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Oxford was tinged with the same hostility to militarism and dread of another conflict that coloured the country at large. Among undergraduates, socialist and pacifist sympathies were unremarkable, even conventional. Neave remained impervious to the prevailing climate. The great RAF war hero and philanthropist Leonard Cheshire, who arrived at Merton two years after Airey, later claimed that, on arriving at Oxford, Airey had ‘bought and read the full works of Clausewitz, and when being asked why, answered that since war was coming it was only sensible to learn as much as possible about the art of waging it.’29
This seriousness sat alongside a determination to have fun. As the constraints of school and home fell away, Neave threw himself into what Oxford offered in the way of hedonism, drinking, dining and making friends, while not paying overmuch attention to his law studies. ‘I did little academic work for three years and then was obliged to work feverishly at the law in order to get a degree,’ he recalled fifteen years after his departure.30
With Isaacs, he revived a defunct political dining club, The Chatham, but it foundered after a few meetings. More durable were the Myrmidons, a Merton institution to which he was elected in the summer of 1935. The club was self-consciously exclusive, named after a warlike classical tribe, and entry was by invitation only. Its members dressed up in tailcoats with purple gold and silver facings and sat down to dinners at which the drink was more important than the food. Former members included Lord Randolph Churchill and Max Beerbohm. Compared to his Eton contemporaries, the Myrmidons of 1935 appear rather undistinguished, and none apart from Neave seems to have made a mark in later life. Their antics were an affront to the prevailing egalitarian mood. The group photographs taken before the dinners show them standing defiantly in Edwardian rig, as if daring the world to challenge them. For all their studied outrageousness, it was hardly Sodom and Gomorrah.
The club’s antics were part of a pattern of indulgence. Like ‘many of the upper class’, they ‘liked the sound of broken glass’. Neave recalled a ‘champagne party on top of my College tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below’.31 In his recollection, the authorities showed ‘great forbearance and even kindliness’ to this behaviour. The college archives, however, tell a different story. An entry in the Warden and Tutors Minute Book for 11 March 1936 records that Neave was one of a group of seven undergraduates gated for four weeks and fined three pounds each for ‘disorderly and scandalous conduct on the chapel tower, in that some bottles were … thrown from the tower by some members of the party’.32
On another occasion, he was fined for hosting a ‘noisy lunch party’. Leonard Cheshire, whose own university career was boisterous, remarked that Airey ‘would often do things that looked a little wild’, though ‘always in a rather nice way and never unkindly’. While this was a trait that ‘undoubtedly endeared him to his school and university friends it possibly had a different effect on his father who one has the impression did not always give him the encouragement which inwardly he needed.’33
It seems that as time passed, the companionship of the early years had faded, and father and son drifted apart. Sheffield Neave had almost no role in his grandchildren’s upbringing. Cheshire believed that his father’s disapproval profoundly affected Neave’s formation and that ‘at an early age he learned to conceal his inner disappointments.’
Neave stayed in touch with Cheshire throughout the rest of his life. In the post-war years, he and Diana were friends with Cheshire and his second wife, Sue Ryder, and supported their charities. This insight from a sensitive and spiritual man is important. Despite his privileges and abilities, there would be many disappointments in Neave’s life, and his way of dealing with them is essential to an understanding of his character.
But undergraduate life also brought satisfactions. His artistic streak found an outlet in the Merton Floats, the college drama group. In 1936, he served as secretary as well as acting the part of Smitty in a one-act play by Eugene O’Neill, In the Zone, and Pope Julius II in Max Beerbohm’s ‘Savonarola’ Brown.34 A vague sense of duty and seriousness stirred from time to time and he joined the Oxford Union. In his third year, he shared digs with Michael Isaacs and they went to debates together. According to Isaacs, they ‘occasionally made vocal contributions, none of which … had any marked impact upon the proceedings.’35 Neave remembered making three speeches at the Union, one of which was an inconsequential discussion of the merits of a motion debated the week before.36
The Union was a less impressive forum than its members liked to imagine. The tone was facetious and it was to some extent an arena for showing off. Nonetheless, it was a testing ground for young men, and later women, with political ambitions. In Neave’s time at Oxford, two men who loomed large in his later life, Edward Heath† and Hugh Fraser,‡ held the presidency. Margaret Thatcher joined when at Somerville less than a decade later, but as a woman could not seek office. Neave’s interest was casual, and raucous attendance at a debate seems to have been as much for entertainment as enlightenment. If he felt any political ambitions stirring at this time, they were not strong enough to propel him into the rough and tumble of Oxford politics.
