Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  A few days later, René took them back to Marseilles railway station for the journey to Toulouse, a staging post to the border city of Perpignan. They were joined by other fugitives including Poles, two Canadian priests and two more Britons, the elderly Mr Roberts, and his eighteen-year-old son. Roberts père, aged sixty-five and born in Liverpool, had been employed in Paris by a ticket-printing company. He was initially interned as a civilian and then released into the Unoccupied Zone. Usefully, father and son also had Irish passports and spoke French fluently. The party found seats in a cramped third class compartment also occupied by a gendarme and his boisterous family, giving Neave fresh fears for his safety. However, the policeman soon fell asleep in the spring heat. They arrived at Toulouse in the middle of a military inspection of a French air force guard of honour, which helpfully delayed their exit because their forged Czech papers were not examined in the mêlée of passengers forced to wait until the comic opera proceedings ended. The party was quartered in the Hôtel de Paris, a run-down establishment where Neave and Woollatt were compelled to stay a further week, leaving only for scanty meals. The city authorities believed the hotel was hardly functioning and never looked at the upstairs bedrooms where a veritable foreign legion of Britons, French, Poles and even Australians was gathered for the final assault on freedom.

  Francis Blanchain supplied his party with a new set of papers. They had forged instructions to report to a centre for refugees at Banyuls-sur-Mer, close to the Spanish border. Then, after more frustrating delays, twelve escapers took the train in two groups to Narbonne, where they had to change. Neave and Woollatt were shadowed by a gendarme as they walked round the town with their unnecessarily new suitcases. They went into a café and his companion cautioned Neave: ‘Don’t get drunk.’ Why not? he asked. ‘You look so appallingly suspicious when you do,’ insisted Woollatt. ‘So do you,’ shot back Neave. So they sat in grumpy silence drinking an occasional brandy until the time came for the last stage to Port Vendres. In truth, Neave often felt an obvious fraud, attracting suspicious looks from officials and policemen. At Port Vendres station, he was stopped by a gendarme who looked at his papers and accused him of being British. It was an anxious moment but the policeman initially let him go. Minutes later, as the group were loitering on the seafront, reassured by Neave’s explanation that he had shaken off his inquisitor, the gendarme came hurtling after him on a bicycle with what looked suspiciously like two fellow officers. The little congregation dithered on the shingle until their guide René shouted ‘Meet at José’s house!’, the emergency safe address he had given them when they were in Toulouse. The party scattered across the beach, jumping over rocks and jetsam in their flight to low woods in the hills. A ragged cheer went up from French promenaders, but the gendarmes did not pursue them and Neave was quickly reunited with Woollatt. When night fell, they found the safe house where all but one of the escapers were already assembled, eating sandwiches and drinking rum, fortifying themselves for the ordeal ahead. Their mountain guide, José, presented himself and asked for payment in advance. Large bundles of cash were handed over, René paying for his Pat line charges. José, a wiry little man with cunning eyes, was a professional smuggler. His trade had prospered mightily since the war began, since there were so many people desperate to escape the war zone. José made them leave any superfluous luggage behind. Neave took only dry socks and chocolate. He and Woollatt bid farewell to René at midnight as the party began the long haul. Up and up they went, following José’s white boots. After four hours of climbing, they rested beneath a rock face. Neave, although relatively fit, was exhausted. They reached the summit at daybreak and breakfasted off cheese, hard-boiled eggs and brandy. A storm burst as they prepared to leave and fine rain and strong wind whipped the escapers pitilessly for hours as they stumbled along mountain paths. When Roberts père collapsed, Neave took turns with Woollatt and the man’s son to carry him on their backs. It was midday before the rain gave way to fog as they reeled down the Spanish side, following shepherd tracks to the lower ground. Through open farmland they tramped exhaustedly all day, avoiding the green-uniformed guards of the Franco government, who would have interned the entire party at a camp in Miranda. José’s white boots finally led them to a village at one o’clock the next morning. They were handed over to a well-built, sharply dressed man on a wooden railway platform who showed them to rough bunks in a wooden shed. ‘Welcome to Spain, gentlemen. Rest yourselves. The train for Barcelona arrives at six.’

