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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
John Freeman was one of Britain's most extraordinary public figures for over half a century: a renaissance man who constantly reinvented himself; a household name who sought complete anonymity. From advertising executive to war hero to MP tipped to be Prime Minister, Freeman then changed direction to become a seminal television interviewer and editor of the New Statesman. He subsequently remodelled himself yet again to become, in turn, an ambassador, a TV mogul, a university professor and, finally, in retirement, a well-known bowls player in south London. Freeman packed nine lives into his ninety-nine years, but all he really wanted was to be forgotten. The paradox of this private celebrity was captured by the very series that made him famous: Face to Face. While Freeman remorselessly interrogated the stars of his age, he himself sat in the shadows, his back to the camera. He was the grand inquisitor, exposing the personalities behind the public figures - but never his own. For ten years, Hugh Purcell has been tracking Freeman's story, trying to come face to face with this enigma who believed in changing his life - and his wife - every ten years. Why did Freeman want to forget what most old men would be proud to remember? Why did he try to erase himself from history? And yet, despite Freeman's best efforts to be ignored, his death in 2014 was marked by an enormous outpouring of appreciation and admiration. With his life now free from its shroud of inscrutability, the true story of this incredibly multifaceted man can finally be told.
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John Freeman by Feliks Topolski for Face to Face.
Contents
Introduction
‘I WISH EVERYBODY would forget I was alive,’ he said. And most people did. But living a very private life in south-west London, until nearing his centenary, was one of the most extraordinary public figures of twentieth-century Britain: an achiever and thrower-away of high office after high office; a celebrity who sought anonymity. ‘John Freeman’, said an old friend, ‘has spent his life moving through a series of rooms, always shutting the door firmly behind him and never looking back.’
He was a chameleon. In the 1940s he was a war hero, then an MP who reduced Churchill to tears. In the 1950s he was tipped as the future Labour leader, but resigned from politics and became a famous TV interviewer. In 1961 he left the BBC to become editor of the New Statesman – at that time, the most influential political weekly. Four years later, he resigned and became a diplomat, first as High Commissioner to India and then as ambassador to Washington. In 1971, he resigned again to become chairman of London Weekend TV and then of ITN. In 1984, he resigned once more and moved to California as a visiting lecturer, until his return to the UK in 1990. In retirement, he became a well-known figure on the bowls circuit of south-west London. No one knew about his past.
In very old age he still did not look back. He said in 2010: ‘I don’t remember the past because I’ve always put it behind me. Not just now, I’ve always been like that. I like to think about the present and even the future, but my past is a closed book, even to me.’
John Freeman was a man who believed in changing his life, and his wife, every ten years. He had four wives and three families, his last child being born when he was seventy-two. His lovers included the politician Barbara Castle, the writer Edna O’Brien, the film star Eva Bartok, the singer Billie Holliday, and the actress Rosalie Crutchley. It’s possible he did not remember them either.
Not only was his past a closed book, but his present was very private too, in so far as he could shield it from outsiders. He was pathologically private, a point well made by Dominic Lawson of the Daily Mail in the opening lines of his obituary written in December 2014:
On Saturday morning, in a military nursing home, two months before his 100th birthday, John Freeman died. If he had anything to do with it, my article would end at this point; indeed, he would have regarded the last three words of its first sentence to be the ideal obituary notice.
The paradox of Freeman, the private celebrity, was symbolised by the TV series that made him famous in 1959: Face to Face. The viewer never saw Freeman’s face. He sat with his back to the camera, in the shadow, smoke from a cigarette curling up between the fingers of his right hand. ‘John is the only man who has made himself celebrated by turning his arse on the public,’ said Kingsley Martin, former editor of the New Statesman. Freeman was the grand inquisitor, exposing the real personality behind the public figure – but never his own.
Thirty years later, the BBC repeated Face to Face and sent the radio psychiatrist Anthony Clare and myself to California to film an introductory interview with Freeman, in which the roles were reversed. The programme was a failure. Freeman had an intimidating physical presence and a manner that combined an old-fashioned, somewhat insincere charm with a complete put-down: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound rude to you, but that’s the sort of portentous question I don’t think I want to answer.’ As always, he gave nothing away.
An old friend of Freeman’s had warned me: ‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during a time of riots.’ After the interview I noticed that the interior of Freeman’s house in Davis was like a hotel room – devoid, as far as I could see, of personal memorabilia.
I became fascinated by John Freeman’s life, particularly by his chameleon-like quality to change it every decade or so, and I wanted to write his biography. His third wife, Catherine, was discouraging: ‘Don’t think he has mellowed and will say, “Now is the time to review my life”; he hasn’t and he won’t.’ Nevertheless, I persisted and asked Freeman, with the proviso that if he objected I would go no further. His reply was one I didn’t expect: ‘I do not feel able to take any part in the project you propose.’ But did that Olympian response leave the door open for others to take part? I asked Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a friend of Freeman, to intercede on my behalf, as he had once thought a biography should be written. He tried and failed: ‘Unsurprisingly, knowing him, he is not prepared to approve your project, even grudgingly. However, he did make clear that, equally, he does not disapprove and will not sue.’ So, despite feeling that chill air of non-approval on the back of my neck, I obtained a commission from a publisher in 2004 and began to research.
It was not easy. John Freeman’s Who’s Who entry had become briefer and briefer over the years and nearly all his early contemporaries were dead. He had written no autobiography, kept no diary and even destroyed private correspondence. Yet his story quickly became tantalising.
Like other celebrities who give nothing away about themselves, anecdotes stuck to him that might be accurate but could be myth. Was it true that as a schoolboy he had heard Mahatma Gandhi speak and decided to become a socialist? Was it true that as a staff officer at Lüneburg Heath in May 1945 he had conducted the German generals to surrender to Field Marshal Montgomery? The answers lay in his school and war records, which I required his permission to access. And why would he withhold that? It seemed little enough to ask. He’d had a distinguished education as a scholar and head of house at Westminster School, followed by a heroic, decorated war with the Desert Rats – Monty called him ‘the best brigade major I have’. Or was this also a myth?