In his later writings, Neave portrayed himself and his companions as odd fish, swimming against a tide of bien pensant leftism and pacifism. ‘My failure to understand the merits of the fashionable intellectual notions of Socialism was regarded as a sign of mental deficiency by the dons,’ he wrote. The mood of the times was defensive and self-deluding, for ‘This was an Oxford where a few brave spirits still tried to emulate the joyful irresponsibility of the ’twenties. In the ’thirties the shadows lengthened and the voice of Adolf Hitler threatened across the waters but it had little effect upon my undergraduate world.’37
This outlook was seized on by the Nazis as evidence of terminal decadence among the youth of Britain, who would have no stomach for another big war. It was, of course, a great mistake. Leonard Cheshire, who despite spending the summer of 1936 in Potsdam living with a militaristic family – an experience he thoroughly enjoyed – took virtually no interest in politics. ‘I don’t remember anything about Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts,’ he told his biographer Andrew Boyle after the war. ‘I’m sure politics meant nothing.’38 Yet this seemingly flippant, pleasure-seeking man about town joined the University Air Squadron as the landscape darkened, and went on to be one of the great figures of the British war.
After Neave went down, the young men and women he encountered in London were not very different: ‘Few cared about Hitler and even less about his ambassador von Ribbentrop. Debutantes “came out” and went their way. It was fashionable to be almost inarticulate on any serious subject.’39 Neave enjoyed the defiant sybaritism as much as anyone, but in one respect he was stubbornly himself. At the start of his second year he joined the Territorial Army. In everyone else’s view, it was an eccentric thing to do: ‘a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and far more tiresome’.40 In December 1935, the London Gazette announced his elevation from ‘Cadet Lance-Corporal, Eton College Contingent, Junior Division OTC’ to second lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Neave wrote about his pre-war Territorial experiences in a tone of light satire over which an element of the ludicrous hovers. He described a large-scale exercise played out on the Wiltshire downs one summer: ‘The sun beat down upon my Platoon as we hid from the enemy behind the chalk hills and listened expectantly for the sound of blank cartridges. I lay on my back beside a wooden Lewis gun. God was in his heaven and the crickets chatted merrily in the dry grass.’41
The entomologist’s son picked out a ‘Small Copper, a Fritillary and even a Clouded Yellow’. The idyll was shattered by the arrival of a First World War vintage brigadier with eyeglasses that glinted menacingly and a bullying manner, who was refereeing the war games. ‘He began to speak, working himself slowly into a cold, terrifying anger at the conduct of my platoon. A position had been chosen that could be seen for miles around. He had seen the men in the chalk-pit with his own eyes from his imaginary headquarters … He declared that he had never seen such ridiculous positions. As for my platoon sergeant in the chalk-pit, his left flank was entirely unprotected …’ Neave got to his feet. ‘There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, sir,’ he said boldly. Even in the emptiness of Salisbury Plain, he claimed, ‘you could have heard a pin drop. My Colonel, white in the face, stared at the ground. The Brigadier gulped.’ The brass hat tried to bluster, ‘but the spell was broken. Congratulations rained on me in the Mess and the old songs were sung far into the night.’ Neave had triumphed with a classic bit of Eton cheek. It was immensely satisfying, but hardly a preparation for war.