  8

  Secret Service Beckons

  In the spring of 1942 Barcelona was a city still recovering from the horrors of civil war. Although Spain was technically neutral, Franco had received massive help from the Germans in his successful three-year military insurrection that ousted the left-wing government elected in 1936. The British consulate in Barcelona, headed by Harold Farquhar, had inadequate funds to finance the operations of MI9. The Consul also had to contend with the downright hostility of the ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, who feared this hazardous work would imperil his diplomatic standing. Initially, Hoare pretended that the ratlines were nothing to do with Britain’s presence in Spain. His Nelsonian attitude made the already insecure work of his officials in Barcelona even more difficult. Historians of MI9 speculate that Sir Harold, as he later became, spent much of his own money on the safe conduct of escapers until the policy changed in favour of bringing servicemen home whatever the cost.

  Neave was still on dangerous ground. He was only vaguely aware of the professionalism of the Pat line, and only hazily conscious that he had been singled out for service in this most secret arm of His Majesty’s Secret Service. A young Englishman from the British consulate met Neave, Woollatt and the two Roberts at Barcelona station and took them for breakfast. Everywhere they looked, they saw secret policemen lazing in doorways or leaning against trees, noting their movements. The Englishman, who, Neave noted with satisfaction, was wearing the tie of his own regiment, the Royal Artillery, treated their presence with a disconcerting nonchalance. Such things were only to be expected in a police state, he shrugged. Neave, who had had uncomfortably close acquaintance with the less amiable side of secret policemen, was shocked.

  Consular staff took the details of the two British officers, kitted them out with loud green-blue tweed suits and dispatched them to a sympathetic anti-Franco worker’s house in the suburbs of Barcelona, where they were confined indoors. Their food was brought to them daily by a young woman from the consulate. Now, almost four months into their escape, they chafed at being kept virtual prisoners, demanding daily to be taken to Gibraltar. Then, without notice, at dawn on 1 May 1942, two men in a Bentley bearing diplomatic number plates came to pick them up. Neave recognised their Foreign Office manner and style of dress, and admired their soft brown hats and their well-manicured hands. They ignored their charges sitting in the back, but, as they bowled through the hinterland to Madrid, Neave began to relax. ‘I felt for the first time in those long, dangerous months that I was home.’1 The party stopped halfway to the capital for lunch of red wine and sandwiches, Neave and Woollatt taking cover behind a pile of rocks whenever another vehicle sped by in a cloud of dust. They arrived at the British embassy just before dusk, in time to join a party of two dozen other Allied escapers of every nation in the embassy garden. Neave protested that he had valuable military information to hand over, but the First Secretary insisted: ‘What you need is a drink.’ At this rather masculine tea party, Neave was startled to hear his name called and turned to recognise Major Philip Newman MC of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who lived in the same Essex village. Extraordinarily, they had both been in Oflag IXA/H at Spangenburg, near Kassel. Now they were retracing their steps to Ingatestone together.

  The embassy at Madrid was a key staging post on the road to freedom. While the ambassador was deeply uncomfortable about the illicit trade in Allied servicemen, one of his attachés, Michael Cresswell, was, in the words of MI9’s historians, a tower of strength who unde
rtook a great deal of the delicate and difficult work of ferrying British evaders and escapers round Spain. His codename was ‘Monday’. That night, Neave was blissfully happy. The next morning, he was equally moved by a service of communion conducted by the Bishop of Gibraltar before the boisterous band boarded a gaudy orange bus for the last lap to Gibraltar. Their new cover maintained that they were students, under the care of Mr Roberts père who had fully recovered from his mountain ordeal.

  The party stayed overnight at a hotel in Cordoba, still under the intense scrutiny of Spanish police checking their fake registration. The men talked of what they would do when they got back to Blighty. One specified three pints of mixed – mild and bitter – while another promised himself a motor drive to the Downs. Generally, their longings were not of a spiritual nature – mostly fit young men in their twenties, they felt that for their efforts the world owed them all the women and the beer they had missed during their years of imprisonment. Down through the mountains to Malaga, and then along the twisting coast road to the frontier post at La Línea, they caroused their way to freedom. Frontier guards disputed their papers but quickly succumbed to the afternoon heat and waved them through.

