Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  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 it
self 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.