9
On New Year’s Day 1973, Airey Neave confided to his diary that at the start of the previous year he had ‘had serious doubts about remaining in Parliament. After twenty years in the House, it did not seem that I should ever achieve very much.’ The defeatist mood persisted. Six weeks later, he was ‘extremely depressed’ and had decided that the ‘next General Election will be my last.’1 He was ‘absolutely fed up with being the scapegoat for everything. It is time I became a professional writer and gave up this arduous, thankless task for ever. I have long wanted to do so but have been persuaded that in some old-fashioned way it was my “duty”. I have no political future but a literary one.’2 When he wrote these words he had just turned fifty-seven and clearly believed that his political life was mostly behind him. In better spirits, he might have judged that his achievement was not so slight. After his ministerial career jumped the tracks, he had pressed on, a hard-working backbencher who butted obstinately against the ramparts of official laziness and indifference on behalf of his constituents and a number of good causes.
Their nature revealed a stubborn decency and a determination to see justice done. At the start of his parliamentary career, he had taken up the cause of about 6,000 Britons who had been placed in Nazi concentration camps, among them Mary Lindell. Nineteen years after the end of the war, thanks in large part to his continual representations, they finally received the compensation that had long before been awarded to French and Belgian victims of the Nazis.
He fought on behalf of widows who had married war veterans after they had left the services and were therefore denied a pension. In 1965, he also introduced a private member’s bill to award pensions to very old and often impoverished people who, because they had made no voluntary contributions to pre-war schemes, had been excluded when the Labour government introduced the National Insurance programme in 1948. He took up the cause on behalf of two constituents in 1964 when the Conservatives were still in power. Over the next six years he made forty-three speeches and interventions in the House. His style was low-key and courteous. He did not speak particularly well, a definite handicap in parliament. He made up for it by a grasp of statistics and detail. Beneath the old-fashioned manners, though, there was real passion and iron determination. In February 1969, he told members that ‘when I started there were 250,000 of these people … there are now 125,000. Four hundred of them are dying each week. This is a terrible thing to have to talk about, in the House or anywhere else.’3 It was more than five years before justice was done, and his efforts won praise from both sides of the House. The implacable processes of bureaucracy and the mean-spirited responses trotted out by ministers sometimes stirred him to lose his customary cool. His persistent questioning of a minister over the case of a seventy-one-year-old woman who had been denied a pension because she had not kept up her National Insurance contributions while detained for nine years in a Soviet labour camp earned him a rebuke from the Speaker.4
Neave was determined that the lessons of the war should be learned and not forgotten. He was anxious that diplomatic expediency should not be allowed to sanitise history and that the Soviet Union’s war crimes should be remembered along with those of Germany. In the face of furious Soviet denial, and to the annoyance of the Foreign Office, he agitated for years for a memorial to the thousands of Poles murdered by the Russians in Katyn forest near Smolensk and elsewhere in the spring of 1940, part of a systematic programme to annihilate the Polish officer class and ‘bourgeoisie’. After many frustrations, a site commemorating them and making clear who was responsible was finally opened at Gunnersbury, West London, in 1976.
Neave’s sense of justice was impartial. From early 1970, he began campaigning for the release of Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison in West Berlin, where he had been held since 1947. Hess was one of the defendants to whom Neave had served indictments at Nuremberg. Peering at him through the window in the cell door, he had been shocked ‘to see his worn figure … I immediately felt sorry for him.’5 When Neave, together with other MPs of all parties and Hess’s wife and son, began their campaign, the old Nazi was seventy-nine. Neave did not doubt his devotion to Hitler and the party. However, he had not been found guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Neave felt decency demanded it was time to let him go. Spandau was controlled by the Four Powers and Moscow was implacably opposed to freeing Hess. He outlived Neave, hanging himself in his cell in 1987.
Neave was his own man, with a personal code that meant his views could never be taken for granted. On capital punishment, he stood on the right of the party; on immigration, on the left. Unlike some of his back-bench colleagues, he was unaffected by imperial nostalgia or notions of British or white superiority. Nor was he susceptible to the weird charm that Enoch Powell exercised over some Conservatives. In the period the diaries cover, Powell was already well down the path that would lead ultimately to his deserting the party and joining the Ulster Unionists. Neave watched his progress with pity, tinged with contempt. The Wolverhampton Wanderer, he believed, talked ‘rubbish’, sounded like ‘a complete fool’ and would ‘end up a tragic figure’.6 When, in August 1972, Idi Amin expelled Uganda’s Asians, right-wing Conservative MPs – and some from the Labour benches – fought the Heath government’s decision to open the doors to the 27,000 refugees who held British or Commonwealth citizenship. Neave supported the government move and worked hard to ensure their welfare on arrival.
