At a meeting at the Palace of Justice that morning, Neave’s procedure had been decided. He would introduce himself to each defendant in turn, hand over a copy of the relevant indictment, list the prisoner’s rights and announce he would return the following day to answer any questions. He was accompanied by a large party. With him were the American General Secretary of the Tribunal, Harold B. Willey; Major Wolfe Frank, a refugee from Germany who had joined the British Army and acted as expert translator; a chaplain, should the prisoner require spiritual sustenance; a psychiatrist, to record his reactions; and a strong security detail, led by Colonel Andrus.
The first encounter was with the most charismatic and complex of the prisoners, a man who inspired both mockery and a fascination heavily tinged with fear. As the cell door swung open, Neave got his first glimpse of Hermann Goering. The Reichsmarschall’s eyes were ‘small and greedy … he had the look of a woman about him … He appeared exquisitely corrupt and soft … My first impression was of meeting a dissolute Roman emperor, game to the last.’ His once-bloated form had deflated and his grey air force uniform hung off him. Neave handed him the indictment and told him his rights. Goering’s response was a theatrical ‘So it has come.’ All afternoon Neave traipsed from cell to cell. Next came Hess, then Ribbentrop, Streicher, von Schirach, Frank, Funk and Frick, Kaltenbrunner and Ley. Last on the list was the German naval chief, Karl Doenitz.
Neave appears to have made a record of his first impressions soon after these visitations. It was another thirty-two years before he aired them in a book. He thought it best to wait until the ‘dark passions of 1945 had cooled’, and it was Diana who persuaded him, in the early 1970s, that the time was now right. His assessments of the men in the cells were a valuable contribution to understanding the character of the Nazis and Nazism. The pen pictures are shrewd, precise and not inhumane. He felt most sympathy for Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who in 1941 had flown himself to the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in an attempt to broker a peace with Britain. He was clearly mentally unbalanced. He wore an old grey tweed jacket and on his feet were the same Luftwaffe flying boots he had worn four years before, ‘all that remained of his mad, courageous mission, which had brought him ridicule and disappointment’.13
Neave’s greatest contempt was reserved for Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, ‘a weak man trying to be brave’, who had got religion since incarceration. He had a particular reason for his animus towards Keitel. It was he who had signed the order authorising the execution without trial of the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, the Royal Marine Commandos captured after the raid on Bordeaux. There had only been two survivors, the men helped to freedom by Neave’s agent and protégée, Mary Lindell. When the task was completed, he reported to the judges, describing the reactions and demands of the defendants. It was quite a debut. Apart from defending a young soldier on a charge of accidentally shooting a woman as she rode along on her bicycle in France during the Phoney War, ‘this was my first essay in advocacy before a court.’
The tribunal was unprecedented. There were difficulties and delays as it groped its way towards an approximation of justice. The proceedings stretched into the new year and it took ten months to conclude. The British prosecution team was led by Hartley Shawcross, Attorney General of the incoming Labour government, and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who served as Solicitor General under Churchill. Maxwell Fyfe was Edinburgh-born, the son of the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School, and a progressive Conservative who had been involved in making policy to meet the aspirations raised in the Beveridge Report for a fairer Britain. He entered parliament in 1935 and managed successful parallel careers as both politician and lawyer.
The ‘short and lively Scot’ made a deep impression on Neave. He admired his ‘industry and skill’ and the way he was able to strike fear into the Nazis. ‘Their patronising smiles and bombast vanished before his questioning,’ he wrote. Maxwell Fyfe’s greatest moment came with his forensic evisceration of Goering over the case of the seventy-seven Allied airmen who tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III, at Sagan, south-east of Berlin, in March 1944. The feat became famous as the Great Escape. The breakout infuriated Hitler, who ordered all the captured prisoners to be shot, a breach of the Geneva Conventions. Until this stage in the trial, Goering had handled himself with increasing confidence. He had held up well under cross-examination by the American prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, and there seemed a chance that he might escape the noose.
