Airey Neave – The Man Who Was Saturday by Patrick Bishop
FREDERICK FORSYTH The Man Who Was Saturday By Patrick Bishop William Collins £20
When Airey Neave was blown apart by an INLA bomb right inside the car park of the Houses of Parliament in March 1979, the location and ingenuity of the murder created a huge media story. But for many outside Parliament and Tory politics, the question about the destroyed figure at the wheel was ‘Airey Who?’
In this remarkable biography, the brilliant historian Patrick Bishop reveals Airey Neave (1916-79) to have been a man of varied parts and multiple talents. His first two decades were conventional to the point of ennui. Born to well-to-do Establishment parents, he proceeded to Eton and Oxford, shining at neither. A conventional ‘something in the City’ life beckoned but his life was utterly changed by the Second World War.
Neave was sent to join the British Expeditionary Force in northern France and ludicrously given command of a battery of searchlights. Unable to imagine why they were shining lights on to the Nazi forces sweeping across violated Belgium and France, he watched the shambles of our retreat towards the coast. The hitherto conventional public schoolboy underwent a life-changing epiphany, coming to despise the blimpish incompetence of fools in high office. Any bells ringing, as we all watch Brexit unfold with our heads in hands?
By the time his unit was captured at Calais, he had taken a bullet in the leg. He discharged himself from hospital, was captured again and sent to a prisoner-ofwar camp. This was when the other Airey Neave emerged. He began to escape – not now and again, but over and over. The exasperated Germans finally despatched him to the ‘escape-proof’ Colditz Castle. There the self-effacing, quietly spoken Etonian waited a few weeks before starting again. He spotted that the uniforms of captured Dutch officers at Colditz were much more like German feldgrau than British khaki. An opportunity. Partnered by a Dutch officer, the two of them, in facsimile German kit (pictured), sauntered through three consecutive gates and into the forest. Very stylish. Then they walked and rode trains to the Swiss border and trudged through the snow to freedom.
A sedate office posting beckoned, but Neave, codenamed simply ‘Saturday’, quickly became a major player in MI9 (the wartime military intelligence department). There he conceived the idea of the rat-run, using the Resistance to help thousands of British POWS escape along the tortuous routes from the heart of Germany to Switzerland or Spain. Particularly valuable was the return of pilots and other aircrew, in whose training so much had been invested. In 1945, at the age of 29, he was appointed to the British War Crimes Executive at Nuremberg. His law degree from Oxford, fluent German and adventures in the war made him an apt choice to form part of the guard of the monsters at the top of the Nazi horror machine – Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Streicher, Von Schirach, Frank, Funk, Frick, Kaltenbrunner, Ley and Dönitz.
To those of us raised through boyhood during the war, these were towering figures of evil, yet Neave encountered them as shuffling, wretched self-excusers – nonentities to whom you would not give a second glance in a busy street, who precisely embodied that notable phrase ‘the banality of evil’. All except the blustering Göring, full of bravado until his forensic destruction in crossexamination by British barrister Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. That was when the former head of the Luftwaffe
realised he was for the noose and crunched a hidden phial of cyanide.
Neave’s friendship with Maxwell Fyfe introduced him to Tory party politics and the fourth and last period of his life. By now earning his living as a barrister, he secured a safe seat at his third attempt, being elected in June 1953 for the Oxfordshire market town of Abingdon. He was not yet forty.
Some are fascinated by the daily doings of backbench politicians and the complexities of parliamentary politics but this writer is not one of them. Like most of my age group I just watched through the Sixties and Seventies the steady degeneration of our country to the squalid Winter of Discontent. By 1974, when the grumpy, charmless and pretty talentless Ted Heath lost again to Wilson, it was clear he had to go. But who could replace him? Who had the sheer grit to turn the country around? On 4th February 1975, the Tories made their choice, against all the odds, of the only woman on the list, Margaret Thatcher. The quiet mandarin behind her campaign was Airey Neave.
Thatcher offered him any post he wanted. He chose Northern Ireland, then consumed by shootings and bombings, as the IRA and its offspring the INLA fought the British Army and the RUC. After the Callaghan government fell, a Tory administration beckoned and Neave would have had his opportunity to bring armed struggle to an end, had someone far away not sentenced him to a shocking death.
The Man Who Was Saturday is not only a superb biography of a hardly seen hero. It holds up a mirror to a period of our national history seen through the eyes of one who was there.