Murdered Colditz hero who always felt like a failure
He’s the man who put Maggie in No.10, but a new biography reveals why Airey Neave was the...
COULD THE disguises and the dissembling really work? The chances seemed pretty slim.
Surely their imitations of German officers’ uniforms would be rumbled straight away by even the dopiest of sentries, ending ignominiously the bid by Airey Neave and his companion to escape from Colditz, the formidable fortress for troublesome prisoners-of-war in Nazi Germany.
The silver epaulettes on their long greenyblue overcoats were made from lino, their dyed trousers were the wrong shade, the leggings of their jackboots were cardboard.
Yet, on a dark, snowy January night in 1942, Neave, a British Army lieutenant, and Dutch officer Tony Luteyn carefully crept from their hiding place beneath the stage of the camp theatre, down a spiral staircase, past the German officers’ mess and the guardroom and out onto an open bridge over the castle moat.
They strode forward, bold as brass, passing one sentry, who stared hard but saluted, then another, until they came to a wicket gate and took a path that Neave knew from a previous escape attempt led to the bed of the dry moat and up the other side. Then it was a mad scramble over a high stone wall . . . and they’d made it. They were free.
The two of them swapped their fake uniforms for workers’ clothes and headed for the nearest train station.
Four days (and many close calls) later, they were ploughing through heavy snow on their hands and knees and across the border into neutral Switzerland.
Neave was the first Briton to make a ‘home run’ from supposedly escape-proof Colditz — a ‘moment of triumph’ he would never forget and for which he would always be remembered as a hero.
He wrote later: ‘We had pitted our wits against the might of Nazism and cheated the Germans in all their self-conscious arrogance and cruelty.’
Thirty-seven years later, in 1979, he would be a national hero again, though of a different sort. As a Tory MP and an outspoken Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who advocated a tough line against terrorists (including the death penalty), he was targeted by INLA, the Irish National Liberation Army, an offshoot of the IRA.
ATHREE-MAN hit squad from Belfast attached a home-made bomb to the underneath of his car, a modest Vauxhall Cavalier, and it exploded as he was driving up the ramp and out of the underground car park at the Houses of Parliament.
His injuries were so severe that police did not recognise him at first even though he was a prominent public figure. He died in hospital.
It was a heinous and shocking assassination that brought terrorism to the heart of Westminster — and a crime for which no one has ever been brought to justice.
A visibly moved Margaret Thatcher — whose surprise election as Tory leader Neave had masterminded and who just a month later would enter Downing Street as prime minister — hailed him as ‘a staunch, brave man, one of freedom’s warriors, a person of tremendous inner strength’.
Yet, paradoxically and almost tragically, as this perceptive biography shows, he was a man who, inside, never really thought he was up to the mark. His private diaries — to which author Patrick Bishop has had access — reveal him as a troubled soul whose successes never compensated for what he saw as his failures.
This sense of inadequacy began at school (Eton), where he was perceived as conscientious rather than inspired or inspiring, and continued at Oxford, where he only managed a Third, a so-called ‘gentleman’s degree’. After a couple of years as a trainee lawyer, he went to war in 1940 and was quickly captured when the Germans overran Calais.
His part in the British Army’s heroic last stand there was minimal, as he was all too keenly aware.
He was leading a searchlight platoon rather than a combat unit, took a bullet in the side when they came under fire during the lastditch defence of the town and was lying helpless in a makeshift underground aid post when it was overrun and he was forced to surrender. His direct engagement with the enemy had amounted to a few futile shots in the air at a German spotter plane.
He felt deep shame, and, though he was being hard on himself, this proved the spur. He refused to accept incarceration and see out his time as best he could but would make every effort to escape.
On the run for three days from one camp, he fell into the hands of the Gestapo, was probably tortured (though, typically, he never talked about it) and threatened with a firing squad. His punishment was to be sent to Colditz. Escaping from there made his name but also meant, to his dismay, that he could never be sent on front-line military duties again (for security reasons, in case he was captured a second time).
He joined Military Intelligence and, with the codename ‘Saturday’, became a pivotal part of MI9, a little-known but dynamic department running escape routes out of occupied Europe for Allied soldiers and airmen caught behind enemy lines.
Thousands of men were brought back, thanks to his efforts — though the self-deprecating Neave would always see them and their Resistance helpers in France (particularly the women) as the heroes rather than himself. ‘Mine did not seem a soldier’s life,’ he lamented.
In search of real action, Major Neave (as he now was) finally got his chance when, after D-Day, he and the SAS set up a secret holding camp in a forest south of Paris as a refuge from German reprisals for those on the run.
All in all, it was a more than creditable war record for one man, rounded off when he was appointed as the lawyer to serve war crime indictments on the Nazi leaders such as Goering and Hess at the Nuremberg trials.
YET he returned home unfulfilled and about to face even more disappointment. The postwar decades were a let-down for him (as they were for many men returning to civvy street). He struggled to make a living as a jobbing barrister and struggled too to have any impact as a backbench Conservative MP after his election to Parliament in 1953.
Despite the fame (but not riches) he got from his well-received books on his wartime exploits, most notably They Have Their Exits about his escape from Colditz, political promotion eluded him.
He was no wheeler-dealing Francis Urquhart (as in the House of Cards character), but rather the plaything of party whips. Indeed, after Neave suffered a heart attack in 1959, the then Tory chief whip Ted Heath supposedly dismissed him to his face as ‘finished’.
He despaired of everything — not least when the hugely popular TV series on Colditz in the Seventies left him and his pioneering escape out of the script entirely. He recorded plaintively in his diary: ‘I would like to be “somebody” but it is, I fear, too late.’ It wasn’t. There was to be one last great escape from the obscurity he feared.
Shortly after, he attached himself to an up-and-coming Tory MP, Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired as ‘brilliant and beautiful’. She was also fearless, reminding him of the amazing women guides and couriers he knew who had risked their lives to run the escape lines in Europe during the war.
When Heath was challenged as Conservative leader in 1974, Neave took on her campaign and did so brilliantly. Reaching back to the tricks of dissembling that had secured his exit from Colditz, he managed to persuade Tory MPs that she couldn’t possibly win the leadership on the first ballot. They could safely vote for her to be sure of ousting Heath, then plump for one of the safer, male candidates, such as Willie Whitelaw.
It worked. Heath — Neave’s nemesis — was out. Thatcher — thanks to Neave — was in. He finally had the success he always craved and there would certainly have been more to come with a senior place in government.
But there was a price, and in that terrible explosion four years later, he paid with his life.
This time there was no escape.
109 Unsuccessful attempts by British Officers to escape from Colditz