorian aloofness from his children. After Airey’s birth, the family moved to a house in High Street, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where four more children were born: Averil, Rosamund and Viola, and then a second son, Digby. Dorothy Neave, descended from an Anglo-Irish family, played a traditional role in the family: she ran a comfortable if unostentatious household. There were servants and appearances to keep up but Dorothy was often unwell and died of cancer in 1943 when Airey was working for MI9. Airey’s daughter Marigold says that he did not have a good relationship with his father. ‘He was very much a scientist. Perhaps that is what made him not very easy to get on with. He was very remote, a very Victorian figure.’² If not physically robust, Airey’s mother possessed a mental determination unusual in her position. ‘Grandmother was quite forward-looking, quite progressive for those days. She was a liberal with a small “l”,’ recorded Marigold. ‘His childhood was not very easy. His mother was very often ill. Officially, he looks very much like her, but he never talked about her. He talked about his father, but not in very glowing terms. He was a very strict character, powerful and good-looking: a strong face, very dark eyes. And physically he was very tough. It was a clash of personalities.’ Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, the Dam Busters war hero, friend and contemporary at Merton, would come to a similar conclusion. Neave, he wrote, was highly independent and always ready to follow his inner convictions. ‘No matter what the opposition, he would often do things that were a little wild, though always in rather a nice way and never unkindly.’ This trait endeared him to school and university friends, ‘but possibly had a different effect upon his father who one has the impression did not always give him the encouragement which inwardly he needed. Thus, at a very early age he learned to conceal his inner disappointments.’³

Airey Neave attended the Montessori School in Beaconsfield, a progressive school where his individuality was respected. In 1925, at the age of nine, he was sent to St Ronan’s Preparatory School in Worthing, Sussex. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, was a remarkable man who had played football for England, and captained the Corinthians, the famous amateur team. The essence of his educational philosophy was captured in the school prayer, known as Harry’s Prayer, which ran:

If perchance this school may be A happier place because of me Stronger for the strength I bring Brighter for the songs I sing Purer for the path I tread Wiser for the light I shed Then I can leave without a sigh For in any event have I been I.

Set in several acres on the outskirts of Worthing, St Ronan’s placed great emphasis on academic excellence, sport and self-development. In many ways an archetypal English prep school – numbering future air vice-marshals and an Asquith among its pupils – it was built in red brick and sat against the backdrop of the South Downs. Despite the usual rigours of such places, the school had a patriotic rather than militaristic air about it. There was no cadet corps but boys were taught shooting, and from time to time a former army sergeant – so old that he had been with Kitchener at Khartoum – came to the school to teach gymnastics and boxing. With their days filled, in the evenings boys were allowed to pursue their own interests. In Neave’s time, some of them built a primitive radio – a crystal set with ‘cat’s whiskers’ tuning. Others drew maps of imaginary countries, bestowing such nations with complex railway timetables. Essentially, they had to learn to make their own amusement, and learn to fend for themselves, all of which helped develop a form of independence.

In 1926 Stanley Harris died of cancer and his place was taken by his brother, Walter Bruce (Dick) Harris, then a housemaster at nearby Lancing College. If Airey was a better than average pupil he was not spectacularly so, and seems to have been suited to his first form which was ‘composed mostly of boys with plenty of ability, one or two of whom however have no great idea of work’. In 1925, he won a combined subjects prize, but in class 1A in 1927 he was fourteenth. By the following year he had crept up to eleventh, then ninth and finally sixth, with 1, 205 points. That autumn, he also won the Latin prize. The highest placing he received was third, but mostly he fluctuated around the lower end of the top ten. The boys were expected to take a full part in the life of the school. Airey played a waiter in the school play in 1928, and the St Ronan’s magazine observed: ‘A word must be given to Neave who by progressive stages became the perfect waiter.’ Praise indeed.

One contemporary at St Ronan’s recalls that Neave was a rather undistinguished small boy, neither games player nor leader nor scholar. He was teased mercilessly about his name. Others spoke warmly of him. Dick Harris described him as having been ‘a gentle child’; echoing that sentiment, Lord Thorneycroft, a contemporary in parliament, would much later describe him as ‘a very brave and yet gentle man’. His daughter Marigold insists that he hated prep school.

At the age of twelve, Airey went to his father’s old school, Eton, one of three boys to go from St Ronan’s in the Lent term of 1929. Eton’s long-serving head, the Reverend Cyril Alington, retired later the same year and his place was taken by Claude Aurelius Elliott, a Fellow and Senior Tutor of Jesus College, Cambridge. Unlike at St Ronan’s, at Eton the house system was everything. Neave’s house tutor was John Foster Crace, a classics teacher who had been there since 1901 but had only become a housemaster in 1923. He was ‘a reticent, reserved and inhibited bachelor with a reputation of being overfond of some of the boys’.⁴ However, he was a good teacher and ventured out of his reserve to produce Shakespeare on the school stage.

At Eton the emphasis was not just on academic brilliance but on sport and other ‘gentleman’s pursuits’ such as fencing and shooting. Scouting was also encouraged, including quasi-military activities such as signalling. As they grew older, boys joined the Officers’ Training Corps. Eton boys shot at Bisley, beating teams from the Scots Guards and the Grenadier Guards. The school was also a forcing house for politicians. In June 1929, a month after the General Election that brought Ramsay MacDonald into power at the head of an all-Labour Cabinet, the Eton College Chronicle recorded that seventy-six Old Etonians sat at Westminster, more than sixty of them as MPs. Predictably enough, only four of the MPs were Labour, while two were Liberal. Three Old Etonians were ministers in the MacDonald administration, including a young Hugh Dalton making his mark as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.

Public figures of the highest rank, including the King and international figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, paid regular visits to Eton. The atmosphere was unashamedly elitist. In Neave’s first year a particularly aggressive Etonian defined the expressive word ‘oick’ as ‘anybody who hasn’t been to Eton’. But when the school debating society considered whether ‘This House would welcome the resignation of the Government’, it was roundly defeated by forty-two votes to twenty, suggesting, perhaps, that the boys were more radical than their forebears.

The St Ronan’s magazine recorded that Airey ‘took remove at Eton, which is the highest form that a new boy who is not a scholar can go into’, and throughout his five years at the school he was competent rather than brilliant. He usually finished among the top half-dozen in his class and on one occasion won a book prize for academic effort, having, as Eton had it, been ‘sent up for good’ three times in a single term. Although the records suggest that he was a good runner, he did not shine at the school’s other traditional sports: cricket, racquets, fencing, soccer, rugby and rowing.

It might be thought that the momentous events away from the playing fields of Eton – the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s – would have passed him by. Indeed, the Eton College Chronicle of October 1930 suggested that the school was ‘terrifyingly remote from the ordinary concerns of life’, yet the same edition carried a spoof on a Communist takeover of the school, with references to ‘Herr Hitler’, and Old Etonians active in the higher reaches of politics would often return to talk to the school. In 1931, the fall of the Labour government amid economic collapse and the return of a national government under MacDonald greatly increased the number of Old Etonians at Westminster to 102, five of them in the Cabinet and nine more scattered in more junior ministerial jobs. It really did seem that being able to say one was an OE was a passport to power. Much has been said about the characteristics of an Old Etonian. A young OE might be considered arrogant, self-conscious, conceited, overconfident; the more mature species had become sober, active and intelligent, a leader of men; while in his dotage an OE might revert to arrogance and jingoism, but of a gentler kind. Neave was too reserved to fit the classic OE profile, but there was something of all those descriptions in him.

Before Neave left Eton he had an experience that few seventeen-year-old English boys of the period could expect to undergo. In September 1933 his parents sent him to Germany to brush up on the language. He was billeted with a family living in Nikolassee, west of Berlin, where he attended school with a boy of similar age who was a member of the Hitler Jugend. Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, when President von Hindenburg asked him to form a government as the leader of the largest single party, the National Socialists. Public and political opinion in Britain was slow to catch up with the terrifying prospect opening up in Continental Europe. Winston Churchill expressed admiration for ‘men who stood up for their country after defeat’. The Times asked sympathetically whether the street-orator would be an efficient ruler and the demagogue a statesman. They had their answer within weeks, when the Reichstag, the parliamentary building, was destroyed by fire. New decrees gave Hitler’s private army, the SA (Stürmabteilung), the power to gaol Jews and dissidents without trial. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau and by July of that year German citizenship was allowed only to members of the Nazi Party. Forced sterilisation of ‘inferior’ Germans was ordered. The terror had begun, but many in Britain believed that war could be averted through the League of Nations. Hitler withdrew from the League, yet still Germany remained a favourite holiday destination and Nazism even found admirers at home, particularly in the upper reaches of British society.

As a foreigner, Airey was excused from giving the Nazi salute when the teacher came into his class, but he was made to sit at the back, where he cut a bizarre figure in a ‘decadent’ yellow (Eton) tie with black spots and longer hair than his classmates. He felt something approaching contempt for the growing nazification of the school. Dietrich, the elder brother of the boy with whom he attended school, was impressed by Airey’s air of independence but warned that it was dangerous. On a railway platform at Nikolassee, Airey sniggered at a fat, brown-booted Nazi SA man. Years later, he recollected ‘the bloodshot pig-eyes of the stormtrooper glaring towards us’. Dietrich hastily manoeuvred him out of sight.

Dietrich was not a party member but he did belong to a sports club in nearby Charlottenburg. Airey joined as an honorary member. With his indifferent performances at school in mind, he volunteered for the relay race. A Festival of Sport was declared in September and his club was ‘advised’ by the authorities to field a team. At this relatively early stage of the Nazi takeover, Hitler had not stolen all sporting events as his own and marching in the torchlight procession was regarded as light-hearted and theatrical. Airey’s friend took him on the march in the face of official disapproval. He was dressed in ‘civvies’ and treated the occasion as something of a joke. His fellow marchers, however, did not: ‘As we joined the uniformed Nazis with their band, our mood changed,’ he recorded.⁵ ‘I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex.’ The march began at ten in the evening. Neave was in the centre, alongside Dietrich and directly behind a contingent of SA troopers in brown shirts and swastika armbands. Down each side of the procession, burning torches blazed. Initially, Neave admitted, he found the grandiose event thrilling. Crowds watched, their faces shining with excitement and pride.

Sportsmen who had been joking began singing; the mood became religious and the marchers expectant. On their parade from Lustgarten down Berlin’s Unter den Linden, they passed the Royal Palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Ministry of the Interior, home of Hermann Goering’s newly established Gestapo. When Neave broke step with his fellow marchers, Dietrich rounded on him, but it happened again before they reached their festival site, the Brandenburg Gate. ‘I found it difficult to keep in step,’ he admitted. ‘Something subconscious was drawing me away.’⁶ The gate was floodlit and festooned with Nazi flags, resembling, he recalled, some gateway to Valhalla. As they marched towards the burned out ruins of the Reichstag, bands played the Horst Wessel song (the Nazi anthem) and Neave was caught up in the emotional turmoil that prompted cynical and doubting fellow marchers alike to give the Nazi salute. ‘Some were on the verge of tears,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, I realised that they were lost forever to the Revolution of Destruction, whereas I would escape.’⁷

Massed bands prepared them for a half-hour speech by Reichssportkommissar von Tschammer und Osten. Airey, the product of a civilisation at odds with the hysteria of Fascism, was bored. The speech was tedious and hackneyed, ‘a maddening anticlimax’. While he fretted, all around him the young intelligentsia listened to the brown-shirted thug with rapt attention, breaking into ‘Deutschland über Alles’ when the speech was over. Neave’s reportage of these events has something of ex post facto reasoning about it. A British teenager, even one educated at Eton, pitchforked for the first time into a foreign country undergoing such convulsions, is unlikely to have come to such sophisticated conclusions. Recollecting these events twenty years later, Neave invested himself with a remarkably mature social and political intelligence, all of which certainly made for a better story. Had his liberal-minded mother known about the reality of Nazism, Airey mused, she would have recalled him instantly. Looking back, he realised that Hitler was preparing the young people of Germany for a war that he had always intended. His youthful eyes had been opened to the dangerous neurosis sweeping Germany but it would be seven more years before he was swept into the net of depravity. He returned to school for the remainder of his final year, to a Britain more perturbed about the controversial MCC bodyline tour of Australia than events in Berlin.

Eton in late 1933 must have seemed an anticlimax after the convulsions he had witnessed in Berlin. His school record shows flashes of distinction rather than consistency. After Eton, an orthodox journey through Oxford – he had chosen to go to Merton rather than follow his father to Magdalen – into the law seemed to beckon. Of good academic repute built initially on the classics, the Merton to which Neave went in the autumn of 1934 was still steeped in Victorian tradition. As the age of adulthood remained at twenty-one, the college stood in loco parentis to its undergraduates and took its responsibilities seriously. Discipline was officially strict, though the authorities turned a blind eye to certain misdemeanours. For the first year students lived in. They had agreeable but austere rooms. There were very few bathrooms: each set had a chamberpot, emptied by the college scout who acted as valet and housekeeper. A normal academic day began at 7.30 a.m. when the scout brought hot water for washing and shaving, and undergraduates then had to attend a roll-call at 8.00, ‘properly dressed’ in socks as well as gowns over their normal clothing. They signed their names in a register in a lecture room in Fellows’ Quad, under the watchful gaze of the day’s duty don. Attendance at matins in the college chapel was an acceptable alternative to roll-call.

After a day of lectures and tutorials, they were free for the evening. Drinking in Oxford’s pubs was forbidden and the rules were enforced by bowler-hatted ‘bulldogs’ (university proctors’ assistants) who toured the watering holes accosting suspects. College gates were closed at 9.00 p.m., and after that students had to ‘knock up’ the porter in his turreted fifteenth-century gatehouse to gain admission. They were fined sixpence after 10.30, and a shilling after ii .00. If an undergraduate had permission to stay out after midnight – rarely granted – he paid a fine of half a crown.

This was all quite expensive for the mid-thirties, when a young man at Oxford could live comfortably on £250 a year, so the curfew was regularly breached by climbing over the perimeter wall back into college. Indeed, it was one of Merton’s traditional sports. Reputedly, twenty-eight break-in routes existed, the most popular being over the wall in Merton Street into the college gardens and then through the loosened bars of a ground-floor set of rooms, where it was customary to leave small change on the table of the hapless undergraduate who occupied the rooms. Dons discreetly allowed the bars to remain loose.

