Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

Beach wrote about these events in letters home. His father notified his MP, who contacted the authorities. When Beach returned to England on a visit in 1867, he received ‘an official communication requesting me to attend at 50 Harley Street’. There it was agreed that ‘I should become a paid agent of the Government, and that on my return to the United States I should ally myself to the Fenian organisation, in order to play the role of spy in the rebel ranks.’8

According to his account, Beach wormed his way into the heart of the movement, rising to the post of Inspector General of the Fenian Brotherhood. He sent back a stream of reports on funding, operations and political lobbying – then, as later, a source of alarm to the British government. Beach’s view of the Irish rebels was very English, a mixture of alarm and amused condescension. ‘What a sight!’ he wrote, describing a whiskey-fuelled gathering in Chicago in 1881. ‘What a babel of voices and a world of smoke … as for hearing, your ears are deafened by the din and clatter of many tongues and stamping feet [assembled] to clamour for dynamite as the only means of achieving their patriotic ends.’9 Yet the rhetoric, he told his readers, was not to be taken entirely seriously: ‘Always you must remember that you are dealing with Irishmen, who in their wildest and most ferocious of fights still retain [a] substratum of childishness of character and playfulness of mood, with its attendant elements of exaggeration and romance.’10

Neave did not record his reaction to Beach’s book. He was, though, greatly impressed by Within Four Walls , published in 1930, a personal account of the exploits of Colonel Henry Antrobus Cartwright, who had been captured by the Germans in the 1914–18 war and succeeded in escaping at his fifth attempt. ‘I greatly respected him,’ he wrote. ‘His book was a classic … As a small boy, I had read it with romantic pleasure, and it played a great part in forming my philosophy of escape.’11

Judged by the 1931 diary, Neave at fifteen was an unremarkable boy, an adolescent apparently free of angst. He seems cool and disengaged. There are no close friendships in evidence, no extracurricular enthusiasms except for an interest in collecting old books (‘I went to Mrs Browns and bought a very nice prayer book, 1811, with good plates for 4s 6d. I think it was worth it.’)12 When the odd emphatic remark does pop up, it is often about school meals. He enjoyed his food and noted the menus with as much detail as his performance in class. The fare was not to his liking. ‘Lunch at 1.30,’ he wrote on 6 July, ‘veal and ham pie and jam sponge and custard. Awful.’ On 26 September, they were offered ‘for boys’ dinner the usual type of cat’s meat’. In this respect, school was a preparation for the prison-camp privations that would follow.

Neave’s education also provided another lesson in how to cope with incarceration. The boys had a complicated relationship with authority. From the outside, the regime seemed strictly hierarchical, with the masters and seniors giving orders which those under them obeyed or suffered the consequences. The reality was more subtle and interesting. Neave’s eagerness to do well did not preclude a bolshie streak. By now, he was well used to English institutional life and aware of its absurdities and injustices. Like his peers, he enjoyed finding ways to get round irritating restrictions. He also liked to challenge authority when the chance arose and the odds of getting away with it were favourable. It was good for morale, a reminder that those who ruled the school did not have it all their own way.

There are frequent references in the diary to ‘mobbing’: semi-spontaneous outbreaks of high jinks which could erupt at mealtimes and even in chapel. ‘After tea there was a great mob which m’tutor came up and stopped,’ he wrote on 26 September. ‘M’tutor’ was his housemaster, John Foster Crace, a classicist who had been at the school since 1901 and had married late and recently become father to a girl. Then, a few hours later, ‘the captain of house got mobbed at supper.’ According to Neave, when Crace appeared to break it up again the boys ran off, but after prayers the housemaster’s tone was almost apologetic, telling them, ‘“I lose my temper sometimes [titters] but I am not really so bad as you may think” [laughter]. He did not see anything wrong with the mobs but they were rather near his family.’ Crace’s cautious reaction to the shenanigans was perhaps a recognition of the truth that, as in prisons, without recourse to brute force, order in school essentially depended on the consent of the inmates. Imposing authority was a tricky business. The boys could spot – and instantly exploit – any perceived chink in the armour. When the class was assigned a new master called Mr Kitchen Smith, Neave’s first impression was that he was ‘quite nice but rather weak’.13 This assessment must have been shared by the others, because when asked, they assured the teacher that they had no outstanding homework to do. It was a fib that was soon discovered, but it had been worth a try.

It is an insignificant episode in itself, yet indicative of the spirit that prevailed among a section of the British prisoners held in German camps in the war to come. The camp guards were uniformed versions of the beaks and prefects they had known at school, and their instinct was to defy them, test them, rag them and keep them off balance whenever possible.

Neave’s school and home life meshed easily. Beaconsfield was only eleven miles from Eton and his mother often visited him at weekends, turning up to chapel or dropping off treats such as baskets of eggs. Neave seems to have been close to her, and sympathetic to her frequent indispositions, when she would retreat to bed with unexplained illnesses. Family lore represents Sheffield Neave as a Victorian father, large and imposing, but absorbed in his work, neglectful of his wife and distant towards his children. By the summer of 1931 there were four of them. After Airey came Iris Averil, 13, Rosamund, 10, Viola, 6, and a brother, Digby, 3. According to Airey’s eldest child, Marigold, ‘He didn’t have a great relationship with his father … He was not a very warm man, I think. This was his problem. He was quite difficult to warm to, quite frightening to look at – he had rather prominent, stern features.’14 As for the other children, ‘They were all girls except for little Digby, who was so little no one hardly bothered with him. And the girls were just considered as girls, and in those days that’s all they were. Nobody paid any attention to them. They were not very important. It was rather a dysfunctional family I always felt.’

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