I wrote to him again. Once more his reply combined flowery charm with blunt dismissal:
Before I return a dusty answer to your letter, I want to tell you how much I appreciate the charm and courtesy with which you have written. I made it plain to you from the start that anything you write would be without my cooperation, and that remains the case – absolutely – I have no intention of changing that decision now. When I retired I resolved to put that life completely out of my mind – to forget it all in fact.
I was deflated by his answer, but all the more intrigued. His final sentence both disturbed and excited me. Why was he so pathologically private? Why was he determined to forget what other old men would be proud to remember?
I pressed ahead, hoping, frankly, that Freeman would pass away while I was writing. He was ninety. His death would enable me to access his records and encourage those friends who respected his privacy to talk to me. By 2013, however, Freeman was in his ninety-ninth year and appearing to fulfil his wish that ‘everybody would forget I was alive’. By then, I had completed a long essay entitled ‘Face to face with an enigma: the extraordinary life of John Freeman’. I could not wait any longer. I offered it to the New Statesman (which was about to celebrate its centenary), as Freeman had been editor there when its readership was at its highest in the 1960s. The present editor, Jason Cowley, liked my essay – always an encouragement to a writer – and published it in the first week of March.
The results exceeded my expectations. My worries that no one would be interested in this figure from the past were completely dispelled. The essay was the ‘most read’ on the online New Statesman for months and has been at the top of the Google rankings for ‘John Freeman’ ever since. When Freeman eventually died in December 2014, the lengthy obituaries and accompanying feature articles proved without doubt that he continues to fascinate the British public. Several acknowledged my New Statesman article – fairly, I think, for I am now the only person who knows the details of the public life of this most private of celebrities.
For the past decade, on and off, I have been researching and writing John Freeman’s biography. For a long time I searched for a title. ‘Private Celebrity’ suggested itself, and ‘Nine Lives’ refers, of course, to his chameleon-like quality of moving from life to life, leaving little baggage behind. All these lives stand for his professional roles, except the last: ‘the ordinary man’. I believe he worked at this in the same self-aware way he worked at his previous roles – as one to be mastered to the best of his ability. There is a whimsical reason for my subtitle too: John Freeman loved cats – particularly his Abyssinian pair, Pushkin and Dulcie, whom he named after the Coleridge poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (from the lines: ‘It was an Abyssinian maid / And on the dulcimer she played’). There was something feline about him too; he walked on his own through his many lives, conscious of his own attractions but showing little interest in others’.
My challenge was to answer the question ‘Who was John Freeman?’ and in this quest I became certain of two things. The first is that there was sufficient written and oral material to attempt an answer. He was true to his word that he had no intention of writing memoirs and had never kept a diary (‘not a single paper’, in fact). This, of course, was frustrating. But, fortunately, Freeman was a professional communicator and much of his life is on the public record. Each of his nine lives has its own, very different archive. There is his head of house ledger at school; his brigade major’s official weekly war diary; his speeches and articles as government minister; his Flavus diary in the New Statesman for over a decade and many, many articles for that journal and also for the News of the World. Then there are his television programmes (in transcript or recording), particularly Face to Face, his diplomatic despatches and his TV chairman memoranda. Even his lectures as university professor are preserved in a California museum. Only Freeman’s ninth life lacks a written archive – when he was trying hard and self-consciously to be ‘an ordinary man’. But about that, the bowls players of Priory Park in Barnes have much to say.
There is no shortage of writing about Freeman either. My favourite sources are diaries, with their gobbets of gossip and anecdote; Woodrow Wyatt, Hugh Dalton, Richard Crossman and Tom Driberg do not disappoint. A close second come the press portraits in which, for over half a century, journalists in the UK and the USA have tried to come ‘face to face’ with Freeman. Most have failed. Some have partly succeeded, particularly those portraits written by friends and colleagues such as Norman MacKenzie, Tom Driberg, Anthony Howard, Francis Hope and Wesley Pruden.
Such was the ubiquity of Freeman that he is indexed in innumerable biographies and histories too – I have half a bookcase full. These include Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols (Freeman wrote the introduction), Henry Kissinger’s White House Years and David Frost’s An Autobiography. He is also, famously, the scarcely disguised ‘love object’ in Edna O’Brien’s short story of that title.
Over the last decade, I have interviewed numerous family members, friends and colleagues of Freeman. Some of them pre-deceased him: the politician Michael Foot; his New Statesman colleagues Anthony Howard and Norman MacKenzie; his first lover, Susan Hicklin (née Cox). They and others, like the statesman Dr Henry Kissinger, the writer Paul Johnson and the diplomat Lord Renwick, knew him over many years. Above all, John’s third wife Catherine has been hugely supportive and helpful in pointing me towards important contributors to this story. My thanks are also due to Judith Freeman, his fourth wife and the mother of his two younger children, for allowing me access to his army service record.
My second certainty is that in writing this biography I have discovered much that is new. The beginning was not promising. Freeman wrote to me: ‘I cannot see why my life is of any possible interest to anybody.’ His eldest son Matthew said, ‘That became his mantra’ – a warning shot across the bows of any biographer. In my view, this dismissive attitude was less a case of modesty or the reticence of a pre-war gentleman than one of perversity. Here, after all, was a man admired by Field Marshal Montgomery; a populariser of Carl Jung; the eponymous lover of Edna O’Brien in ‘The Love Object’; a close friend of Henry Kissinger; and a respected boss of Rupert Murdoch – to name but a few from his hall of fame.
Freeman makes a challenging subject for a biographer. I discovered that he was not only dismissive of different episodes in his life, but he seemed to mislead on purpose. For instance, he told both his wife Catherine and his friend Tom Driberg that he had wasted his time at Oxford, doing little except drink heavily and court girls. In fact he edited the university paper Cherwell under a disguised name and he was also Flavus, the political diarist who interviewed Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow March, reported the fight between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and students at Carfax Hall in Oxford, and attended meetings in support of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. In other words, he was already politically engaged as a socialist and a participant in the dramas of the 1930s.
Many years later he told friends that when he was a visiting professor at Davis University in California, he had little to do except give a few guest lectures and enjoy campus life – nothing of interest there apparently. In actual fact, he was a full-time member of the political science faculty, teaching the undergraduate syllabus to young Californians, and setting and marking exams. For an ex-ambassador to the United States, in his seventies by then and well past retirement age, this was yet another remarkable role change.