He left Oxford in the summer of 1937 with a ‘gentleman’s degree’ (third class), a result that can have done little for his relationship with his father. In London he joined an old-fashioned firm of City solicitors, where he dressed in bowler hat and dark suit and learned his trade processing the legal leftovers. He was set on being a barrister and obtained a pupillage at chambers in Farrar’s Building in the Temple. By then his pessimism about the future of Europe was proving all too justified. On 12 March 1938, Hitler ordered the German army into Austria and the following day the country was declared part of the German Reich. Shortly afterwards, Neave transferred out of his Territorial regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, and into the 22nd (Essex) Anti-Aircraft Battalion, a unit of the Royal Engineers. The move was presumably because its proximity to London would make it easier to meet his military commitments. At the same time, his interest in politics was growing. He joined the Castlereagh, a dining club which met in St James’s about once a fortnight while the House was sitting, to hear the candid and off-the-record views of a Tory politician. Michael Isaacs remembered a dinner in July 1939 when the guest of honour was Anthony Eden, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary the previous year over Prime Minister Chamberlain’s handling of relations with Italy. He had since become a major in the Territorials. ‘He came on after drilling his [men] and spoke eloquently to us about the grim immediate outlook. We all realised that it was only a question of time …’42
* Joseph Grimond (1913–93), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; Liberal MP for Orkney and Shetland, 1950–83; leader of the Liberal Party, 1956–67; created Lord Grimond, 1983.
† Edward Heath (1916–2005), educated Chatham House School and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, 1950–83; Leader of the Conservative Party, 1965–75; Prime Minister, June 1970–March 1974.
‡ Hugh Fraser (1918–84), educated Ampleforth and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Stafford and Stone, 1945–84.
2
Blooded
In May 1940, Airey Neave got his first real taste of war. The experience was bitter and depressing. The defence of Calais repeated some familiar tropes of British military history. It showed the country’s politicians and generals at their worst and the troops they directed at their stoical best. The four days of fighting affected Neave profoundly. Almost everything he worked at thereafter was in some way shaped by what he saw and felt in the port’s burning streets and shell-spattered ramparts.
Neave spent the Phoney War in mundane roles that underlined the truth that, much as he exalted the soldier’s calling, a lot of military life was simply tedious. By transferring out of the infantry to a Royal Engineers anti-aircraft unit, he had removed the possibility of commanding front-line troops in battle. In the autumn of 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, for reasons that are unclear, he switched to the Royal Artillery, and was assigned again to an anti-aircraft unit. Instead of firing guns, they operated searchlights. Their job was to dazzle dive-bombers and low-flying aircraft and to illuminate targets for the ack-ack gunners. It was not for this that he had studied Clausewitz. As he admitted ruefully, it was hardly ‘a shining form of warfare’.1
The first six months of hostilities were spent in a field in Essex preparing for an invasion that never came. After a training stint in Hereford, he set off in February 1940 to Boulogne to join the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), in charge of an advance party. The searchlight men ranked low in military esteem. A remark by a Guards officer that their equipment was ‘quite Christmassy’ rankled. Yet although he might have preferred a more dashing outfit, Neave liked his comrades, and his accounts of his service with them are affectionate and respectful. By the time he reached Calais he was a troop commander with the 2nd Searchlight Battery of the 1st Searchlight Regiment (RA), in charge of about eighty men. They included ‘a high proportion of older men with First World War experience. Most were industrial workers with a few clerks and professional men … All were vocal and democratic.’2
They ‘did not see themselves as front-line soldiers’, and with good reason. When they arrived in France they were virtually untrained in infantry tactics and were armed with rifles that most of them had never fired. Their other weapons were some old-fashioned Lewis machine guns and a few Bren guns for use against aircraft. As defence against the German armour that spearheaded the Blitzkrieg, they had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It fired slim, .55 calibre rounds at a rate of ten a minute that could penetrate a light tank at 100 yards but were little use against the Panzer IIIs in the divisions bearing down on the BEF. In any case, no one in the unit was qualified to operate it.
Nonetheless, what they lacked in regimental elan ‘they made up in willingness to fight’. Again and again in the four days of the siege they showed extraordinary guts. Unlike the previous generation of upper-class British men who had served in the war, Neave and his contemporaries had had few dealings with people outside their social level who were not servants or tradesmen. The army had given him his first intimate exposure to how other Britons thought and behaved. It taught him that patriotism, courage and gallantry were not the preserve of the privileged.
