A Very Private Celebrity (22 page)

During the war years the strongest patriots could be communists because the common enemy was fascism. A number of
New Statesman
staff worked secretly for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) writing propaganda for dissemination into Nazi-occupied countries. Prominent among them was Richard Crossman, who was dubbed ‘a master of psychological warfare', and Aylmer Vallance's job was to ensure they did not give away military secrets. But during the Cold War that followed, the enemy was the Soviet Union and its communist satellites in eastern Europe, so allegiances were severely tested. On which side of the street did Vallance walk between 1945 and 1955? The jury is still out. Evidence that it was on the west: he kept his military rank of lieutenant colonel in his passport until his death, which must have provided some sort of cover, and he travelled behind the Iron Curtain frequently using a travel agency in north London, Gateway Tours, that was rumoured to be money-laundered by MI6. Evidence that it was on the east: he was a huge admirer of Yugoslavia in particular, named his son ‘Tito', and several of his articles had a pro-communist bias. C. H. Rolf, who shared a
New Statesman
office with him and happened also to work part-time for the police, offers this verdict:

After Vallance's death in 1955, John Freeman wrote to his son ‘Tito' (real name Philip): ‘My own friendship with him [Aylmer] was close and very rewarding. And yet, looking back forty years and more, I realise that I never really knew who he was or what he believed in.' About this time, when Philip introduced himself in a London club the response was: ‘Not Aylmer's son? He was a damned fine intelligence agent.'

Vallance's shady past life must have appealed to Freeman. It could have fitted into John Buchan's
Greenmantle
spy story. A neat, spry man with a goatee beard beneath a long face and glasses, he normally faded quietly into the background as those with something to hide normally do. Yet he had led an extraordinary life. He had joined the intelligence services in 1915 and played the ‘great game' across the Himalayas. The ‘game' included fighting a duel in the jungle and walking, disguised as a Sikh, from Karachi to Singapore.

In the 1930s he had become editor of the
News Chronicle
but had been sacked for a sex scandal that involved the female motoring correspondent, the editor's table and a surprise visit from the prudish chairman, Lord Cadbury. He had joined the staff of the
New Statesman
in 1937. A consummate journalist he turned out well-informed copy on finance, fisheries and food, filling any gap necessary at short notice where a few hundred words were required. He was a quick and calm editor, working at the printers with a hand poised over the copy ready for a last-minute change, or, for that matter, a last-minute addition.

Although a lifetime socialist, he spent many a weekend at a Scottish castle fly fishing, drinking heavily with his house party and then
driving back to London for a Monday editorial. He looked like a Scottish laird and behaved more like a
bon vivant
than an earnest socialist. He loved European travel and had European wives: the first a White Russian émigré who deserted her family to be with him; the second, Helen Gosse, a member of the Communist Party and granddaughter of the distinguished literary polymath Sir Edmund Gosse; the third a destitute German refugee, Oertie Christina Fischinger. Vallance was more than a friend for Freeman: he was a mentor and even, perhaps subconsciously, a role model.

On his deathbed in 1955, Aylmer summoned his young daughter Margaret, asking her to open the drawer of his desk. Inside was a long-barrelled revolver. She left it where it was:

Three years later Mima died, also from cancer.

Was Freeman a communist sympathiser, even a fellow traveller? In his more extreme ‘leftist' period from Oxford through the war he no doubt admired Lenin and the revolutionary ideals of Trotsky: he was not called ‘Trotsky Freeman' for nothing. But he was never in the Communist Party and, according to Edward Hyams, who knew him well on the
New Statesman
, he was never taken in by ‘Uncle Joe' Stalin. He always considered him a tyrant and villain: ‘The villainy of which he held Stalin guilty was the perversion of socialism so as to make a lie of what Freeman believes to be essentially true.'

In the summer of 1956, Freeman travelled for six weeks through the so-called ‘People's Democracies' of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It was a formative experience. He wrote a long piece for the
New Statesman
on his return – ‘A Profile of People's Democracy' – and spoke about his impressions several times on BBC radio. The timing of his visit was significant. It was after Khrushchev's revelations at the 20th Party Congress in February of that year but before the Russian invasion of Hungary in November, a brief period when Soviet communism appeared to be showing a human face. Yet his article was severely critical of the very basics of Soviet communism:

Freeman wrote that the ‘Peoples' Democracies' were fundamentally different from the Soviet Union because Poles, Czechs and Hungarians knew that they had until recently belonged within the mainstream of European social democracy. Yet their form of socialism was ‘here to stay' and in 1956 that was a reasonable assumption. As a socialist he saw evidence for optimism: ‘Despite the cruelties and the bungling that have characterised the People's Republics hitherto, social attitudes and the economic pattern are gradually evolving, which bear
some
relation to what
any
socialist must recognise as being his aim.'