Neave was undoubtedly one of the climbers, an unconscious rehearsal of his exploits at Colditz a few years later, and in captivity he must have mused on the irony of his position, where, for three years, he had perfected the art of breaking in rather than out. Once at Oxford, Neave quickly made his way to the worst company that Merton offered. He was elected to the exclusive Myrmidon Club, a group of undergraduates, never more than a dozen in number, who dedicated themselves to the good things of life. The club was founded in 1865, fancifully in emulation of George Bathmiteff, a Russian nobleman and Merton undergraduate who had dallied with a danseuse who wore a garter of purple and gold. Originally, its aims were to explore the Cherwell and other river systems, but with the advent of undergraduates like Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1870s the club soon became the haunt of young bloods. To perpetuate the memory of the danseuse, Myrmidons, named after the faithful followers of Achilles, wore purple dinner jackets faced with silver and white waistcoats edged with purple and gold. Their chief activities were eating and drinking, generally in each other’s rooms but also formally every term in their own dining rooms above a tailor’s shop in the High Street.

Within months of going up to Merton, Neave was inducted into the Myrmidons, at a meeting in the rooms of K.A. Merritt, a keen tennis player. Colin Sleeman, who was to become Captain of Boats and subsequently a distinguished lawyer and defence counsel at the Far East War Crimes Tribunal, was elected the same day. At that point the club numbered seven. They met regularly in Neave’s rooms for the following year, and in June 1936 he was elected secretary. The minutes show him to have been a conscientious but terse recorder of events. On 20 October 1936, the Myrmidons met in Mr Logie’s rooms, he wrote in a flowing (indeed, overflowing) Roman hand, and fixed the dates for lunch and dinner that term. It must have been a good meeting. Neave’s account, in a trembling hand, is full of crossings-out and emendations. He signed himself with a flourish and then underneath wrote ‘trouble’, without further explanation. On 5 February 1937, he recorded that the Myrmidons met in Mr Wells’s rooms and elected two new members. They organised lunch ‘for a date now lost in the mists of obscurity’, or perhaps the mists of Dom Perignon. The club now had nine members, and was ‘full’. The minute books are the only formal history of the Myrmidons’ activities, though they are still a legend for drinking and bad behaviour at Merton. Some idea of their academic application may be gained from the degrees posted in the college register. One got a fourth in geography, another a pass degree in mathematics; Merritt gained a third in history while Sleeman managed only a fourth in jurisprudence. The Myrmidons were capable of sottishness but were no more than undergraduate drunks. They invited Old Boys to their dinner, invariably held in London, where Neave had become a member of the Junior Carlton Club. They also aimed high in their guest invitations. As late as 1951, Winston Churchill, recently reinstalled as Prime Minister, wrote regretting that he could not attend their dinner because the pressure of affairs was ‘considerable’.

The Myrmidons also gained an eccentric reputation for literary interests, chiefly through Max Beerbohm and his friends who had been members in the 1890s. The Myrmidons are assumed to be the model for the Junta in Beerbohm’s gentle, witty Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson. In spite of being known as the ‘most virile’ of Merton’s clubs, they also had a cultured side, which showed itself most strongly in amateur dramatics. The Myrmidons scorned OUDS – the self-esteeming Oxford University Dramatic Society – in favour of Merton Floats, the college’s own theatre group, founded in 1929 by two undergraduates, Giles Playfair and E.K. Willing-Denton, the latter a ‘prodigiously extravagant and generous’ young man. This was, Playfair later recollected, a time of festive teas, luncheons, dinners, suppers and moonlight trips on the river followed by climbing over the wall into college. Willing-Denton, who spent his entire allowance in the first month, was noted for his ten-course luncheons. He and Playfair persuaded actors of the calibre of Hermione Baddeley to come down to Oxford, and Merton Floats enjoyed a succès d’estime in the mid-war years when the social scene was at its height. In 1936, Neave was secretary of Floats and his friend Merritt was president. Sleeman was the grandly titled front-of-house manager. They put on two plays: In The Zone, a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill set on the fo’c’sle of a British tramp steamer in 1915, in which Neave played the role of Smitty; and Savonarola, a play of the 1890s attributed to Ladbroke Brown, in which Neave appeared as Pope Julius II. Neave also found time to make three speeches at the Oxford Union, of which no record remains. On one of these occasions he found himself debating the merits of the previous week’s motion.

It was an altogether engaging life. Neave later admitted that he did little academic work at Oxford and was obliged to work feverishly at the law before his finals in order to get a degree. He graduated in 1938 with a third in jurisprudence and a BA. ‘The climax of my “Oxford” education was a champagne party on top of my college tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below,’ he wrote.⁸ He remained thankful in adult life for the kindness and forbearance shown by his college during those profligate years. Life was never to be so insouciant again.

3 King and Country

In the febrile pre-war atmosphere of the 1930s, Oxford shared in the political polarisation that shook society at large. As early as February 1933, months before Neave went up from Eton, the Oxford Union carried a motion ‘This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country’. The vote was unambiguous: 275 to 153. Most undergraduates thought no more about their casual pacifism, but Winston Churchill expressed nausea at this ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’. ‘One can almost feel the contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany,’ he added disdainfully.

Neave was not among the fainthearts. Unlike most of his university contemporaries he had seen the Nazis at first hand and did not like what he saw. However, unlike some of his contemporaries – including Denis Healey, a future Defence and Foreign Secretary – he did not embrace the fashionable left. He was emphatically a patriot and willing to fight for King and Country. Furthermore, he believed that a war with Germany was inevitable. In 1933, while still at Eton, Neave had written a prize-winning political essay analysing the probable consequences of Hitler’s rise to power and predicting the likelihood of war. Leonard Cheshire recalled: ‘On arriving at Oxford he 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.’¹ To this alarming intellectual precocity, Neave, still in his teens, added military intent. While those about him flirted with the Young Communist League, he joined the Territorial Army at the tender age of nineteen. ‘It was fashionable in some quarters to declare that no one but a very stupid undergraduate would fight for his King and Country,’ he remembered later. ‘To be a Territorial was distinctly eccentric. Military service was a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and more tiresome.’² He despised the phrase ‘playing at soldiers’, and took some comfort in the fact that those he contemptuously referred to as ‘decadents, fantastics and intellectuals’ were fighting for their very lives within a few short years.

In the meantime, his reading of Clausewitz was of little help on manoeuvres with an infantry battalion in the TA summer camp on the Wiltshire Downs. Neave remembered how he lay blissfully in the grass, a wooden Lewis gun by his side, listening for the sound of blank cartridges but concentrating more on the butterflies, identifying a small copper, a fritillary and a clouded yellow as his platoon clowned around on the edge of a chalk pit. ‘We were not prepared for war. We never are,’ he reflected. His daydreaming was rudely interrupted by a full brigadier kitted out for the First World War who shouted ‘Lie down there!’ as Neave began to stand up, feeling ridiculous in plus fours and puttees covered in chalk and grass. The imaginary conflict continued under a blazing sun. In the post-mortem on this ‘battle’, the brigadier raged at Neave, accusing him of choosing an exposed position for his men. Why had he allowed his left flank to go unprotected? Neave answered, with more nerve than diplomacy: ‘There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir, I posted it there.’ The brigadier was deflated and Neave was a popular subaltern in the mess that night. If he was aware that such manoeuvres were poor preparation for the gathering storm he was nonetheless proud to receive in 1935 a registered envelope from the War Office informing him that His Majesty King George V sent greeting to his trusted and well-beloved Airey Neave and appointed him to a commission as second lieutenant in his Territorial Army.

After graduating, Neave went up to London to read for the Bar. His first placement was in 1938 in the office of an old-fashioned solicitor’s in the City. Here he learned the basics of law in action. It had its entertaining moments. One summer evening found him, kitted out in bowler hat and umbrella, accompanied by a junior clerk, serving an injunction on a group of thespians in a church hall in Cricklewood, north London. The play, by a local author, libelled Neave’s client and the High Court injunction he served on the producer forbade its performance. The producer read the long legal document tied with green string, a familiar sight to journalists but evidently a great shock to amateur performers. ‘You can’t do this to us,’ he expostulated. ‘It’s against the law!’ Echoes of this farcical scene resounded in Neave’s memory years later, when he was called on to serve the indictment to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Neave moved on to become a pupil in a barrister’s chambers in Farrar’s Building in the Temple, close to Temple Church, but beneath the superficial gaiety of the capital and the debutante season, war was rapidly approaching. In the late summer of 1939, a matter of days before war was declared, Anthony Eden, Minister for War, announced on the radio a doubling of the size of the Territorial Army. Airey and his cousin Julius were listening to the broadcast at Mill Green Park. Airey immediately proposed that they go and join up and the pair cycled off to the local Drill Hall in nearby Fryerning Lane. Julius Neave remembers that the recruiting officer said ‘That’s very nice of you. So, would you like to be soldiers, or officers?’ They replied: ‘Given the choice – officers!’ Both had what was known as a ‘Certificate A’, meaning that they had passed a proficiency test with the Officer Training Corps at school. As a second lieutenant in the TA, Neave would quickly have been called up in any event.

He was posted to an anti-aircraft Searchlight Regiment and spent an unromantic six months in a muddy field in Essex learning his trade, before being dispatched to a searchlight training regiment in Hereford. It was hardly Clausewitz. An impatient Neave preferred to be in the field, like Rupert Brooke and his other war heroes of history. He was soon to have all the action he wanted, and more. In February 1940 he was sent as a troop commander to Boulogne, where the uneasy peace of the ‘phoney war’ reigned. Lieutenant Neave was placed in charge of an advance party of ‘rugged old veterans’ from the First World War, mostly industrial workers with some clerks and professional men, a ‘vocal and democratic lot’ who did not consider themselves crack soldiers but made up for lack of infantry training with a willingness to fight. They were equipped with rifles (though many had never fired one), old Lewis guns, a few Bren guns and the new Boys anti-tank rifle which none of them knew how to use. Neave’s troop, part of the Second Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment, was tasked mainly with operating searchlights in fields around large towns, dazzling bombers and aiding anti-aircraft gunners. The searchlight soldiers were held in little esteem, one Guards officer describing their contribution as ‘quite Christmassy’. An indignant Neave kept his counsel and waited for the underdogs to show their mettle.

He did not have long to wait. Military folklore says that Hitler’s decision to invade the Low Countries and France was made over lunch with von Manstein, Field Marshal of the Wermacht Gerd von Rundstedt’s chief of staff, over lunch on 17 February 1940. On 2 April, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain confidently told the Commons: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Early in the morning of 10 May, the Nazi Blitzkrieg on the Low Countries and France began. Under the brilliant direction of General Heinz Guderian, German panzer divisions smashed their way through the Ardennes, overrunning Belgium and striking deep into France. Within five days, Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, was telephoning Churchill to say: ‘We have been defeated.’ It was an appalling prospect. The British Expeditionary Force numbering hundreds and thousands of men, sent to oppose any German invasion, was in danger of being surrounded and cut off in northwestern France. The war for Europe was in danger of being lost before it had begun. Still, service chiefs in London judged that Hitler’s lines of communication had become so extended that a frontal attack on the Channel ports was unlikely. ‘It was not to be believed,’ wrote war historian Michael Glover, ‘that, within two or three days, they could threaten, far less capture, Boulogne and Calais. A week earlier the idea would have appeared equally fantastic to the German High Command.’³

On 17 May, after a depressing summit in Paris with Reynaud and the French High Command, Churchill, now Prime Minister after the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, ordered his chiefs of staff to draw up plans for withdrawal of the BEF. Guderian’s panzers were racing across northern France, making for the coast and the Channel ports. Neave and his searchlight battery were in Coulogne, a few miles south-east of Calais, right in the way of the German advance. He arrived there from Arras on 20 May, having squashed himself into a tiny khaki-painted Austin Seven with his large and belligerent driver, Gunner Cooper. His troops followed behind in 3-ton army lorries. As they drove through Lens and St Omer, the tide of refugees fleeing west increased. In the ancient town of Ardres, a woman shouted that they were cowards running away from the Germans and spat at the column.

Coulogne had seen British soldiers before. In the time of Henry VIII, when the English had occupied Calais, it was an outer stronghold. In the First World War, it had been a base camp. Neave quartered himself in the Mairie, in the town square. For the first night, they were spared the bombing that had sent the French fleeing for their lives. The young lieutenant imagined that his role in the forthcoming defence of Calais would be commanding his searchlight battery. He was just twenty-four, ‘unmilitary and with opinions of my own’. However, he also later vouchsafed that he and his men were ‘ready to die, or at least expecting to die’.⁴ The Germans did their best not to disappoint them. As he dozed under a chestnut tree in front of the Mairie in the hot afternoon of 23 May, a German light attack aircraft scored a direct hit on the building, sending tiles tumbling down over him. It was nearly fatal. More mortar bombs exploded among the refugees, killing some of them and Neave’s dispatch rider, Gunner Branton. The casualties included a young girl. Neave noticed a British soldier gently drawing her tartan skirt over her knees to preserve decency even in death. The air raids were followed by panic rumours among the French that German armoured divisions were closing in, but a disbelieving Neave thought they might only be lightly armed reconnaissance groups. How could British High Command not know the whereabouts of Guderian and his tanks?

Searchlight detachments were ordered to converge on Coulogne, gathering a force of about sixty men for the defence of this ‘ghastly bottleneck’. Neave’s men dug trenches in the southern sector and put up rather inadequate roadblocks comprising furniture from the local school and the village hearse. Their work was hampered by the spate of fugitives from the battle zone, whose pathetic columns stretching up to half a mile long had been infiltrated by spies and fifth columnists. At one stage, Neave was forced to draw his .38 Webley revolver on a crowd of refugees threatening to break through the roadblock, prompting cries of ‘Don’t shoot, mon lieutenant!’ The German tank thrust reached them in the afternoon of 23 May but was held back for five precious hours by the Searchlight Regiment’s spirited defence of its HQ at nearby Orphanage Farm. Neave’s Bren gunners took part in this action, but almost fired on their own side until he moved them forward. After the farm came under intense artillery fire, the order to retreat towards Calais was given at about 7.00 p.m. Neave was told to go back into Coulogne to blow up a new piece of kit known as the ‘cuckoo’, a sound-location device which at all costs must not be captured. With a sergeant and a sapper, he tried valiantly with gun cotton to destroy the trailer on which the secret equipment was mounted. As they tried feverishly to carry out the order, two French aviation fuel drivers set fire to their tankers alongside. The ‘cuckoo’ blew up and Neave’s party escaped, choking on fumes from the blaze, to the Calais road.