Even after months of anticipation, the end of the Phoney War came as a shock. On 10 May 1940, the German forces that had massed along the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg plunged west. The main thrust came where the least preparation had been made to meet it – through the Ardennes. In three days, forces spearheaded by the Panzer divisions of Heinz Guderian cleared the forest and crossed the Meuse. On 13 May, aided by pulverising attacks by the Luftwaffe, they broke the French defences at Sedan. The armoured columns moved at a speed that surprised the Germans themselves, sweeping round behind the Allied armies arrayed around the Belgian border. On 19 May, the three divisions of Guderian’s XIX Corps were in Amiens, less than fifty miles from the Channel. The following day they reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme, driving home a wedge that divided the Allied armies in the Pas de Calais and Belgium from the French forces to the south.
Utterly sure of his instincts and confident in his tactics, troops and tanks, Guderian was set on a move that, had it succeeded, might have brought Britain’s war to an end. His goal was the Channel ports, and in particular Dunkirk, which, once taken, would leave the BEF stranded and facing annihilation or surrender. Various factors combined to prevent him from maintaining the headlong pace. Not least was the caution of his superiors at Army High Command HQ, shared by Hitler himself, who feared the speed of the advance would expose XIX Corps to a devastating flank attack.
The Germans need not have worried. The Allied commanders were reluctant to credit the strength and extent of the breakthrough. The eventual move to counter it, a Franco-British drive south into the enemy flank around Arras on 21 May, achieved some initial success before being beaten off. However, it was to have important consequences. The action further reduced the appetite for risk in Berlin. Guderian was ordered to halt, dashing his hopes of a lightning victory.
On the day before the Allied counter-attack, the 2nd Searchlight Battery (2nd SL) was in Arras. That morning they received orders to move to Calais, seventy miles to the north-west. As they left, there was little sense of alarm in the British garrison. They drove off down long straight roads past Vimy Ridge and the flat fields that only twenty-two years before had been a vast killing zone. Neave travelled in the front seat of an old khaki-painted Austin Seven alongside his driver, Gunner Cooper. Cooper was large and eager to see action, frustrated at being diverted away from the defence of Arras to what looked like another spell of tedious duty. Neave was inclined to agree. He had heard that there were Germans around but he and his comrades did not believe ‘that [they] had broken through … We were confident that, at most, a few armoured cars, a few motor-cyclists or a few light tanks were threatening the Allied lines of communication.’3 In fact, the countryside to the east and west was filling up with Panzers.
They spent the night under the plane trees of the market square in the mediaeval town of Ardres, ten miles south of Calais, and arrived the following morning at their destination, a village called Coulogne on the south-eastern approach to the port. Neave set up his HQ in the Mairie. No bombs fell that night and he wrote later that on going to bed he ‘refused to believe that our role in Calais would be other than anti-aircraft defence’. But then he was ‘twenty-four, unmilitary, with opinions of my own’.
Neave was being a little hard on himself. He had tried his best at soldiering, the theory as well as the practice. His failure to predict what was about to unfold was unsurprising. He and everyone else deployed in the defence of Calais were the victims of the extraordinary complacency of those in overall charge of operations, an attitude that was matched by an incompetence and vacillation that was surprising even to those familiar with the British military’s capacity for deadly muddle. Years later, he made a detailed study of the episode using official papers and the accounts of participants. There will always be debate about what effect the siege of Calais had on the shape of the Battle of France. What has never been in doubt is that the direction of the defence from on high was a disgrace.
The German victory in the west has come to seem a preordained inevitability. That was not how it appeared at the time. The forces were evenly balanced. In the all-important realm of armour, the French had better tanks than the Germans and they had more of them. The Germans, though, made the maximum use of their resources. They were better organised and had better communications, exemplified by the radio links between individual tanks and from ground to air which could concentrate forces relatively swiftly to maximum effect. Most of all, they had a winning attitude. They were attuned to victory. Medium-level commanders were encouraged to initiate action without waiting for orders, and their men were eager to fight. These benefits on their own did not ensure success. But luck was on the Germans’ side, and their good fortune was compounded by the slow reactions and bad decisions of the Allied command. In Neave’s sector of the battle, both were on constant display.