  If they expected a hero’s welcome on British territory, they were much mistaken. The Gibraltar base authorities had not heard of them and left them to kick their heels outside the orderly room, guarded by two military policemen. The drama of escape was somewhat lost in the administrative tedium of arriving back at camp. Watching RAF planes take off and land at the new aerodrome, Neave found time to laugh at his predicament. The smile faded when he met the intelligence officer, who pointed out sharply that they had arrived inconveniently, on a Saturday afternoon. In the British army, Neave remarked to Woollatt, only Sunday was more sacred to officers. He did not know then that the intelligence officer in question was Donald Darling, whose cover name was ‘Sunday’. Darling had been moved from Lisbon to Gibraltar on the day of Neave’s escape from Colditz, and stayed there until late 1943, officially as a civilian liaison officer, though the civil population had been evacuated earlier in the war. Darling ran a one-man interrogation office which was of inestimable value for MI9. He took each fugitive through every move of his escape, building up a complete picture of the ratlines.

  Neave and his companions made full use of the entertainment that the Rock had to offer in wartime. Still clad in his improbable Spanish tweeds, he drank pink gins and slowly absorbed the sights and sounds of freedom, albeit in a heavily fortified war zone. In the officers’ mess at base, he found himself something of a hero. Young officers stood him rounds of beer to hear his escape exploits, but at his back he felt the gimlet eyes of the intelligence officer, and when he came to security-sensitive information Neave clammed up. At lunch, Darling sat next to him, offering his congratulations on Neave’s conversational skills while hoping that he would not say too much. Security-conscious Neave beamed with pleasure. ‘It was like receiving a school report that was better than one hoped,’ he recalled later.

  Two days after their arrival in Gibraltar, the escapers, impatient in new battledress without rank or number, were embarked on a troopship bound for Britain. Apart from a U-boat scare, the journey to the Clyde was uneventful, and in bleak, misty weather on 13 May 1942 they were landed by motor boat at Gourock. Neave found nothing welcoming in the barren streets of Clydeside. He, Newman and Woollatt went to a dreary pub for their first ritual pint on home ground, where one of the escapers prompted horse laughter in the bar by asking for a ham sandwich, something virtually unknown by this stage of the war. They had only a sketchy idea of the privations of the Home Front and the Nazi bombing of cities. Neave was also surprised to see a huge liner carrying American troops steaming up the Clyde: when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he had been in Colditz town gaol reading Charlotte Brontë. The USA was now engaged in the war, which was reaching a critical phase. While he was on the run across Occupied Europe, Singapore had fallen to the Japanese. British forces were being pushed back in the Western Desert, though Malta had withstood Axis efforts to bomb the island into submission. In Russia, the Red Army was still retreating from the hammer blows of the panzers. While in prison, Neave, like his fellow officers, was able to follow the main events of the war through a contraband wireless. He had not, however, grasped the sheer scale of change at home. He and his companions left the Gourock pub disconsolate and embarrassed, ‘unable to recapture the old world or understand the new’.

  Sitting later in a Glasgow hotel restaurant that evening, waiting for the overnight train to London, Neave, still trying to come to terms with his new surroundings, was astounded to see his younger sister Rosamund. She had been on holiday in Scotland and was returning south on the same train. Brother and sister greeted each other with incredulity, while Neave reflected on the series of chance reunions that had accompanied his flight: meeting the Swiss doctor, von Erlach, who had visited him in Spangenburg; the reunion with Philip Newman in Madrid, and now this unexpected rencontre with Rosamund. It seemed to him that Fate had placed these friends at stages to help him along his way. Neave also used his influence to help others. When his party went to board the night train, a tough little corporal among their number who had staged a one-man escape found he had been omitted from the travel warrant. The military police barred him from the platform and a furious row ensued. Neave and his fellow officers intervened. Other-rank escapers joined in the argument, as did his sister Rosamund. Attracted by the mêlée, a full colonel supported his MPs, and an enraged Neave stormed: ‘If this man is left here I shall see to it that the War Office is informed of this scandal. Surely you can accept the word of officers who have escaped from Germany!’ The colonel suggested that Neave and his colleagues could themselves be German agents, prompting hoots of laughter. Neave produced his documents signed by Donald Darling in Gibraltar. When the guard blew his whistle the escapers rushed the barrier, hauling their prize corporal with them on to the night express.

