Airey Neave

Airey Neave joined the Territorial Army as a Royal Artillery officer and was called up to regular service at the beginning of the war.

He was sent to France in February 1940 as part of a searchlight regiment, but was wounded and captured by the Germans at Calais in May 1940.

In April 1941 he escaped from a POW camp in German-occupied western Poland, but was captured while trying to enter Soviet-controlled Poland and was briefly in the hands of the Gestapo. He was then sent to Colditz Castle.

Neave escaped from Colditz at his second attempt in January 1942, using a trap door beneath the camp’s theatre stage during a show. Disguised in home-made German uniforms, he and a fellow prisoner walked out of the prison, then travelled by train and on foot into neutral Switzerland.

Neave eventually returned to England, becoming the first British officer to make a ‘home run’ from Colditz. After the war Neave became a Member of Parliament, but was killed in 1979 by an Irish Republican terror group who planted a bomb beneath his car, which exploded as he drove out of the Palace of Westminster car park.