I believe that I have uncovered a life of massive achievement, as well as a constant attempt to hide it. John Freeman was an extraordinary man. As Dominic Lawson wrote in Freeman’s obituary: ‘It is safe to utter the cliché, “We will never see his like again.”’
Chapter 1
Young man about town
ON 26 JUNE 1959, John Freeman interviewed one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis on Face to Face – Carl Gustav Jung. Freeman began in his usual, brisk, interrogatory style:
FREEMAN: How many grandchildren have you?
JUNG: Oh, nineteen.
FREEMAN: And great-grandchildren?
JUNG: I think eight and I suppose one is on the way.
FREEMAN: Now, can I take you back to your own childhood? Do you remember the occasion when you first felt consciousness of your own individual self?
Presumably Freeman had done his homework, for Jung was not disconcerted by this unusual question. He gave an extraordinary answer:
That was in my eleventh year. Suddenly, on my way to school, it was just as if I had been walking in a mist, and I stepped out of it and I knew: I am. And then I thought: But what have I been before? And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing how to differentiate myself from things. I was just one thing among many things.
Would that Freeman had been similarly introspective when he gave his Face to Face type interview to the psychiatrist Anthony Clare in 1988, but, as usual, ‘the shutters were up’. However, there are sufficient clues in his own childhood that have encouraged psychiatrists, including the late Anthony Clare, to speculate about his personality.
John Horace Freeman was born on 19 February 1915 in one of those grand stucco Regency houses on the south side of Regent’s Park near the centre of London. His father Horace was a successful chancery barrister of Lincoln’s Inn and his mother Beatrice, née Craddock, was the daughter of a prosperous butcher’s family, whose premises were on nearby Marylebone High Street. In fact, John was born in Grandmother Craddock’s house.
Soon his family moved out, to the salubrious but dull suburb of Brondesbury, into a large Edwardian house on Walm Lane with eight bedrooms, two or three servants, two cars and a sizeable garden (though with only one bathroom, as was the norm in those days). Presiding over meals at the dining-room table was a portrait in oils of Horace’s father James by Edward Handley-Read, which was once exhibited at the Royal Academy. James Freeman was born in the year of the Battle of Waterloo, one of fifteen children, and became a teacher in Newbury, Berkshire. He, in turn, was descended from Lincolnshire or East Anglian farmers, which, bearing in mind John’s conspicuous red hair, suggests a Viking inheritance.
The painting of James showed him at breakfast reading The Times. On the wall opposite was a copy of the famous The Derby Day painting by William Powell Frith (1819–1909). Next door, an extensive library included all the works of Charles Dickens, which John read before he was twelve. He was attracted more to the storylines (according to a relative) than to the implied social criticism. Not that all his reading was serious: he later confessed to a childhood liking for horror comics such as those about the fictional Chinese poisoner Dr Fu Manchu. His father had a taste for classical poetry, particularly the Aeneid, which he encouraged his two sons John and James (born in 1917) to study. This adds to the impression of an haute bourgeoisie family enjoying the security and comfort of late Edwardian life after the watershed of 1910. John described his parents as ‘Asquithian Liberals, that is to say they considered themselves as being in their day progressive, but they would find themselves at present [in the 1960s] on the extreme right wing of the Tory Party.’
He did, however, bear emotional scars. His father Horace had a cold, analytical mind and discouraged closeness, at least until his last years. Apparently, he and his sons had dinner together once a week, otherwise by appointment. He did not leave either of them money in his will. John once said that from the age of six he disliked his father and despised his mother – ‘a pretty but silly woman’ he called her. He must have had a loveless and lonely childhood, but he was extraordinarily self-sufficient. He first smoked when he was four and soon after devised an electric alarm system in his bedroom that warned if his parents were around. He rode the trains to school on his own, climbing from carriage to carriage. He roamed around London. He used to recount the story of taking himself off to the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square and asking at the box office: ‘Is this a suitable play for a boy of seven?’ Theatre was to be an abiding interest throughout his life.
His relations with his brother James, two years his junior, were also cool. He seldom chose to see him when they were adults, saying, ‘I’ve never liked James ever since I saw him deliberately destroying my copy of Alice in Wonderland in his cot.’ There was more to it than that, for John was convinced that his father preferred James to him – another clue for psychologists.
That was probably true because, while John was an unruly child, James was a well-behaved and academically inclined boy who did everything that was expected of him. After the war, during which he fought in Burma and won the Military Cross, James followed his father to the chancery bar and specialised in industrial relations. He was also a practising Anglican. At his funeral, where there were many prayers, a eulogy and Pie Jesu from Faure’s ‘Requiem’, sung by his daughter, John was heard muttering: ‘I don’t want any of this sort of thing when it’s my turn.’ In the event, he was to get his wish.
Anthony Clare was not the only psychiatrist to refer to the significance of Freeman’s childhood. He had submitted to a polite mauling in that Face to Face interview, so perhaps he was licking his wounds when he considered that Freeman had the characteristics of a social psychopath. He referred me to the Psychiatric Dictionary (published by the OUP), which defines a social psychopath as having ‘a poorly developed sense of empathy leading to unfeeling and insensitive behaviour but disguised as a superficial charm and absence of “nervousness”, an egocentricity and incapacity for love’. This, continues the Psychiatric Dictionary, has as its aetiology ‘emotional deprivation early in life’. Social psychopathy is more characteristic of leaders than of the rest of us, according to a study at Surrey University:
Surveys of high achievers like prime ministers, US presidents and leading entrepreneurs have shown that nearly one-third lost a parent before the age of fourteen (compared with 8 per cent of the general population). Left high and dry at a young age they have resolved to snatch hold of their destiny; adversity is the key to exceptional achievement.1
Be that as it may, when John was thirteen he won an exhibition, later a scholarship, to Westminster School and began five very happy years there. When he left in 1933, he wrote: ‘I only hope that my successors have as calm a voyage [as I had] and will look back on their life at Westminster with as much pleasure as I do.’ In old age, he reminisced with Nigel Lawson about the good times at their alma mater, relating with relish how he had lost his virginity to an under-matron at the age of fifteen. In middle age, he described to his drinking companion Tom Driberg how his favourite Westminster watering holes had been the Two Chairmen pub in Queen Anne’s Gate and, more daringly, the bar of a celebrated Edwardian haunt in Soho called Romano’s. There is no sense here of Freeman as a lonely and loveless teenager; rather it is of a worldly boy enjoying a sophisticated and tolerant school at the heart of the nation’s life.