They found only relative safety in the city. Guderian’s tanks had been briefly, and inexplicably, halted the previous week on Hitler’s personal instructions. His race to the sea might otherwise have been complete by this stage of the war, trapping and capturing the BEF gathering on the sand dunes of Dunkirk just up the coast from Calais. But now he was advancing at full speed and Calais was in the way of his main objective: the British army. His initial plan was to bypass the port and take Dunkirk with the Tenth Panzer Division, but a determined counter-attack by the British south of Arras on 21 May checked his drive, and the German High Command ordered Guderian to wait on the Somme, robbing him of the impetus that could have altered the direction of the entire conflict. Taking advantage of this breathing space, the British threw reserves across the Channel into Calais, elements of the Royal Tank Regiment, the Queen Victoria’s Rifles and the 60th Rifle Brigade. Their orders were unclear and constantly changing. Meanwhile, service chiefs began emergency planning for Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of 330,000 soldiers of the BEF from the sands of Dunkirk by the Royal Navy and a flotilla of ‘little ships’.

German artillery found their range on Calais docks as these reserves were landing and the siege of Calais began in earnest. The British High Command was in an agony of indecision: whether to fight to the death in the strategic port, dominated by fortifications dating back to the sixteenth century, or withdraw. Churchill had once described Calais as ‘simply an enceinte [fortification] protected by a few well-executed outlying fieldworks … it could certainly not be counted on to hold out more than a few days against a determined attack’. Indeed, at 3.00 a.m. on 24 May, the War Office telegraphed Brigadier Claude Nicholson, commander of British forces in the port, that it had decided ‘in principle’ on evacuation. Many British soldiers, including Neave, hoped desperately that that decision would be implemented. It never was.

As Neave related in his war classic, The Flames of Calais, it was impossible to sleep on the night he bivouacked on the dunes to the west of the town. He was aware that Calais would be surrounded and that a battle was imminent. Yet, throughout the night, rumours of evacuation grew. Neave was frank. ‘Calais had become a city of doom, and I was not in the least anxious to remain. I did not feel heroic.’⁵ Later that day, Churchill countermanded the previous decision: a War Office telegram decreed that Calais should be defended to the end, ‘for the sake of Allied solidarity’. Nicholson was instructed: ‘Select best position and fight on.’ The garrison of Calais, recorded Glover, was deliberately sacrificed to demonstrate Britain’s commitment to her allies, ‘but it was the last major sacrifice that Britain was going to make in that lost cause’.⁶ British troops trapped behind the nineteenth-century fortifications could not throw back Guderian’s panzers. The best they could do was hold up the Nazi advance so that Operation Dynamo could be implemented.

On the ground, the men were beginning to realise the way things were going. They needed no explanation. ‘It was now time to forget about evacuation and show what “non-fighting soldiers could do,’ Neave reflected. With fifty volunteers from his men, he formed up with newly disembarked troops of the Rifle Brigade and marched to the eastern ramparts. As he marched, he thought of others who had moved up the line. ‘This was it. Everything before was of no consequence. But would I pass the test?’

His orders were to reinforce ‘B’ Company of the 60th on the south-west of the town centre where a German breakthrough appeared imminent. A staff officer led them through the deserted streets to the Boulevard Léon Gambetta, which was under fire from German tanks and machine gunners advancing up the Boulogne road. Neave left his men in the shelter of a doorway and stepped nervously into the boulevard. Tracer bullets and even tank shells rained down as he made for the Pont Jourdan railway bridge. He clung for dear life to the sides of the houses as he crept towards his objective. This was his first experience of street fighting, and he was not ashamed to admit that he was acutely frightened. Reaching the bridge, he was called down to the railway tracks below by Major Poole, commander of ‘B’ Company. Poole ordered him to get his men into the houses on either side of the bridge and fire from the windows. ‘You might fight like bloody hell,’ he admonished.

Neave and his men, armed only with rifles and two Bren guns, took up position in the houses and opened fire on the German positions on the Boulogne road. Their inexperience showed, as regulars of the 60th fighting at the other side of the bridge shouted ‘F—ing well look where you’re shooting!’ Amid the firing, the proprietor of a café at the end of the street, wearing the Croix de Guerre from the First World War, coolly dispensed cognac. In mid-afternoon, a British tank made a brief appearance, prompting a furious response from the Germans, a savage bombardment which pinned Neave down in the Rue Edgar Quintet, a normally quiet street with a girls’ school, but now deserted. The only visible sign of life was the face of a frightened girl at a cellar window.

As the afternoon wore on, Neave began to feel the lack of combat training for battle: his reading of Clausewitz had not prepared him for street fighting. The heat from the sun and blazing buildings produced an unbearable thirst. He longed to get back to the café. He waited for the firing to lift and was about to cross the road when he felt a ‘sharp, bruising pain’ in his left side. He collapsed to the pavement, rifle clattering. A concerned soldier shouted from a window: ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Neave did not reply but pondered uselessly whether it was a sniper or a machine-gun bullet. He realised he could still walk, and, doubled-up, staggered across to the café. His most pressing fear was that the Germans would break through and he would be left behind and taken prisoner. It was a common fear shared by all. British combatants had a confused but horrific picture of the fate of prisoners taken by the Nazis. Death in action they understood but the stories of concentration camps made them fear capture even more. The café proprietor brought him a large measure of cognac, while a medical orderly inspected his wound. Through a half-faint, Neave heard him say: ‘You’re a lucky one, sir. ‘Arf an inch from the ‘eart.’

The orderly and a Frenchman helped him to his feet and began walking him to an aid post where they met a young officer of the 60th in a scout car, Lieutenant Michael Sinclair. Sinclair pointed out an improvised Red Cross ambulance. After an argument about where they should go, the French driver took Neave to the Hôpital Militaire, a former convent in the Rue Leveux, where he was diagnosed as having a ‘penetrating flank wound’ needing an operation. Neave still feared capture and was carried protesting to the operating theatre ‘where grinning French surgeons in white caps, and smoking Gauloises cigarettes, awaited me’. In his recovery ward, Neave could hear the shelling intensifying. The Germans had taken the town hall, which now flew the swastika. Beside him, a mortally wounded young Hurricane pilot begged him to keep talking. He died as dawn broke on 25 May and Neave folded his arms. Shells fell closer and closer, among the mulberry trees in the hospital garden and in the street outside, smashing the hospital windows. With the other wounded, he was taken down to the cellar while the battle raged outside. Two fellow officers of the Searchlights and several gunners were killed. At 2.00 p.m. that day, 25 May, Anthony Eden telegraphed Brigadier Nicholson with the instructions to maintain his defiant stand. On this occasion, there was no mention of ‘Allied solidarity’, the expression which had infuriated Churchill as being entirely the wrong way of motivating British soldiers to fight. This time the appeal was to Empire and regimental loyalty: ‘The eyes of the Empire are on the defence of Calais,’ Eden urged. Nicholson rejected two German proposals of surrender: ‘The answer is no as it is the British army’s duty to fight as well as it is the German’s.’ Deep in his hospital bunker, Neave heard progress of the battle as more wounded were brought in. Calais was on fire. At 9 o’clock that evening, Churchill and Eden came out from dinner and ‘did the deed’, ordering Nicholson to fight to the end. Churchill told his doctor, Lord Moran, ‘I gave that order; it was my decision, althought it sickened me to have to do it. But it was Calais that made the evacuation at Dunkirk.’ For years afterwards, Churchill was unable to speak of Calais without emotion.

As dawn broke on Sunday 26 May, it was plainly only a matter of time before the Germans overran the old town and the port area where British forces were still holding out. The evacuation had been cancelled, though some wounded were still being taken off under heavy shelling by motor torpedo-boat. Stuka raids again hit the hospital. Around Neave men lay badly hurt and blinded. He recollected that the smell of wounds and fear was overpowering. Yet the British laughed and laid bets on when the bombers would reappear. In mid-morning, their position became untenable. A Stuka’s bomb fell by the main doors of the hospital, blowing them in and showering debris on the wounded. Terrified that the next direct hit would bury them all alive, Neave decided to make a break for it. He could walk, with difficulty, and if he could reach the Gare Maritime he might be among the wounded being taken off. With the admonition of the French medical officer ringing in his ears, Neave and a corporal who volunteered to go with him crawled out beneath the great double doors into the burning streets. He had no idea how badly the situation in Calais had deteriorated. Whole streets were ablaze as they made their halting way northwards to the harbour station. Neave was doubled up with the pain of his wound and his companion limped badly. Thick smoke choked them both. At the junction with the Boulevard des Alliés, they turned east and continued through eerily silent Calais-Nord. Suddenly, shells burst around the pair as they passed the Courgain. Neave was not hit but the corporal ‘vanished in the blinding flash and dust’. Falling to the ground, Neave crawled to the side of the street. From a cellar window, an old Frenchman offered him a bottle of cognac. He drank, and lurched on alone to the lighthouse where he encountered troops of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in front of the station, staring down their guns as he struggled to join their ranks. An officer barked at him to hurry up and listened in disbelief to his extraordinary story. Calais had been expertly infiltrated by German fifth columnists and the QVR were taking no chances. Neave’s identity card was carefully scrutinised as yet more cognac was dispensed. He looked round at scenes of devastation. Amid the debris lay the bodies of dead British soldiers. He was hurried to the first aid station below the Gare Maritime, where more wounded lay. Soon after, intense shelling forced them to find deeper cover in a tunnel under the port’s Bastion 1.

After the Stuka and artillery bombardment of the morning of 26 May, it was only a matter of time before the Germans took Calais. Guderian arrived in person to direct the attack, and street by street British forces were pushed back into an enclave around the port. The Citadel fell at 4.30 in the afternoon, and the commanding officer, Brigadier Nicholson, was taken prisoner. He did not surrender his forces, however. In fact, the garrison never surrendered. Split into small groups, the men were hunted down piecemeal and killed or captured when their ammunition ran out. The Gare Maritime was evacuated, soldiers taking refuge in the dunes. Some remained on top of Bastion 1, above Neave, firing on the Germans, but their position was untenable and they surrendered. Lying in one of the underground rooms, Neave could hear the hoarse shouts of German under-officers and the noise of rifles being flung to the floor of the tunnel. Through the doorway came the enemy, field-grey figures waving revolvers. A huge man in German uniform wearing a Red Cross armband put him gently on a stretcher. He was a prisoner of war. It was a sad ending to a desperately fought battle.

Outside the bastion, British troops were ordered to scatter and try to escape in small parties, an instruction interpreted as ‘every man for himself’. Just before 8.00 that evening, Eden messaged his officer commanding: ‘Am filled with admiration for your magnificent fight which is worthy of the highest tradition of the British army.’ The message never arrived. By then Nicholson was a prisoner and the gallant stand of his men was over. Less than three hours later, troops of the BEF began disembarking at Dover from the beaches of Dunkirk.

The wisdom of the decision to hold Calais to the last man has been hotly debated for sixty years. Neave, who endured the entire bloody nightmare (and whose courage earned him a Military Cross), was naturally partisan, and devoted his most polemical book to the issue. The stand at Calais against impossible odds can be compared with other actions in the history of war, he argues. ‘All through the episode there runs a thread of poor intelligence and indecision.’ Reinforcements were landed too late to do little more than block the town entrances. Tanks were deployed, but not in numbers to hold back the Blitzkrieg. Neave blames those who failed to supply the War Office with up-to-date information on Guderian’s dash for the coast, during which he was pursued and bombed by the RAF. ‘Coordination of intelligence with the RAF had evidently a long way to go,’ he remarked tersely.

Neave also complained of an air of defeatism in the War Office, whose top echelons had evidently decided that most of the BEF had already been lost and troops were needed much more urgently for the Home Front than in the defence of Calais. The fault for the loss of Nicholson’s brigade, he insisted, lay with ‘higher authority’, the General Staff which was obsessed with getting the BEF back to Britain and had no plan for Calais. ‘Indeed, it was not clear who was in charge of the operation.’ In addition, few commanders ‘since the days of Balaclava’ had issued such suicidal orders as Lieutenant-General Sir Douglas Brownrigg, Adjutant-General of the BEF, who had ordered tanks to attack Boulogne when it had already been lost. Given Neave’s ancestry perhaps the reference to Balaclava was not the most appropriate.

Churchill was in no doubt that the last stand at Calais was vital for the success of Operation Dynamo which allowed the British army to fight another day. In the British press the defenders were lionised as heroes. Writing in The Times, Eric Linklater argued that the death struggle waged over four days halted panzer troops who would otherwise have cut off the retreating BEF: ‘The scythe-like sweep of the German divisions stopped with a jerk at Calais,’ he wrote. ‘The tip of the scythe had met a stone.’ Guderian himself and the respected historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart disagree with this poetic verdict. In his war diaries, the German general insisted that the heroic defence of Calais, while worthy of the highest praise, had ‘no influence’ on the development of events at Dunkirk and did not delay his advance. Neave is withering on this point. ‘One thing is indisputable, the Tenth Panzer Division was delayed at Calais for four days and not by Hitler,’ he wrote.⁷ Guderian, he claimed, was covering up for his failure to take the port earlier, as he had planned.

Liddell Hart argued, somewhat patronisingly, that Churchill was obliged to justify his decision to sacrifice the Calais garrison, but questioned whether it had the outcome asserted by the wartime premier. The panzer division that attacked the port was only one of seven in the area and had been deployed ‘because it had nothing else to do’. The gallant stand was nothing more than ‘a useless sacrifice’, Liddell Hart maintained. Neave was plainly infuriated by this view. He contended: ‘There was nothing useless about the stand at Calais. It hampered Guderian during crucial hours, especially on 23 and 24 May, when there was little to prevent his taking Dunkirk. It formed part of the series of events, some foolish, some glorious, which saved the BEF.’⁸ Glover suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes, though strangely he finds it ‘irrelevant’. Nicholson’s brigade had to be sacrificed as a gesture to shore up the crumbling Anglo-French Alliance, even though it was already doomed. ‘At least it made an epic for Britain at a time when all was defeat and withdrawal,’ he writes condescendingly.⁹

At the time, however, the military merits of the battle for Calais were far from Neave’s mind. He was about to experience at first hand what he and his men had most feared: Nazi incarceration. He nearly did not make it. On the morning of 27 May, after surviving another night in the bastion tunnel, he was taken by ambulance into the centre of Calais. En route, the vehicle was rocked by a burst of shellfire that forced the crew to take cover. Ironically, this was offshore ‘friendly fire’, from the cruisers Arethusa and Galatea, bombarding the investing German forces. The ambulance restarted and he was dumped on a slab in the covered market of Calais-St Pierre as if he was a piece of meat. In this makeshift field hospital, his imprisonment began.