He arrived as the scramble began to prevent catastrophe. Following the capture of Abbeville on the 20th, reinforcements were ordered across the water to the Channel ports. The 20th Guards Brigade was sent to Boulogne. Calais was to be defended by the 30th Infantry Brigade. Firepower against the Panzers would be provided by the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and a Royal Artillery anti-tank battery (229th). However, there would be no field artillery and the huge demands placed on the RAF meant that air cover was sparse. The meagre existing garrison, which consisted of a platoon of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and some anti-aircraft batteries, was to be boosted by three infantry battalions of the newly formed 30th Infantry Brigade. The force was under the command of Brigadier Claude Nicholson, a thoughtful and determined forty-two-year-old, whose reputation among his peers was high.
This seemed like a healthy addition to the defences. However, as Neave judged in his post-war study, ‘Nicholson faced an impossible task … Many among the 3,000 British troops were untrained for battle. They had neither proper equipment, arms or ammunition … [he] had no field artillery and very few tanks. His only additional support were 800 French soldiers and sailors and a handful of Dutch and Belgians.’4 The first infantry battalion to embark was the Queen Victoria’s Rifles, a territorial motorcycle combination unit, which arrived with the 3rd RTR and 229 RA Anti-Tank Battery aboard the SS City of Canterbury in the early afternoon of 22 May. Confusion and miscalculation meant that the QVR arrived without their machines, transport or three-inch mortars. The two-inch mortars were stowed, but with only smoke bombs for ammunition. Four of the RA battery’s anti-tank guns were somehow left behind. Unloading the RTR’s forty-eight light and medium tanks was maddeningly slow, and the inefficient way that equipment had been stowed on embarkation meant the fast-moving Cruiser IIIs were the last to come off. The armament – three-pounder cannon and Vickers machine guns – had been packed in mineral jelly, which had to be laboriously cleaned off before a shot could be fired. The other two regular infantry battalions – the 1st Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, and the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (60th Rifles) – arrived the next day. They were highly trained, but the Rifle Brigade had only half its ammunition and transport. Even when allowances were made for the inevitable balls-ups inherent in a last-minute embarkation, it was, as a young tanker officer remarked subsequently to Neave, ‘the most extraordinary way to go to war.’5
Nicholson was famously unflappable. However, Neave reckoned he ‘must have been deeply troubled’ by ‘a stream of contradictory orders’. In the course of the siege, from across the Channel came instructions to send his tanks first this way, then the other. At various times he was told to prepare to withdraw, then to stand and fight. The desperation of the situation was obvious to London, and Nicholson ‘asked repeatedly for artillery, ammunition and food: he had explained his situation and the enemy’s.’ In addition, he had been ‘visited by two generals, an admiral and a naval commodore’.
Neave wondered, ‘if they knew that they were so unfairly matched, why did they not send the reinforcements for which Nicholson pleaded?’ The answer was that from hour to hour events slipped further and further beyond the Allies’ control, so they were constantly reacting to situations that had already changed for the worse. As it finally became clear that the entire BEF was facing a choice between annihilation or evacuation, the fate of the Calais garrison became a secondary consideration. Instead, it was allotted a sacrificial role and the dubious honour of fighting to the death.
The halt order given to Guderian was rescinded late on the night of 21 May. He was to resume his advance on Boulogne and Calais, fifty miles to the north and west. During 22 May, the fresh winds of the storm brewing on the horizon began to be felt by Neave and his battery, ensconced around Coulogne. The village began to fill up with refugees, seeking to escape from a German advance coming from they knew not where.
On that day his chief, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Goldney, who commanded 1st Searchlight Regiment, moved up from Lille to Ardres to take control of the air defences of Calais. Goldney ordered all searchlight detachments to concentrate on their troop headquarters – the Mairie at Coulogne in the case of Neave’s outfit. He would now be in charge of sixty or seventy men, armed with rifles, two Bren guns and one Boys anti-tank rifle, to defend the villages which had become the outer ring of the port’s defences. His men got to work digging trenches on the south and south-east approaches to the village and setting up roadblocks.
As the day wore on, the flow of refugees increased. Like many who endured the siege, Neave later came to believe that among them were a number of Fifth Columnists. By now the port was under attack from the Luftwaffe. The troops on the checkpoints blocked the refugees’ path to Calais, where bombing had wrecked electricity and water supplies. At the docks, in the lulls between bombardments, they struggled to disembark reinforcements and unload supplies, then fill up the returning ships with casualties and non-fighting servicemen deemed by London to be ‘useless mouths’ with nothing to contribute to the struggle.