Freeman’s years at Westminster were not hedonistic; they were formative. Whereas many public schoolboys left school culture-bound, as Christian officers and gentlemen ready to serve their country as future leaders, only for university to encourage them to work out who they really were and what they wanted from life, for Freeman it was the reverse. Westminster taught him the civilising values of tolerance and courtesy, which never left him, but also awakened a social and political consciousness. When he was seventeen he joined the Labour Party after a shocking experience that led him to write in his house magazine ‘the outstanding fact of the year’ was that the school ‘had heard the voice of England’s forgotten people’. He was referring to the hunger march that massed outside the school gates in Palace Yard on 1 November 1932.
The worldliness of Westminster was partly due to its location right next to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. It was also due to the headmaster, Dr Harold Costley-White – later a Canon of Westminster Abbey and then Dean of Gloucester Cathedral. He was quietly determined to teach a strong sense of public responsibility and a code of courtesy, as well as the importance of intellectual self-confidence. To this end, he revived the debating society in Freeman’s last year. The opening proposition was: ‘This house would welcome the establishment of a dictator.’ Freeman spoke against, proposing Lloyd George as an evil dictator in a mocking speech that contrasted him with the Roman consul Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who displayed all the civic virtues before resigning his office and returning home to plough his fields.
Westminster School made every use of its proximity to Parliament. In 1931, Mahatma Gandhi – in London for the Round Table Conference on Indian independence (this is when Churchill called him ‘a half-naked fakir’) – spoke to the school’s political and literary society on ‘Indian Self-Government’. A sketch of the event by John Bowle hangs in the school library. Freeman was listening, and the desirability of Indian independence became one of his consistent beliefs. Soon after, he met Krishna Menon, who was campaigning aggressively in the United Kingdom for the cause, and Freeman is also on record as saying that the first political speaker to make an impact on him was Stafford Cripps, who was committed to ending British rule in India. Finally, Freeman provided his own postscript. When he was High Commissioner to India in the 1960s, he looked back upon that schoolboy meeting with Gandhi: ‘I remember the sense of surprise, awe – and perhaps “melting” is the word – which his visit evoked.’
Other speakers to the political and literary society also showed a distinct left-wing bias. In 1933, the communist journalist Claud Cockburn gave a talk entitled ‘A Journalist in Germany’ and the headmaster described ‘My Visit to Russia’. In 1934, the year after Freeman left, Professor Harold Laski spoke on ‘Liberty’ and Professor Julian Huxley on ‘Science and Society’. Such talks must have been heady stuff for an impressionable teenager.
The climax of Costley-White’s liberal intentions was the formation of the United Front of Progressive Forces (UFPF), based at Westminster School. John had left by then, but his brother James was on the executive committee. In common with other leading public schools such as Wellington, where Freeman’s contemporary Esmond Romilly had started a widely publicised pacifist journal (Out of Bounds: Public Schools’ Journal Against Fascism, Militarism and Reaction), Westminster made up for the establishment’s seeming indifference to fascism by actively campaigning against it. Esmond Romilly was by now working in a communist bookshop in London and starting a society for ‘escaped’ public schoolboys. He was shortly to cycle off to Spain and join what became the International Brigades. It would have been typical of Westminster’s encouragement of public debate to invite the Romilly brothers, Esmond and Giles, to speak at the school. In any event, the manifesto of the Westminster UFPF was announced in February 1936 amid ‘scenes of enthusiasm unparalleled at Westminster’. It committed its members to:
Uncompromising resistance to fascism, conservatism and war…
Vigorous efforts to secure international disarmament…
The nationalisation of armaments and the coal industry…
The abolition of the Means Test, slum clearance…
The drastic reform of the House of Lords…
The audience of fifty to sixty boys and staff then rose to its feet and gave the first rendering of the ‘United Front Song’:
Lift up your voices now. Singing for freedom,
Peace and fraternity, more for the poor;
Work for the workless and justice for all men,
Progress in unity! No more war!
Over the next five weeks, UFPF (nicknamed not unfairly as ‘ufpuff’) held three public demonstrations and two more meetings, and thus ‘ended a term of remarkable vitality and enthusiasm’.2
Compared to this ecstatic report, the school magazine, The Elizabethan, makes dull reading. It is the predictable digest of sport, chapel and Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). The July 1932 edition includes a rowing profile of the seventeen-year-old John Horace Freeman (‘Red’ to his friends because of his hair, not yet his politics), who was in the first VIII and continued to be the following year: ‘A delightful man to have in the crew. A tremendously hard worker and very keen. At present he rows like the village blacksmith. Next year his aim must be “maximum power with maximum at ease”.’
To brawn may be added a big head, according to the Busby House ledger of 1931: ‘JF has plenty of brains and common sense but is inclined to that opinion himself, which alienates his elders.’ His classroom achievements were high though not uniform. Records show that his mathematics results were truly abysmal in his early years, for he obtained nought out of 100 in two exams – a fact he was inclined to boast about later on. Perhaps he made up for this by reading extensively. He said in later years that Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and George Bernard Shaw’s plays had helped form his political views – a tribute to Westminster’s encouragement of self-education.
It was Dr Costley-White who revived rowing (‘water’ in the school slang) and this is how the young Freeman got to know him. His obituary in The Times centred on his Christian faith: ‘Costley-White was a man of deep religious convictions, which permeated all his work. He was a forceful and fluent preacher; he had a keen and active mind and was a lover of music, a subject he did much to encourage at Westminster.’ He left the school to become a distinguished Church of England clergyman. Since Freeman later acknowledged his debt to his former headmaster, the question arises as to whether this influence extended to Freeman’s faith too.
The answer must be ‘no’. The Christian religion (Church of England) was routine at Westminster, and the fifteen-year-old Freeman submitted to Confirmation as a rite de passage, administered to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He recalled feeling the weight of the ‘apostolic hands’ on his head and noted that they trembled. Instead of accepting this as a transmission of the Holy Spirit, he remembered thinking: ‘The old boy’s not long for this world.’ Nor was he: the Archbishop died a few months later in 1930.