Questioned by Maxwell Fyfe, Goering denied any knowledge of the ‘Sagan’ order. He claimed that he was on leave when it was issued and only learned later that fifty recaptured escapees had been shot. Maxwell Fyfe ‘skilfully tested his alibi as if he were prosecuting a burglar at the Old Bailey’. Neave ‘listened, fascinated, to this historic exchange … cross-examination at its best’. Repeating his denials, Goering became ‘alarmed and blustering’. He ‘lost his self-control’. The sneaking respect felt by some for the Reichsmarschall’s bravado evaporated. ‘Goering had lost the battle,’ wrote Neave. Maxwell Fyfe’s ‘cross-examination saved the face of the Allied prosecution’ and ‘marked Goering down for the death sentence’.14
The episode on which he had been skewered – the murder of escapee POWs – obviously had a special meaning for Neave, which Maxwell Fyfe acknowledged when they spoke in the lunch interval at the end of the opening session. Neave congratulated him, saying, ‘You’ve got him.’ Maxwell Fyfe ‘smiled at me and said, “I know how you must feel.”’ The significance of his acquaintance with the advocate-politician went deeper than that. Here was someone to look up to, and in time perhaps to emulate.
The conduct of the Soviet legal team also left a deep impression, but of alarm and revulsion. They were clearly controlled directly from Moscow. The Soviet alternate judge on the bench, Colonel Alexander Fedorovich Volchkov, was said to be People’s Commissar for Justice and a professor of international law. Neave suspected he was not a judge at all. Instead, it seemed more likely he was an intelligence officer serving with the NKVD. Neave makes clear in his book on the tribunal that as well as his courtroom functions he was still acting as an intelligence operative. He wrote that ‘the intelligence services of the Western world, whose representatives at the trial included myself,’ sent back reports on Moscow’s man. Later, he came to believe that Volchkov was involved in the Katyn massacre of 10,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940. Among the many atrocities of the war, this one held a particular significance for him – perhaps because of Diana’s connection with the Poles.
When his day’s work was done, Neave enjoyed the febrile social life that swirled around the tribunal. The town was full of soldiers, lawyers, secretaries and journalists. In the evenings the well connected gathered in the Marble Room of the Grand Hotel to gossip, flirt, dance and drink. Nuremberg lay in the American zone of occupation, a Land of Cockaigne through which flowed a river of booze. The Soviets, who had gone in no time from uneasy allies to the likely next enemies, were not seen much in the Marble Room and got drunk in the villas they shared with their women, singing, dancing and firing their revolvers. One night shots were heard outside the Grand Hotel. A Russian officer staggered into the lobby, collapsed and bled to death. In order to avoid embarrassment to the Soviet delegation, the band in the Marble Room was ordered to play on.
Neave entered into the spirit of rather desperate fun,including a drinking contest that was arranged among the principal participants in the trial. Each contestant had to gulp down as much as possible of the appropriate tipple. For the Americans it was bourbon, for the Russians vodka, for the French cognac and for the Brits whisky. The winner was Airey Neave.15
An undercurrent of anxiety and melancholy ran beneath the victors’ surface euphoria. The shrewd eyes of Rebecca West, who was covering the trial for the Daily Telegraph and the New Yorker magazine, observed that they were ‘gay for moments but were permanently depressed’. She was then fifty-three, a literary lioness whose love life had
been as adventurous as her voyaging. H. G. Wells was an old flame. Francis Biddle became a new one. She and Neave hit it off immediately. Biddle may have been struck by Neave’s youthful looks, but West ‘took him for a man of forty, and rather worn at that’.16 He impressed her in other ways. It seemed to her that he divided ‘his attention between ideals of a sort that refused contentment, amusement at the world, and a puzzled interest in the persistent wickedness of man’. She noted a marked humility. A ‘number of people who had had dealings with him during the war thought more highly of him than he did himself.’ Above all, he grasped the significance of the event. In her view, he was ‘as conscious as anybody there of the true meaning of the trial’.
