Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave

Then came the problem of the buttons. O’Hara and Neave went to Pat Reid in some distress. Neave told him the project was running short of lead. O’Hara’s reserves of lead piping – ‘thin German stuff’ – had been used up. As they spoke O’Hara eyed longingly the alcohol still that the British officers were using to make their Christmas booze. Reid took fright: ‘What are you looking at? I hope you’re not hinting.’ O’Hara demurred but pointed out that the only other source of lead piping was in the lavatory block. With only three lavatories to serve forty officers breaking one up might trigger a revolt, so the still’s lead coil was removed, melted down and poured into white clay moulds carved by a Dutch officer. ‘Oberleutnant Schwarz’s’ belt and leggings were made from cardboard, as was his revolver holster, stuffed with nothing more dangerous than newspaper. The finishing touch, a cap of an Offizier of the Third Reich, was converted from Neave’s own dress uniform cap by Squadron Leader Brian Paddon. It was an impressive sight: the shiny black peak bent Nazi-style, with a design of leaves, a red and white roundel, eagle’s wings and a swastika on the front, all made from linoleum, the whole thing finished off with white piping sewed to the edge of the brim. Neave was delighted. ‘With such a uniform I could face the arc lights once more with confidence,’ he remembered.3 Even Reid was impressed. At a passing-out test, he complimented Neave and his helpers. The uniforms would pass in any conditions other than broad daylight at close quarters.

Neave was by now impatient to go. He harried Reid about the readiness of the escape route and was told to keep his hair on. Meanwhile, rehearsals for the pantomime went ahead. Providentially, Luteyn was in the camp orchestra. Neave remembered him as a drummer, but Luteyn insists he played the double bass, which he bought from an English officer. A unique photograph of the show’s line-up confirms that in this performance he played the double bass. The escape was planned to take place a few days before Christmas. The weather was deteriorating rapidly and Neave was anxious to avoid freezing to death on a German hillside. A combination of circumstances, however, forced a delay. According to Neave, their uniforms and false papers were not quite ready but Luteyn recollects that the postponement was due to a seasonal increase in train controls because so many German soldiers were going home for Christmas. Either way, the escape bid was postponed until the new year. Ballet Nonsense was a huge success; it included a new scene at Wombat College in which Dr Calomel gave a burlesque Nazi salute three times, to the discomfiture of German officers in the audience. Chaplain Platt noted in his diary: ‘After the interval, Anthony’s [Neave’s] public school farce delighted the British and fogged the foreigners … The public school farce was redolent of masters’ perceived interest in small boys, though one could plainly see that the intention was a take-off of a well-known schoolmaster.’4

After the pantomime, sloshed on bootleg alcohol, the men danced, fell dead drunk to the floor or vomited. In the midst of this revelry, a German officer came in to wish them a Happy Christmas: ‘The laughter ceased abruptly and there was a silence so deliberate and terrible, that it struck the German like a blow in the face,’ related Neave. ‘He looked blankly about him, saluted and disconsolately withdrew.’5

Escape day was set for 5 January 1942; the phoney uniforms and civilian clothes had already been concealed beneath the stage. Reid decided to send out two pairs of escapers on successive nights, immediately after the change of sentry in front of the guardhouse, so the guard would be ignorant about officers’ movements during the previous two hours. The break would take place after the nine o’clock Appell. Snow was falling during the roll-call, but Neave was roasting under his usual combination of battledress and sweater over civilian clothes, plus RAF trousers – and the black-painted cardboard leggings. Looking over to the Dutch contingent where Luteyn was similarly attired, Neave had an overpowering sense that this was his last evening in the castle.

On the order of dismissal, Neave and Luteyn mingled with senior officers as they moved into their quarters and went straight up to the theatre above. Fumbling their way in the dark, they ducked below the stage. Reid carefully opened the ‘shovewood’ trapdoor, and the three let themselves down noiselessly on a mattress-cover rope into the room below. There the escapers discarded their British uniforms and dusted down their German disguise. Reid led the way in stockinged feet through the first door until they were across the bridge and outside the final barrier: the locked entrance to the loft above the German guardhouse. Here, the escapers put on their boots and waited, fear and exasperation mounting, while Reid fought with the obstinate lock, at one point even admitting: ‘I’m afraid I can’t get it open.’ But after he fiddled for ten minutes with his patent wire pick-lock, the heavy door creaked open.

