The mystery around Airey Neave’s death is perhaps in keeping with the air of secrecy that attached to him in life and would continue to hang around for decades after he departed it. Forty years on, it is time he stepped out of the penumbra and into the light.
* Richard Ryder (1949–), educated Radley and Magdalene College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk, 1983–97; Government Chief Whip, 1990–95; created Lord Ryder of Wensum, 1997.
† Jonathan Aitken (1942–), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; Conservative MP for Thanet East, 1974–83; Minister for Defence Procurement, 1992–94; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 1994–95; imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice, 1999.
‡ Tom King (1933–), educated Rugby and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Bridgwater, 1970–2001; from 1983, successively Secretary of State for Environment, Transport, Employment, Northern Ireland and Defence; created Lord King of Bridgwater, 2001.
1
British boys at school in the 1920s grew up in the shadow of death. This is not a metaphor but a fact. During the decade, memorials went up at every school, ancient or modern, bearing the details of former pupils who had gone off to the Great War and not come back. Eton already had a major memorial, built to honour the fallen of the ‘Second Boer War’ of 1899–1902. It was on a grand scale and included a library and an assembly hall. One hundred and twenty-nine names were listed on stone tablets. When the time came to consider another memorial, the scale of the loss was very different.
Between 1914 and 1918, the trenches of the Western Front, the grey wastes of the North Sea, the heights of Gallipoli and the baked earth of Palestine and Mesopotamia swallowed 1,157 Old Etonians. Various grand schemes were examined, including a tower in the style of the era of the school’s founder, Henry VI. In the end, the enormity of the loss defeated imagination. The death toll amounted to more than the number of boys at the school when war broke out (in 1914 there were 1,028 pupils). The authorities settled on a frieze of plain bronze plaques listing name, rank and date of departure. It runs the entire length of the cloisters along the western wall of School Yard.
When Airey Neave arrived at Eton in 1929 the bronze tablets were still shiny. In addition, grieving parents had commissioned their own small plaques commemorating their lost sons. So it was that Neave and his classmates passed their days moving between house, classroom, library and refectory, constantly overlooked by reminders of war and death, sacrifice and duty.
In the first years of his school career, this burden of expectation seems to have weighed lightly, if at all, on his concerns. We can glimpse his thoughts in a surviving diary from 1931, when he was fifteen. The pages are full of the routine preoccupations of a boy of his class and time, with little that hints of the extraordinary life to come. The overall tone is assured, befitting his membership of an elite which had, until recently, taken its continued power, status and prosperity for granted. Both his father and grandfather had been at Eton before him. Among his forebears were two governors of the Bank of England and a number of high-ranking soldiers. His father was descended from a baronet.
The Neaves, and the women they married, seemed the warp and weft of the British Establishment, comfortably off, confident and used to exercising authority and receiving automatic respect. However, they also had an inquiring streak, lively minds and a history of striking out down unconventional paths. One female ancestor, Caroline Neave (1781–1863), was a philanthropist and prison reformer. His grandfather, Sheffield Henry Morier Neave (1853–1936), inherited a fortune while at Eton, and after Balliol College, Oxford, seemed set on a life of pleasure. A trip to Africa in pursuit of big game brought about a conversion to seriousness. He became interested in the eradication of the tsetse fly, which carried sleeping sickness and malaria. In middle age, he trained as a doctor and he ended up Physician of the Queen’s Hospital for Children in the East End of London.
His interests were inherited by his son, Sheffield Airey Neave, born in 1879. After Eton, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read natural sciences. His speciality was entomology, the study of insects, the importance of which to public health and agriculture in the British Empire was starting to be appreciated.1 In the early years of the century, he worked for the Colonial Office on scientific surveys in Northern Rhodesia and served as an entomologist on a commission investigating sleeping sickness in the Congolese province of Katanga. In 1913, he was appointed assistant director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, and stayed in the post for thirty years before taking over as director.
Sheffield married Dorothy Middleton, a colonel’s daughter, and on 23 January 1916, at 24 De Vere Gardens, a tall London brick house in Knightsbridge, she gave birth to a son. In keeping with Neave tradition, he was christened with a basket of surnames plucked from the family tree. In his youth, Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave hated the handle he had been lumbered with. For a period in the Second World War, he took to referring to himself as ‘Tony’. But the name on the birth certificate stuck, and with it all the jokey and embarrassing permutations that schoolboy and service wit could devise.
Shortly after the birth, the family moved to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Their new home, Bishop’s House, was large and comfortable, with steep-pitched red-tile roofs and mullioned windows, surrounded by lawns and flower beds, and only a short walk from the station, where there were regular services to Sheffield’s work in London. Airey went to the local Montessori school, an enlightened choice at a time when the Italian educationalist’s ideas were just taking hold in Britain. Then, aged nine, he was sent away to St Ronan’s, an academically inclined prep school on the coast at Worthing, before arriving at Eton in the spring of 1929.
The school was undergoing the same painful transformation as the rest of the country as it adjusted to the post-war world. However, the curriculum would have been familiar to a boy from the previous century. Classics still ruled and an extraordinary amount of the boys’ time was spent construing Greek and Latin poetry and prose. Games were exalted and the stars of the river and cricket pitch were gilded demigods. Outside the classroom and the playing field, though, the atmosphere was stimulating, and independent thought was encouraged under the leadership of the lively and well-connected headmaster, Dr Cyril Alington, who as well as hymns wrote detective novels.
Neave had just turned fifteen when the surviving pages of his diary open. He comes across as earnest and hard-working, recording in detail all the homework he is set and the marks he receives. Mostly he was in the top half of the class, but his efforts seem to have been conscientious rather than inspired. It was the same story at games. He spent the afternoons kicking and knocking balls around, panting along muddy paths on cross-country runs or heaving an oar on the river.
All this effort brought little reward, not even the ephemeral pleasure of ‘a ribboned coat’ or ‘a season’s fame’. In one cricket match, he struggled for seventy-five minutes to make nine runs. Though fairly robust, he seems to have been ill frequently. He suffered from a skin complaint and some other unspecified ailment which required regular physiotherapy sessions with a nurse called Miss Dempster, who ‘weighed and measured me and made various uncomplimentary remarks about the shape of my figure’.2
He showed an early interest in soldiering and joined the Eton army cadet corps, but found the drill a challenge. ‘I am rather vague about bayonets still,’3 he recorded a few months after joining up. Then, a day later, ‘We learned field signals etc of which I understood little.’4 Thus, an early pattern was