His war experiences had stimulated a particular interest in the well-being of those whom conflict had swept from their homes. In 1970, he was appointed British delegate to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The head was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, a polyglot Harvard graduate, intellectual and socialite. He was also spiritual head of the world’s Nizari Ismailis, the Islamic sect to which many Ugandan Asians belonged. The conservative Englishman and the international jet-setter got on well and Neave was an effective advocate for the UNHCR, intervening many times between 1970 and 1975 to secure British aid for its projects.
None of these activities paid the school fees. With the termination of his ministerial career, he looked around for ways to bring in money. He could not live on the royalties from his books, respectable though they were, and he could never hope to command high fees at the Bar. Like many an ex-Tory minister before him, he cast around for directorships in firms where his parliamentary presence would be an asset. Family connections came to his aid.
John Thompson was a long-established engineering firm based in Wolverhampton. In the mid-1950s they were awarded a contract to provide boilers and pressure vessels for a giant nuclear power station being built on the eastern bank of the Severn, near Berkeley, Gloucestershire, which went into commission in 1962. Sir Edward Thompson lived at Gatacre Park and was a neighbour of the Giffards at Chillington. After Neave recovered from the heart attack, he was appointed the firm’s legal and parliamentary adviser and given a seat on the main board. When John Thompson was taken over by another engineering firm, Clarke Chapman, the arrangement continued. The post came with an office in Tavistock House, Bloomsbury, and a secretary, valuable perks at a time when support resources at Westminster were minimal.
It was an excellent fit. Neave’s employers were getting someone with close connections to the nuclear industry, and his keen amateur interest in science gave him a degree of technical expertise. He was proud of his scientific bent, remarking in his diary after a lunch at the Royal Society (‘nice, clever people’) that he ‘found I could keep my end up’. His competence was recognised in 1963, when he became a governor of Imperial College. In 1965, he joined the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, which he chaired for five years from 1970. In that time it produced four important papers which shaped government policy. Among them was a report on birth control which recommended that it be available free on the NHS to anyone who wanted it. Another dealt with an issue in which he had a personal and financial interest – the question of which reactors the government should buy for the country’s nuclear power stations.
There were other directorships, but the affairs of John Thompson and Clarke Chapman were Neave’s main preoccupations.7 He showed the same persistence in promoting their interests as he brought to everything, yet was scrupulous in declaring the connection and there was nothing insincere about his devotion. He believed in supporting British firms over foreign competitors and shielding them where necessary from international competition. In this respect, as in others, his outlook was in marked contrast to what came to be called Thatcherism. None of his colleagues, then or later, regarded him as an ideologue, including Thatcher herself. ‘It was difficult to pin down Airey’s politics,’ she wrote. ‘I did not consider him ideologically a man of the right. He probably did not look at the world in those terms.’8
Europe was already a divisive – potentially an explosive – issue. Heath’s great ambition was to lead Britain into the European Economic Community, and in January 1973, twelve years after the first application had been made, he succeeded. Neave was in favour of European union as a means of diminishing the potential for future war, as well as opening up new vistas to the British economy. Its capacity for bureaucratic expansion into political space was not then so evident. His devotion to parliamentary democracy, and doughty defence of its rights against the executive, make it unlikely that he would have seen the increasing power of Brussels as benign.
When, after his death, colleagues and journalists looked back over Neave’s career, it was sometimes suggested that he had carried his intelligence connections into civilian life. Later, a novel and a TV series took the idea much further, presenting him as a sinister figure with a hand in all sorts of murky, deep state operations. The known facts are less dramatic. It would have been surprising if he had not kept in touch with former colleagues and done informal favours for the security services. There is also some evidence that he played a small part in one of the great spy stories of the age.
Greville Wynne had been brought up poor in a mining village in South Wales. He trained as an electrical engineer, attending night classes at Nottingham University, where he joined the Officer Training Corps and, according to his own account, attracted the attention of the security services by alerting them to a German agent operating at his workplace, the Ericsson telephone factory.9 He was recruited by MI5 and spent the war snooping on suspected subversives. Afterwards, he set himself up as a middle man representing British engineering companies on the Continent. In the mid-1950s, he was contacted by his old MI5 controller, who was now working for MI6. He obliquely offered Wynne a chance to get back into the game, working behind the Iron Curtain.
