Eton in late 1933 must have seemed an anticlimax after the convulsions he had witnessed in Berlin. His school record shows flashes of distinction rather than consistency. After Eton, an orthodox journey through Oxford – he had chosen to go to Merton rather than follow his father to Magdalen – into the law seemed to beckon. Of good academic repute built initially on the classics, the Merton to which Neave went in the autumn of 1934 was still steeped in Victorian tradition. As the age of adulthood remained at twenty-one, the college stood in loco parentis to its undergraduates and took its responsibilities seriously. Discipline was officially strict, though the authorities turned a blind eye to certain misdemeanours. For the first year students lived in. They had agreeable but austere rooms. There were very few bathrooms: each set had a chamberpot, emptied by the college scout who acted as valet and housekeeper. A normal academic day began at 7.30 a.m. when the scout brought hot water for washing and shaving, and undergraduates then had to attend a roll-call at 8.00, ‘properly dressed’ in socks as well as gowns over their normal clothing. They signed their names in a register in a lecture room in Fellows’ Quad, under the watchful gaze of the day’s duty don. Attendance at matins in the college chapel was an acceptable alternative to roll-call.
After a day of lectures and tutorials, they were free for the evening. Drinking in Oxford’s pubs was forbidden and the rules were enforced by bowler-hatted ‘bulldogs’ (university proctors’ assistants) who toured the watering holes accosting suspects. College gates were closed at 9.00 p.m., and after that students had to ‘knock up’ the porter in his turreted fifteenth-century gatehouse to gain admission. They were fined sixpence after 10.30, and a shilling after ii .00. If an undergraduate had permission to stay out after midnight – rarely granted – he paid a fine of half a crown.
This was all quite expensive for the mid-thirties, when a young man at Oxford could live comfortably on £250 a year, so the curfew was regularly breached by climbing over the perimeter wall back into college. Indeed, it was one of Merton’s traditional sports. Reputedly, twenty-eight break-in routes existed, the most popular being over the wall in Merton Street into the college gardens and then through the loosened bars of a ground-floor set of rooms, where it was customary to leave small change on the table of the hapless undergraduate who occupied the rooms. Dons discreetly allowed the bars to remain loose.
Neave was undoubtedly one of the climbers, an unconscious rehearsal of his exploits at Colditz a few years later, and in captivity he must have mused on the irony of his position, where, for three years, he had perfected the art of breaking in rather than out. Once at Oxford, Neave quickly made his way to the worst company that Merton offered. He was elected to the exclusive Myrmidon Club, a group of undergraduates, never more than a dozen in number, who dedicated themselves to the good things of life. The club was founded in 1865, fancifully in emulation of George Bathmiteff, a Russian nobleman and Merton undergraduate who had dallied with a danseuse who wore a garter of purple and gold. Originally, its aims were to explore the Cherwell and other river systems, but with the advent of undergraduates like Lord Randolph Churchill in the 1870s the club soon became the haunt of young bloods. To perpetuate the memory of the danseuse, Myrmidons, named after the faithful followers of Achilles, wore purple dinner jackets faced with silver and white waistcoats edged with purple and gold. Their chief activities were eating and drinking, generally in each other’s rooms but also formally every term in their own dining rooms above a tailor’s shop in the High Street.
Within months of going up to Merton, Neave was inducted into the Myrmidons, at a meeting in the rooms of K.A. Merritt, a keen tennis player. Colin Sleeman, who was to become Captain of Boats and subsequently a distinguished lawyer and defence counsel at the Far East War Crimes Tribunal, was elected the same day. At that point the club numbered seven. They met regularly in Neave’s rooms for the following year, and in June 1936 he was elected secretary. The minutes show him to have been a conscientious but terse recorder of events. On 20 October 1936, the Myrmidons met in Mr Logie’s rooms, he wrote in a flowing (indeed, overflowing) Roman hand, and fixed the dates for lunch and dinner that term. It must have been a good meeting. Neave’s account, in a trembling hand, is full of crossings-out and emendations. He signed himself with a flourish and then underneath wrote ‘trouble’, without further explanation. On 5 February 1937, he recorded that the Myrmidons met in Mr Wells’s rooms and elected two new members. They organised lunch ‘for a date now lost in the mists of obscurity’, or perhaps the mists of Dom Perignon. The club now had nine members, and was ‘full’. The minute books are the only formal history of the Myrmidons’ activities, though they are still a legend for drinking and bad behaviour at Merton. Some idea of their academic application may be gained from the degrees posted in the college register. One got a fourth in geography, another a pass degree in mathematics; Merritt gained a third in history while Sleeman managed only a fourth in jurisprudence. The Myrmidons were capable of sottishness but were no more than undergraduate drunks. They invited Old Boys to their dinner, invariably held in London, where Neave had become a member of the Junior Carlton Club. They also aimed high in their guest invitations. As late as 1951, Winston Churchill, recently reinstalled as Prime Minister, wrote regretting that he could not attend their dinner because the pressure of affairs was ‘considerable’.
The Myrmidons also gained an eccentric reputation for literary interests, chiefly through Max Beerbohm and his friends who had been members in the 1890s. The Myrmidons are assumed to be the model for the Junta in Beerbohm’s gentle, witty Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson. In spite of being known as the ‘most virile’ of Merton’s clubs, they also had a cultured side, which showed itself most strongly in amateur dramatics. The Myrmidons scorned OUDS – the self-esteeming Oxford University Dramatic Society – in favour of Merton Floats, the college’s own theatre group, founded in 1929 by two undergraduates, Giles Playfair and E.K. Willing-Denton, the latter a ‘prodigiously extravagant and generous’ young man. This was, Playfair later recollected, a time of festive teas, luncheons, dinners, suppers and moonlight trips on the river followed by climbing over the wall into college. Willing-Denton, who spent his entire allowance in the first month, was noted for his ten-course luncheons. He and Playfair persuaded actors of the calibre of Hermione Baddeley to come down to Oxford, and Merton Floats enjoyed a succès d’estime in the mid-war years when the social scene was at its height. In 1936, Neave was secretary of Floats and his friend Merritt was president. Sleeman was the grandly titled front-of-house manager. They put on two plays: In The Zone, a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill set on the fo’c’sle of a British tramp steamer in 1915, in which Neave played the role of Smitty; and Savonarola, a play of the 1890s attributed to Ladbroke Brown, in which Neave appeared as Pope Julius II. Neave also found time to make three speeches at the Oxford Union, of which no record remains. On one of these occasions he found himself debating the merits of the previous week’s motion.
It was an altogether engaging life. Neave later admitted that he did little academic work at Oxford and was obliged to work feverishly at the law before his finals in order to get a degree. He graduated in 1938 with a third in jurisprudence and a BA. ‘The climax of my “Oxford” education was a champagne party on top of my college tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below,’ he wrote.8 He remained thankful in adult life for the kindness and forbearance shown by his college during those profligate years. Life was never to be so insouciant again.
In the febrile pre-war atmosphere of the 1930s, Oxford shared in the political polarisation that shook society at large. As early as February 1933, months before Neave went up from Eton, the Oxford Union carried a motion ‘This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country’. The vote was unambiguous: 275 to 153. Most undergraduates thought no more about their casual pacifism, but Winston Churchill expressed nausea at this ‘abject, squalid, shameless avowal’. ‘One can almost feel the contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany,’ he added disdainfully.
Neave was not among the fainthearts. Unlike most of his university contemporaries he had