Patrick Bishop - The Man Who Was Saturday

Which house you belonged to was important, indeed crucial, to the experience of Eton. It was where you slept and ate, and the teacher in charge of it disciplined you, directed your education and acted in loco parentis. In Maugham’s mind, Neave’s house, presided over by John Foster Crace, was a haven of civilisation. It was only in upper school that boys could visit houses other than their own. Maugham was introduced to Crace’s by Michael Isaacs, whose family were friends of his parents. Isaacs was Jewish, the son of the Marquess of Reading. He became Neave’s lifelong friend. Maugham wrote glowingly of the coterie that he soon joined: ‘Marcus Rueff, Patrick Gibson, Ben Astley, David Parsons, and Airey Neave. They talked about Suetonius and Mozart, Michael Arlen and Adler, and though they were all good at games they never discussed them.’ He concluded wistfully, ‘I am certain that if I had been in Mr Crace’s house I would not have been persecuted. On the contrary, I would have enjoyed each term and my outlook would have been wider.’25

They were indeed a colourful and adventurous crew. Rueff was a talented musician who, while serving in the Rifles, was mortally wounded in a German ambush at Derna in Libya in April 1941. Patrick Gibson was captured in the same action, then later escaped, walking five hundred miles over the Apennines and crossing German lines to rejoin the Allies. He went on to serve in the Special Operations Executive, waging war in occupied territory. David Parsons would become better known as the actor David Tree, the handsome lead in thirteen British films. He lost a hand in a training accident and also joined SOE.26

Politically, Maugham and Neave took different paths. Maugham reacted to the rise of Fascism by becoming a socialist. When war came, he declined a commission in the Hussars and joined up as a trooper in an armoured regiment, serving in the Western Desert. What they shared was bravery, patriotism and a sense of duty. Maugham was credited with risking his life repeatedly to pull as many as forty men from stricken tanks. They also shared an association with the world of intelligence and espionage. After being rendered unfit for active service by a severe head wound sustained in the summer of 1942, Maugham became an intelligence officer and went on to play an important part in founding the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, initially based in Jerusalem, a training centre for British spies and diplomats. After the war, he became a successful writer, best known for his novella The Servant , which was made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde and James Fox, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. He struggled with a drink problem and his sexuality. Despite their contrasting outlooks and personalities, Neave and Maugham remained in touch and Robin stood as godfather to Airey’s youngest boy, William.

Neave left school in the summer of 1934, bound for Oxford, twenty miles further up the Thames, where he had a place at Merton to read jurisprudence. His schooldays had seen only modest success. In the words of Michael Isaacs, ‘I cannot say that Airey stood out among his contemporaries as likely to make any considerable impact upon public life. He was an agreeable and amusing companion, diligent in his work and quite tough physically.’27 Eton may have provided little in the way of practical learning. It did, however, inculcate a certain way of looking at and dealing with the world, summed up by Jo Grimond, who had left a few years previously: ‘Boys were taught that what they did there mattered. They were taught that responsibility rested with them and could not be sloughed off. They were taught to behave as members of a community and to have regard to the wider communities of their country and their fellow men.’28

Oxford was tinged with the same hostility to militarism and dread of another conflict that coloured the country at large. Among undergraduates, socialist and pacifist sympathies were unremarkable, even conventional. Neave remained impervious to the prevailing climate. The great RAF war hero and philanthropist Leonard Cheshire, who arrived at Merton two years after Airey, later claimed that, on arriving at Oxford, Airey had ‘bought and read the full works of Clausewitz, and when being asked why, answered that since war was coming it was only sensible to learn as much as possible about the art of waging it.’29

This seriousness sat alongside a determination to have fun. As the constraints of school and home fell away, Neave threw himself into what Oxford offered in the way of hedonism, drinking, dining and making friends, while not paying overmuch attention to his law studies. ‘I did little academic work for three years and then was obliged to work feverishly at the law in order to get a degree,’ he recalled fifteen years after his departure.30

With Isaacs, he revived a defunct political dining club, The Chatham, but it foundered after a few meetings. More durable were the Myrmidons, a Merton institution to which he was elected in the summer of 1935. The club was self-consciously exclusive, named after a warlike classical tribe, and entry was by invitation only. Its members dressed up in tailcoats with purple gold and silver facings and sat down to dinners at which the drink was more important than the food. Former members included Lord Randolph Churchill and Max Beerbohm. Compared to his Eton contemporaries, the Myrmidons of 1935 appear rather undistinguished, and none apart from Neave seems to have made a mark in later life. Their antics were an affront to the prevailing egalitarian mood. The group photographs taken before the dinners show them standing defiantly in Edwardian rig, as if daring the world to challenge them. For all their studied outrageousness, it was hardly Sodom and Gomorrah.

The club’s antics were part of a pattern of indulgence. Like ‘many of the upper class’, they ‘liked the sound of broken glass’. Neave recalled a ‘champagne party on top of my College tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below’.31 In his recollection, the authorities showed ‘great forbearance and even kindliness’ to this behaviour. The college archives, however, tell a different story. An entry in the Warden and Tutors Minute Book for 11 March 1936 records that Neave was one of a group of seven undergraduates gated for four weeks and fined three pounds each for ‘disorderly and scandalous conduct on the chapel tower, in that some bottles were … thrown from the tower by some members of the party’.32

On another occasion, he was fined for hosting a ‘noisy lunch party’. Leonard Cheshire, whose own university career was boisterous, remarked that Airey ‘would often do things that looked a little wild’, though ‘always in a rather nice way and never unkindly’. While this was a trait that ‘undoubtedly endeared him to his school and university friends it possibly had a different effect on his father who one has the impression did not always give him the encouragement which inwardly he needed.’33

It seems that as time passed, the companionship of the early years had faded, and father and son drifted apart. Sheffield Neave had almost no role in his grandchildren’s upbringing. Cheshire believed that his father’s disapproval profoundly affected Neave’s formation and that ‘at an early age he learned to conceal his inner disappointments.’

Neave stayed in touch with Cheshire throughout the rest of his life. In the post-war years, he and Diana were friends with Cheshire and his second wife, Sue Ryder, and supported their charities. This insight from a sensitive and spiritual man is important. Despite his privileges and abilities, there would be many disappointments in Neave’s life, and his way of dealing with them is essential to an understanding of his character.

But undergraduate life also brought satisfactions. His artistic streak found an outlet in the Merton Floats, the college drama group. In 1936, he served as secretary as well as acting the part of Smitty in a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill, In the Zone , and Pope Julius II in Max Beerbohm’s ‘Savonarola’ Brown .34 A vague sense of duty and seriousness stirred from time to time and he joined the Oxford Union. In his third year, he shared digs with Michael Isaacs and they went to debates together. According to Isaacs, they ‘occasionally made vocal contributions, none of which … had any marked impact upon the proceedings.’35 Neave remembered making three speeches at the Union, one of which was an inconsequential discussion of the merits of a motion debated the week before.36