Wynne, although by now successful, wealthy and reasonably happily married with a young son, accepted eagerly. As he observed in his engaging autobiography, ‘you become to a greater or lesser extent addicted to the cliché situations of third-rate fiction, all the paraphernalia of dead-letter drops, secret rendezvous and the ever present element of danger. Once you’ve had a taste of that, you can never be entirely happy living a safe, complacent and prosperous normal life.’ Wynne needed commissions to act as the agent for UK companies to sustain his espionage activities behind the Iron Curtain. Among the firms he represented was John Thompson. ‘The late Airey Neave, one of the firm’s directors at the time, approved my appointment,’ he wrote in 1983.
Wynne went on to act as one of MI6’s chief contacts with Oleg Penkovsky, a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, who for a while was the West’s most important intelligence asset. From 1961 until his arrest in October 1962, Penkovsky passed on information about Soviet missiles, nuclear plans and the identities of spies, until he was unmasked by KGB double agents working in Washington. Wynne’s name soon emerged. He was arrested at a trade fair in Budapest and sentenced to eight years in a Soviet prison. Penkovsky was executed by firing squad. Wynne served one year of his sentence in appalling conditions before Britain arranged for him to be swapped for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale.
Neave could hardly have been unaware of Wynne’s MI6 connection when he signed off on his recruitment. Whether his involvement went further than that is unknown. Neave’s diaries hint at some sort of intelligence role in the post-war years. On 31 October 1973, he recorded a conversation with Diana in which they ‘discussed the growing demoralisation of the country which we believe is due to Communist activity’. He went on, ‘I am wondering how to act and wish I were back in the Intelligence Service.’10
Whatever the nature of his connection, by the 1970s it seems to have been tangential. His soft voice and retiring manner gave him a conspiratorial air which came in useful when he was managing Margaret Thatcher’s leadership bid. It fuelled speculation that he was closer to the security services than was perhaps the case. If he was a spy, he left little trace of his activities. There is nothing in his diaries, and no family recollections, to suggest a secret parallel life. Neave may have thought it amusing, and possibly beneficial, to leave the illusion intact.
His remarks about the Communist menace might suggest an affinity with the movements that sprang up in the period pledged to take charge in the event of industrial strife causing a breakdown in law and order. In the last years of Heath’s premiership, the spirit of 1926 was in the air and the prospect of a general strike seemed real. Then, as before, there was a mood among sections of the middle classes to step in to keep the country running. Neave became tangled up in this when, perhaps unwisely, in June and July 1974 he attended two meetings with the right-wing backbencher Carol Mather, who had served in the prototype SAS and also as an intelligence officer. Mather had set up a ‘study group’ of eight MPs to look at the creation of a citizen volunteer force to impose law and order. Neave described it as a ‘civil protection group’.11 The episode chimed with the eruption onto the national stage of General Sir Walter Walker, a fire-eating soldier of the old school who had just retired after holding several senior posts at NATO. Walker publicly called for a ‘dynamic, unifying’ leadership above politics to ‘save the country from the Communist Trojan Horse in our midst’. He then took over the leadership of a movement called ‘Unison’, which claimed a 100,000-strong membership, all raring to step in if the unions brought the country to a standstill. Simultaneously, the existence of another band of patriots was revealed, an organisation called Great Britain 75, which was headed by the founding father of the Special Air Service, David Stirling. Both quickly fizzled out, but they played to the excitable mood of the time, and press and saloon bar were soon abuzz with speculation that a right-wing coup was afoot.
A leak in the Birmingham Post revealed the Carol Mather initiative. On 30 August, Neave spent hours on the phone trying to pour cold water on the story. The results were predictable. ‘The Times had quite a reasonable account of their talk with me and my disclaimer that our “citizens police force” had anything to do with General Walker (Unison) and Colonel Stirling (GB75),’ he wrote. ‘However, other papers, especially the Daily Mirror, suggested fascist tendencies.’ Another member of the Mather group, Monday Club stalwart Harold Gurden, had fed the frenzy by ‘announcing his scheme for 10,000 plainclothes vigilantes’. Neave, however, had only envisaged ‘reform of the Special Constables to combat vandalism’.
This was not a hasty rewriting of events. Diary entries before the Mather row blew up make clear his lack of sympathy with the self-appointed saviours. ‘Much talk about a “military takeover” by General Walker and disgruntled servicemen who distrust politicians,’ he had written on 21 August. ‘I think and hope this will come to nothing. The Army should be under the control of Parliament. All this is a symptom of the hysterical state of our society and the break-up of the party system.’
