The Man Who Was Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

Blooded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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