On 1 October 1946, the sentences were delivered. Twelve defendants were condemned to death, seven imprisoned for terms from ten years to life, and three acquitted. The hangings took place on 16 October. Neave was not there to witness them. A fortnight before, he had flown back to England, wondering what role he would play in the new world that was taking shape and how he was going to provide for his wife and growing family.
8
The Long March
In the early afternoon of 1 July 1953, Airey Neave stood on the balcony of the Queen’s Hotel, Abingdon, with Diana at his side, as supporters in the crowd below cheered the new MP. Like most of the important things in Neave’s life, success had not come without effort. This was his third attempt to enter parliament. The struggle had not been made easier by the sight of lesser men breezing their way to Westminster – not least, his untrustworthy subordinate of IS9 days, Peter Baker, who had made it on his first try, in the 1950 general election.
Neave had also stood in the 1950 election, contesting the Labour stronghold of Thurrock, where he was, as expected, thrashed. In the election called in October the following year, he lost again to Labour in the more promising constituency of Ealing North, where he came within a whisker of success, only 120 votes behind the winner. He nonetheless decided to try his luck elsewhere. Within a few months of the election, a glittering prize beckoned. Sir Ralph Glyn, Conservative MP for the Abingdon division, was standing down. Neave presented himself with a clutch of other hopefuls and reached the shortlist of six. He was youngish (thirty-six), by now reasonably well established as a barrister in London and had a fine war record. On 18 March 1952, after a selection meeting at Didcot Conservative Club, he was selected as candidate.
It was another fourteen months before Sir Ralph was raised to the Lords, and the by-election to replace him was set for 30 June 1953, three weeks after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He was facing manageable opposition. The main threat came from Labour, represented by Ted Castle, a pencil-moustachioed David Niven lookalike who was selected less than a fortnight before polling day. He had seen out the war as night editor of the Daily Mirror and was married to the formidable Barbara Castle, one of the few women in the House of Commons. She was a combative redhead and an acolyte of Labour’s deputy leader, Aneurin Bevan, whose ferocious manner and radical agenda rattled the teacups of Middle England. Such associations were unlikely to endear Castle to undecided voters in what was a traditional Tory seat. Neave did his best to link his opponent to the Bevan camp and claimed that his credo included ‘near-Communist ideas’.1 Castle protested in vain that he ‘never had any connection whatsoever with the Bevanite group’. His cause was not helped when ‘Nye’ appeared during the campaign to harangue a crowd of five hundred in a field.
The by-election came nineteen months into the Churchill premiership and was seen as an important test of the government’s standing. The great man sent Neave a message of support, flaying the ‘Socialists’ – as the Tories invariably referred to their opponents – and trumpeting his administration’s achievements. Churchill reminded voters that the Korean War was over, and far from being – as Labour charged – Cold Warmongers, ‘hopes of peace are foremost in our minds.’ At home they were keeping their promise to build 300,000 new homes a year and ‘a new and bright spirit’ was pervading the nation. Journalists descended on the constituency, including the Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ – the columnist William Connor. ‘Abingdon is a maddeningly amorphous constituency that is very hard to get a grip on and has driven both the candidates red-eyed with the weariness of pursuit,’ he wrote. ‘There are 127 outlying villages. There are thousands of resolute Tories and an equal number of unshakeable Socialists. Their occupations range from growing turnips to making nuclear energy.’2
Naturally, Connor spoke highly of his colleague, describing Castle as ‘lively, energetic, likeable’. But he also had positive words about Neave. He was ‘compact, somewhat reserved, and with a military record that, if valour on the field was the same as political ability, would sweep him to Westminster.’ He went on, ‘Unfortunately the two qualities are not interchangeable.’