Neave’s faith in parliament as guarantor of citizens’ rights and curb on executive power was strong. The low esteem in which politicians were held outside Westminster frightened and depressed him. That, along with the tendency of the left of the Labour Party to see themselves as the representatives of the unions rather than the general public, presented a real threat to democracy. Like most politicians, he had an ambivalent relationship with the media, using newspapers and broadcasters when he could to make his points and build his image, but despising what he saw as their frivolousness and irresponsibility, which encouraged the breakdown of respect for the democratic process and the erosion of trust. He deplored the airs that TV journalists were increasingly giving themselves. After watching an edition of the BBC TV Midweek current affairs programme on parliament that he had declined to appear in, he complained that ‘the programme would have been improved if Ludovic Kennedy had not interrupted the whole time.’ The following day he congratulated himself on his judgement: ‘The BBC are a ripe lot of bastards and anti-parliamentarian,’ he concluded. The media distorted and trivialised, stoking contempt. For that reason, he had been an early supporter of televising parliamentary debates and select committee hearings, regarding the diehards who opposed it as ‘stone-age men’.12
It is fortunate that Neave chose to resume his diaries in 1973 after a ten-year hiatus just as his life, and British history, was reaching a climacteric. Even for those who lived through them, the 1970s now have a planetary remoteness. Much of what passed now seems surreal and things we then took for granted appear outlandish and even shocking. The central political drama was the struggle by the Heath government to reach a working relationship with the trade unions, who imposed themselves economically, politically and psychologically on the nation in a way they can only dream of doing now.
By 1973, the Heath government had reversed the policy on which it had come to power three years before of setting wage levels through free collective bargaining. After the notorious ‘U-turn’ of 1972, it was now committed to a prices and incomes policy, backed by legislation, which sought to impose order on wage demands in return for slaying the dragon that menaced almost everyone’s life: inflation.
Heath sought to achieve stability by inviting the trade unions to participate in shaping government policy. Agreements would not be imposed: they would be discussed and negotiated in a mature manner which took account of the nation’s needs as well as the direct concerns of this or that union. The endless consultations that followed might have seemed democratic in form. Directed by Ted Heath, they often felt more like an army orders group in which the bright, efficient CO he had once been in wartime issued commands and expected them to be obeyed. As Labour leaders knew before and later, it did not really make any difference which party was in charge. The unions were not interested in helping to run the country. Their concern was with the wage packets of their members; the fate of the nation and the well-being of their fellow citizens was the business of others. The conflict between government and unions defined British politics for the next decade and beyond, and the realities and atmospherics of national life could only change after a peaceful revolution in policy and strategy. Airey Neave would play a vital part in creating the conditions to bring it about.
At the beginning of 1973, it was clear that Heath’s approach was not viable and that he and his government were facing endless trouble. For all the supposed enmity between them, there is no evidence in the diary that Heath’s difficulties gave Neave any pleasure. There was more that united them than set them apart. Like Neave, Heath had visited Germany before the war and witnessed the ‘evil emotion’ Nazism could generate. He had attended a Nuremberg rally in the summer of 1937, with a seat in the aisle where Hitler almost brushed his shoulder as he marched to the podium to begin his rant.13 In the war, they both served in the Royal Artillery, in anti-aircraft units. There were points where their paths must have crossed. Heath was in action at Nijmegen in September 1944, defending the bridge against air attack, when Neave was there with IS9. Heath’s unit stayed on in Germany after the war and he wangled a trip to the War Crimes Tribunal, where Neave’s reputation as a minor star of the proceedings must have reached his ears. After the war, they both continued in the Territorials. In parliament, Neave stayed dutifully within party parameters and gave no cause to attract Chief Whip Heath’s ire. Whether he voted for him in the leadership contest of 1965 we do not know. But to his party leader and prime minister, Airey gave more than token support, and, as the diaries attest, he often sympathised with his problems.
As 1973 progressed, there were plenty to contend with. The annual inflation rate rose to a peak of over 25 per cent in 1975. The trade unions were thus pitched into a permanent fight to maintain living standards by pursuing wage awards that at least matched price rises. Naturally, those representing strategic industries wielded the most clout – starting with the National Union of Mineworkers. They would play a crucial part in Heath’s decline and fall.
