... was born in Faversham, Kent, in 1888, and commissioned into the Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant in July 1908. He was promoted to lieutenant in August 1910, and the declaration of war in August 1914 found him, at the age of 25, serving in Gibraltar with the 15th Field Company.
By October he was fighting in the trenches at the Battle of Ypres, and on the night of 19 December 1914 (seven days after his 26th birthday) he was leading a party of sappers in action when he was asked by the commanding officer of a battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment to go forward and strengthen the defences in a recently captured German trench. When he got there he found that the Germans were counter–attacking with bombs, that all the British bombers had been wounded, and that the bombs that were left would not go off. Neame discovered that this was because there were no fuses left. Knowing that the grenades could be lit without a fuse by holding a match–head on the end of the grenade's fuse access point and striking a match box across it, Neame began lighting grenades in this fashion and throwing them into the German trenches, at the two different places where the German counter–attack was materialising. In this way he held the counter–attack back for forty–five minutes, whilst under continual return fire, and this allowed the West Yorks Regiment to evacuate its wounded behind him back towards the original British frontline trench.
Neame received further mentions in despatches in January and December 1917, and ended the war in November 1918 with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel.
At the 1924 Paris Olympics he was a member of Great Britain's gold–medal–winning 100m Running Deer team. This involved teams of four, firing single shots at a moving target that simulated the animal. 1924 was the third time it had been included in the Olympic Games, and it was included twice more: in 1952 and 1956. You can see a picture of a different (no doubt more genteel) example of the same event here (on Wikipedia).
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Neame was made General Officer Commanding British Forces in Palestine and Trans–Jordan, in the acting rank of lieutenant–general. In February 1941 he was appointed General Officer Commanding and Military Governor of Cyrenaica (the eastern coastal region of Libya), which had recently been captured from the Italians. This did not go well; he was one of almost 3,000 men of the 2nd Armoured Division who were captured in Rommel's advance. He was transported, along with generals O'Connor and Combe, across the Mediterranean Sea for incarceration in Italy.
These three senior officers were instrumental in a number of successful escape attempts, and in reprisal Neame's batman (Gunner Pickford, of the Royal Horse Artillery) was sent to another camp by the Italian Army.
Neame was released following the Italian Armistice of 1943, but faced a hazardous journey of several hundred miles through enemy–occupied territory to reach the safety of the Allies' line. He arrived back in England on Christmas Day 1943, having travelled via Tunis (after interviews with Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Harold Alexander, and also Winston Churchill), but found that there was no job waiting for him in the Army, with his star in the descendent after the debacle of his capture in 1941. He remained on the Active List until the end of the war, however, in his substantive rank of major–general.
In August 1945 he was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Guernsey, in the local rank of lieutenant–general, where he served until 1953. He was knighted in 1946, and in January 1955 he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Kent. He died in 1978, four months into his 90th year.
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