After some anxious moments at Marseilles, they made contact with their next protector. Louis Nouveau and his circle were the exception to Langley’s observation that a fugitive was unwise to expect help from the wealthy. Before the war he had been a stockbroker in the City of London and his friends were successful local businessmen, two of them of Greek origin and one married to a German communist.
The pair spent the next fortnight with Nouveau and his wife, Renée, in a modern flat on the Quai Rive Neuve overlooking the old port. Though he did not know it, they were in the hands of one of the major escape networks ferrying evaders who had avoided capture through occupied France and into Spain. It was now run by a man known as ‘Pat O’Leary’, who despite his Irish name was a former Belgian army doctor: hence the ‘Pat Line’.
O’Leary had inherited the line, not founded it. It had been built up ad hoc by a small group of unassuming men who had been thrown together by the chaos of war and whose response to it had revealed the gleam of heroism beneath their modest exteriors. The story went back to Marseilles in the summer after the fall of France in 1940. An early arrival was the Reverend Donald Caskie, who had been the minister of the Scots Kirk in Paris, who decided that, in view of the fiery sermons he preached against the evils of Nazism, it was sensible to head south before the Germans reached town. He took over a seamen’s mission at the port, which became an unofficial reception centre for British servicemen who by one means or another had fetched up on the Mediterranean shore.
He was soon in partnership with another Scotsman. Ian Garrow was a captain in the Highland Light Infantry serving as a transport officer with the 51st Highland Division. After the division surrendered at St-Valery-en-Caux on 12 June 1940, he and a group of his men set off westwards, hoping to make it back to Britain via the Channel Islands. After many adventures and several changes of plan, they were arrested near Cahors, in the Unoccupied Zone.19 In October they were moved to Fort St-Jean in the old port at Marseilles.
Like Caskie, he had no experience of clandestine work, but they both turned out to be very good at it. Initially, Garrow was part of a team of British officers at the fort organising escapes. Rather than leave himself, he chose to stay behind and establish an efficient organisation to help others. Under the terms of his parole, he was able to move around reasonably freely. He made friends at the American consulate and among prominent local citizens, including Louis and Renée Nouveau. In June 1941, Garrow teamed up with Albert-Marie Guérisse, a Belgian army doctor. Guérisse had been evacuated to England during Dunkirk and had joined the Royal Navy, serving on a converted merchantman carrying out clandestine work behind enemy lines for the Special Operations Executive. He had taken the cover name ‘Patrick Albert O’Leary’. The first name was bestowed on him by SOE. The rest he borrowed from a French-Canadian friend he had met during a spell at school in England.20
In April 1941, Pat O’Leary had been arrested by the French during an operation to land agents and pick up evaders and escapers on a beach near the Spanish border. He was interned in St Hippolyte-du-Fort, north-west of Nîmes, where security was lax. He was soon in touch with Garrow, who organised his escape. He intended to get back to Britain and SOE, but Garrow was impressed by him and saw him as a lieutenant and possible successor. When Garrow was arrested in October 1941, O’Leary took over. The organisation he inherited was by that stage receiving financial help from MI9 in London and the services of MI6, under the cold eye of its Machiavellian deputy director, Claude Dansey. In 1941 he was 64 years old, with forty years in the spy world behind him. ‘Z’, as he was code-named, was vindictive, arrogant and contemptuous of those he deemed to fall short of his high professional standards – a broad category.
So far, MI6 had not had a good war. Their entire European network had been rolled up in November 1939, when German agents posing as conduits to a dissident group inside the Wehrmacht snatched two key British agents at the town of Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. With the creation of the Special Operations Executive, set up in July 1940 to carry out sabotage operations in occupied Europe and aid local resistance groups, the monopoly MI6 had previously had on undercover work in enemy territory was ended. Dansey deeply resented the encroachment into his domain and seemed to regard SOE as an enemy on a par with the Germans.