The miners had first challenged the government in the previous year when they went on strike for seven weeks in pursuit of a large pay rise that would restore them to their position in the top stratum of the industrial workers’ pay league. Every pit in Britain was closed. Flying pickets pressured other workers to strike in sympathy and tried to block the movement of stockpiled fuel to power stations and factories. The national grid flickered as the fuel supply dried up and Heath declared a state of emergency. After the mass picket of Saltley coke depot in Birmingham and the death of a striker at a power station near Scunthorpe, struck by a speeding lorry, the authorities faltered. The government retreated, conceding almost all the miners’ demands. The crisis subsided but it was not resolved, and as the winter of 1973–74 approached, another clash with the miners loomed.
Heath now had the whole union movement against him. In 1971, the government had pressed through the Industrial Relations Act, which sought to rationalise negotiations and make agreements subject to the law. To register as legitimate representatives, unions had to sign up to rules of conduct, particularly on the circumstances in which strikes could be called. The Act was vehemently opposed by the Trades Union Congress, and trying – unsuccessfully – to bring them into line drained much of Heath’s remaining energy. Neave supported the government strategy and sympathised with Heath’s travails. He gave praise on the rare occasions when the Prime Minister pulled off a reasonable TV performance and respected his capacity to remain outwardly ‘optimistic and buoyant’ against all the odds.14
He felt for Heath when media-confected distractions such as the Lambton affair blew up. In the spring of 1973, a hitherto obscure Tory peer, Lord Lambton, was outed for frequenting prostitutes. Lambton’s haughty manner and dark glasses – worn for medical reasons – made him the picture of upper-class decadence, which to some extent he was. So too did the revelation that he liked to smoke a joint post coitum. Lambton’s role as Under-Secretary of State for Defence provided a thin public-interest justification for the story, raising the prospect of a breach of security and a rerun of the Profumo affair. Lambton left public life, but before departure confronted the allegations head-on in a television interview with Robin Day, offering that ‘people sometimes like variety. I think it’s as simple as that.’15 A subsequent inquiry cleared him of any wrongdoing. Heath handled the rumpus well in the eyes of Neave, who regarded the scandal as a storm in a teacup. ‘Is one to be always a security risk if one fucks someone who is not one’s wife?’ he mused.16
What bothered Neave about Heath was not his policies so much as his personality. In this he was merely one of many, inside and outside politics. Heath’s grumpiness and glacial social manner have now become legendary. In the current age of faked bonhomie, his indifference to what people thought of him and refusal to follow the advice of early spin doctors seem almost noble. However, even in those times, even among the last generation of Britons equipped with stiff upper lips, his manner was offensive. He managed to alienate everyone, not least Tory ladies. ‘Diana said that the Conservative Women were angry because the PM did not come to their tea party,’ Neave wrote on 21 May 1973. A few days later, Diana reported that her friend Nancy, wife of Martin McLaren, who was PPS to the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, had declared herself ‘very fed up with the PM. He never speaks to anyone.’ He noted a ‘very strong feeling among our backbenchers, especially the wives, that they count for nothing.’17 Like everyone, Neave spent time analysing the enigma that was Heath. One day someone seemed to have put their finger on it for him. A local constituency supporter remarked that Heath was ‘a kind man, without a heart’.18 As an epitaph for Ted, it was as good as any.
As time passed, it became clear that Heath’s awkwardness was not merely an unfortunate character trait. A growing number of Tories came to think that it was a central element in the endless crises. With his wooden delivery and deficit of charm, he would never rally the nation behind the tough policies on offer. In time he would be a huge electoral liability.
For Neave, the darkening political picture was matched by frequent glooms and lapses into depression. He was often ill with unserious but debilitating ailments that further undermined his morale. He was far more sensitive than his confident exterior suggested. He never seems to have developed the tough hide needed to cushion the push and shove of politics. His former secretary Veronica Beckett, with whom he kept in touch after she joined the Foreign Office, remembered that, even after he was elevated to Margaret Thatcher’s front bench as Northern Ireland spokesman, he was ‘very, very sensitive to criticism’. She remembered him telling her that after some rough press comment he had called the leader, seeking sympathy. ‘She apparently said, “Pull yourself together. If you want to be a politician, that’s what happens,” or words to that effect.’19 He harboured little vanities and felt snubs – real or perceived – keenly. On 1 June 1973, he recorded that he had once again failed to appear on the Queen’s birthday honours list. He had given up hope of getting a knighthood, which was his due as a long-serving Tory MP, while Heath was in charge.20 Nonetheless, he confessed he was ‘upset’.21
This small setback came at the time of one of his periodic resolutions to pack in politics. He had just lost someone dear to him, fellow MP Harry Legge-Bourke, who died the week before. ‘If I can be said to have any close friends, he was the oldest,’ he wrote. They had started at Eton together in 1929 and he was ‘one of the last gentlemen in the wretched House of Commons’. The memorial service in Ely Cathedral was the trigger for further despairing reflections. The hymns and panegyrics were ‘sad but rather fine, but I kept mourning my own failure and ineffectiveness.’22 Religion did not provide much solace. The rituals of the Church of England were part of his routine, and he regularly attended at the church in Ashbury, where he sometimes read the lesson. According to the children, though, he was a cultural rather than a spiritual Anglican, and God gets no mention in his writings, public or private.
