Title: The Man who was Saturday
Author: Patrick Bishop
Publisher: William Collins
PP: 291 including index
Price: £20
ISBN: 978-0-00-83094-6
I have been an avid fan of WWII escape and escape-related stories with particular reference to Colditz Castle and Stalag Luft III ever since reading The Wooden Horse by Paul Brickhill when I was about nine years of age and then seeing The Great Escape in full glorious colour at the Odeon cinema in Coatbridge (about 10 miles east of Glasgow) when I was about 10.
I couldn’t quite believe it the other week when a former soldier I know told me in the Downhill Only Ski Club clubhouse in Wengen that he knew Tony Rolt, who built the Colditz glider. Talk about degrees of separation!
So when I saw details of this new book devoted to the first British escapee from Colditz, Airey Neave, I just had to have it.
Unusually for this kind of book, the first 50 pages of The Man who was Saturday are devoted to painting a detailed picture of the subject’s life before capture, itself preceded by a few sombre pages covering his sudden death on March 30 1979. I find myself unexpectedly reluctant to give his murderers the oxygen of publicity even at a remove of more than 40 years.
Patrick Bishop has had access to personal papers, diaries and anecdotes that occasionally bring Neave, thought inscrutable by many, to life in his captivity. The one about teasing German guards by placing breakfast orders on their doors after spending the night chatting with a prisoner from the cell next door, who was a locksmith in real life, brought a smile to this grizzled face.
The summary of his first attempt to escape from Colditz on pages 73-75 is almost heart-breaking for its depiction of a grown man’s naivety in a situation no layman can possibly begin to comprehend.
The sentence ‘Neave’s disguise had no chance of succeeding in daylight’ pretty much says it all. Re-reading the corresponding section of Neave’s own book They Have Their Exits in the light of Bishop’s account is a fascinating exercise in comparing and contrasting.
Moving into the much less familiar territory of Neave’s life and times at MI9 and the even less familiar territory of his time as a Member of Parliament, Patrick Bishop cites They Have Their Exits and another of Neave’s books, Cyclone. Both I have bought and read.
Along with Neave’s account of the Nuremberg trials (simply titled Nuremberg), where he served papers to a number of men about to be tried for Nazi war crimes.
Nuremberg is on my shelf waiting to be read. It will have to wait until I properly dissect and absorb The Man who was Saturday….
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I wrote the above on March 15, very soon after receiving my review copy, which I have literally just finished reading (April 20, Holy Saturday 2019). I have to say that The Man who was Saturday is not really what I was expecting it to be. It just does not feel like a book based on personal papers and interviews with people who knew the subject, but maybe that reflects the personality of Airey Neave. I have now read several books about him or by him and still have not developed a feel for the person.
There is a lot of extraneous material. Between pages 32-40, for instance, there is far too much detail about the fighting in Calais as the British Expeditionary Force was forced into retreat, and there are far too many names to absorb. It is almost as if the writer lacks confidence that the subject could carry the story.
Neave’s time in Colditz is briskly dealt with. He arrives in the castle on page 71 and is in Switzerland on his way to completing his home run by page 87. His time at MI9 as Saturday receives similar short shrift in pages 109-124. His role at the Nuremberg Trials is covered in just 20 pages from page 125.
From then on, representing almost half of the book (which is unusually short, I feel) we learn of his time as a Member of Parliament. This is no disrespect to Airey Neave, but rather to question whether Patrick Bishop has made the most of his raw material.
Maybe his book should have been called The Man who was Saturday, The Extraordinary Life of Airey Neave, Soldier, Escaper, Spymaster and Modest Politician who ran Margaret Thatcher’s successful Conservative party leadership campaign.