His attitude towards the other potential rival, MI9, was more nuanced. The relationship between MI6 and MI9 was imprecisely defined. In the words of the official historians, they were ‘closely bound … sometimes too close for comfort’.21 However things looked on paper, in the end ‘what Dansey wanted done was done, and what he wanted undone was undone.’ What is more, ‘he could have broken Crockatt, or anyone else in MI9, as easily as he blew his own nose.’ Dansey moved in fast to exert control over the infant MI9. In the summer of 1940, he sent a young MI6 officer called Donald Darling to the Iberian peninsula to start re-establishing links between Britain and France, with which there was now no means of communication by land, sea, air or even radio.22 Under his code name ‘Sunday’, Darling was soon in touch with Garrow in Marseilles and sending him money. Henceforth he would play a vital role supporting the escape networks in France and Belgium.
To the eyes of Neave and Woollatt, as they passed the days looking out at the spring sunshine sparkling on the waters of the Mediterranean from the comfort of the Nouveaus’ flat, the Pat Line seemed efficient and reasonably secure. In fact, it was just recovering from the discovery that for months it had been completely compromised by the treachery of one of its most active members. For every story of selflessness that the Pat Line generated, Harold Cole provided a black counterpoint. The few pictures that exist of him show a nondescript figure with a long thin face, a high forehead and a square jutting chin. His hair was sandy and from time to time he wore a moustache. Despite his drab appearance, he was a master manipulator of both men and women. He was born in Marylebone in London in 1911 and, by the time war broke out, he was well known to the police, who held eleven warrants for his arrest. Cole had joined the Royal Engineers and was posted to France, where in the spring of 1940 he deserted after stealing an officer’s uniform and chequebook.23 He was arrested and imprisoned in Lille, but soon after the German attack in the west he broke out and moved in with a woman in the town, taking the name of her husband, who was off fighting for his country. When the war in France ended, Cole re-emerged in an unexpected role. He made contact with British troops stranded in the area and, using the French contacts he had made through his girlfriend, escorted them with local assistance to Paris and across the demarcation line to Marseilles. In the beginning at least, his motives seem to have been altruistic. News of Cole’s good work filtered back to London and he soon won the approval of Claude Dansey. His name also began featuring in intelligence reports reaching Donald Darling in Lisbon. To ‘Sunday’, he seemed ‘the antithesis of the Scarlet Pimpernel, in that he stood out as an Englishman in the very French surroundings in which he operated. Wearing plus fours and a pork pie hat, speaking rudimentary French with a cockney accent, it seemed incredible that he was not questioned and arrested by the Germans.’24
Darling reported his thoughts to London but ‘learned to my surprise that Colonel Dansey [and MI9] thought he had a sporting chance of getting away with it for some time to come.’ Nonetheless, Darling felt Cole was ‘too good to be true’. He pestered London to run checks with the War Office and Scotland Yard. The silence that met his requests seemed ‘tantamount to telling me to mind my own business’. Meanwhile in Marseilles, O’Leary was also growing suspicious. He had given Cole large sums of money to fund operations in Lille and he decided to check on how much of it had reached the intended beneficiaries. According to the story later recounted by Neave, in autumn 1941, while Cole was relaxing in Marseilles, O’Leary travelled to Lille and contacted a man called Duprez, who had given shelter to British airmen and was supposed to have been reimbursed for his costs.25 Duprez denied getting any money from Cole and O’Leary brought him back with him to Marseilles t
o confront Cole.26 When challenged, Cole denied the charge and insisted Duprez had been paid. After a fight, Cole escaped and returned to northern France, where he offered his services to German military intelligence, the Abwehr. O’Leary tried to warn the line’s agents in the area. But according to the MI9 files, the information Cole handed over resulted in a wave of arrests, including that of his mistress.27 From then on he was a full-time German agent. Neave reckoned that he ‘cost the lives of fifty of the escape organisation’s bravest helpers’.28
It was some time before the scale of his betrayal was pieced together and decisive action taken. In April 1942, just before Neave and Woollatt arrived in Marseilles, O’Leary crossed to Spain and was smuggled into Gibraltar for a summit meeting with Darling and Jimmy Langley of MI9. All addresses and cover names known to Cole were to be abandoned and anyone who encountered him was to shoot him on sight. As Neave pointed out, with communications with London relying on ‘a shaky system of messages in toothpaste tubes brought by couriers over the Pyrenees’, assembling vital information was extremely difficult. A radio link would have alerted everyone to the suspicions about Cole, but at this stage MI9’s activities in the field were not given high priority by the Air Force, and without their help it was impossible to drop wireless operators and sets.