Reid told Neave they must not move for exactly eleven minutes, the time it would take him to retrace his steps to the theatre. Neave accepted the order but warned he would not ‘hang around’ after that. The pair would take the first opportunity of a quiet spell in the guardhouse below. Reid reminded them of their ‘escape theatre’: on reaching the guardhouse door, they were to stop in full view of the sentry, calmly pull on their gloves, swap casual remarks and walk smartly down the cobbled ramp to the outer gates. ‘We waited ten or fifteen minutes, and went down the stone stairs,’ recollected Luteyn. ‘On the first floor, where the officer of the guard was quartered, someone had just put on the radio. The door was ajar, but he didn’t hear us, and couldn’t see us because we nipped through very quickly. If he had seen us, it would have been finished. When we came out of the guardroom, the soldiers jumped up and stood by the door. A sergeant opened the door for us. Our hearts were pounding!’6 Their cameo German performance was unnecessary.

They strode out to the snow-covered outer wall, Neave doing his best to adopt a Prussian military manner. Unfortunately, despite all the practice, he still marched with his hands behind his back, every inch a British officer. Luteyn hissed: ‘March with your hands at your sides, you bloody fool.’ By the gate into the outer courtyard, the first sentry saluted and said ‘Nothing to report.’ They thanked him and walked on to the second sentry by the outer gate. Luteyn ordered him to open the door which he did. They were now outside the main castle, on the moat bridge, from which the wicket gate led down into the moat and up the other side towards the German married quarters. By now it was snowing heavily and as they stumbled down a German soldier came towards them. He halted, staring at the ‘officers’. Neave hesitated and was ready to make a run for it, a reminder of his earlier sense of panic once beyond the castle gate. Luteyn, with great presence of mind, demanded forcefully: ‘Why do you not salute?’ Open-mouthed, the soldier did as he was told and the escapers hurried on up the other side of the moat and round the married quarters to a high oak fence. Surmounting this, they were at last in tree cover. Neave’s cardboard belt was ripped apart in the climb and his ‘holster’ disappeared into the snow.

The final obstacle was a high, moss-covered stone wall, overlaid with snow and ice. ‘Here, we made our first mistake,’ remembered Luteyn. ‘I helped Neave up with my hands so he could sit on it and pull me up. We should have done it the other way round, because I was much bigger and more powerful.’7 Every time Neave tried to pull his companion, he fell backwards in a confusion of snow and stone. Eventually, he caught Luteyn under the arms and they struggled to the top, panting heavily. They sat on the coping for a minute, then jumped 12 feet to the broken ground below. Neave was bruised, shaken and frightened. They leaned against the trees, breathing in the sharp, cold January air before Neave urged them on. They tore off their lovingly prepared fake uniforms and threw them into the river that wound its way below the woods.

In his diary entry for 5 January, Chaplain Platt recorded: ‘Anthony Neave and a Dutch officer, Second Lieutenant Luteyn, escaped ten minutes ago. It was a scheme requiring the boldest initiative and at least eight weeks’ preparation. It was carried out with the utmost secrecy, and already they are outside the castle.’ During 1941, only two British officers succeeded in getting clear of the castle, and they had both been recaptured. ‘The British are due for a success, and the seven people who so far know of Anthony’s break are fairly confident that this is it.’8

Clear of the castle, Neave and Luteyn set off to walk to the town of Leisnig, six miles away. They would be less noticeable in this manufacturing centre than in the town of Colditz, where they risked recognition. The plan was to take an early morning workmen’s train to Leipzig, thirty-five miles to the west. Thence, they would proceed south by train via Ulm and Nuremberg to Singen on the Swiss border, where they would walk to freedom. The imaginative Dutch had bribed a Colditz guard to secure a railway timetable, so the escapers knew that the first train left at 5.00 a.m. They thus had seven hours to kill in the freezing dark. Mercifully, although the thermometer read minus 17 degrees Celsius, the snow was abating and the moon aided their progress across frozen fields until they reached the country road to Leisnig. With rising confidence, they struck out for the station. Neave was dressed in a blue jacket. Fashioned from an officer’s uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, this was the gift of Capitaine Boris, a Jewish reserve officer in the French regiment, in recognition of Neave’s support of the small Jewish contingent in Colditz. His RAF trousers were turned down over his Polish boots and the civilian guise was completed by a ski cap made from a blanket.

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