Although Freeman felt no confirmation of faith as a result of this experience, nor did he feel indifference. Years later, he told his High Anglican friend Tom Driberg that although he lacked ‘the gift of faith’, he ‘had no difficulty in doing anything officially expected in this field’. Perhaps sympathetic agnosticism summed up his attitude, or was it just the relaxed tolerance that stemmed from Westminster? Incidentally, his mother was a regular churchgoer, though his father was ‘a total agnostic’. Additionally, Freeman’s third wife was a Catholic, so all three of their children were baptised as Catholics, with his approval.
In later years he showed respect towards other people’s Christian beliefs. He wrote in the New Statesman in 1963:
I’ve always been intrigued by (and respectful of) the views of Christian socialists. Their essential belief, after all, receives much countenance from the Gospels – though precious little from the churches – and the notion of the equality of men before God is profoundly attractive and the very foundation of the respect for individuals which should be the purpose of socialist morality.
The Gospels appealed to him much more than the conservatism of the Church of England: Tranquilla Non Movere should be its motto, he wrote on another occasion.3
It was a feature of public schools at this time, and for at least thirty years afterwards, that the school prefects had more authority and status than the assistant masters. For example, at many schools the prefects could administer corporal punishment, while the teachers could not. This odd inversion went back to Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby 100 years before, whose ‘praeposter’ system (literally ‘placed before’) installed the senior boys as the custodians of discipline, subject only to his control. The tradition was tellingly satirised by Lindsay Anderson’s film If… (1968), in which it led to a violent school insurrection that must appeal to the fantasies of public school boys whenever they watch it. It was also common practice for the head of house to write a confidential ledger about his term of office, open only to his successors. The Busby House ledger of Westminster School for 1932–33 (now open to researchers) gave me the first insight into the private world of John Freeman.
What is more personal and unique than handwriting? Freeman’s changed little over seventy years and it is instantly distinctive. It is firm, fluent, but notably unformed, as though he was not interested in what it looked like, only in what he wrote. It is self-confident and regular, more administrative than creative. Seeking to open up this most private of individuals, I sent samples of his handwriting from different eras to a professional graphologist for her interpretation. She knew nothing about John Freeman, other than his autograph, so her analysis was perceptive. In summary:
A love of adventure, particularly in the sphere of competitive achievement. His constant need to be active, though, could cause him to feel restless. Kind and friendly with family and close friends, but with acquaintances and business colleagues unlikely to reveal feelings. Sensitive to criticism but unlikely to express emotion.
A compulsive need to achieve but an absence of warmth. Dispassionate, he experiences life as an onlooker. Socially likes to be correct, has charm at his disposal but is not pliable. Thinks for himself and takes a stand on principles. Egotistical, he feels himself to be special – above others. Strong leadership qualities, works well under pressure and appears not to suffer from stress. Works systematically, a good organiser, thrives on difficult assignments and is easily bored. An intelligent person with sharpness and speed of thought, keen perception that enables him to arrive at solutions quickly.
The overall tone of Freeman’s ledger entries is one of authority. Freeman could have been the housemaster of Busby’s – not that he had any time for Busby’s actual housemaster: ‘Hilary is the worst housemaster I ever came across or heard of and his wife in my opinion is an unpleasant, snobbish and silly woman.’ He dismissed the outgoing matron as ‘an inefficient old bitch’, thus showing an earthy expression that did not desert him with the years. No one could accuse him of misogyny, however: ‘The new woman is a perfect jewel. I hope future generations of Busbyites will value her as highly as we do.’ Bearing in mind his affair with the under-matron, I wonder whether the value he placed was more personal.
Freeman’s intentions as head of house were to implement the philosophy of the headmaster. His approach was almost paternal:
I have done as much as I can to stimulate interest in the debating society and the League of Nations union. Intelligent opinion is more important than achievement at games … I am convinced that the Corps (the OTC) is a bad and unnecessary institution. I have decided to abolish personal fagging, which I consider to be an idiocy. Fags should be treated like decent human beings and if this had happened before then the house would have been much happier.
Reading this, I had to remind myself that Freeman was still a boy at school, very much a teenager. Little wonder his girlfriends at Oxford said he was a grown-up among students, self-possessed and quietly arrogant.
In later years, Freeman said that abolishing personal fagging (the allocation of junior boys as virtual servants to their seniors) was his legacy to Westminster. He wrote the next term (Lent, 1933):
As indicated, I have abolished fagging and no harm has been done. There is no sign of juniors becoming uppish. Whether fagging implants a respect for authority I am doubtful! People in the Under report that life is more peaceful and pleasant and the standard of work and discipline is better than before. Incessant and useless petty punishments are futile for monitors and fags.
Freeman’s most prominent entry in the ledger concerns an event that ‘although it has no direct connection with the history of the house, may be worth recording’. History has proven him right:
On the evening of Tuesday 1 November [1932] a great army of hunger marchers attempted to force an entry into the House of Commons. These marchers had come to London from all parts of England and Scotland some days before and there had already been two demonstrations – one in Hyde Park, where a great deal of damage and injury had been done, and one of a more peaceful nature in Trafalgar Square. Then they requested that a deputation should be allowed to appear before the bar of the House of Commons. This request was foolishly refused with the result that about 10,000 unemployed assembled at Parliament Square. Strict orders were given that nobody from Westminster was to go outside Dean’s Yard. I went out alone to see what could be seen. After one or two truncheon charges the square was empty and the marchers were driven into the mouth of Victoria Street. A police barricade was thrown round with a Police HQ in the middle, from which Lord Trenchard directed operations by flashlight signals. As the crowd became confined between the Abbey railings and the Guildhall, it became rather ill tempered. However, under the control of Wal Harrington more serious rioting was avoided. All this time the crowd was being driven steadily along Victoria Street by mounted police. We heard a great deal of rioting in Great Smith Square, where rioters broke through the police cordon. All evening Dean’s Yard was used as a Police Reserve HQ with mounted police exercising their horses. It was all quite exciting.
At this point I was expecting to read that the school had ‘heard the voice of England’s forgotten people’. In fact, Freeman ends unpredictably: ‘But for the extreme tact and bravery of the police, the results might have been more serious – perhaps it’s a pity they weren’t.’ A successor head of Busby’s annotates in the margin: ‘Either a sadistic, snobbish or blatantly stupid point of view.’