Thoughts of retirement continued to seduce. He had embarked on another book – his account of Nuremberg – and again he clutched at the idea that he could abandon ‘the booby-trap world of politics’ and make a living from his pen.23 Diana, he recorded, ‘does not encourage me … she is anxious about our old age and the inadequacy of my pension arrangements.’24 Sensible Diana. Projects for thrillers and a biography of the explorer H. M. Stanley had foundered. The considerable literary success he had enjoyed came from mining his wartime experiences, and the seam was surely nearly exhausted. Interest in Colditz, though, was unabated. Unfortunately, it did not directly benefit him. Every Thursday night throughout the autumn of 1972, Britons were glued to their TV sets by an enthralling new series with a fine cast and powerful storylines. Colditz ran for fifteen episodes, and a second series followed in January 1974. Most of the characters were invented, a few clearly identifiable and others an amalgam of several real inmates. None of them was based on Airey Neave, nor did his famous escape feature.
The technical adviser was Pat Reid, who was the model for the escape officer ‘Captain Pat Grant’, and Reid’s escape via the Singen route to Switzerland was the climax of the first series. The huge publicity surrounding the show did bring some media attention Neave’s way, in the form of press features about the ‘real Colditz’, TV and radio appearances and the like. One evening in May 1973, he was the guest of Rupert Murdoch, then a fledgling press baron, at the Sun annual TV awards. At dinner he sat at a table with Nyree Dawn Porter of Forsyte Saga fame, Mr and Mrs Rolf Harris and the second Mrs Murdoch. He liked Alwen Harris, as he did Anna Murdoch – an ‘Australian Catholic with whom I discussed contraception.’ He was pleasantly surprised when Colditz won an award and he was called forward to accept it.25
This was gratifying, but it did not compensate for the irritation he felt at perceived inaccuracies in the series and at the fact that his own feat had been overlooked. In various interviews, he let some of his dissatisfaction show. He was quoted as saying the harsh conditions had been underplayed, so that the castle seemed more like a holiday camp, and the prisoners looked as if their hair had been styled by Vidal Sassoon (he denied saying the latter – the great hairdresser’s name was unknown to him). In private, he was sharp about the way history, as he saw it, had been tampered with. After a party at the Imperial War Museum in January 1974 to mark the start of the second series, he recorded with gratification that he ‘met many old friends who recognised that I was the pioneer escaper who led the way’.26 However, the programme presented ‘Pat Reid as someone who made a home run when he spent the rest of the war in Switzerland’. The Colditz escape was still his most cherished achievement. When, a few days later, a letter appeared in The Times expressing weariness with the second series, under the heading ‘Is There No Escape from Colditz?’, he remarked tetchily, ‘And so a great episode is now derided.’27
There were moments, though, when he recognised his good fortune and was properly thankful for it. ‘I never cease to feel how lucky I am in my home and my family,’ he wrote in March 1974.28 He loved the Old Vicarage. Diana had made it ‘a dream place’.29 Whatever emotional distance might have separated him from his children when they were young had faded. Marigold had left home first, married, become a mother and pursued a career path that he had limited interest in, and as a result he knew her ‘comparatively little’.30 He was proud of her intelligence, and the grandchildren gave him amusement and pleasure.
The boys were down at Ashbury most weekends, bringing friends and livening the place up. William’s high spirits and adventurous nature, which was combined with sound common sense, cheered up his father. Patrick was less flamboyant, but diligent and determined, and each step as he set off down the path of a career in international banking was approvingly noted. Above all, there was Diana. She never seems to have grown exasperated with his frequent depressions and dissatisfactions with his lot. For, though he might count his blessings from time to time, the banked fire of ambition still glowed. ‘I would like to be “somebody”,’ he confessed in the summer of 1974. ‘It is, I fear, too late.’31 He was wrong. Though there was nothing at all to suggest it, his time was at long last approaching.