Fortunately for Neave and Woollatt, Cole’s activities had not affected the Pat Line’s Switzerland-to-Marseilles branch. After two weeks in the Nouveaus’ flat, where they had to move about quietly to avoid raising the suspicions of the collaborationist occupants of the flat below, they were told to get ready to leave. An Anglo-French guide called Francis Blanchain took them by train to Toulouse. They stayed for a week while a party of other fugitives – Poles, Frenchmen, Brits and Australians – assembled. A slow train took them to Port Vendres, where they met their guide, a wiry little smuggler who was growing rich through passing people over the mountains. The trek took twenty-four exhausting hours.
On arrival in neutral Spain, there was none of the exhilaration that had gripped them in Switzerland. The regime was unwelcoming and escapees could, if captured, be thrown into gaol. A shifty-seeming local courier took them to the consulate at Barcelona and, on 1 May 1942, two immaculate Foreign Office types drove them in a Bentley to the British embassy in Madrid.
At the beginning of the war, Sir Samuel Hoare, the ambassador, had been anxious to do nothing that would jeopardise his mission’s continued presence in neutral Spain. Donald Darling’s activities had given him particular cause for concern. Since then, things had relaxed. On arrival, they were met by the first secretary, ‘a big man with a welcoming handshake’. This was Michael Creswell, who as ‘Monday’ was a key player in MI9’s Iberian operations and with whom Neave would soon be working. He led them to a large wooden building in the garden where twenty or thirty men were drinking beer and sherry. It was a stirring sight: ‘They came from every Allied nation, all of them tough, hard and determined, all of them ready to fight.’29 After his recent experiences, Neave felt he could hold his head up in such exalted company. The following day, the men boarded a bus and were driven south, bearing papers that identified them as a party of students. At La Línea the Spanish guards did not hide their disbelief but waved them through. In Madrid, he had met ‘Monday’. Now, in Gibraltar, he came face to face with Donald Darling, ‘Sunday’, who interrogated him about his journey. Then he boarded a troopship for Gourock on the Clyde. His life as ‘Saturday’ was about to begin.
* From January 1941, the camp at Fort St-Jean at Marseilles was closed and its internees moved to the other two.
6
Room 900
If Neave was expecting a hero’s welcome, he was soon disappointed. On arrival in London, he was subjected to a further interrogation by MI9 at an office in the Great Central Hotel in Marylebone. He remembered the dull and solid pile from his undergraduate days as a place to repair to after a night on the tiles, for a drink or a bath before taking the milk train back to Oxford. He was questioned by an earnest Intelligence Corps captain who recorded his experiences in War Office officialese. When he had finished, he showed Neave the result. The account was ‘far less exciting than a report by the CID on their observation of a public convenience’.1 To have his adventures reduced to a drab recitation of dates and places was annoying. He might not have been on the receiving end of a Gestapo rubber truncheon, but there was nothing in the testimony that could convey ‘the sheer terror of being in their hands’. He pretended not to care. He was ‘young and lucky’ and alive.
He was impatient to visit his family, now at Mill Green Park, Ingatestone, Essex, which Sheffield had inherited in 1936 on the death of his father. This was more of a duty than a pleasure. He wanted ‘to get the homecoming over and done with and then get back to London to make up for time lost’. As well as the fun to be had, he had promised some of his old Colditz comrades that he would call on their families with their news. But first, he was told, he could not leave before he had spoken to someone who was waiting for him downstairs. On his way to the rendezvous he ran into Hugh Woollatt.2 It was their last meeting. Woollatt was killed in Normandy in 1944.