Freeman probably wrote his ‘forgotten people’ epitaph in the Busby House magazine (as opposed to the ledger), which is missing from the library now, but was possibly available just after the war, when the journalist Anthony Howard, who used the quote in his newspaper profile of Freeman in 1961, was also head of Busby House. The image remains of young Freeman wandering around on his own in the midst of a very large-scale riot and watching the confrontation between desperate marchers and mounted police – a confrontation unequalled until the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. It must have been a formative experience.
It was Freeman who revived the Busby magazine, writing in the ledger with unintended precocity: ‘I have sacked the old printer, found a new one, organised advertising and asked all old Busbyites to contribute. I am editing it myself as I am the most suitable person.’ He ends: ‘Looking back over the whole year, I can see that I had a very happy year as head of Busby’s. I honestly believe that the other members of the house enjoyed themselves too.’ There can be but few occasions in later years when Freeman wrote so unguardedly, but then he cannot have conceived of a biographer accessing his report seventy-five years later.
There follows a long break in the sequence of the ledger. A subsequent head of Busby’s accounted for it:
This is due entirely to J. H. Freeman, who, in spite of continuous demands from subsequent heads of house, to which he either turned a deaf ear or returned a vague promise, persisted in keeping the ledger. After five years of absence it was in danger of becoming a myth. The ledger was eventually recovered by Hayward who visited Freeman several times at Oxford.
The missing years of the ledger could be taken as a metaphor for Freeman’s missing years at Oxford University.
John Horace Freeman, says the university register, was in residence as a Commoner at Brasenose College (1933–37), where he was awarded a third-class degree in Classics. To be specific, he was given a pass in Mods and a third in Greats, which was just better than a fail. The college magazine, The Brazen Nose, adds that he rowed for the first VIII during his first year. Apart from that entry, he may as well not have existed until he was awarded an honorary fellowship in 1969.
In later years he did nothing to dispel this reputation for undistinguished anonymity. He told Catherine that he went up to Oxford determined not to read another book, and he wasted his time gambling and drinking in order to spend his father’s money accordingly. This confessed dissipation led later friends like Norman MacKenzie (an assistant editor at the New Statesman 1944–62) to wonder whether Freeman then and later had a wild streak that needed to be rigorously, not to say icily, controlled. ‘Quite possibly,’ said Catherine when I put this to her in 2003. ‘He’s capable of a furnace of feeling, which is why he tamps everything down and is so ultra-controlled.’
On 19 October 1935, the editor of Cherwell wrote a leader asking: ‘Is Oxford Degenerate?’ The author obviously thought so, and with good reason – which applied to Freeman as much as anybody else:
Ours is essentially a tragic generation. Born in the turmoil and bloodshed, the suicidal folly and the bestiality of a great war, passing our lives in the midst of the social and economic upheaval that resulted, we are likely to die prematurely in another and yet more violent conflict. The security, the peace and the wealth, which might have been ours and which other generations before us have known, have been sacrificed on the altars of honour and national pride.
It is small wonder then if we are a degenerate and an embittered generation; small wonder that we at Oxford, more fully alive than most of our contemporaries to our situation, are branded as unmoral and unprincipled by our immediate predecessors.
A report in the Gloucester Echo of 9 April 1934 confirmed this image of the well-off, dissolute Freeman, one of the ‘gay young things’ of the era:
The Hon Henry Cecil of Stowlangtoft Hall, near Bury St Edmunds, younger brother of Lord Amherst of Hackney, who was injured in a motor car accident near Thetford, Norfolk, on Saturday, has recovered consciousness, and his condition today was comfortable. Mr Cecil was accompanied by a friend, Mr John Freeman, who was slightly injured.
They were lucky to escape. Their car crashed through a wire fence, turned a somersault, and landed upside down on the railway line 17 ft below. There was very little visibility at the time (early on Sunday morning) due to a mist. They had been returning from a dance at Euston Hall, the seat of the Duke of Grafton.
Freeman’s injuries were not slight. It was discovered later that he had fractured his skull, as a result of which he spent two months in a nursing home and gave up rowing. According to his army medical report he suffered from giddiness for several years afterwards.
One of Freeman’s close acquaintances at Oxford was Woodrow Wyatt, whose career would be linked with his over the next half-century, through university, the army, Labour politics, broadcasting, journalism and female friends. In 1986, they met at a dinner party given by Lady Montagu. Freeman told her, ‘I’ve known Woodrow for nearly fifty years,’ and Woodrow replied, ‘Yes, I’ve known all your wives and you have known all mine.’4
They each had four. Wyatt’s first wife was Susan Cox, whose first lover was John Freeman. In the absence of Freeman’s autobiography, I offer Woodrow and Susan’s scene-setter of university life at Oxford.
Woodrow Wyatt was accepted by Worcester College in 1936, after he wrote a twenty-minute essay entitled ‘My Thoughts on Hyde Park’. He had little intention of studying: ‘If your prime object in going to Oxford or Cambridge is to study, you might as well go to a red-brick university where you can get all the textbooks and routine instruction you want.’ The first dinner in hall, he sat next to an Old Etonian. ‘Look at their bottoms in the showers,’ he would say of other Worcester undergraduates. ‘You can see how common they are.’ Dinner was dull, he continued:
Unless someone was ‘sconced’. I forget what prompted this ritual – perhaps extreme obscenity, the breach of a convention or just fun brought a challenge to drink a sconce. A huge sconce or pot, holding two or three pints of beer, was brought in ceremonially. If the subject of the sconce could drink the whole pot in a single continuous swallow, he won. The challenger had to pay for his beer. Frequently the victors, white in the face, left hall soon afterwards.5
Drinking expensive wine was a matter of status: ‘A member of New College was Alan Hare [later a famous philosopher]. He asked me for a drink in his rooms. At twelve in the morning we drank Château Latour. I was deeply impressed.’