4 Capture

Neave hated being taken prisoner, at the age of twenty-four, at the very start of the war. It was not just fear of the unknown. German front-line troops, soldiers like himself, had behaved well towards the wounded but it was the Nazis he dreaded. Furthermore, there was a psychological dimension to his capture. A prisoner of war, he discovered, suffers a double tragedy. Most obviously, he loses his freedom. Then, since he has not committed a crime, his spirit is scarred with a sense of injustice. Neave articulated this resentment as a bitterness of soul that clouded the life even of strong men. ‘The prisoner is to himself an object of pity,’ he argued. ‘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 …’¹

Despite his wound, Neave determined not to fall into this psychological trap. Well-versed in the escape stories of the First World War, he quickly set himself to thinking how to avoid being sent to a prison camp deep in the heart of Occupied Europe, where escape would be much more difficult. Though hospitalised, he was still only thirty miles from England, and much of France was still free of Nazis. Flight was not impossible: Gunner Instone, of Neave’s Second Searchlight Battery, was already busy escaping through France and Spain after knocking out two sentries.

His wounds were too serious, however, to attempt an escape from the hospital to which he was moved, unless he had help. Out of the blue, a French soldier, Pierre d’Harcourt, who had evaded capture from his tank regiment by posing as a medical orderly, offered a solution. Neave could abscond from the ward he shared with four other officers by posing as a corpse. Allied prisoners were still dying, and d’Harcourt, a Red Cross volunteer, could smuggle him out of the hospital in an ambulance in place of a deceased officer. It would not be easy. German guards checked the bodies before they were removed for burial in the Citadel, where Nicholson’s men had fought so bravely. Nor do the plotters seem to have given much thought to disposing of the spare corpse. They hatched extravagant plans to steal a boat and flee across the Channel, but before their ideas could be translated into action d’Harcourt heard that the prisoners were to be evacuated further inland to Lille in late July. The plot had to be abandoned. Nonetheless, Neave found the experience of escape planning very good for morale. It occupied his fertile brain and gave him hope. The elusive d’Harcourt vanished to Paris, where he was active in the first escape lines for Allied prisoners through Unoccupied France before being captured. He spent four years in the notorious Fresnes prison and Buchenwald concentration camp before being liberated, half-dead, in 1945.

En route to Lille that July the German lorry carrying the wounded broke down. This mishap seemed to offer a chance to escape. While the lorry was being repaired, Neave and other walking wounded survivors of Calais wandered around the streets of Bailleul, without guards. The local people offered them food and wine, and some offered to hide them from their captors. The French spirit of resistance was already showing itself within weeks of capitulation, but Neave did not avail himself of these offers. He admitted later that he lacked not just the physical strength but also the nerve to seize the opportunity. The weeks in hospital had sapped his will. ‘My vacillation cost me dear,’ he wrote, ‘but at this time there was no military training in such matters.’² In the warm summer evening, French people threw flowers and bid them goodbye from the main square of Bailleul, and Neave felt ashamed at his inaction. Subsequently, he vindicated his hesitation. Had he got away so soon, he argued, he would not have escaped from Colditz and would not have been in a position to help others emulate his example. It was perhaps a questionable piece of rationalisation after the event, to square his conscience with this unheroic episode.

Once in the Lille hospital, his thoughts again turned to flight. This time he planned to escape with Captain John Surtees of the Rifle Brigade and a Corporal Dowling of the Durham Light Infantry. A young Frenchwoman who brought food and flowers to the wounded promised to help. Once out of the hospital, they would get civilian clothes, take the train to Paris and live incognito in a Left Bank pension. It did not seem dangerous, but it was not a very well thought-out escapade for the trio had no papers and practically no money. Senior officers later upbraided them for putting the other wounded men at risk of reprisals had they got away.

In August 1940, the prisoners of Lille hospital, or at any rate those judged to be walking wounded, were taken on a long march east to their destination in a POW camp. They trudged through Belgium ‘from one foul transit camp to another’ before arriving at the mouth of the River Scheldt. There, they embarked on a huge, open coal barge for a three-day journey up the Waal and the Rhine to Germany. Neave felt he was on a voyage of lost souls crossing into the unknown. Life was over. As they passed under the bridge at Nijmegen in Holland, a young woman waved at the prisoners; as she did so, the wind caught her clothing, lifting her skirt and with it the spirits of the men. Neave, although overcome with despair, could not but admire the insouciance of the average Tommy, who never gave in, never lost heart.

The officers were disembarked to take up residence in Oflag IXa at Spangenburg, near Kassel. Their place of incarceration was an imposing Schloss with a vaulted gateway, moat, drawbridge and a clock tower. Here the men could walk round the battlements and on a clear day take in the view of farmland and distant hills.

Spangenburg reminded Neave of school – a school to which their fathers might have been sent. In a sense he was correct, for indeed they had: the castle had been a POW camp in the first war. The new boys, like the previous generation, slept in two-tiered bunks with straw palliases and coarse blankets. It was August, one year into the war. Years of imprisonment stretched ahead of them, and initially Neave resigned himself to his fate. He filled in the time with composition and meditation, writing half a fantastic novel about the life after death of a Regency peer, a study of Shakespeare’s sonnets and an essay on eccentrics for the camp magazine. He soon discovered the limits to the literary taste and sense of humour of English officers. His articles were rejected as unsuitable. The days thus passed wearily, and when he came to write his accomplished account of his adventures he preferred to draw a veil over these early efforts.

There were few attempts to escape. On one occasion, the officers who got away were captured and beaten up by drunken German civilians. Surprisingly, escape was considered bad form by the senior British officers, who had successfully imposed a pre-war army system of discipline and class values inside the camp. They argued that escape for one or two men would invite reprisals on the hundreds left behind, and even threatened unsuccessful escapers with court martial, though they were not in a position to carry out the threat. Low morale and poor rations also contributed to the ‘anti-escape’ attitude.

However, in the autumn of 1940, Red Cross parcels began arriving, improving health and lifting spirits. Would-be fugitives could now hoard ‘iron rations’ to sustain them during any planned flight. Opportunities for escape also increased in December 1940 when Neave and others were moved to a new camp in the wooded village below the castle. They were closer to a Stalag, a camp for non-commissioned officers and rank and file, who went on working parties outside the wire where the prospects for escape were more frequent. Neave, by now bored by the deadening routine of reading, talking and waiting for Red Cross parcels, sought to transfer himself to the Stalag. Life in the new camp brought new frustrations. The prisoners were closer to society and woke every morning to the sounds of the farmyard. Such proximity sometimes made them feel part of normal life but at the same time reminded them they were not. Here, Neave passed the winter ‘in discomfort, but without great suffering, unless it were of the soul’. His stomach became accustomed to the meagre prison diet, and he was unable to eat a whole tinned steak and kidney pudding doled out to each prisoner on Christmas Day.

Before his plan to transfer to a Stalag could be implemented, however, Neave and his fellow POWs were suddenly transferred in February 1941 by train to Poland. Their destination was an ancient, moat-encircled Polish fortress on the River Vistula at Thorn (modern-day Torun), part of the huge encampment of Stalag XXa. (They later learned that they had been moved to this inhospitable spot as a reprisal for alleged ill-treatment of German prisoners in Canada.) At Thorn, officers were quartered in damp underground rooms, with little opportunity for exercise and none for escape. The fact that they were in Poland, a country about which they knew little, and hundreds of miles further east, made flight even more difficult. It was a soul-destroying existence, enlivened only by the daily rendition of ‘Abide With Me’ at sunset by a group of British orderlies on the drawbridge above the moat. Despite his imprisonment, Neave, who had been confirmed at St Ronan’s, did not lose his Christian faith, as some did. He later remarked that the singing of this hymn ‘was the only moment of hope and reality in all our dismal day’.

The main compound, for several hundred British NCOs and men, was three miles away. Neave quickly realised that this site was his best hope of escape. Several of the men from his own Searchlight Battery captured after the fall of Calais were in the hutted camp, and he communicated with them through working parties that came every day to the fortress. As required by camp discipline, Neave took his plan to the senior British officer, Brigadier the Hon. N.F. Somerset DSO, MC. He proposed to escape from the hut used by a captured British dentist to treat POWs. The ‘surgery’ consisted of a treatment room, waiting room and a lavatory behind it with a corrugated iron roof. Neave, with his co-escaper Flying Officer Norman Forbes, planned to slip away from the dentist’s hut, and then hide for a few days among the teeming throng of ‘other ranks’ inside the camp, before making a break from an outside working party. Neave’s fellow officers in his room mocked his plan, but it was approved by Brigadier Somerset. He was ‘paired’ with Forbes, an RAF Hurricane pilot who had been shot down over the French coast, because he spoke fluent German. It was an excellent match. Forbes, Neave decided, was of original mind, more practical than himself and a man of great determination.

Theirs was not the first escape bid. Several other officers had tried to get out of Spangenburg, and three Canadian flying officers dressed in fake Luftwaffe uniforms had almost succeeded in stealing a German aeroplane to fly to neutral Sweden. They had swapped places with men on an outside working party to reach the aerodrome and were only detected by their ignorance of German. Tougher controls on movement in and out of the fort were introduced after that but Neave was undeterred. He bought a workman’s coat and pair of trousers from a British officer who had given up thoughts of escape to read for a law degree, and a fellow officer with artistic skills made him a forged civilian pass, identifying him as a carpenter from the town of Bromberg.

Neave was not very thorough in his escape plans. For instance, he had no travel papers for the hazardous 200-mile journey across Poland to where he believed the Soviet front lines to be, nor had he much money, only a few Reichsmarks and a ‘medieval faith’ that his store of tinned food and chocolate would see him through. Escaping east was a doubly dangerous business. The Soviet authorities looked with deep suspicion on Allied escapers. They sometimes interned them, or worse. As Neave noted: ‘Few British soldiers who reached the Russian lines during this period were heard of again.’³ The pair planned to make contact with the Polish Resistance in Warsaw, with a view to linking up with the Red Army on the Russian armistice line at Brest-Litovsk. Alternatively, and rather fantastically, they hoped to do better than the Canadians by stealing an aeroplane at Graudenz, north of Warsaw, and flying to Sweden. Neave had two copies of a sketch plan of the aerodrome.

As he lay on his bunk bed, day after day, Neave fantasised about freedom. His sole desire was to be free of the terrible monotony of the fort. Once outside and under the stars he imagined he would care little what happened to him. He dreamed of nights sheltering in the shade of some romantic forest, alone in the world. He would be happy if he could be free if only for a while. Such daydreaming indicated an obsessive desire to get out, one sadly unmatched by the organisational planning required to sustain a successful escape. On 16 April 1941, Neave and Forbes joined the small detachment of officers being marched to the dentist’s surgery. It was a warm spring morning, with signs of new growth in the fields around. The prisoners joked with their guards: ‘Back home by Christmas!’ an unsuspecting German ribbed Neave. ‘Certainly!’ he replied, laughing.

Everything was ready at the dentist’s. Under the roof of the lavatory hut, Neave’s go-between, an army sergeant, had hidden bundles of wood for them to collect as part of their deception. The dentist treated Neave’s gums with iodine and he divulged their escape plans. The dentist smiled and shook his hand. Back in the waiting room, Neave waited until 11.00 a.m. before asking to go to the lavatory. The attention of the guards outside was distracted by a fast-talking prisoner. Once inside the lavatory hut, Neave took off his greatcoat and hid it where the wood had been secreted and waited for Forbes. His companion swiftly joined him, and at a low whistle from the sergeant they strolled out with their bundles, wearing unmarked battledress uniforms. They walked unchallenged towards the main entrance of the camp, joshing one another as they walked, in the habit of British POWs. The German guard on the gate, who was chatting to a British corporal, showed no interest in them. He was not on the lookout for people breaking into the camp. Neave and Forbes walked casually to one of the huts, where Company Sergeant Major Thornborough of the Green Howards ushered them to their new quarters at the far end. There they discussed plans for their concealment with Neave’s former Searchlight Battery Quartermaster-Sergeant Kinnear. Their disappearance would be discovered as soon as the dentist’s detachment was recounted, and the pair would have to hide in the hut for several days until the German search parties were called off. They lay on their bunks savouring the moment, before Thornborough called them out to watch the entertainment. By now the guards had realised they were two dental patients short, and a hullaballoo ensued. Neave and Forbes, each equipped with a brush and pail as part of their escape props, looked on as heavily armed soldiers set off for the woods with maps and dogs, in pursuit of the men watching them from inside the wire.

Lying on their bunks, or hiding beneath them during hut searches, the escapers waited and waited, tortured by fears that a stool pigeon in the camp might give them away. It was clear from their repeated searches of the huts that the Germans believed they were still in the camp, and their helpers in the warrant officers’ hut (‘a homely place’, Neave observed, spick and span as a British barracks) risked severe reprisals if they were unearthed. They were anxious to get someone back to England to report their plight, as rations were inadequate and some POWs had not survived the long Polish winter. ‘Their selflessness touched me deeply,’ Neave recorded. During their three-day stay, they mixed as equals, without reference to rank, united by a common objective to defy the enemy.

Early in the morning of 19 April, Neave and Forbes fell in with a working party of more than a hundred men and marched out of the camp into the countryside, singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘The Quartermaster’s Stores’. The next stage of their escape had been worked out by their camp hosts. They were to hide in a hay barn, and make a final break for freedom at night. Meanwhile, they worked under the gaze of armed guards, filling palliasses with straw. At one stage, Neave, stopping work to seek out a hiding place, feared he had been identified by a German officer who ordered him to get on with his job and kept him under close surveillance thereafter. But the day passed without incident, except that the food lorry brought two extra men to take their place on the return to camp. In the late afternoon, a corporal motioned Neave and Forbes to their hiding place in the rafters of the barn. Here they stayed until ten that night, silent and unobserved. Then they concealed their army uniforms in the hay and donned workmen’s clothes, complete with Polish ski caps made from army blankets. They had now become Volksdeutscher, or German nationals, who had been sent to live in eastern Poland by the Nazis.