The man waiting for him in the lobby was Jimmy Langley, who he had last seen in prison hospital in Lille. Neave knew nothing about his escape. Now here he was, neatly turned out in his Coldstream uniform, with one empty sleeve pinned to the tunic. Pleasure at the encounter was tempered by the news that he had been summoned to lunch with ‘someone important’. Neave brightened up when he heard that the VIP was Langley’s chief at MI9, Brigadier Norman Crockatt. He remembered his encounter back in Berne with Cartwright and the attaché’s cryptic remark that MI9 ‘wanted me back’. He ‘began to feel interested’. Lunch was in the masculine comfort of Rules in Covent Garden. After Neave had recounted a few stories of POW life, Crockatt came to the point. He outlined the work MI9 was doing. The escape-and-evasion picture was changing. Until the end of 1941, most evaders were still soldiers stranded after the fall of France. Since then, the tempo of the air war had picked up and the main task now was to recover aircrew who had been shot down. With the American Air Force about to go into action over Europe, the numbers would only go up. These men were highly and expensively trained warriors, whose return to action would advance the struggle.
To sustain the escape lines on the ground, the organisation had begun to train its own agents and to establish new routes to Spain. Crockatt mentioned the problems facing the Pat Line as a result of Cole’s treachery. The Gestapo were on to it and it was not expected to last much longer. The men and women in the field needed money and communications. If Neave wanted to help them, Crockatt was offering him a berth working with Langley in MI9’s secret escape section. Neave agreed immediately, telling him that ‘it’s the one job I should like to do. I have become used to the atmosphere of escape, and I would do anything to help the people over there.’3
This was a big decision to take without any time for reflection. Yet Neave never seems to have reconsidered his choice. From an early age he had been attracted to the idea of soldiering, joining the Territorials when uniforms were at their most unfashionable. Things had not turned out as he would have hoped. The one thing he had proved good at was escaping. He had the temperament for it. And undoubtedly he wanted to do what he could to repay those who had sacrificed their lives and liberty to help him get back home. But this was still a big step. By accepting Crockatt’s offer, he was turning away from the sharp end of warfare and accepting what was probably going to be a largely desk-bound role. Hugh Woollatt was returning to his regiment, taking his place in the line again. Jimmy Langley would perhaps have preferred to do likewise, but he was minus an arm. Joining MI9 meant saying goodbye to Neave’s dreams of martial glory. It was an understandable decision, but still a surprising one.
Why had Crockatt wanted him? In Neave’s account, after accepting the offer he went on to say, ‘I am very pleased, sir, that you think I am suitable.’ Crockatt had replied sharply, ‘Don’t be modest.
You are one of the very few who has had such experience – not only of escape from Germany but of the Resistance as well.’ This was partly true. There were not many escapers at this point, but plenty of evaders who had made it back and knew far more about the workings of the Belgian and French resistance groups than Neave. And, if being an escaper was an important qualification, why choose Neave and not, say, Woollatt, who had also pulled off a dramatic home run? Espionage in Britain was often a family affair. Jimmy Langley’s father had been in the secret service. The intelligence community preferred to recruit from among those they knew and felt comfortable with. If Neave had any family connections, he was too discreet to say so. The die was cast. Crockatt told Neave he would be assigned to the department called IS 9(d), based at Room 900 in the War Office in Whitehall, working alongside Langley. The ‘IS’ stood for Intelligence School, a meaningless designation at this point. Here Neave’s example will be followed and the outfit will be known simply as ‘Room 900’. His broad job description was to ‘look after secret communications with occupied Europe and training of agents’. The post came with a promotion. He would start as a captain. It was all very gratifying. He left Rules savouring the prospect of ‘another great adventure’.
But before that there was a fortnight’s leave to enjoy. His father came to meet him at Ingatestone station. Neave ‘walked up to him and we said nothing for a moment. It was not a time for words.’4 The companionship recorded in the Eton diaries seems to have stiffened into something cool and formal. He had written to his parents several months after his capture, complaining about a bureaucratic glitch which had prevented him from being promoted to full lieutenant, something he was entitled to as a result of his TA service. His mother had taken up the cause vigorously, bombarding the authorities with letters, and Sheffield Neave had supported the campaign loyally. Nonetheless, the family maintain that for most of his life, relations between father and son were distant, if not hostile. One cause of the estrangement, they say, was his father’s treatment of his mother. Dorothy suffered bad health and had been desperately ill while he was a POW. She had rallied a little just before his return but would die ten months later. How Sheffield Neave dealt with the situation is not documented. However, the family say he was not a faithful husband and that at this time he had already taken up with his assistant, Mary Hodges, who he married in 1946.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 12