Another ritual that condoned self-indulgence was ‘sporting your oak’, that is shutting the thick outer door of one’s room to secure absolute privacy. This may have originated to promote quiet study, but was more of signal to indicate a girl within, hopefully without all her clothes on. One day when the provost called on Wyatt, he found the ‘oak sported’: ‘Later he looked at me sadly. He did not approve of girls and would never have admitted them as members of the college. He never came to see me again.’ The girl in question was Susan Cox. She was at Somerville College when university membership of female undergraduates was still being disputed. In fact, the Oxford Union debated the issue in 1936 (although women were not allowed to join the union even if they wanted to). Wyatt wrote an article for a magazine he founded called The Oxford Comment, headed ‘Oxford Women Are Awful’. He began: ‘The average woman undergraduate is wearing ill-fitting clothes, has a shiny face, untidy hair and a sloppy ungainly walk.’ He did, graciously, identify Susan Cox as an exception, and rightly so, for she was a tall, golden-haired beauty, with blue eyes and freckles.
Thirty years later, she wrote about the status of female students during her time at Somerville for the Oxford Magazine. She was now Susan Hicklin, and her daughter was just starting at the same college. As such, she was called a ‘freshman’, which was the starting point for her mother’s article. She called it ‘Two Faces of Eve’. Here it is in summary, interspersed with ditties about the two sexes taken from Cherwell magazine when Freeman was writing for it:
What did the girls at Oxford look like? I did notice there were girls about. Sometimes I even spoke to them and they spoke to me. But looking back I seem to sense a disappointment that getting to Oxford hadn’t also raised us to the status of men. There was a tendency to refer to girls whom we didn’t like as ‘females’ and those whom we did like as ‘chaps’.
I like men
Now and then
I enjoys
Boys.
I keep brandy
Handy
I look best
Undressed
I [Susan Hicklin] sought enlightenment from John Betjeman’s An Oxford University Chest – a one-man survey that appeared in my last year. ‘I suppose it is only right to bring in undergraduettes but it would be wrong to suppose they play a large part in the social life of the university. Wherever women come into undergraduate clubs, they drive men out.’
Although the room was rather small
I knew she wouldn’t mind at all.
There was a sofa and a floor
Could any woman ask for more?
The trouble with us in the ’30s was that we did not know quite what to aim at. Debs and secretaries were smart – at different ends of the scale; embryo schoolmistresses were not. How were we to avoid looking like either?
My mother solved the problem. She handed onto me a vast deep blue cloak with its high velvet collar. Striding down the Turl with it thrown toga-like over each shoulder, it appealed to me as just the right romantic get-up for the ‘dreaming spires’ routine. Eyes right! And salute to All Souls with a Dominus Illuminatio Mea.
Now that I’ve done what you desired
I’m feeling cold and very tired,
And any decent woman loathes,
Her honour lost, to lose her clothes.6
In 2004 Susan Hicklin spoke to me about Freeman. She and her sister Prudence had known him since their schooldays, when they went to Francis Holland School by Regent’s Park in London, near where John was born. First, the young Freeman had an affair with Prudence; then with Susan, when they were undergraduates together. They remained friends into old age.
He was dashingly handsome with wavy red hair, blue eyes and a slim, fit body. He had a strong physical presence and he must have found womanising very easy. I never asked him if I was his only girl. I was just jolly glad that this Olympian figure took me out sometimes. He had this self-sufficiency, you see, which women find a challenge. I remember once he took me to Henley to watch his brother James row.
He loved beautiful things. He gave me an early edition of The Country Wife but he did not write anything in it. He never signed anything.
He was upright and full of principle. He could not bear people who did not do what they said they would do and he could be forbidding. That was John.
I asked her how this squared with Freeman’s reputation for dissipation.
That’s not the word I would use. He was certainly hedonistic, determined to enjoy life. He had escaped from a stern father and a force-fed education and, you see, he must have found Oxford all too easy, particularly attracting women. He actually seemed above things, very grown-up. He wasn’t a party person. He told me: ‘I’m not very good at playing la betise [the clown].’ He was not an involvement person, not a joiner. In fact he was a Mr Something-Else. He was gracious, charming, but you could never get the measure of him.
Years later she said mischievously to Catherine Freeman, on meeting her for the first time: ‘I was determined that at least one of my sons would have red hair.’
Freeman’s life at Oxford was more politically involved and more public spirited than he admitted. Why he completely ignored the truth in his later accounts to friends, as he also did in his army record, is a mystery. He could only have written his dismissive letter to me – ‘I can’t see how my life can be of any possible interest to anybody’ – if he had convinced himself over the years that his perverse modesty or extreme privacy were justified. In fact, at Oxford he even changed his name to deflect attention – and that really is perverse. Here is the missing account of John Freeman’s Oxford years.
Freeman, Wyatt and Philip Toynbee (who was at Brasenose with Freeman and became the first communist president of the Oxford Union) were members of the Labour Club. Freeman and Wyatt also helped found the Experimental Theatre Group, inspired by Professor Neville Coghill. This was obviously to Freeman’s taste because it encouraged entirely home-grown talent working under an agreement of anonymity. It was set up as a deliberate reaction to Oxford University’s Dramatic Society (OUDS), which had enough prestige in 1935 to attract both John Gielgud and G. B. Shaw to supervise the casting of its production of Richard II. The principle of the Experimental Theatre Group was that the play itself was important, not the cast who worked on it. This made reviewing a little difficult, but its first production of Dryden’s All for Love, produced in three weeks, was considered by Cherwell ‘an excellent production and quite up to OUDS standards’. Later, Freeman listed in his Who’s Who entry for 1946 that his recreation was drama – a suitable choice for such a chameleon.
Freeman’s founding membership of the Experimental Theatre Group is a clue to the identity of Flavus. On 23 May 1936, Flavus showed up for the first time as the pseudonym of the writer of a weekly column in Cherwell called ‘Morals and Politics’. In Roman times, Flavus was the name of a red-haired conspirator who failed to overthrow the dictator Nero, but Flavus was also the pseudonym used by Freeman when he later edited the ‘London Diary’ in the New Statesman. No coincidence, surely? Flavus disappeared when Freeman stopped being editor of Cherwell in April 1937.
On 24 October 1936, Flavus strayed for the only time from morals and politics to a theatre interview. The subject is Dame Sybil Thorndyke, who was staying at the Randolph Hotel. It bears the Freeman style, particularly the somewhat effusive complimenting, which was the Freeman way:
We talked about Coward and Shaw, actors and critics, Wales, Eurypides and D. H. Lawrence and I asked her what she thought of the Experimental Theatre Club. ‘It’s a great idea,’ she said, ‘and if you’re doing the job properly we shall soon feel the effect of it.’ Ann [daughter of Sybil, also an actress performing in Oxford] came in. She is charming and lovely – may I say that she will have to wait a little while before she is as lovely as her mother?
