Public figures of the highest rank, including the King and international figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, paid regular visits to Eton. The atmosphere was unashamedly elitist. In Neave’s first year a particularly aggressive Etonian defined the expressive word ‘oick’ as ‘anybody who hasn’t been to Eton’. But when the school debating society considered whether ‘This House would welcome the resignation of the Government’, it was roundly defeated by forty-two votes to twenty, suggesting, perhaps, that the boys were more radical than their forebears.
The St Ronan’s magazine recorded that Airey ‘took remove at Eton, which is the highest form that a new boy who is not a scholar can go into’, and throughout his five years at the school he was competent rather than brilliant. He usually finished among the top half-dozen in his class and on one occasion won a book prize for academic effort, having, as Eton had it, been ‘sent up for good’ three times in a single term. Although the records suggest that he was a good runner, he did not shine at the school’s other traditional sports: cricket, racquets, fencing, soccer, rugby and rowing.
It might be thought that the momentous events away from the playing fields of Eton – the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s – would have passed him by. Indeed, the Eton College Chronicle of October 1930 suggested that the school was ‘terrifyingly remote from the ordinary concerns of life’, yet the same edition carried a spoof on a Communist takeover of the school, with references to ‘Herr Hitler’, and Old Etonians active in the higher reaches of politics would often return to talk to the school. In 1931, the fall of the Labour government amid economic collapse and the return of a national government under MacDonald greatly increased the number of Old Etonians at Westminster to 102, five of them in the Cabinet and nine more scattered in more junior ministerial jobs. It really did seem that being able to say one was an OE was a passport to power. Much has been said about the characteristics of an Old Etonian. A young OE might be considered arrogant, self-conscious, conceited, overconfident; the more mature species had become sober, active and intelligent, a leader of men; while in his dotage an OE might revert to arrogance and jingoism, but of a gentler kind. Neave was too reserved to fit the classic OE profile, but there was something of all those descriptions in him.
Before Neave left Eton he had an experience that few seventeen-year-old English boys of the period could expect to undergo. In September 1933 his parents sent him to Germany to brush up on the language. He was billeted with a family living in Nikolassee, west of Berlin, where he attended school with a boy of similar age who was a member of the Hitler Jugend. Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, when President von Hindenburg asked him to form a government as the leader of the largest single party, the National Socialists. Public and political opinion in Britain was slow to catch up with the terrifying prospect opening up in Continental Europe. Winston Churchill expressed admiration for ‘men who stood up for their country after defeat’. The Times asked sympathetically whether the street-orator would be an efficient ruler and the demagogue a statesman. They had their answer within weeks, when the Reichstag, the parliamentary building, was destroyed by fire. New decrees gave Hitler’s private army, the SA (Stürmabteilung), the power to gaol Jews and dissidents without trial. The first concentration camp opened at Dachau and by July of that year German citizenship was allowed only to members of the Nazi Party. Forced sterilisation of ‘inferior’ Germans was ordered. The terror had begun, but many in Britain believed that war could be averted through the League of Nations. Hitler withdrew from the League, yet still Germany remained a favourite holiday destination and Nazism even found admirers at home, particularly in the upper reaches of British society.
As a foreigner, Airey was excused from giving the Nazi salute when the teacher came into his class, but he was made to sit at the back, where he cut a bizarre figure in a ‘decadent’ yellow (Eton) tie with black spots and longer hair than his classmates. He felt something approaching contempt for the growing nazification of the school. Dietrich, the elder brother of the boy with whom he attended school, was impressed by Airey’s air of independence but warned that it was dangerous. On a railway platform at Nikolassee, Airey sniggered at a fat, brown-booted Nazi SA man. Years later, he recollected ‘the bloodshot pig-eyes of the stormtrooper glaring towards us’. Dietrich hastily manoeuvred him out of sight.
Dietrich was not a party member but he did belong to a sports club in nearby Charlottenburg. Airey joined as an honorary member. With his indifferent performances at school in mind, he volunteered for the relay race. A Festival of Sport was declared in September and his club was ‘advised’ by the authorities to field a team. At this relatively early stage of the Nazi takeover, Hitler had not stolen all sporting events as his own and marching in the torchlight procession was regarded as light-hearted and theatrical. Airey’s friend took him on the march in the face of official disapproval. He was dressed in ‘civvies’ and treated the occasion as something of a joke. His fellow marchers, however, did not: ‘As we joined the uniformed Nazis with their band, our mood changed,’ he recorded.5 ‘I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex.’ The march began at ten in the evening. Neave was in the centre, alongside Dietrich and directly behind a contingent of SA troopers in brown shirts and swastika armbands. Down each side of the procession, burning torches blazed. Initially, Neave admitted, he found the grandiose event thrilling. Crowds watched, their faces shining with excitement and pride.
Sportsmen who had been joking began singing; the mood became religious and the marchers expectant. On their parade from Lustgarten down Berlin’s Unter den Linden, they passed the Royal Palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Ministry of the Interior, home of Hermann Goering’s newly established Gestapo. When Neave broke step with his fellow marchers, Dietrich rounded on him, but it happened again before they reached their festival site, the Brandenburg Gate. ‘I found it difficult to keep in step,’ he admitted. ‘Something subconscious was drawing me away.’6 The gate was floodlit and festooned with Nazi flags, resembling, he recalled, some gateway to Valhalla. As they marched towards the burned out ruins of the Reichstag, bands played the Horst Wessel song (the Nazi anthem) and Neave was caught up in the emotional turmoil that prompted cynical and doubting fellow marchers alike to give the Nazi salute. ‘Some were on the verge of tears,’ he said. ‘Afterwards, I realised that they were lost forever to the Revolution of Destruction, whereas I would escape.’7
Massed bands prepared them for a half-hour speech by Reichssportkommissar von Tschammer und Osten. Airey, the product of a civilisation at odds with the hysteria of Fascism, was bored. The speech was tedious and hackneyed, ‘a maddening anticlimax’. While he fretted, all around him the young intelligentsia listened to the brown-shirted thug with rapt attention, breaking into ‘Deutschland über Alles’ when the speech was over. Neave’s reportage of these events has something of ex post facto reasoning about it. A British teenager, even one educated at Eton, pitchforked for the first time into a foreign country undergoing such convulsions, is unlikely to have come to such sophisticated conclusions. Recollecting these events twenty years later, Neave invested himself with a remarkably mature social and political intelligence, all of which certainly made for a better story. Had his liberal-minded mother known about the reality of Nazism, Airey mused, she would have recalled him instantly. Looking back, he realised that Hitler was preparing the young people of Germany for a war that he had always intended. His youthful eyes had been opened to the dangerous neurosis sweeping Germany but it would be seven more years before he was swept into the net of