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 underground to St John’s Wood. We got to Lord’s about 11.10, when play had just started. We had quite good seats in Stand G. Harrow were all out for 230 by about 12.45 and by the lunch interval were 59 for 0 [having been forced to follow on]. We went to a tent at the back of the grandstand for lunch … Sandwiches, cider cup, strawberries and cream, cake and iced coffee … After lunch we walked about and watched the match. We met on the field a friend of Daddy’s …’
In the summer holidays that followed, father and son pursued a Betjemanesque routine, playing golf and tennis together, making family visits to friends and relations in their Home Counties residences. One day, Sheffield took him off to Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire, to check on the progress of a population of rare Large Copper butterflies that had been introduced a few years before. The diary entries are light and natural, with no hint of tensions or conflict. They contrast with the references to childhood that appear in the diaries Neave kept towards the end of his life, which do not suggest cloudless happiness or any great affection for the patriarchs of the family. His paternal grandfather was ‘a selfish shit’.15 As for the rest, ‘they were a sad quarrelsome family. No one was happy. I suffered from them in my time.’16
Beyond the security and comfort of Eton and Bishop’s House, the world was swept by confusion and conflict. The early 1930s were a tumultuous time at home and abroad. Britain was sunk in an economic depression that brought misery and despair, not just to the industrial North but to the mellow towns and villages of the Home Counties. In Europe, it was clear that the recent war had settled nothing and old hatreds burned as fiercely as ever. Late in 1932, a speech by Stanley Baldwin raised the spectre of a new war in which ‘the bomber will always get through.’
It was in this baleful atmosphere that Airey Neave made his first visit to Germany, in 1933, at the age of seventeen. The trip would be a turning point, jolting him into political awareness and fixing him on a moral bearing that he would follow for the rest of his life. Later, he would refer to the experience often, presenting it as an awakening: to the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of civilisation.
His parents had decided he would benefit from a spell in Berlin to improve his grasp of German.17 Eton, like most British schools, took an academic rather than a practical approach to language teaching, with the result that, according to Jo Grimond, ‘no boy who had spent hundreds of hours … of classes could carry on the simplest conversation in French.’18 He arrived in late summer to lodge with a family who lived at Nikolassee, a lakeside suburb west of Berlin. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor on 30 January that year and the Nazis were tightening their grip on German society.
Neave attended classes at the local school with one of the sons, who was a member of the Hitler Youth. ‘At the entry of the teacher each morning we were expected to give the Hitler salute, but as a foreigner I was excused,’ he remembered many years later. ‘I was an unconventional pupil and at first an object of derision. I sat at the back of the class. My hair was much longer than that of the German boys and I wore a decadent yellow tie with black spots.’19
Neave soon learned that it did not do to mock Germany’s new masters. Dietrich, the elder son of the family, who was at university in Berlin, was not a party member and admired the young guest’s independent spirit but warned him that it could be dangerous. One day, waiting for the train at Nikolassee, Neave sniggered at the sight of a ‘fat, brown-booted storm-trooper’. He recalled that Dietrich ‘hastily manoeuvred me out of sight. I can remember the bloodshot pig-eyes of the storm-trooper glaring towards us.’20
The climax of the visit came when Neave went with Dietrich to a rally one warm evening in the first week of September in the centre of Berlin. Neave had signed up as a temporary member of a sports club in Charlottenburg to which Dietrich belonged, and although no great athlete, he was good enough to get into the relay team. When the Nazis announced a Festival of Sport in the capital, the club was advised to take part. It began with a classic piece of totalitarian theatre. At ten o’clock a vast procession of sports organisations set off from the Lustgarten, in the centre of the city, and marched to a rally near the Brandenburg Gate. These were the early days of Nazism and, although the signs of repression were everywhere, in Berlin there were still many who did not disguise their scepticism. Among some of the athletes, participation in the festival was ‘seen as something of a joke’.
The sportsmen wore civilian suits and ‘marched off with light hearts’. However, when they were joined by a band in Nazi uniform, ‘our mood changed. I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex. The young men beside me who, minutes before, had been joking, started singing. Suddenly the Festival of Sport had become religious and the marchers expectant.’ His friend was as susceptible to the mood as everybody else, because when Airey broke step with the others, ‘There was an angry shout from Dietrich, “Can’t you march in step?”’21
With bands blaring and banners flying, they tramped past the Brandenburg Gate, which ‘floodlit, and adorned with Nazi pennants … looked like the gateway to some theatrical Valhalla.’ The left- and right-hand marcher in each rank held a flaming torch. In the flickering light, the faces of the silent crowds lining the streets ‘glowed … with excitement and pride’. As they neared the rostrum where the speeches would begin, the band struck up the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. To Neave, the half-hour speech that followed from Reichssportführer von Tschammer was tedious. But then he looked round at his companions. ‘They were intellectuals, university students, writers and artists. To my amazement, they were listening to this bull-necked Prussian in his brown uniform with fixed attention.’ When von Tschammer at last stopped speaking, ‘the huge crowd sang “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” as the banners swayed in the breeze. The fervour of the women was breathtaking.’22
This was an extraordinary experience for a seventeen-year-old boy raised in a code of understatement and emotional restraint. The account he left of it was written in 1978 – that is, forty-five years after the event. Time and hindsight surely led Neave to lend a certain sophistication to the thoughts and reactions of his teenage self. Yet there is no doubt that exposure to the sights and sounds and passions of Nazism touched him and filled him with foreboding. It had given him an insight into the nature of Hitler’s rule that turned out to be more astute than that of many of his elders, who still regarded Hitler as a temporary phenomenon, or as someone who was subject to the normal laws of diplomacy and power politics.
Neave returned to Eton with a new maturity. He was convinced that war with Germany was inevitable. According to some accounts, he won a prize for an essay warning of the danger posed to peace by the rise of Hitler, but no trace of it remains in the school archives.23 His new interest in Germany was demonstrated in a paper he delivered to the Essay Society in 1933 on Walter Rathenau, the German liberal statesman murdered by ultra-nationalists eleven years before.
In the summer of 1934, he wrote an essay called ‘The case against pacifism’, in which he took a fatalistic view of Europe’s future and lamented the ‘illogical theories of selfish, muddle-headed … people who are trying to alter the vices of civilisation by talking about them and doing nothing’.24 The ‘horrible fact’ was ‘that man is still a very quarrelsome animal.’ The tendency was currently on display in Germany, where ‘nationalism … is both inevitable and dangerous because it always foments and bursts out when a nation is aggrieved and oppressed.’ It was ‘very unfortunate that a nation should be in such a condition but that is all the more reason for strengthening our defences by land, air and sea.’
Neave believed that war was ‘regrettable but inevitable’ and that the pacifist mood then current would evaporate when the first bombs dropped.
‘No one really doubts that the Oxford Union [which the year before had voted ‘in no circumstances to fight for its King and Country’] would go with the others when the time came.’ While he believed that ‘there are few people in this country who would not fight for England … I hope there are none who will fight for France.’ Six years later he would do just that.
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.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 3