As Airey criss-crossed the division, Diana was almost always by his side, undaunted by the fact that she was only weeks away from the birth of their third child, William. Many years later, she told him that it had been ‘a tremendous vote-catcher being pregnant’.3 As it turned out, Abingdon was in effect gaining two members for the price of one. Over the years, Diana Neave would devote almost as much energy to the constituency as her husband did, and later perhaps more so when he was diverted by his Northern Ireland duties. Neave won by a comfortable margin of 5,860, increasing the Tory vote by 977. He now had a solid base on which to build a career in national politics and would represent the constituency until his death. It suited the Neaves very well, particularly Diana. Marigold can remember her mother ‘being not at all keen on Ealing’, and ‘Thurrock equally she wasn’t too excited about.’4
It covered nine hundred square miles, a vast area including five main towns, stretching from the suburbs of Oxford in the north to the outskirts of Swindon in the west, enclosing ancient market towns like Wantage and Faringdon and the mellow villages of the Vale of White Horse. It was well populated with traditional Tories of robust views. Though he was courteous and attentive to this layer of his support, such folk were not really the Neaves’ type. One night they went to dine with a retired general, a stalwart of the local party in a neighbouring district, who ‘did a good deal of drinking’. Afterwards Neave recorded in his diary his host’s ‘patronising’ attitude to the local MP, and his surprise at the fact ‘that Diana was allowed to make political speeches’. As he drove away from the general’s manor house, he was ‘glad it is not in my constituency’.5
More to their liking were the Oxford dons, literary figures and scientists among his constituents. They included the workforce of both the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham. Neave had received little formal scientific training, but his interest was deep and in time he taught himself enough to be able to understand the fundamentals of important contemporary technological developments. Their impact on politics and the economy would become his special subject and his primary area of parliamentary expertise.
Abingdon might be considered safe Tory territory, but he never took his tenure for granted. Despite comfortable majorities at every successive election, he fretted constantly over the soundness of every ward and village, badgering his agent, Leslie Brown, and local party chairwoman, Meredydd Saunders-Davies, a former intelligence officer, for information about the local mood and machinations. Neave’s relationship with Brown was sometimes fractious but Meredydd, a true-blue spinster, stout and good-hearted, who lived with her sister Gwenfra, was a friend as well as a vital ally whose judgement he relied on heavily. His successive secretaries, Hannah Hulme and Joy Robilliard, provided another mainstay. They dealt stoically with a heavy workload, typing up and despatching the scores of daily letters to constituents, officials and ministers that in the pre-email age drove political activity, as well as dealing with his business interests.
For the next twenty-two years, the Neaves’ life – for in many ways it was a single existence – was largely passed shuttling bac
k and forth between London and the constituency. His appetite for work was insatiable, his engagement complete, and if interest and energy and a modicum of aptitude are the key ingredients of political success, then steady advancement seemed assured. With hindsight, the transition from soldier to MP appears natural, but there was nothing inevitable about the development. Neave wrote much about the forces that drove his wartime service. None of his books say anything about why he decided on a peacetime political career.
There was no real family tradition of political service and there were few early indications that he was set on a course for Westminster. The adolescent trip to Germany had stimulated an interest in ‘abroad’, but at university he took only a casual interest in the Oxford Union, traditional nursery of aspiring politicos, and never sought office. Despite his engagement with the wider world, there is not much evidence that he was particularly concerned with what went on at home. He left nothing behind that reveals his attitude towards the great question of what sort of Britain should emerge from the blood, sweat, toil and tears of war. There is no record of his thoughts about the Beveridge Report, which ushered in the welfare state, nor his reaction to the shock defeat of Winston Churchill in July 1945.
That he chose the Conservatives was unsurprising, but not inevitable. There were others with his background and wartime experience who decided that the future lay with Labour; men like Aidan Crawley, who took part in numerous escape attempts from Stalag Luft III. Crawley would prise staunchly Conservative Buckingham from the Tories with a massive swing in the 1945 election. Neave was not burdened with the attitudes towards those beneath him on the social ladder that afflicted some with a similar upbringing. The war had provided continuous proof that it was unwise to make assumptions about people on the basis of background. Nonetheless, he was no radical, inclined rather towards gradualism and continuity. He had a strong romantic streak, but it was circumscribed and qualified, only given full rein in time of war and in matters of the heart.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 17