One of the barn doors was padlocked but the other was secured only by a wooden bar held in place by twisted wire which the corporal had already loosened. It was the work of moments before they were out in the open farmyard. Through the dark, they could make out the farmhouse, which was used by Germans as a mess. A dog growled and then barked, and they froze as an officer looked out to satisfy himself that there was nothing untoward, before bolting the door. Clambering over a high wooden fence, they could make out the profile of low hills where the Germans had an artillery firing range. They walked quickly across marshy ground, fearful of the noise of tracker dogs and torchlight pursuers, but they had got clean away. Neave rapturously breathed the fresh air of freedom. ‘It was like walking on air,’ he remembered. They stumbled through a landscape pockmarked by shell holes. Their route took them into a wood, along rides between the trees towards the town of Alexandrov, some twenty miles distant. Occasionally, they saw lights and once, near a small settlement, a dog disturbed the night silence. They hurriedly took refuge in the dark banks of trees.

It was hard work. The heavy rucksack of tinned food dug irritatingly into Neave’s shoulder, while beneath his thin workman’s clothes he sweated in thick Red Cross underwear. By 4. 30 in the morning they had covered ten miles, and stopped to fortify themselves with chocolate and an apple. A cold wind sprung up, bringing rain. Swinging his tins of sardines and condensed milk on to aching shoulders, Neave and his companion trudged on. There was no mistaking the amateurish nature of their enterprise: ‘These were the pioneer days of 1941, when escape was not a science but an emotional outburst,’ he admitted later. ‘I thought of an escape as a kind of hiking tour … as for Forbes and myself, we were tramps or hoboes, glad to be at large.’⁴

Dawn found the pair by the railway line which ran from Podgorz and Sluzewo, checking their compass to keep on a southeasterly direction to Warsaw, 150 miles away. They tramped on, bypassing Alexandrov and keeping to the fields to avoid German patrols. The early morning rain turned heavier, soaking and dispiriting the pair. They took refuge in a Polish farmhouse, where two young women watched wordlessly as they stripped naked and dried their clothes before the open fire. Resuming their march through sodden fields, they came upon evidence of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on Poland in the autumn of 1939: Polish army helmets perched atop rough white crosses, burned-out farmhouses and barns, a shattered chapel with a crucifix broken in two. At nightfall, lost in a labyrinth of cart tracks, they sought shelter in another Polish farmhouse. A farmworker listened to them ask the way to Wlocawek (German Leslau), smiled and answered in English. The farmer there was ‘Tscherman [German] … very bad’. He suddenly appeared, shouting at the farmworker as if he were a dog, and the escapers fled. Deeper in the countryside, they came on another farm, where they were welcomed by the old man of the house and his two daughters. Neave stood awkwardly in the living room, pointing to his soaked and torn trousers. The old man spoke to one of his daughters and she left the room, returning with a pair of peasant’s corduroy trousers. They had no fly buttons and Neave cut off the buttons from his painter’s trousers for the girl to sew on, which she did, blushing and giggling. No money changed hands. Neave was conscious of the dangers the family ran in helping them. Another Pole came to warn that the German farmer was looking for them, and fear was evident in the way they talked. ‘A great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror,’ Neave recalled. ‘Was it to destroy these simple lives that I had escaped?’⁵ They could sleep in the barn, said the old man, but they must leave at dawn.

After a fitful night in the hay, the pair resumed their forced march to Wlocawek. Neave shaved by a stream and cooled his blistered feet. He reflected how oddly domestic it seemed, using Elastoplast to dress his sores. By mid-afternoon on their second day of freedom, they reached Wlocawek. Resting by the River Vistula, they were spotted by a German officer, who went away without speaking. Once in the town, they were overwhelmed by the ubiquity of Nazi flags and emblems, even above the doors of workmen’s cottages, until they realised the date: it was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. In Wlocawek Neave witnessed an act of thoughtless Nazi brutality: a young SS thug assaulted a Jew wearing the Star of David on his back for not saluting his troop, sending the man flying into the gutter and his hat across the road. No one dared pick it up. That evening, they again sought refuge at a farm but realised they were among the enemy. The family was German, the boy of the family sporting a swastika belt bearing the legend Gott Mit Uns. They escaped into the cover of a pine forest and huddled together for warmth, worn out by their ordeal.

By the third morning of their escape, Neave was in a state of physical exhaustion. The regime of a poor diet and lack of proper exercise during almost a year of captivity was taking its toll. He felt that he had ‘lost his feet’, which had deteriorated to ‘raw stumps’ dragging along the ground. Their pace slowed. Hauling themselves painfully along rough tracks, they halted from time to time to sleep and regain their strength. Apart from a lonely woodman, they met no one. They crossed the Vistula by a rail bridge taking the line south from Plock, and in the evening approached the village of Gombin. It was empty and unwelcoming. They stumbled on the road to Warsaw, looking for shelter but finding none. The pair lay down in a ploughed field, endeavouring to sleep but waking regularly to keep their circulation going. Their reserves of chocolate had gone, forcing them to eat a revolting mixture of condensed milk and tinned sardines. ‘I thought the night would never end,’ recollected Neave.

When it did, they set off without breakfasting but with as much vigour as they could muster to reach their goal, Warsaw, by nightfall. Trudging across interminable ploughed farmland, they reached the agricultural town of Itow, thirty miles from the capital. Beyond Itow they would be in the frontier zone of the General-Government of Poland, the remnant of Polish territory left between the Russians and western Poland handed over to German nationals. They had no papers to enter this zone and only a haphazard idea of where the actual frontier lay. Three miles further on from Itow, they came to another run-down village, and asked a woman where the border was. Nervously, she replied ‘It is here’, and fled. Pain and weariness conspired to rob them of vigilance as they walked through the village, towards the frontier post alongside a guardhouse, which was apparently unmanned. They strode through the gate, straight into the arms of two watching German sentries sitting by the roadside, rifles by their sides. They did not have the strength to run away. The soldiers, remembered by Neave as big, stupid and fresh-faced, asked them for their papers. Forbes, the German speaker, admitted that they had none. But everyone had to have papers to cross the General-Government, the soldiers insisted. Surely these men knew that. ‘We were only going to visit our mother, who is sick in Sochaczew,’ said Forbes. ‘This is my brother.’ They were led into the guardhouse where a German official, a whip hanging on the wall behind him, bawled ‘Attention, Polish swine!’

He then instructed the sentries to take Forbes outside while he interrogated the exhausted Neave, who mumbled his prepared explanation that he was a Volksdeutsch from Bromberg. Desperate with fatigue, his brain refused to function. He forgot his limited stock of German and spoke haltingly. The official laughed and brandished the whip in his face. Neave stuck to his story, hoping to give time for Forbes to make a run for it. ‘I could not. I no longer cared that I was caught again or even if this brutal official were to flog me to death,’ he admitted.⁶ After a few minutes, Neave gave up the unequal struggle and brought from under his shirt the metal disc identifying him as Prisoner of War No. 1198. His enthusiastic but ill-prepared bid for freedom was over. Had his grasp of German been better, or his exhaustion not so complete, he might have bluffed his way through. It was not to be.

Pandemonium broke out. Forbes was brought back into the guardhouse, and another official woke from his sleep and joined in the general clamour. Neave’s co-escaper tried manfully to cope with their accusations. ‘You are not Englishmen, but Polish spies,’ they cried. ‘This is a matter for the Gestapo.’ Neave’s accuser gabbled down the telephone, his dog-tired prisoners barely understanding what was being said. They were then marched back to Itow by a soldier, who, conscious of their condition, did not hustle them. Neave noticed Forbes discreetly tearing up his map of Graudenz aerodrome, which might suggest they were indeed spies, and panicked. Where had he put the other copy? From the police station at Itow they were driven back under guard to Plock, which turned out to be a down-at-heel town swarming with SS. Their lorry dropped them outside a modern block and Neave’s heart missed a beat. By the door, he saw a board carrying the legend ‘GESTAPO’. Their worst fears had been realised.

The two men were taken to a small room where an SS officer and an interrogator in plain clothes asked them more questions and ordered them to empty their pockets. Pitiful remnants of their bid for freedom – bits of chocolate and bread, scraps of paper, a match box disguising a compass – spilled on to the table. The plain-clothes interrogator sorted through these items disdainfully and then seized on a small, folded piece of paper from Neave’s wallet. It was the map of Graudenz aerodrome. ‘So, my friends, you are from the Secret Service!’ he said triumphantly. Unbeknownst to Neave, Graudenz was a bomber station, from which the Luftwaffe would attack the Soviet Union at the outset of Operation Barbarossa only two months later.

Neave was taken to an upper floor where a young, uniformed SS officer questioned him closely in English, while a typist took down his answers. Years later he confessed, ‘I was in great terror, though I tried to appear calm and innocent.’⁷ Neave insisted to his interrogator that he had got the idea from other prisoners, working near Graudenz, which was half true. He had been inspired by the Canadian flying officers at Thorn and had planned to escape by stealing an aeroplane, because Forbes was a pilot. ‘You are lying,’ said his inquisitor. ‘You are a spy. You were taking this to the Russians.’ Neave maintained that they were not, and told the curious officer that they were trying ‘the same game’ as the Canadian escape, of which his captor was unaware. The SS officer telephoned Thorn camp and received verification that there had been just such an escape bid, and that prisoners Neave and Forbes were indeed missing. Gradually, the tension eased. They were joined by another SS man, and began talking more casually about the war, referring to a map on the wall. Neave’s brave sally that Britain would win the war prompted cynical laughter. They asked if Polish peasants had helped their escape, and Neave, still wearing his peasant’s corduroy trousers, diverted the questioning to German mistreatment of the Poles. The SS men showed utter contempt for the Poles and their Catholicism, but they ceased interrogating him about spying. Neave’s composure gradually returned. He asked his blond young interlocutor what he had been doing before the war, and, with his resentful admission that he had been at university studying for his doctorate of philosophy, the interrogation ended. Neave and Forbes were marched through the streets of Plock under armed guard to the town prison and put into solitary confinement. Their pathetic civilian disguises were exchanged for coarse grey prison clothes. Neave slept for several hours before being roused for his evening ‘meal’, a bowl of swill containing bad potatoes and swedes. The Polish orderly boy, in prison clothes, whispered that the other inmates knew their identity, and managed some patriotic sentiments before continuing his round.

But Neave’s ordeal was not yet over. Above the door of his cell a notice identified him as ‘Neave, Airey. Spion’. For two days, he recovered in his cell, sleeping most of the time between ‘lunch’ of bread and turnip soup and a half-hour exercise period. Separated with Forbes from the other inmates, he hobbled round the prison courtyard, quietly exchanging details of their interrogation. To Neave’s relief, Forbes had given the same story about the aerodrome map. They had already concocted an agreed version of their escape from the camp, exonerating British other ranks. Neave’s reverie was interrupted some days after the initial interrogation by his gaoler’s curt insistence: ‘The Gestapo wants you.’

Back in the Gestapo building, he had a new, more vicious interrogator, this one with close-cropped black hair and a scarred face. He was just finishing questioning a defiant Polish woman, to whom Neave offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Go on, smile you English officer,’ raged his Nazi debriefer. ‘You started this war. You brought these Poles into it. Both of you are spies! Spies! Spies!’ The SS man glowered at Neave, with, as he thought, ‘murder in his eyes’, and challenged his cover story. The Graudenz map, he shouted, must have come from a Pole. Neave reiterated that it had come from a British prisoner of war. Who? He refused to say. Then, English gentleman, added the plain-clothes SS man, he would remain a guest of the Gestapo until he thought better of his obstinacy. Suddenly the officer softened, becoming for a moment a soldier like Neave. The prisoner should not think, he said, that just because he was in civilian clothes he had not fought like the lieutenant. In fact, he had seen action on the Polish Front, and a small ribbon in his button denoted an award for bravery. ‘Go, Herr Neave, and think things over,’ he admonished.

Back in his prison cell, Neave contemplated his position. He trembled at the prospect of further interrogation, fearing that if physically tortured he would reveal more of the truth. He felt defenceless and alone, anxious lest he face execution like the Polish officer in the cell opposite sentenced to death for killing a Gestapo agent. He prayed, cursed and patrolled his cell agitatedly. ‘I closed my eyes, and despair came over me like a great fog,’ he wrote later.⁸ ‘I could not see a way out of the darkness.’ In his dreams he was tramping through swamps of dark, stagnant water on the road to Russia, the way marked with the bones of former travellers. The next morning brought relief; he was awoken by the warder who addressed him as Herr Leutnant, and told him he was going back to Thorn ‘with Oberleutnant Forbes’. Once again, he was a British officer. The attitude of his gaolers changed markedly. They were handed back their civilian clothes, including the hated rucksack with its remaining sardines and condensed milk. Neave also retrieved his pipe, tobacco and the box of matches with its concealed compass. With Teutonic thoroughness, everything had been returned, except the map that almost cost him his life. He had memorised the layout of Graudenz, however.

After ten days, the escapers were taken back by train from Plock to Thorn, along the north bank of the Vistula that had been their bearing for Warsaw. They talked amiably of the war to their guards, who knew less than they did. The POWs at Thorn had a radio receiver smuggled in in a medicine ball from Spangenburg. Their welcome at Thorn was less agreeable than their departure from the clutches of the Gestapo. A furious German officer, whose guards had allowed them to escape, drew his revolver and marched them ‘Hande hoch’ to windowless dungeons in the outer wall of the fortress. When they protested at the pigsty conditions a sentry thrust his gun down the ventilation hole into Neave’s cell. ‘If you are swinehounds, you must expect to be kept in pigsties,’ he yelled. Neave threatened to report his filthy language to the Kommandant and the gun was hastily withdrawn.

After a night in appalling conditions, they were locked in a room above the keep, without furniture but for two beds, while weighing over their failed escape bid. They came to one maddeningly simple, but vitally important, conclusion. They had tried to cross the Polish countryside too quickly and without method. ‘We had, as it were, charged the barricade of the General-Government frontier without calculation,’ he decided. And yet they had got so close to Warsaw. It would have been comparatively simple to skirt the ill-defined border through the woods and make their way to the capital. Moreover, in such inhospitable terrain, an escaper had to understand the strain his vulnerability would place on his spirit. ‘Loneliness and physical stress undermine the most resolute,’ he wrote.⁹ The escaper must conserve his forces by lying up in the warmth for long periods. The lessons of this failed escape bid were not lost on him.

On being sent back to his room in the fort, Neave found that his short period of freedom had given him fresh strength. He went back to the novels of Victorian England that reminded him so much of home, and found an inner peace. One night, after he had finished Mrs Henry Wood’s sentimental melodrama, East Lynne, he was roughly roused by a German guard and told that he was being moved immediately. ‘We have had enough trouble with you,’ said the guard. Gathering his few belongings in a bundle, he joined a small party of prisoners among whom he recognised Forbes. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ asked Neave. ‘To the Bad Boys’ Camp at Colditz,’ came the reply.