Nevertheless, the over-centralisation, bureaucracy and interference from Russia was blighting individual initiative, and underneath that
suffocation
was something worse:

This is not the essay of a starry-eyed communist sympathiser, many of whom were members of the Labour Party at this time; still less of the hard-line, Russia-right-or-wrong ideologue, who were the fellow travellers and party members of the 1950s. It is obviously a perceptive analysis by an independently minded journalist within the democratic-socialist context. That was Freeman. To gossip that he may have been a spy is completely ridiculous.

Any doubts where Freeman stood on nuclear disarmament, a subject on which pro-Soviet sympathies quickly showed themselves, should have been dispelled the next year, 1957. Once again, as in the '30s and '40s, the
New Statesman
set an agenda and moulded public opinion. On 2 November, it published the most seminal article in its 100-year history: ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bomb' by J. B. Priestley. Goaded by Aneurin Bevan's crushing of unilateralism at the recent Labour Party conference (‘it is not statesmanship – it is an emotional spasm') and using his father-of-the-nation style that had served him so well in his BBC Home Service
Postscripts
of 1940, Priestley ended:

After this, the birth of CND was just a matter of time. The editor that week was John Freeman. He agreed to sign off the article although, wrote C. H. Rolf, ‘he was himself in sympathy with Bevan and the party's decision'.
22

Later that month a meeting of opinion shapers was held in Kingsley Martin's flat. Bertrand Russell was there, J. B. Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, the former American ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, whose recent Reith Lecture series ‘Russia, the Atom and the West' had stoked up anxiety about nuclear warfare, and the Labour MP Denis Healey, a specialist in defence. The new
New Statesman
leader-writer Paul Johnson watched it get off to a bad start:

That was the beginning of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Over the next few months the
New Statesman
became a global forum where world leaders protested their commitment to world peace. Bertrand Russell began the exchange in November 1957 with ‘An Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev'. It came down to the exhortation ‘to agree to disagree' (this being the mantra first coined in the
New Statesman
by Richard Crossman): ‘It is not necessary that either side should abandon belief in its own creed. It is
only necessary that [East and West] should abandon the attempt to spread its creed by force of arms.'

Khrushchev himself replied a month later, in an article written in Russian and accompanied by a personal letter to the editor. When the package arrived from the Soviet embassy, Kingsley Martin suspected it to be a hoax. The Soviet premier endorsed Bertrand Russell's hopes for a sunlit future for mankind and condemned ‘the criminal policy of militarism'. With that scoop the sales of the
New Statesman
went up by 2,000 to well over 70,000, then an all-time high.

The uplifting tone was soured by the eventual reply of the implicit villain of the piece, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He pointed out (February 1958) that the Soviet Union had never renounced the use of force to solve international affairs, as its invasion of Hungary in 1956 had proved. It was left to Spike Milligan, appropriately, to poke fun at the Dr Strangelove concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). He was one of hundreds who joined in the
New Statesman
debate:

During this period Freeman was often in the editor's chair. J. B. Priestley said: ‘John Freeman was against us, but editorially he behaved superbly.'
25
Freeman's view was that distinguished writers of the left were perfectly entitled to write polemical ‘ban the bomb' articles, but the
New Statesman
should not identify formally with a pacifist pressure group, particularly one that would require Britain to leave NATO. So
he reinforced Kingsley Martin's indecision, so to speak. Paul Johnson told me: ‘Barbara [Castle], John and I would not let him [Kingsley Martin] take what we considered a pacifist line. Kingsley referred to us as the ‘red-headed league' [they all had red hair] and thought we were ganging up on him.' Tony Howard amplified this:

It is surely significant that Major John Freeman had been a soldier with four years of defending Britain by force of arms behind him.

The New Statesman cartoonist Vicky shows Kingsley Martin
handing over to John Freeman.