  On arrival at Euston on the morning of 14 May, three and a half months after walking out of Colditz, Neave sat in his carriage alone long after the train had emptied, savouring the atmosphere of being home again. Little details gave him particular delight: the leather buttons on the carriage upholstery; the handle of the heat regulator; sunlight filtering through the smoke-stained roof of the station; women in tweeds hailing porters – the rich mosaic of a traditional British station, redolent of things familiar even in wartime.

  Neave’s immediate instructions were to report to the Great Central Hotel, Marylebone, which had been requisitioned by the War Office. Before the war, he had enjoyed drinks in the same hotel at four in the morning, before the milk train took him back to Oxford. Now, it was protected by sandbags and guarded by MPs with fixed bayonets. In place of the pretty blonde of former days, a sergeant manned the reception desk. He informed Neave that he was in the London Transit Camp and asked where he had come from. ‘Germany,’ said Neave. ‘Then you’ll be wanting MI9,’ the imperturbable sergeant replied.

  Despite its secretive name, MI9 turned out to be a large double room on the second floor, with trestle tables where the imposing brass beds of his youth had once stood. Two officers interrogated him about his escapes, in an apparently languid sort of way that irritated Neave, who was later to learn, when he was asking the questions, that escaped POWs often found it hard to talk about their experiences. Reluctantly, he gave his interrogators details of the Pat line and then escaped to the hotel lounge which now masqueraded as an officers’ mess. It was still only eleven in the morning, and in keeping with the British traditions that he had been so happy to reacquaint himself with a few hours earlier, the bar was shut. Neave chafed at the delay in getting home to his family in Ingatestone, though telephoning his father that morning had revealed the unchanging diffidence between them. Sheffield Neave was busy shaving and could find little to say to his son.

  MI9, however had not finished with him. As Neave twiddled his thumbs in a dowdy armch
air, a slightly built, moustachioed officer wearing the uniform of the Coldstream Guards approached, instantly recognisable as Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmy Langley. Neave had last seen Langley in a makeshift hospital for British prisoners of war in Lille in the summer of 1940. In the interim, Langley had lost his left arm, amputated because of his wounds. He had escaped from the hospital with the aid of a mysterious escape line known as the ‘Institut Mozart’, first to Paris and then into Unoccupied France where the Vichy Armistice Commission declared him unfit for military service and repatriated him home via Spain. Langley congratulated him on his escape and invited him to lunch with ‘someone important’. They went off to Rules in Maiden Lane, then, as now, a quintessentially English eating place, where Neave was introduced to Brigadier Norman Crockatt, head of MI9. Neave was immediately taken with this smart, handsome man with an undisguisable military bearing, wearing the tartan uniform of the Royal Scots and ribbons of the MC and DSO. Crockatt gently probed him for information, then suddenly became serious. ‘You’ve seen the people who work for us behind the lines,’ he said. ‘They need money and communications. Do you want to help them?’ His thoughts full of Maurice and other Pat line operatives, Neave needed no second bidding. It was, he later recalled ‘the one job I should like to do’. Crockatt was relieved and said that, subject to security clearance, he could begin working for Langley’s organisation IS9(d) in Room 900 in the War Office. He would have the rank of captain. His work would involve secret communications with Occupied Europe and the training of agents. He did not elaborate, except to observe that it would not be a bed of roses and he should keep his mouth shut and get results. Lunch was abruptly terminated and Neave was left behind in Maiden Lane trying to come to terms with his sudden recruitment into the Secret Service. Before him lay the prospect of ‘another great adventure’.