Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

In the first years of his school career, this burden of expectation seems to have weighed lightly, if at all, on his concerns. We can glimpse his thoughts in a surviving diary from 1931, when he was fifteen. The pages are full of the routine preoccupations of a boy of his class and time, with little that hints of the extraordinary life to come. The overall tone is assured, befitting his membership of an elite which had, until recently, taken its continued power, status and prosperity for granted. Both his father and grandfather had been at Eton before him. Among his forebears were two governors of the Bank of England and a number of high-ranking soldiers. His father was descended from a baronet.

The Neaves, and the women they married, seemed the warp and weft of the British Establishment, comfortably off, confident and used to exercising authority and receiving automatic respect. However, they also had an inquiring streak, lively minds and a history of striking out down unconventional paths. One female ancestor, Caroline Neave (1781–1863), was a philanthropist and prison reformer. His grandfather, Sheffield Henry Morier Neave (1853–1936), inherited a fortune while at Eton, and after Balliol College, Oxford, seemed set on a life of pleasure. A trip to Africa in pursuit of big game brought about a conversion to seriousness. He became interested in the eradication of the tsetse fly, which carried sleeping sickness and malaria. In middle age, he trained as a doctor and he ended up Physician of the Queen’s Hospital for Children in the East End of London.

His interests were inherited by his son, Sheffield Airey Neave, born in 1879. After Eton, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. His speciality was entomology, the study of insects, the importance of which to public health and agriculture in the British Empire was starting to be appreciated.1 In the early years of the century, he worked for the Colonial Office on scientific surveys in Northern Rhodesia and served as an entomologist on a commission investigating sleeping sickness in the Congolese province of Katanga. In 1913, he was appointed assistant director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, and stayed in the post for thirty years before taking over as director.

Sheffield married Dorothy Middleton, a colonel’s daughter, and on 23 January 1916, at 24 De Vere Gardens, a tall London brick house in Knightsbridge, she gave birth to a son. In keeping with Neave tradition, he was christened with a basket of surnames plucked from the family tree. In his youth, Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave hated the handle he had been lumbered with. For a period in the Second World War, he took to referring to himself as ‘Tony’. But the name on the birth certificate stuck, and with it all the jokey and embarrassing permutations that schoolboy and service wit could devise.

Shortly after the birth, the family moved to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Their new home, Bishop’s House, was large and comfortable, with steep-pitched red-tile roofs and mullioned windows, surrounded by lawns and flower beds, and only a short walk from the station, where there were regular services to Sheffield’s work in London. Airey went to the local Montessori school, an enlightened choice at a time when the Italian educationalist’s ideas were just taking hold in Britain. Then, aged nine, he was sent away to St Ronan’s, an academically inclined prep school on the coast at Worthing, before arriving at Eton in the spring of 1929.

The school was undergoing the same painful transformation as the rest of the country as it adjusted to the post-war world. However, the curriculum would have been familiar to a boy from the previous century. Classics still ruled and an extraordinary amount of the boys’ time was spent construing Greek and Latin poetry and prose. Games were exalted and the stars of the river and cricket pitch were gilded demigods. Outside the classroom and the playing field, though, the atmosphere was stimulating, and independent thought was encouraged under the leadership of the lively and well-connected headmaster, Dr Cyril Alington, who as well as hymns wrote detective novels.

Neave had just turned fifteen when the surviving pages of his diary open. He comes across as earnest and hard-working, recording in detail all the homework he is set and the marks he receives. Mostly he was in the top half of the class, but his efforts seem to have been conscientious rather than inspired. It was the same story at games. He spent the afternoons kicking and knocking balls around, panting along muddy paths on cross-country runs or heaving an oar on the river.

All this effort brought little reward, not even the ephemeral pleasure of ‘a ribboned coat’ or ‘a season’s fame’. In one cricket match, he struggled for seventy-five minutes to make nine runs. Though fairly robust, he seems to have been ill frequently. He suffered from a skin complaint and some other unspecified ailment which required regular physiotherapy sessions with a nurse called Miss Dempster, who ‘weighed and measured me and made various uncomplimentary remarks about the shape of my figure’.2

He showed an early interest in soldiering and joined the Eton army cadet corps, but found the drill a challenge. ‘I am rather vague about bayonets still,’3 he recorded a few months after joining up. Then, a day later, ‘We learned field signals etc of which I understood little.’4 Thus, an early pattern was established. Young Airey’s zeal was not matched by natural aptitude, and much as he would have liked to, he did not cut a very convincing martial figure. He left school with the rank of lance corporal.

Eton encouraged a strong interaction with the world outside its walls, hosting a stream of distinguished visitors who came to address the boys. Many were former pupils. Others, such as Mohandas Gandhi, were internationally famous. By the time he visited in October 1931, he was well embarked on his campaign to liberate India from British rule. The invitation had come from the Political Society run by the boys, an initiative of Jo Grimond, who went on to lead the Liberal Party. *He wrote that when the school authorities learned of it, they were ‘vexed … However, they soon recovered their poise and fended off the indignant letters fired by blimpish Old Etonians.’ Gandhi, who wore his familiar loincloth as protection against the dank October Thames Valley weather, was ‘only a modified success. Mr Gandhi was long-winded and shuffled round all direct questions. He did not impress the boys.’5 Airey Neave noted in his diary that the Mahatma rose from his bed in the headmaster’s house long before dawn and ‘prayed from 4–5 a.m. in the garden’.6

That is as far as the entry goes. Politics barely get a mention in the diary at this stage. There is a reference to the political crisis of August 1931. It resulted in a new National Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, which saw taxes rise. As far as Neave was concerned, the main consequence was the economies that resulted at Bishop’s House. ‘The new budget has made Daddy sack John,’ he wrote, a reference to the gardener Airey sometimes helped with his chores, washing the car and rolling the lawn.7 It is an interesting choice of words. The suggestion is that it is the Prime Minister’s fault that John has lost his job, rather than a failure on his father’s part to make the economies necessary to keep the gardener on.

The only hint of interest in another realm that would later absorb so much of his energy comes when he mentions borrowing a book called Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service from the college library. The author was Henri Le Caron, the pseudonym of Thomas Miller Beach, born in Colchester in 1841, who as a young man emigrated first to Paris and then the United States. The story he told combined two themes that would come to play a large part in the destiny of Airey Neave. One was the secret intelligence world. The other was violent Irish Republicanism. While living in Illinois, Beach saw the first stirrings of the Fenian movement. In 1866, the Brotherhood launched raids across the nearby border of Canada, the closest piece of British territory within reach. The rebels, some of them veterans of the Civil War, carried a banner declaring themselves to be the ‘Irish Republican Army’. They were easily defeated but the episode set in train the long campaign against British rule at home and abroad that continued with only temporary interruptions until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.