The cause of freedom
Patrick Cosgrave
In November 1978, in a tatty bookshop in Battersea, I bought a copy of one of Airey Neave's books. It was called Little Cyclone, and told the story of a young Belgian nurse, Andree de Jongh, who, in 1941, and without training or preparation of any kind, marched two Belgians and one Scot across the face of occupied Europe to the British consulate at Bilbao. Afterwards, she ran the greatest of all Resistance escape routes — the Comet Line. She was, eventually, captured, and tortured at Ravensbruck and Mauthausen. But she survived, and in 1946 She came to London to receive the George Medal.
By the time I bought the book Neave had Just finished his master work on the Nuremberg trials. He had published other and brilliant studies of the last war, but Dedee (as She was called) was the only one of his Resistance colleagues to whom he had given a whole book.
Mine was a first edition. So I brought it triumphantly into his office and demanded that he inscribe it. 'Oh, no', he said. 'It wasn't my story. Get her to write on it.' I found out that Mlle de Jongh was still alive; that she had gone as a nurse to the Congo, and been trapped in the Congolese revolution; that she had gone from there to Ethiopia, and been trapped in the bloody revolution of Colonel Mengistu. 'I think she IS still in Addis Ababa tending lepers', Airey wrote to me on 7 November last year. Later, over lunch, he said, 'I didn't have that kind of courage.' I expostulated, but he waved me down. He did, though, inscribe the book, adding, after conventional greetings, 'remembering the cause of freedom.' I have no more treasured possession. I have told that story at some length in the hope that it will show something of the man's rare quality; and, thus, something of his legacy. There are many men in the House of Commons who served bravely in the last war, but none who combined his courage in the face of adversity (the failed escapes, the Gestapo questioning), his intellectual brilliance in fighting the war in the Resistance world, and his rise to political distinction in Britain in the Seventies. Again and again over four years of friendship I pressed him for answers, about the why and the how of courage in war, and about the contemporary political fight in which we were both engaged. He always evaded any personal claim, and of all his answers the one I remember that best represents his style was when he said, 'Patrick, nothing I've done is all that important. I just slog on.'
The effect to which he slogged on, and his commitments, are extraordinary. His war record, and the Colditz escape, would have been enough for any lifetime. Then he became an MP. He became, even, a junior minister, and resigned from the Macmillan government because of a weak heart. He stayed in the House, and stayed to chair, for several years, the Select Committee on Science and Technology, producing a series of reports dominated by his own unemphatic style and his own speciality in this field — an ability to balance concern for scientific advance with concern for its effects. Meanwhile, he wrote his books about the war. They are books exceptional and dominant in the war. literature of our time because, while they tell stories of heroism, they explore most graphically the underlying causes of conflict among men.
While he was doing all this he found some other causes of freedom. He was one of the first, for example, to notice that National Insurance provisions did not cover a substantial number of people who were at the time (the late Sixties) over eighty years of age. He lent his will and skill to changing all that; and succeeded. The man who had suffered so much from the Nazis spent years trying to rescue Rudolf Hess from Spandau. 'Well,' he said when, outraged. I argued against this (to me ) strange activity of his,'! think it's right.'
And, with all these other things to do, and books to write, he took on, in January 1975, the management of the campaign to make Margaret Thatcher leader of the Conservative Party. How skilful he was is too well known for me to expatiate on it. When victory was hers, however, he again walked the most difficult path. deliberately taking on the most arduous and — if one was ambitious — most destroying job of the Northern Ireland portfolio. This task, too, he set about in a quiet way. His commitment — to the unity of the kingdom — was of steel, like every other commitment he ever made. But his humanity for a troubled province was enormous. Gerry Fitt, the Catholic Uster member, with little hope for his idea of a United Ireland to gain from Airey Neave, said as much to me the day before the Callaghan government was brought down; and, with great courage — for he is also a target for assassins — repeated it after Airey was dead. In all matters of administrating the province Gerry Fitt felt he could trust Airey Neave.
Simply to set down, then, the list of all the things he did is to make an astonishing record. It is not, perhaps, a record with a system. It says, simply, that Airey Neave did the good things and the most difficult things all his life, and no calculation entered into his view of what had to be done. I can see him, though, perhaps drifting along a corridor, smiling over a meeting, concealing all he had done and suffered — and all the things his wife, who shared the war with him, had done and suffered — putting his right hand to his hair and saying, 'Don't pitch it too high.'
He did, though, pitch it high once. I asked him, a year ago, if he feared assassination. He paused and said: 'If they come for me the one thing we can be sure of is that they will not face me. They're not soldier enough for that.'
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