The Union was a less impressive forum than its members liked to imagine. The tone was facetious and it was to some extent an arena for showing off. Nonetheless, it was a testing ground for young men, and later women, with political ambitions. In Neave’s time at Oxford, two men who loomed large in his later life, Edward Heath† and Hugh Fraser,‡ held the presidency. Margaret Thatcher joined when at Somerville less than a decade later, but as a woman could not seek office. Neave’s interest was casual, and raucous attendance at a debate seems to have been as much for entertainment as enlightenment. If he felt any political ambitions stirring at this time, they were not strong enough to propel him into the rough and tumble of Oxford politics.
In his later writings, Neave portrayed himself and his companions as odd fish, swimming against a tide of bien pensant leftism and pacifism. ‘My failure to understand the merits of the fashionable intellectual notions of Socialism was regarded as a sign of mental deficiency by the dons,’ he wrote. The mood of the times was defensive and self-deluding, for ‘This was an Oxford where a few brave spirits still tried to emulate the joyful irresponsibility of the ’twenties. In the ’thirties the shadows lengthened and the voice of Adolf Hitler threatened across the waters but it had little effect upon my undergraduate world.’37
This outlook was seized on by the Nazis as evidence of terminal decadence among the youth of Britain, who would have no stomach for another big war. It was, of course, a great mistake. Leonard Cheshire, who despite spending the summer of 1936 in Potsdam living with a militaristic family – an experience he thoroughly enjoyed – took virtually no interest in politics. ‘I don’t remember anything about Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts,’ he told his biographer Andrew Boyle after the war. ‘I’m sure politics meant nothing.’38 Yet this seemingly flippant, pleasure-seeking man about town joined the University Air Squadron as the landscape darkened, and went on to be one of the great figures of the British war.
After Neave went down, the young men and women he encountered in London were not very different: ‘Few cared about Hitler and even less about his ambassador von Ribbentrop. Debutantes “came out” and went their way. It was fashionable to be almost inarticulate on any serious subject.’39 Neave enjoyed the defiant sybaritism as much as anyone, but in one respect he was stubbornly himself. At the start of his second year he joined the Territorial Army. In everyone else’s view, it was an eccentric thing to do: ‘a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and far more tiresome’.40 In December 1935, the London Gazette announced his elevation from ‘Cadet Lance-Corporal, Eton College Contingent, Junior Division OTC’ to second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Neave wrote about his pre-war Territorial experiences in a tone of light satire over which an element of the ludicrous hovers. He described a large-scale exercise played out on the Wiltshire downs one summer: ‘The sun beat down upon my Platoon as we hid from the enemy behind the chalk hills and listened expectantly for the sound of blank cartridges. I lay on my back beside a wooden Lewis gun. God was in his heaven and the crickets chatted merrily in the dry grass.’41
The entomologist’s son picked out a ‘Small Copper, a Fritillary and even a Clouded Yellow’. The idyll was shattered by the arrival of a First World War vintage brigadier with eyeglasses that glinted menacingly and a bullying manner, who was refereeing the war games. ‘He began to speak, working himself slowly into a cold, terrifying anger at the conduct of my platoon. A position had been chosen that could be seen for miles around. He had seen the men in the chalk-pit with his own eyes from his imaginary headquarters … He declared that he had never seen such ridiculous positions. As for my platoon sergeant in the chalk-pit, his left flank was entirely unprotected …’ Neave got to his feet. ‘There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir,’ he said boldly. Even in the emptiness of Salisbury Plain, he claimed, ‘you could have heard a pin drop. My Colonel, white in the face, stared at the ground. The Brigadier gulped.’ The brass hat tried to bluster, ‘but the spell was broken. Congratulations rained on me in the Mess and the old songs were sung far into the night.’ Neave had triumphed with a classic bit of Eton cheek. It was immensely satisfying, but hardly a preparation for war.
He left Oxford in the summer of 1937 with a ‘gentleman’s degree’ (third class), a result that can have done little for his relationship with his father. In London he joined an old-fashioned firm of City solicitors, where he dressed in bowler hat and dark suit and learned his trade processing the legal leftovers. He was set on being a barrister and obtained a pupillage at chambers in Farrar’s Building in the Temple. By then his pessimism about the future of Europe was proving all too justified. On 12 March 1938, Hitler ordered the German army into Austria and the following day the country was declared part of the German Reich. Shortly afterwards, Neave transferred out of his Territorial regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and into the 22nd (Essex) Anti-Aircraft Battalion, a unit of the Royal Engineers. The move was presumably because its proximity to London would make it easier to meet his military commitments. At the same time, his interest in politics was growing. He joined the Castlereagh, a dining club which met in St James’s about once a fortnight while the House was sitting, to hear the candid and off-the-record views of a Tory politician. Michael Isaacs remembered a dinner in July 1939 when the guest of honour was Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary the previous year over Prime Minister Chamberlain’s handling of relations with Italy. He had since become a major in the Territorials. ‘He came on after drilling his [men] and spoke eloquently to us about the grim immediate outlook. We all realised that it was only a question of time …’42
* Joseph Grimond (1913–93), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; Liberal MP for Orkney and Shetland, 1950–83; leader of the Liberal Party, 1956–67; created Lord Grimond, 1983.
† Edward Heath (1916–2005), educated Chatham House School and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, 1950–83; Leader of the Conservative Party, 1965–75; Prime Minister, June 1970–March 1974.
‡ Hugh Fraser (1918–84), educated Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Stafford and Stone, 1945–84.
2
In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the country’s politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the port’s burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.
Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldier’s calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack