The Man Who Was Saturday

Patrick Bishop

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780008309060
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Soldier, spy, lawyer, politician – Airey Neave was assassinated in the House of Commons car park in 1979. Forty years after his death, Patrick Bishop’s lively, action-packed biography examines the life, heroic war and death of one of Britain’s most remarkable 20th century figures.

1

A Question of Upbringing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neave’s diary presents a warmer picture of Sheffield. On 11 July, they went to the Eton–Harrow cricket match together, which Eton won handsomely by an innings and 16 runs. ‘After breakfast Mummy took some photographs of Dad and I. We went by the 10.00 to Paddington and then took the ...