So Flavus is a member of the Experimental Theatre Club? It must be Freeman.
The political views of Flavus are definitely socialist. On 7 November 1936 he writes:
The Jarrow marchers have arrived in London and no other working-class demonstration has aroused such widespread sympathy. These courageous marchers are a living indictment of the wanton and callous policy of the national government. They are a living argument for socialism. Never again will the people of Jarrow entrust their interests to a government of profiteers and aristocrats.
This must have been the occasion when Freeman first met Ellen Wilkinson, newly elected as Labour MP for the Jarrow constituency and once a founding member of the Communist Party. She was known as ‘Red Ellen’, a reference, as with Freeman, to her hair colour and her politics. Freeman said years later that Ellen Wilkinson had been a formative influence on his politics.
Flavus leaves no doubt about where he stands on the Spanish Civil War that had just begun: ‘The only possible excuse for a pro-Rebel policy [support for Franco’s Nationalists] is the strongest possible political prejudice. The Madrid government [the new Republic] has every conceivable moral and legal right on its side.’ (31 October 1936)
It was the rally of Oswald Mosley and his Fascists at the Carfax Assembly Rooms in Oxford that really got Flavus worked up. Like the Fascist Olympia rally of 1933, attended by Philip Toynbee, it was a violent confrontation between individual protest and ‘storm-trooper’ over-reaction:
Do you want free speech or not? That question has got to be answered. If you do, you will agree with me in feeling nothing but contempt and loathing for Sir Oswald Mosley and his half-baked young men. Every lover of freedom will continue to ask questions on these occasions and presumably continue to be beaten up. Fascist tactics have got to be stopped. The most vigorous protests offer the only hope of freedom. (30 May 1936)
There is no political apathy here; no dissipation in booze and sex. Assuming Freeman to be Flavus, in a matter of months he witnessed fascism at first hand, saw the nadir of Britain’s social divide, and took sides on ‘the last great cause’ (the Spanish Civil War).
Cherwell in March 1937 carries a startling paragraph: ‘Editor Freeman, who has done most of his editing from London, has been overcome by his cares. Our affable editor goes to town for an operation every Monday and Friday. He has now had enough and is resigning.’ The full name of the editor of Cherwell is given as George Freeman of Brasenose College. No such person exists in the university register, neither in those years nor in any other. The Association of College Archivists could not trace ‘George Freeman’ to any college. Without much confidence, I asked Catherine Freeman if John was ever called ‘George’ at Oxford.
‘Georgie – yes, that’s what some of the girls did call him.’
Could this be a reference to the nursery rhyme?
Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie
Kissed the girls and made then cry
When the boys came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away.
Why did John disguise himself as George? Hiding from the public gaze? Deflecting criticism? Perhaps an in-joke? And why did he go down to London every weekend? Possibly this was a reference to the aftereffects of his car crash, but, according to Tom Driberg, Freeman now had an extracurricular job in London – selling women’s underwear:
When he was trying to read for Honour Moderations, some impulse prompted him to leave Oxford and go to London; here he earned a living by tutoring and also, for some weeks, by selling ladies’ underwear, door to door, in the East End. Then he went back to Oxford, late for the start of term; his father and his college were sensible about it.
When Driberg asked Freeman why he had done this, he gave his usual answer: to ‘supplement his income’.7 I think the truth is more likely to be journalistic curiosity in London low life – an interest he shared with Henry Mayhew, the author of London Labour and the London Poor (1851), who was also the founder of Punch, one of Freeman’s favourite magazines.
All this must have contributed to Freeman’s embarrassing exam results. The second Flavus, writing in the New Statesman (18 May 1962), gave a more reasoned excuse:
When I set out on a somewhat inglorious obstacle race through the Oxford school of Greats more than a quarter of a century ago, I was wholly unversed in the disciplines of logic and they had forgotten to tell me what philosophy itself was about. The result was that I was plunged into a maze of abstractions, which filled me alternately with despair as I failed to grasp their relevance and with manic delight as I constructed some metaphysical sandcastle.
This was by way of saying that subsequently he discovered A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which he was reviewing for the NewStatesman, and that introduced him to Bertrand Russell, whereby ‘the whole business became plain and purposeful: philosophy was not a gentleman’s game like Latin verse, but an imperative pursuit of truth about oneself and ones’ relation to the external world’.
Freeman left Oxford in May 1937 and, for the next two years, he marked time. There can be no other explanation why he joined the advertising consultancy of Ashley Courtenay Ltd based in Pall Mall, off Trafalgar Square. Another world war was coming and it was hardly the time to start on a lifelong vocation. He regarded it as a mild diversion, worthy of some intellectual input because, he said, writing advertising copy was like writing Latin verse. One of the accounts he handled was for Chubb’s locks and safes – ‘undoubtedly the best’, he used to say. Another was for Lanson champagne, for which he formed a permanent liking. In later years he looked back to Ashley Courtenay Ltd with humorous disparagement: ‘If you want to know what it was like, Dorothy Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise gives a good picture.’ He was referring to her hero Lord Peter Wimsey, who made his name with a campaign of free gifts for cigarette coupons, and the slogan ‘Whiffle your way round Britain’.
He seems to have enjoyed being in London. He lived on a houseboat, went to the theatre and had many girlfriends, including – Susan Hicklin told me – Winston Churchill’s daughter Diana. This is just about possible, although Diana was five years older and had married the Conservative politician Duncan Sandys in 1935. Susan also told me that he befriended the Punch magazine humourist E. V. Lucas. I find it easy to see why. Lucas’s sense of humour would have been at home in The New Yorker (Freeman’s favourite magazine), as it was based on observing the human condition with all its quirks and curiosities. He is best known today for his aphorisms, which would also have appealed to Freeman; for example: ‘A perfect holiday would be to join a travelling circus as a utility man’ or ‘There can be no defence like elaborate courtesy’. When Freeman met him he was in his last years, living a solitary life in London. He ate out in clubs and restaurants and resented interference in his private life. Thirty years later, in his Flavus column in the New Statesman
