Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

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.