The Man Who Was Saturday
Soldier, spy, lawyer, politician – Airey Neave was assassinated in the House of Commons car park in 1979. Forty years after his death, Patrick Bishop’s lively, action-packed biography examines the life, heroic war and death of one of Britain’s most remarkable 20th century figures.Airey Neave was one of the most extraordinary figures of his generation. Taken prisoner during WW2, he was the first British officer to escape from Colditz and using the code name ‘Saturday’ became a key figure in the IS9 escape and evasion organisation which spirited hundreds of Allied airmen and soldiers out of Occupied Europe. A lawyer by training, he served the indictments on the Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg war trials. An ardent Cold War warrior, he was mixed up in several of the great spy scandals of the period.Most people might consider these achievements enough for a single career, but he went on to become the man who made Margaret Thatcher, mounting a brilliantly manipulative campaign in the 1975 Tory leadership to bring her to power.And yet his death is as fascinating as his remarkable life. On Friday, 30 March 1979, a bomb planted beneath his car exploded while he was driving up the ramp of the House of Commons underground car park, killing him instantly. The murder was claimed by the breakaway Irish Republican group, the INLA. His killers have never been identified.Patrick Bishop’s new book, published to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, is a lively and concise biography of this remarkable man. It answers the question of who killed him and why their identities have been hidden for so long and is written with the support of the Neave family.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Patrick Bishop 2019
Cover design and illustration by Leo Nicholls
Maps by Martin Brown
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Patrick Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008309046
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008309060
Version: 2019-04-05
TO MARY JO, THOMAS AND MARTHA ROSE
Contents
Prologue: ‘Some Devils Got Him’
10 ‘A Perfect Woman, Nobly Planned’
The siege of Calais
Plan of Colditz Castle
AN’s unsuccessful and successful escapes through Germany, Poland and Switzerland
Escape lines operated by Pat O’Leary and Comet in France and the Low Countries
Arnhem showing Pegasus operations
Biography masquerades as history but is often a species of fiction. That is not necessarily the fault of the biographer. Establishing the external facts of a public life in modern, well-documented times is fairly straightforward. It is charting the inner landscape that is the problem. How can we know what someone really thought, what drove him or her to do this or that? Letters and diaries open a window on these processes, of course, but can we be sure the motives and feelings they reveal are genuine, and not retouched with an eye to the good opinion of posterity?
In tackling the life of Airey Neave I have leaned on two versions of who he was. The public one is laid out in the several memoirs he published based on his service in the Second World War. The other is contained in the voluminous diaries he kept covering crucial years in the last period of his political career. The frequent introspective and unsparing passages make it hard to believe they were written for anyone but himself. Thus I felt I had the basis for something like a reasonably authentic portrait: Neave as he would like to be seen – and Neave as he saw himself.
There is another very important viewpoint – Neave as he appeared to everyone else. Neave struck many of his contemporaries as inscrutable. The face he presented to the world was conventional and confident. This was to some extent an act. Behind the bland mask lay a very different personality: racked by insecurities, plagued by doubts and depressions and haunted by a sense of failure and underachievement. Studying his life confirmed for me the truth of the words of the country priest whom André Malraux met when serving with the Maquis in the mountains of south-eastern France. Asked what he had learned about humanity from the many confessions he had heard over the years, he gave the answer ‘The fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person.’
I find that answer moving and heartening. It is said to be a hazard of writing biography that familiarity breeds contempt and in the course of the research the author comes to loathe the relative stranger they blithely shacked up with at the start of the project. I am happy to say that for me the experience had the opposite effect. I came to like Neave a lot. He had his faults: vanity, touchiness, a dissatisfied nature. But they are greatly outweighed by his virtues: physical bravery – not in short supply among his generation – but also moral courage, quiet patriotism and a basic decency.
All came to an end in a shocking death at the hands of the forces he had been opposing in one way or another all his life. He led an interesting one, and his story has a satisfying curve. The adventures and achievements of his early career seemed to promise a glowing future. Instead, there followed years of frustration that sometimes brought him close to despair. Then, unexpectedly, the stars aligned to deliver a success that was all the more satisfying for its late arrival. He lived through a period of history which, though fairly recent, now feels curiously remote. What follows is an attempt to reanimate both him and his time.