5 Colditz

High above the Saxony town of Colditz broods an impregnable castle surrounded on three sides by sheer rock precipices, approached only by a narrow cobbled causeway over a deep moat. Infuriated by the frequent escapes of Allied officers, the Nazis decided to concentrate here, in a Sonderlager, or punishment camp, the most recalcitrant of the ‘bad boys’ from other camps in Occupied Europe. Colditz was thought to be escape-proof, and indeed it had proved to be so in the First World War when it housed Allied POWs. The logic was understandable but erroneous. By putting all the most determined officers together in Oflag IVc, the German High Command effectively established an escape academy, which scored an impressive number of ‘home runs’ in the five and a half years of its existence. ‘We made things better for our prisoners by cramming Colditz with new escape material week after week,’ confessed the camp intelligence officer in a frank post-mortem. Every new arrival brought knowledge of new methods of escape, of fresh routes, or documents, of checks on trains and the like. ‘In this castle, the prisoners had the interior lines of communication, and the initiative as well.’¹

This did not seem to be the case at all when the first British officers arrived in the autumn of 1940. Captain Patrick Reid, the chairman of the British escape committee, recollected that the prisoners could see their future prison almost upon leaving the station: ‘beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink into our boots’. Schloss Colditz towered over the town of the same name and the River Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. The castle was rebuilt on much older foundations, dating back to 1014, in the early eighteenth century by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (known as ‘the Strong’ because of his tireless sexual drive: he is supposed to have fathered 365 children). The castle had seen many sieges and sackings and even its name betrayed its fortunes. Colditz is a Slav word-ending, dating from the time it was occupied by the Poles. Its original name was Koldyeze. The town, essentially an overgrown village, was situated in the centre of a triangle formed by the big cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. The land surrounding the castle was hilly and wooded, known locally as ‘little Switzerland’, and levelled out northwards into a fertile agricultural plain. It was buried deep in the Reich, 400 miles from the nearest neutral territory, Switzerland.

Since its abandonment by the Saxon royal family in 1800, Colditz had housed prisoners of one sort or another. In the 1920s it was a mental asylum, and when he came to power in 1933 Hitler used the castle to incarcerate his enemies, real or imagined, and to train the Hitler Youth. Its outer walls were 7 feet thick, resting on a rock face that rises 200 feet above the river. The inner courtyard, where the English officers were to live, rose a further 60 feet. Their cells were six storeys high with iron bars on the windows. Searchlights played on the walls all night, and in these early days at least there were more guards than prisoners. It was a truly forbidding place, designed to dishearten would-be fugitives.

The first prisoners of the Second World War were Polish officers, who arrived in the autumn of 1939 when Colditz was no more than a transit camp. With the outbreak of war in Western Europe the following year, it was designated a Special Camp, and French and Belgian officers started to arrive. The first British officers reached the castle in early November 1940. This advance guard of three Canadian RAF flying officers was boosted by a group of six army officers recaptured after escaping from a camp near Salzburg.

Colditz was designated Oflag (Offizierslager) IVc and came under the command of Werhmacht Group Four, based in Dresden. The Germans derived their authority to establish a special camp from Section 48 of the Geneva Convention which permitted strict surveillance, though without loss of any other prisoners’ rights as provided by this agreement. ‘In effect, this camp had a greater number of searches, roll-calls and so on than in the normal camps, and much less room to move around in – just a forty-yards square courtyard, and no open space except the park outside, which might only be visited for short and fixed periods daily under some restriction and much surveillance,’ wrote Reinhold Eggers, latterly in charge of security at the prison.² Oberst Prawitz was the Kommandant during Neave’s spell there. The German guards were mainly drawn from middle-aged and even elderly men called up to serve their country, though some had seen action in the First World War.

The prospect of moving to Colditz, of which he knew virtually nothing (not even where it was), contrarily lifted Neave’s spirits. The atmosphere of public school and university still permeated officers’ lives, and the idea of ‘a camp for naughty boys, a sort of borstal’ did not disturb him. He was flattered to be singled out so early in his POW career as a nuisance to the enemy. ‘I was like a boy who, flogged by the headmaster, proudly displays the stripes on his backside,’ he confessed later. As the British contingent passed across the drawbridge of Thorn fortress before dawn that late spring morning, he even looked forward to new adventures.

To begin with, a long train journey offered another opportunity for escape. As they travelled slowly south, the prisoners scanned the countryside and looked for weaknesses in their armed escort, but they were heavily guarded and even accompanied when they went to the lavatory. It was not a pleasant trip. When they changed trains at Posen, the POWs were spat upon. Neave cultivated the guard sitting next to him, a garrulous, middle-aged toyshop keeper from the Dresden area who had been called up for military service. Hoping to give his well-meaning guard the slip en route, Neave so shamelessly played on his feelings of homesickness that tears came to ‘his stupid blue eyes’. It was not perhaps an attractive thing to do, but his manipulation of the guard showed just how obsessive the idea of escape had become.

At Dresden they changed trains again. Here, Neave took the opportunity to study the master race off guard: waiting for trains, dozing, wolfing down Wurst and margarine sandwiches, showing their tickets and papers to the railway police. It was a useful chance to reconnoitre the railway system. Prisoners and guards alike slept with their heads on the waiting-room tables, but an alert Neave kept up the conversation with his toy merchant. They fell into a serious discussion about what would happen after the war. The shopkeeper said there were many Communists in Dresden, and they would simply change their brown shirts for red. He asked Neave for his address in Britain, and took him to a secluded part of the waiting room where railway workers were drinking morning coffee and the conversation flowed freely. Neave was surprised at how amenable they were to his seditious propaganda. As the discourse deepened, he edged away unnoticed on his chair towards the door. He was within a yard of an impromptu escape when his guard turned round and asked: ‘More coffee, Englishman?’ He could not refuse and his chance had gone. Soon after they were herded out on to the platform for the train to Colditz. In later years, Neave thought often of the toyshop soldier, so genuine in his hatred for the war and his captive’s tribulation. In his classic account of his wartime experiences published eleven years after that morning in Dresden, Neave wrote: ‘Now I feel almost ashamed of my attempt to take advantage of his good nature.’ In 1946, the shopkeeper wrote to the address Neave had given him, complaining of his fate under the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany, and asking for help. Neave replied in the most general terms to avoid exciting the attention of Communist censors. This incident provoked an unusual outburst of personal philosophy from Neave: ‘Some hypocrite has called this the century of the Common Man,’ he remarked, ‘but in no age have common men suffered more for being human and kindly.’³

On the short, crowded train journey from Dresden, Neave studied his fellow passengers. In his compartment, a German officer took in the sight of British POWs in battledress uniforms and muttered nervously to his gargantuan Hausfrau Hilde: ‘Kriegsgefangener!’ (prisoners of war). She spent the journey complaining loudly about the flight of Hitler’s right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, on 10 May. Why did the Führer not stop him? Where did he get the plane? This was news indeed. Hilde was very cross. Hess had apparently parachuted into Scotland from a Luftwaffe plane, bearing a message of reconciliation to the Duke of Hamilton, and had promptly been interned. (Neave would later meet him in a cell at Nuremberg, where he served war crimes charge papers on him.) On this morning, however, the mere mention of Hess’s name in front of the enemy prompted the browbeaten officer to silence his wife. The prisoners broke into smiles. Neave lit his pipe and winked at his comrades-in-arms.

The party of five ‘bad boys’ arrived at Colditz in the early morning of 14 May 1941. They were drawn up at the station and marched across the cobbled Bahnhofstrasse and up Badergasse, crossing the shallow but fast-flowing River Mulde by a wide, modern bridge 50 yards long. From here, they skirted the main square and trooped up the short, cobbled access road to the castle, across the moat bridge and through the great gates of the inner courtyard. ‘I felt the battlements close in, enfolding us, so that I looked round in fear,’ Neave recalled later. ‘White faces peered at me from the windows, and men in strange clothes paced up and down in the shadows.’⁴ Then he spotted John Hyde-Thomson, an officer of the Durham Light Infantry who had also escaped from Thorn, clattering along the cobbles in clogs to welcome him. He was quickly made to feel at home, not just with the contingent of twenty British prisoners but with the polyglot community of Poles, French, Belgian, Dutch and Serb POWs. After the depression of Thorn, Colditz, for all its forbidding appearance, was like escaping from a turgid political meeting to ‘a salon filled with wit and self-confidence’.

Incredibly, among the small British company were three clergymen from the Chaplains’ Department. One, J. Ellison Platt, an army Methodist chaplain who had chosen to stay with the wounded at Dunkirk rather than get away, observed the newcomers. In his diary, published long after the war, Platt recorded on the day of Neave’s arrival that the camp was rapidly filling up. The French contingent numbered two hundred ‘and the British increase by ones and twos daily’.⁵ The padres led the latest intake up a stone staircase to a large hall on the first floor, where all but the most senior British officers lived. Neave felt as if he were being ushered by masters to a school for waifs and strays. After a meal of hot stew, German bread and lard, they were escorted to smaller rooms off the mess hall where they were allocated bunks. Neave immediately fell into a deep sleep.

He was roused at 7.30 the next morning by the shouts of ‘Aufstehen’ (get up) by German NCOs walking through the dormitories. Thereafter he was inducted into the daily routine. Breakfast, of ersatz German coffee made from acorns, bread and margarine, was brought up to their quarters half an hour later by British orderlies. At 8.30 all the prisoners assembled in their national contingents in the courtyard for Appell – roll-call. After much laborious counting and saluting, the prisoners were allowed to get on with their hobbies: reading, music lessons, language lessons and exercise. The daily routine altered little, until the escapes began in earnest, when the Germans instituted more roll-calls to reduce the opportunities for getting out. ‘Lunch’, usually a thick barley gruel very occasionally containing pork skin, was served at 12.30, and the final roll-call took place at 9.00 p.m. Soon after, they were locked into their cells for ‘lights out’. For undergraduates of Colditz academy, however, this was simply the signal to start a night shift of intense activity.

Perhaps with some overstatement, Neave later insisted that every single officer in the castle had but a single thought – to escape. Lord Campbell of Alloway QC, then plain Alan Campbell, a young army officer who was one of the first to be sent to Oflag IVc, remembers: ‘One spent most of one’s time trying to escape. We were always planning escapes or doing escapes.’⁶ Campbell occupied the bunk below Neave and so observed him at close quarters. ‘We never quarrelled. I found him agreeable, amusing. But I never got to know him. He was a withdrawn, distant character, with a slightly isolationist, ruthless streak.’ Ken Lockwood, a stockbroker in civilian life who looked after the British ‘shop’ and supplied would-be escapers with German money, comments that Neave in particular was keen to get out, but points out: ‘We couldn’t all escape. One accepted that. But the object of the exercise was to get somebody out of the camp and if possible get them away successfully.’ He concurs with Alloway’s assessment that Neave was ‘very quiet, very much his own man. I don’t think any of us got to know him really well.’⁷

The prisoners engaged in a restless battle with the ‘goons’, as the hapless German guards were known, and they were endlessly busy looking for anything that might aid themselves, or others, to get out. Neave plunged himself into this hive of industry with relish, delighted that he no longer had to fear the mild disapproval of fellow inmates content to live out the war that he had experienced in previous camps. Eggers deplored the attitude of his recalcitrant charges. ‘Indiscipline, I can truly say, was the unspoken order of the day on their side: indiscipline often amounting to plain personal insolence, or at least studied offhandedness.’⁸ He singled out the British as being particularly obstreperous. They even used occasional excursions to the town football ground to show off how well turned out and disciplined they could be while marching through the streets, giving chocolate to the children, until this privilege was stopped. The Germans realised they were mounting a magnificent piece of counter-propaganda, at their own expense.

Neave was not involved in the first serious attempt at a British breakout, which took place only a month after he arrived. Twelve officers, including two Poles, tunnelled their way out of the canteen, having successfully (as they believed) bribed a German guard 700 Reichsmarks to look the other way when they made their exit on to a small patch of grass beneath the parapet. The sentry accepted the down payment of 100 marks, and promptly betrayed them to the Kommandantur. The sentry was allowed to keep the money, promoted, sent on leave and given a War Service Medal.

Watching this botched escape from his window at two in the morning, Neave brooded on the shortcomings of tunnels as the best way to get out. Escapers, he concluded, must pit their wits against something frailer than the castle walls – the Germans themselves, as the last escapers had in part tried to do. The gap in their defence seemed to lie in the hope that the guards would be deceived by a bold attempt to leave by the front gate dressed in German uniform. While he pondered this plan, Neave joined ‘the board’ of an international tunnel, comprising British, French, Polish and Belgian officers. He had scant confidence in the project, but in a schoolboyish way he felt he had a place in the second eleven. The tunnel was started under a bed in the sick bay and went through the floor of the Red Cross parcel room below. From there, the international consortium argued about what direction to take. Nonetheless, they worked with a vigour, using broken knives, forks, door latches – anything metal they could lay their hands on – until four months later the tunnel stretched for 20 feet beneath the Red Cross room floor. Neave had no faith in its success, but he believed in the self-discipline that all escaping activity encouraged. It strengthened the spirit of POWs, occupied their mind and reduced the tedium that could otherwise drive them to distraction.

Two nights a week, Neave toiled flat on his stomach, a handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the choking dust. Disposal of the debris was the most difficult thing for most of the obvious hiding places had already been bagged by other tunnellers. Neave and his crew stored great piles of dust and stones in the loft of the building, which eventually gave way, breaking a water pipe that showered French prisoners as they slept. While he worked away at this forlorn occupation, Neave continued to develop his own project. Through their ‘goon watch’, the prisoners knew all about the movement of German personnel throughout the castle. They now learned that everyone who entered the inner courtyard that housed the prisoners had to collect a numbered brass disc at the guardhouse, present it to the sentry on the inner gate, and return it to the guardhouse. Peter Allan, a second lieutenant in the Cameron Highlanders, bribed a visiting civilian painter to part with his brass pass, which went into the British cache of escaping material. However, the workman was obliged to report his ‘loss’, and the German officers warned their guards to be on the lookout for the missing disc.