That night, Neave ‘lay awake in my bedroom at the Mairie and heard the tramp of their feet as they were turned away to sleep in the fields. The red glow of the fires of Calais, started by the Luftwaffe, shone on the ceiling and there was the sharp crack of the anti-aircraft guns.’6 At dawn he was woken to deal with an emergency. A column of men, women and children, half a mile long and led by a young priest, was confronting the guards at the checkpoint at the Pont de Coulogne, which crossed the Canal de Calais. He arrived to find the priest trying to persuade the crowd to disperse to the fields, but they were determined to reach the port and a boat to imagined safety, and there were ugly shouts of treachery. They ‘seemed about to rush the roadblock,’ Neave recalled. ‘I drew my .38 Webley revolver of the First World War and asked for silence. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, mon lieutenant,” said several anxious voices.’ He managed to calm them down and persuade them to turn back to the countryside. It was the first episode in a dramatic day.
Though he did not know it, the Germans were closing in all round. The British garrison in Boulogne, twenty-two miles to the south, was already under siege by Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Division. A 1st Panzer Division battle group, under Oberst Walter Krüger, was only eighteen miles away from Calais. For the moment, Guderian was uninterested in Calais and still dead set on gaining Dunkirk. The troops were tired and operating on stretched lines. Their orders were to press forward and secure crossings over the Aa river to the east of Calais. They were to enter the port only if it was thought that it could be taken by surprise and a major battle avoided. That morning Guderian did not have control of the 10th Panzer Division, which had been held in reserve during the Allied counter-attack at Arras. At 10 o’clock it was restored to him. The decision was now taken to move them forward fast. They were given Calais as their next objective.
In the meantime Battle Group Krüger was advancing to the south of Calais, intent on capturing the bridgeheads that would allow Guderian’s forces to close on Dunkirk. To do so, they had to get across the Canal de Calais. As they moved forward in the early afternoon of Thursday 23 May, the defenders of Calais and the Germans clashed for the first time. As the Panzers moved between the hamlet of Hames-Boucres and the village of Guînes, they met with 3RTR tanks commanded by Colonel Ronald Keller, who against his better judgement was responding to an order from the BEF HQ to proceed to St-Omer. In the action that followed, up to a dozen British tanks were lost – about a quarter of the total strength.
They were forced to withdraw and the Germans pushed on to Les Attaques on the Canal de Calais, a few miles south of Coulogne. The news of their arrival reached the commander of the ‘C’ Troop of the 1st Searchlight Battery, 2nd Lieutenant R. J. Barr, whose headquarters were at Ferme Vendroux, just to the north of the German line of march. Barr rounded up fifty men and a lorry and set off across the canal to prevent the Germans crossing at Les Attaques. His force was beefed up by reinforcements from 2nd Searchlight Battery from Coulogne. Panzers began moving over the canal bridge at 2 p.m., to be met by fire from the Brens, rifles and Boys guns of Barr’s improvised force. The hot resistance lasted for three hours, but eventually the defenders were surrounded and forced to surrender.
While this was going on, Krüger’s infantry advanced on Orphanage Farm, less than a mile to the north of Coulogne, where the 1st Searchlight Regiment commander, Colonel Goldney, had set up his HQ. Goldney prepared to defend it with the padre, the medical officer and a handful of men, despatching a small force to hold a ridge on the southern approach to the farm against the attackers. When making his dispositions, Neave had posted Bren gunners on the south-eastern side of Coulogne, below the ridge held on the other side by Goldney’s advance guard. When the Germans arrived, they opened up on the farm’s defenders with ‘very heavy rifle and automatic fire’. Sited in the lee of the ridge, Neave’s men were unable to see the fray but nonetheless opened up in the direction of the fighting, ‘narrowly missing’ their comrades.7 The result was that a despatch rider ‘roared over the fields’ from Goldney’s farmhouse HQ ‘with a well-deserved “rocket” from the Colonel and the Brens were moved forward.’