Most importantly, Neave had to fashion for himself a ‘German’ military uniform that would be sufficiently convincing to get him past the guards. He had also to equip himself with civilian clothes capable of sustaining his disguise as a foreign worker all the way to Switzerland, the nearest neutral country 400 miles to the south. He thought first of bribing the very German guards he was attempting to fool to acquire a complete uniform, but he concluded that this might take years, and he was impatient to be free. So he resolved to make his own, despite admitting that he was hopeless with his hands.

Neave sacrificed a month’s supply of Red Cross chocolate to buy from a Polish officer what he later described as ‘an ancient tunic … in a remote sort of way it resembled in length and design that worn by German private soldiers’. It was the wrong colour – khaki rather than field-grey – and although he contemplated dyeing the tunic, this was beyond him. Instead he employed less subtle means: he applied layers of green paint normally used for making the scenery in the camp theatre. A Polish tailor sewed fake insignia, fashioned from cardboard and painted silver, on to the left breast. Dark green cloth epaulettes with the white numerals of an infantry regiment, a forage cap fashioned from a piece of Polish uniform, white piping and an amateurish cardboard badge with eagle’s wings completed this improbable disguise. He planned to wear RAF trousers for the escape, and lastly equipped himself with a pair of handsome jackboots bought from a Polish orderly with Red Cross provisions. Neave realised that his mock uniform would never pass muster in daylight. Even with the precious brass disc, he would have to pass through three sentry posts, and might also meet other soldiers who would see through his disguise.

Ellison Platt, the Methodist chaplain, noted in his prison diary for 28 August: ‘For weeks Anthony Neave has had no thought for anything but tailoring and dyeing.’ (After his first diary entry for 14 May, in which he uses Neave’s correct first name, Platt invariably wrote ‘Anthony’, a clear indication that this was how Neave was known, and wished to be known, in the camp.) Platt observed that Neave’s scheme was one of great audacity, adding: ‘It consisted of passing out of the main gates in the uniform of a German soldier. Since the time the maggot first entered his brain, every minute has been dedicated to “getting ready”.’ His first idea was to steal a uniform, which might be done ‘at a pinch’, but could prove very unpleasant if caught in an abortive escape. ‘So, on reflection, it would be better to take the long route and make it: during the period of making, nothing else has existed in the world. With an unethical fertility of invention he got hold of a mixture of several incredible substances which produce a lightish green field if applied to a khaki material.’ Not quite near enough for daylight, but, under artificial light, quite indistinguishable from the real thing, he noted. ‘The dyeing experiments have occupied a full three weeks.’ His swastikas, woven on tunic and hat, were extraordinarily well done, as was the belt, ‘a creation in tin and cardboard that deserved a better fate’.⁹

Neave was less convinced, later admitting: ‘I was only too aware of the fancy-dress appearance of my uniform, fit only for amateur theatricals,’ he wrote. ‘Prisoners, however, develop a blind faith in the most impracticable means of escape. They underestimate the risks, believing that some kindly Providence will surely aid them. For me, escaping was still a schoolboy adventure reminiscent of the books of G.A. Henty. I had yet to learn that success can only be learned by a minute mastery of detail and a study of the mind and methods of the enemy.’¹⁰

For now, he had only the haziest idea how he would get back to Blighty. He imagined himself stealing a bicycle from the outer courtyard and pedalling across the moat bridge to freedom in a hail of bullets. Pat Reid was unimpressed by Neave’s fake uniform but did not order him to abandon the project. It was agreed that he should go out at night, trusting to the darkness to mitigate his Gilbert and Sullivan appearance.

Then there was the problem of his ‘rifle’. German guards always carried a rifle and bayonet, even the lance-corporal, or Gefreiter, whom he was seeking to imitate. Neave decided that making a fake weapon would be too difficult, so he determined to be a soldier on special duty reporting to Hauptmann Priem, the camp’s duty officer. Even for this unlikely duty, he would need a bayonet in a scabbard. An officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, Scarlet O’Hara, carved one for him from a bed board, and decorated it with a buckle of tin foil on a cardboard belt. For civilian clothes, he dyed an RAF tunic in a vat of the lead from indelible pencils. He spent days, too, making a Tyrolean trilby, only to endure the mortification of it being seized during one of the regular German searches for escape materials. He had to make do with a sham ski cap. For the journey he believed was imminent, Neave equipped himself with a rough map of the Swiss frontier and a makeshift foreign worker’s identity card. He also had a small amount of German money, around 50 Reichsmarks (the equivalent of just over £3 at the wartime exchange rate). These he was instructed to carry in a Cellophane wrapping inserted into his rectum. His attempts to practise this manoeuvre gave his fellow officers much entertainment.

He was now ready, indeed restless, to go. The project had taken over his life. Daytime was spent in a frenzied round of preparation. By night, he dreamed of being on the run to freedom. 28 August 1941 was chosen for the break – little more than three months after he had entered Colditz in fear. The weather was very hot. Neave attended the nine o’clock roll-call wearing his British army greatcoat over his amateurish Gefreiter uniform. When the German officers gave the order to dismiss, the prisoners scattered to their quarters, while the guards lined up to go off duty. A fellow officer quickly removed Neave’s greatcoat. Jamming the sham forage cap on to his head, he walked briskly to the massive courtyard door. There was not much light at the gate, Reinhold Eggers recalled later, for the searchlights tended to be shone on the walls above, rather than on the gate. The German guards were in a hurry to get back to the guardroom and the German NCO on duty only looked casually at the numbered passes pushed into his hand.

Here was Neave’s chance. He presented his brass disc to the Unteroffizier at the gate and went through his carefully rehearsed lines. ‘I have a message for the Kommandant from the duty officer.’ He was allowed through the half-open door. As Neave turned quickly left and marched on down to the outer gate, a giddy sense of relief flooded through him. He walked quickly, his jackboots resounding with a military ring on the cobbled stones. In a virtual delirium, he imagined himself acting in a theatre without an audience, giving a performance for his own pleasure. The first archway through which he had to pass loomed up ahead.

Then, a brutal return to reality. Neave had gone left, not right, to the guardroom with the other German soldiers. And the NCO was not sure about his face. He looked again at the disc. It was the Number 26 about which he had been warned. According to Eggers, the sentry yelled ‘Halt!’, but ‘Number 26’ walked on. Other guards joined in the shouting, but ‘Number 26’ merely quickened his step.

Neave tried to ignore the shouts but then committed a fatal error. He turned round, and in the arc lights the painful inadequacy of his comic opera costume was plain for all to see. The scenery paint on his tunic and the forage cap of which he was so proud glowed in the artificial light. ‘I was a figure of the underworld, a demon king under the spotlights in a Christmas pantomime,’ as he later confessed.¹¹ Neave turned back and ran towards the archway and the bicycle that was to take him to freedom. But from the archway came a second, firmer voice: ‘Halt, or I fire.’

Realising that further resistance was pointless, Neave turned back again towards the guardroom and put his hands in the air. The archway guard stuck a rifle in his back and all the soldiers in the guardroom gathered round in great excitement, shouting, gesticulating, waving rifles and revolvers as if caught up in a major military incident. One Unteroffizier, enraged at Neave’s audacious impersonation, screamed: ‘This is an insult to the German army! You will be shot!’ The mayhem died down with the arrival of the Kommandant, Oberst Prawitz. The impeccably dressed Prawitz looked Neave up and down disdainfully, took in the details of his amateurish uniform, remarked on the impertinence of the escape bid and ordered that he be taken away to the cells.

Chaplain Platt argued that Neave’s failure lay not in his comic opera uniform but in the way he behaved in trying to escape. Once outside the gates, the German guards stood about waiting to fall in and march back to their quarters. ‘Neave couldn’t possibly do that,’ Platt wrote in his diary. ‘His only hope for success lay in an unobtrusive disappearance from the immediate scene, and then to walk rapidly down the causeway to the outskirts of the village.’ Alas, his quickstep departure aroused suspicion. Neave had not made sufficient distance to warrant making a hit-or-miss dash for the open country, Platt commented. ‘There wasn’t a chance in a million that he would get twenty yards without being shot. So failed a very worthy effort.’¹²

In the cells Neave was thoroughly searched – ‘more thoroughly than usual’ according to Eggers. They discovered the Cellophane container stuffed with money, which was a disconcerting find. It showed that the prisoners had access to German currency, an invaluable aid to escaping. Neave was led roughly away to solitary confinement, where he took off his makeshift cardboard belt and wooden bayonet and hurled them to the floor in a fit of temper. It was hours before he could sleep. Years later, he would reflect on his dejection at being caught, on his fall from self-made hero to a sad joke in a burlesque German uniform. Perhaps he was too hard on himself. It was not his uniform that had given him away, nor necessarily his behaviour, but the brass disc that the British contingent had coaxed out of the civilian painter. Had they copied the disc, and engraved a different number, the ruse might have worked. Even so, and as Chaplain Platt observed, Neave had not thought through his tactics after getting over the first big hurdle, the castle gate. His passion for flight was the rage of youth. He was still only twenty-five, perhaps older than his years but still lacking in a strategic grasp of the science of escape. Neave had proved he could get out of Colditz, but not clear away from Nazi Germany. Being a loner was his nature, and it was not enough. It never would be. He needed others, allies with a greater instinct for the long range.

In the morning after his failed bid, the guard brought him the usual ersatz coffee. Gravely, he warned Neave that he was about to be court-martialled and shot. Neave snorted with derision. He was no longer afraid. He felt only foolish and unaccountably ‘liverish’. Later in the morning, he was frogmarched to the Kommandant’s headquarters, where in a formal, wood-panelled gallery, he was inspected by Colditz officers one by one. The reactions to his uniform varied from derision to wrath. Kommandant Prawitz ordered him to stand to attention and salute, German fashion. Neave was beside himself with rage and made a poor show of a German salute. Prawitz ordered him to do it again, this time properly. The other officers sniggered and Neave saluted again. It was a humiliating experience. He was made to stay in the gallery, under guard, for the rest of the morning. From time to time, police officers from the village and soldiers came in to gape at him as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Then, an elderly photographer from the town was brought in to take his picture. Neave posed for the camera, perspiring profusely beneath his lurid uniform. ‘I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn,’ he raged. ‘I grew crimson with mortification as the old man doddered about the gallery exchanging feeble jokes with the soldiers. It seemed hours before the comedy was over.’¹³ The photograph he took survives to this day and it does Neave more credit than he realised at the time. He stands, half at ease, left arm behind his back so that the scabbard for his ‘bayonet’ is clearly visible. He stares coolly at the camera and it is impossible to imagine him thinking anything but: ‘You may have got me this time, but there will be another.’

After the embarrassing charade of being photographed, his fake uniform was removed, thereafter to take pride of place in the Kommandant’s personal museum. The threat of court martial for impersonating a German officer was quietly dropped. Instead he would serve the customary indignity of imprisonment in the town gaol when a cell became available, there being constant pressure on accommodation due to frequent escape bids.

Neave’s humiliation was not complete. At the evening roll-call, Hauptmann Priem, the officer to whom Neave was supposed to be taking a message during his escape, announced to the crowded courtyard: ‘Gefreiter Neave is to be sent to the Russian Front.’ Everyone joined in the laughter. ‘It was friendly towards me,’ recalled Neave, ‘but it was not music to my ears.’ Eggers remembers the incident slightly differently, recording that Priem announced: ‘Gefreiter Neave is posted to the Russian Front.’ Eggers also recalled: ‘There was an almighty roar of laughter. Lieut. Neave looked very rueful. Six months later, though, he had the last laugh.’¹⁴ Following Neave’s daring bid, the camp authorities tightened security. All escapers and new arrivals were subject to mouth and body – i.e. rectal – examination. All military personnel had to carry a printed pass, signed and stamped by the camp adjutant, which was to be shown to all sentries. However, not even the German guards observed such Teutonic thoroughness. They were often too deferential to higher ranks and the rule was never completely observed. Roll-calls, too, were extended, and a new system of counting introduced to make deception harder.

Before the year was out, Neave was caught once again, this time in the Polish orderlies’ quarters on top of the old sick bay when he should have been in bed. German guards who picked Neave and a fellow prisoner up on the night of 23 November assumed, wrongly, that the miscreants were helping an escape bid by two Canadians found on the roof. Chaplain Platt noted enigmatically in his diary: ‘Actually, they were pursuing interests of their own.’ They were thrown into the Schloss prison, but, gaol space being at such a premium, Neave was locked in an unheated double cell with two fellow officers. Their cigarettes were confiscated and ‘they thought themselves to be holy innocents exposed to the harsh winds of a cold, hard and unjust world’. They determined on a protest notice, which read ‘Achtung! Dieser Tat ist eine Schandtat’ (Attention! This is a scandal). Reasoning that it was of little use to write out so high-minded a notice unless it could be suitably displayed, the trio picked the lock of their cell door, pinned the notice at eye level on the outside, then locked themselves in again and went to sleep. Episodes like these, amusing though they were, drove the German guards to despair.

6 Escape

Neave was sentenced to the usual twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for his escape attempt. Several weeks elapsed before he could serve his term in Colditz town gaol, and he spent the time staring disconsolately from the British quarters as the weather turned colder. In early October he was taken under guard along the route by which he had tried to reach freedom. The sentries joked that the new white barrier at the final gate was a tribute to his audacious bid. His books and tobacco wrapped in a blanket, Neave was in no mood for entertainment.

Then, by his own account, he spotted another way out of the castle. Looking over the parapet of the moat bridge, he noticed a rough pathway leading across the tumbled stones of the dry moat towards the German married quarters. A small wicket gate stood half open in the moat bridge wall. If he could gain access to this gate, he was free of the barbed wire, with only a fence round the married quarters and a 12-foot high wall around the park beyond to negotiate. Excited, Neave crowed with delight, puzzling his guard with his air of elation. Neave’s version of events is contested by Pat Reid, who said he himself had spotted the small garden gate on his arrival at Colditz a year earlier. The energetic Dutch, always on the lookout for escape possibilities, also claimed to know of its existence.

Banged up in his municipal cell, Neave still thought of escape. The tiny barred window was beyond reach. He climbed on to the massive East European-style stove and contemplated cutting through the ceiling, breaking out of the roof and letting himself down to the gravel courtyard with a blanket rope. Thus occupied with thoughts of flight, he was surprised by the gaoler who roared with laughter: ‘So soon, Herr Leutnant! You must stay with us a few days longer.’ Next day, they moved him to a cell on the ground floor. He endured his spell of confinement remote from the worsening fortunes of the war, smoking on his bunk in the company of Jane Eyre and the Duchess of Wrexe. On his way back to the castle twenty-eight days later, he noticed again the little wicket gate, which by now appeared in his dreams as ‘the gateway to the land beyond the Blue Mountains’.

Some weeks earlier, Pat Reid had also had an inspiration. A trained engineer, he understood architectural drawings and had the happy knack of mentally being able to take buildings to pieces and put them back together again. It occurred to Reid that the wooden stage of the camp theatre, on the second floor of a building occupied by the most senior Allied officers, offered escape potential. It was constructed over a room leading to the top of the German guardhouse outside the prisoners’ courtyard. This corridor was sealed off from POW quarters by heavy locked doors and bricked-up windows, but it might be accessible from above. Together with ‘Hank’ Wardle MC, a Canadian in the RAF, he reconnoitred the theatre and found that by removing wooden steps from a dressing room he could move freely about under the heavy stage. There were no floorboards, only rubble on top of a lath-and-plaster ceiling over the corridor.

Reid and Wardle sawed a 2-foot square through the ceiling and found the room below disused and empty. To disguise their activity, they constructed an ingenious device known as ‘the shovewood’. This was a plaster-covered hatch fixed from above with turnbuckles resting on the ceiling joists. It was virtually invisible from below, and in any event no guards ever went there. This was Neave’s ‘magic entrance’. As Reinhold Eggers later lamented: ‘We had left the prisoners a very simple barrier, no more than a floor-ceiling between their quarters plus a door into a passage on our side to get through.’¹ Reid clambered down on a rope made from a mattress cover, padded down the corridor in carpet slippers and picked the lock of the door. Beyond, a passage ran over the courtyard gate – the most difficult barrier to negotiate – and ended at another locked door. This yielded easily to his skills and Reid found himself at the top of steps leading into an attic above the guardhouse. The sounds of laughter and noisy drinking drifted up from the German Officers’ Mess below. If an escaper could disguise himself as a German officer, the guards at the gate would scarcely give him a second glance, because this time he would be approaching from the right direction.

What is more, the prisoners were planning to put on a Christmas pantomime within weeks, offering the perfect opportunity to mount an escape. Reid began a search for the right officers. He quickly whittled his list down to six, including Neave. He told them ‘casually’ that he could get them out of Colditz if they could acquire convincing German officers’ uniforms. Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thomson, who had already tried to get out in a consignment of palliasses, were finally chosen to make the break, in company with two Dutch officers.

There were compelling reasons for cooperation with the Dutch. First, their command of German was much better than that of the British, second, their long blue-green army greatcoats bore a striking resemblance to the Wermacht uniform, and third, they were inveterate escapers. They had already made four ‘home runs’ via Switzerland. This Anglo-Dutch entente had been operating for some months through Reid and his opposite number, Captain van den Heuvel, invariably known as ‘Vandy’. He finally settled on a brave young officer of the Netherlands East Indies Army, Second Lieutenant Toni Luteyn, to accompany Neave. In 1940, the Dutch army had capitulated to the invading Germans. Its officers were required to sign an oath of non-combatance, or face internment for the rest of the war. Virtually all signed, with the exception of a contingent of sixty-seven colonial army cadets who had just passed out of Breda Military Academy. Luteyn, aged twenty-three, was one of them. He was interned in a camp at Zossi on the Dutch – German border, but when one of them escaped they were moved deeper inland to Oflag VIIIc in Poland. After more escapes, the whole lot was dispatched to Colditz in July 1941, arriving soon after Neave. Until now Neave and Luteyn had scarcely met. They were thrown together by calculation rather than friendship. Despite being the younger of the two – he was only twenty-four – Luteyn was the senior partner because of his command of German. ‘We had some exercises, because Neave did not speak German, except jawohl,’ Luteyn said years later, ‘but going through the guardroom there was quite a chance somebody would talk to us, and they would talk to the highest ranking officer. So I was “promoted” to Hauptmann and he was a first lieutenant. We practised that exercise for a week in the courtyard. He had to march on my left-hand side. If he didn’t wheel to my left, I shouted at him.’²

Meanwhile, both would-be escapers were rehearsing for the camp pantomime, Ballet Nonsense. Neave later dismissed the ‘pathetic futility’ of the entertainment, insisting that although such performances keep prisoners from brooding on their fate, the actual performances were ghastly. But at the time he threw himself energetically into the show, writing and producing a three-act sketch with the improbable title ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, which was clearly based on his experiences at Eton. Neave played the principal character, the unpleasant headmaster Dr Calomel. The other parts were equally nasty, as befitted the obscene dialogue and cynical performance. The chaplains complained about the ‘unsuitability’ of the sketch and Neave thought it a ‘wretched little piece’ but it brought the house down in Oflag IVc.

A photograph of the full cast shows him striking a pose in gown and mortar board of black paper and steel-rimmed spectacles, made up to look like a beetle-browed, leering Groucho Marx. While Neave busied himself on stage, Reid and Wardle were hard at work beneath his feet creating the ‘shovewood’ escape route through which they planned to send several Anglo-Dutch teams. Neave and Luteyn would go first, followed twenty-four hours later by Hyde-Thomson and Luteyn’s fellow officer Lieutenant Donkers. At one point in rehearsals, when Neave was pacing the boards in a scene where Dr Calomel expels the son of a duke, Reid and Wardle emerged from beneath his feet, covered in dust.

Neave acquired a Netherlands Home Army uniform overcoat, which he hid, wrapped in sacking, beneath the floorboards. The prisoners had hundreds of these hides, some of which are still giving up their secrets today, sixty years later. With the help of camp experts, he then set about converting it into a German officer’s uniform. Epaulettes, fashioned from linoleum cut from the bathroom floor, were painted silver to match the officers’ silver braid. He gave himself a gold regimental number. Neave promoted himself to Oberleutnant Schwarz and Scarlet O’Hara carved gold wooden stars to denote his rank. O’Hara was one of the unsung heroes of Colditz who sat in their primitive quarters day after day helping others to escape. The selflessness of men like him helped twenty officers to escape from the ‘impregnable’ fortress, eleven of them British – the best escape record of any camp in Nazi Germany.

Then came the problem of the buttons. O’Hara and Neave went to Pat Reid in some distress. Neave told him the project was running short of lead. O’Hara’s reserves of lead piping – ‘thin German stuff’ – had been used up. As they spoke O’Hara eyed longingly the alcohol still that the British officers were using to make their Christmas booze. Reid took fright: ‘What are you looking at? I hope you’re not hinting.’ O’Hara demurred but pointed out that the only other source of lead piping was in the lavatory block. With only three lavatories to serve forty officers breaking one up might trigger a revolt, so the still’s lead coil was removed, melted down and poured into white clay moulds carved by a Dutch officer. ‘Oberleutnant Schwarz’s’ belt and leggings were made from cardboard, as was his revolver holster, stuffed with nothing more dangerous than newspaper. The finishing touch, a cap of an Offizier of the Third Reich, was converted from Neave’s own dress uniform cap by Squadron Leader Brian Paddon. It was an impressive sight: the shiny black peak bent Nazi-style, with a design of leaves, a red and white roundel, eagle’s wings and a swastika on the front, all made from linoleum, the whole thing finished off with white piping sewed to the edge of the brim. Neave was delighted. ‘With such a uniform I could face the arc lights once more with confidence,’ he remembered.³ Even Reid was impressed. At a passing-out test, he complimented Neave and his helpers. The uniforms would pass in any conditions other than broad daylight at close quarters.

Neave was by now impatient to go. He harried Reid about the readiness of the escape route and was told to keep his hair on. Meanwhile, rehearsals for the pantomime went ahead. Providentially, Luteyn was in the camp orchestra. Neave remembered him as a drummer, but Luteyn insists he played the double bass, which he bought from an English officer. A unique photograph of the show’s line-up confirms that in this performance he played the double bass. The escape was planned to take place a few days before Christmas. The weather was deteriorating rapidly and Neave was anxious to avoid freezing to death on a German hillside. A combination of circumstances, however, forced a delay. According to Neave, their uniforms and false papers were not quite ready but Luteyn recollects that the postponement was due to a seasonal increase in train controls because so many German soldiers were going home for Christmas. Either way, the escape bid was postponed until the new year. Ballet Nonsense was a huge success; it included a new scene at Wombat College in which Dr Calomel gave a burlesque Nazi salute three times, to the discomfiture of German officers in the audience. Chaplain Platt noted in his diary: ‘After the interval, Anthony’s [Neave’s] public school farce delighted the British and fogged the foreigners … The public school farce was redolent of masters’ perceived interest in small boys, though one could plainly see that the intention was a take-off of a well-known schoolmaster.’⁴

After the pantomime, sloshed on bootleg alcohol, the men danced, fell dead drunk to the floor or vomited. In the midst of this revelry, a German officer came in to wish them a Happy Christmas: ‘The laughter ceased abruptly and there was a silence so deliberate and terrible, that it struck the German like a blow in the face,’ related Neave. ‘He looked blankly about him, saluted and disconsolately withdrew.’⁵

Escape day was set for 5 January 1942; the phoney uniforms and civilian clothes had already been concealed beneath the stage. Reid decided to send out two pairs of escapers on successive nights, immediately after the change of sentry in front of the guardhouse, so the guard would be ignorant about officers’ movements during the previous two hours. The break would take place after the nine o’clock Appell. Snow was falling during the roll-call, but Neave was roasting under his usual combination of battledress and sweater over civilian clothes, plus RAF trousers – and the black-painted cardboard leggings. Looking over to the Dutch contingent where Luteyn was similarly attired, Neave had an overpowering sense that this was his last evening in the castle.

On the order of dismissal, Neave and Luteyn mingled with senior officers as they moved into their quarters and went straight up to the theatre above. Fumbling their way in the dark, they ducked below the stage. Reid carefully opened the ‘shovewood’ trapdoor, and the three let themselves down noiselessly on a mattress-cover rope into the room below. There the escapers discarded their British uniforms and dusted down their German disguise. Reid led the way in stockinged feet through the first door until they were across the bridge and outside the final barrier: the locked entrance to the loft above the German guardhouse. Here, the escapers put on their boots and waited, fear and exasperation mounting, while Reid fought with the obstinate lock, at one point even admitting: ‘I’m afraid I can’t get it open.’ But after he fiddled for ten minutes with his patent wire pick-lock, the heavy door creaked open.

Reid told Neave they must not move for exactly eleven minutes, the time it would take him to retrace his steps to the theatre. Neave accepted the order but warned he would not ‘hang around’ after that. The pair would take the first opportunity of a quiet spell in the guardhouse below. Reid reminded them of their ‘escape theatre’: on reaching the guardhouse door, they were to stop in full view of the sentry, calmly pull on their gloves, swap casual remarks and walk smartly down the cobbled ramp to the outer gates. ‘We waited ten or fifteen minutes, and went down the stone stairs,’ recollected Luteyn. ‘On the first floor, where the officer of the guard was quartered, someone had just put on the radio. The door was ajar, but he didn’t hear us, and couldn’t see us because we nipped through very quickly. If he had seen us, it would have been finished. When we came out of the guardroom, the soldiers jumped up and stood by the door. A sergeant opened the door for us. Our hearts were pounding!’⁶ Their cameo German performance was unnecessary.

They strode out to the snow-covered outer wall, Neave doing his best to adopt a Prussian military manner. Unfortunately, despite all the practice, he still marched with his hands behind his back, every inch a British officer. Luteyn hissed: ‘March with your hands at your sides, you bloody fool.’ By the gate into the outer courtyard, the first sentry saluted and said ‘Nothing to report.’ They thanked him and walked on to the second sentry by the outer gate. Luteyn ordered him to open the door which he did. They were now outside the main castle, on the moat bridge, from which the wicket gate led down into the moat and up the other side towards the German married quarters. By now it was snowing heavily and as they stumbled down a German soldier came towards them. He halted, staring at the ‘officers’. Neave hesitated and was ready to make a run for it, a reminder of his earlier sense of panic once beyond the castle gate. Luteyn, with great presence of mind, demanded forcefully: ‘Why do you not salute?’ Open-mouthed, the soldier did as he was told and the escapers hurried on up the other side of the moat and round the married quarters to a high oak fence. Surmounting this, they were at last in tree cover. Neave’s cardboard belt was ripped apart in the climb and his ‘holster’ disappeared into the snow.

The final obstacle was a high, moss-covered stone wall, overlaid with snow and ice. ‘Here, we made our first mistake,’ remembered Luteyn. ‘I helped Neave up with my hands so he could sit on it and pull me up. We should have done it the other way round, because I was much bigger and more powerful.’⁷ Every time Neave tried to pull his companion, he fell backwards in a confusion of snow and stone. Eventually, he caught Luteyn under the arms and they struggled to the top, panting heavily. They sat on the coping for a minute, then jumped 12 feet to the broken ground below. Neave was bruised, shaken and frightened. They leaned against the trees, breathing in the sharp, cold January air before Neave urged them on. They tore off their lovingly prepared fake uniforms and threw them into the river that wound its way below the woods.

In his diary entry for 5 January, Chaplain Platt recorded: ‘Anthony Neave and a Dutch officer, Second Lieutenant Luteyn, escaped ten minutes ago. It was a scheme requiring the boldest initiative and at least eight weeks’ preparation. It was carried out with the utmost secrecy, and already they are outside the castle.’ During 1941, only two British officers succeeded in getting clear of the castle, and they had both been recaptured. ‘The British are due for a success, and the seven people who so far know of Anthony’s break are fairly confident that this is it.’⁸

Clear of the castle, Neave and Luteyn set off to walk to the town of Leisnig, six miles away. They would be less noticeable in this manufacturing centre than in the town of Colditz, where they risked recognition. The plan was to take an early morning workmen’s train to Leipzig, thirty-five miles to the west. Thence, they would proceed south by train via Ulm and Nuremberg to Singen on the Swiss border, where they would walk to freedom. The imaginative Dutch had bribed a Colditz guard to secure a railway timetable, so the escapers knew that the first train left at 5.00 a.m. They thus had seven hours to kill in the freezing dark. Mercifully, although the thermometer read minus 17 degrees Celsius, the snow was abating and the moon aided their progress across frozen fields until they reached the country road to Leisnig. With rising confidence, they struck out for the station. Neave was dressed in a blue jacket. Fashioned from an officer’s uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, this was the gift of Capitaine Boris, a Jewish reserve officer in the French regiment, in recognition of Neave’s support of the small Jewish contingent in Colditz. His RAF trousers were turned down over his Polish boots and the civilian guise was completed by a ski cap made from a blanket.

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