A Very Private Celebrity (38 page)

The enigma of John Freeman is that just when you think you understand the man you have spent years thinking about, you discover a contradiction. For instance, those close to him over much of his life would agree that he was, in effect, ‘a cold fish', but his colleagues at LWT, the teachers at Davis and the bowlers of Barnes would not agree. His own contradictory opinions of people, however, were clear, as was his tendency to slide away from confrontation behind a smokescreen
of politeness. Time and again Freeman was complimentary to colleagues in print or in person but rude about them behind their backs: Harold Wilson is a good example. Whether or not this stems from the deeper psychological trait of disliking others because he disliked himself, as he told Catherine, is getting into Anthony Clare territory. I suggested to Lord Lawson that Freeman's dislike of people might have been affected by his dislike of several of the professions he had spent time in, politics for example? ‘Everything he did, he wanted to do really well, because he would have been unhappy if he thought he was doing badly, but that didn't mean he had respect for the people with whom he was working. That was quite different.'

Approaching ninety, life began to close in. The girls left home so the Freemans moved into a small house nearby in Charles Street. John crashed the car into a tree and decided to give up driving. He began losing his balance and found walking difficult, although he kept going for a while on public transport. They wintered in South Africa frequently, where Judith had a small house on the Eastern Cape, but stopped that in 2008 after John had a bad fall. At home he watched television a lot, particularly American football when he could find it. His reading was middle-brow and slightly old-fashioned; authors like Dorothy Sayers and Evelyn Waugh – the latter had been one of his more difficult guests on
Face to Face.
In 2007, he told Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith that he had set himself the task of re-reading books that had made an impression on him when he was young and comparing his judgements now with then – ‘a rewarding and occasionally humbling experience'.

The Freemans sent a letter to friends every year with family news, often with a photograph. Coincidence or not, it normally showed John with his back to the camera. Norman MacKenzie, an expert on Charles Dickens, said they reminded him of the letters that Scrooge
– ‘not exactly but something of that sort' – might have written after his change of heart. He meant that for years Freeman had presented a private front to the world – ‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during a time of riots' is how he put it once – and now he was sending out a newsletter! It was at this time too that Freeman wrote to me, ‘I wish everybody would forget I was alive.' The point is that ‘everybody' referred to the public life he had left behind and the ‘change of heart' to the ‘ordinary' life of family and friends that he was now living. The letters were kind, warm, and upbeat: ‘In most respects my health is good and my mind is still active and alert. I am cared for with total selflessness by my beloved Jude and our two daughters who between them make me feel both wanted and part of their exciting and busy lives.'
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They entertained old friends from the LWT days, like the Teslers and Blands, and new friends like the Triggses, but reminders of a public life were less welcome. The Kissingers always tried to make contact when they were in London but found Freeman ‘inaccessible'. In 2011 Nigel Lawson's son, Dominic, visited Freeman to find out more about his time at Westminster School:

Freeman told MacKenzie at their last meeting 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.'

In 2012, Freeman's health declined to the extent that he thought he was becoming a burden to his family. He decided he would call on his military service from the Second World War and move into the Star and Garter Home in Richmond for disabled ex-service men and women. So, at the age of ninety-seven, he said goodbye to his friends and closed another door.

‘An actress I used to know in New York called Bette Davis said “old age is not for wimps”,' Freeman told the family. He described in a last email to Norman MacKenzie in October 2012 what these twilight months were like:

Behind a door with the rather forbidding nameplate ‘Major John Freeman: The Rifle Brigade', he lived a solitary life except for family who paid brief visits on a rota. Occasionally he would go out in a wheelchair with Judith. The Star and Garter in Richmond, he said, was by no means ‘a grand officers' club: ‘It's a tumbledown, ludicrously
inconvenient old barn with nowadays only about forty or fifty residents, mostly what we used to call “other ranks”. The care, however, is simply first-class, particularly the food.'

Before long he was moved to a new, purpose-built Star and Garter home in Surbiton. But this was one community he did not want to join. When his second son Tom visited from California, where he now lives, to say goodbye, he heard the sounds of ‘If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands' drifting from the residents' lounge. Freeman called it ‘the last bastion of Pooterism', Charles Pooter being the fictional character in
Diary of a Nobody
who was full of self-importance.

In his last year Freeman was hard of hearing, short of sight and unsteady, but he could use email and he would sit in a chair for a few hours a day. Brian Tesler thought that he had such control over his life that he would celebrate his century in February 2015 and then close the final door. Probably this anniversary meant nothing to him. In December 2014 he carefully arranged for book tokens to be sent to his grandchildren and then, on the morning of Saturday 20 December, he died.

The funeral service was held in the local parish church of St Michael and All Angels in Barnes on 12 January 2015. As the congregation assembled, Matthew escorted Catherine up the isle to the second row of pews. A small, grey-haired woman turned round and said, smiling, ‘I'm so glad you came.'

Catherine was puzzled and said, ‘I'm sorry, but I don't think we've met.'

The woman replied, ‘I'm Judith.' It was an absurd moment and they both laughed, for they had not seen each other for forty years, and so a potentially awkward moment was defused. The families were all there, apart from Tom who was in America and one of Matthew's children, Lily, who was in India. Judith sat with her daughters Tors and Jess in
the front pew. Catherine sat behind with her daughter-in-law, Rose, and Cynthia and Javid Akhtar. Lizi was there with her family and Lucy brought her son Conor. The two sat with Matthew and his son James, who were pall bearers. The congregation was predominantly local, many including the Kimbers and Janet Triggs from the bowling fraternity. A few friends from the past paid their last respects – Paul Johnson from
New Statesman
days, Sir Christopher Bland and Brian Tesler from the LWT era, and Lord Lawson. Matthew read Psalm 43 which ends: ‘Why, my soul, are you downcast? / Why so disturbed within me? / Put your hope in God / For I will yet praise him / My Saviour and my God'. Victoria read a P. G. Wodehouse short story. At John Freeman's request there was no eulogy. It was, said Catherine, a plain, peaceful occasion. Matthew and Lucy accompanied the coffin to the crematorium and then joined their mother.

Freeman had told Tom Driberg sixty years before that although he lacked the ‘the gift of faith', he ‘had no difficulty in doing anything officially expected in this field'. Presumably he would have approved of his own funeral. Such an outstanding contributor to British life over the second half of the twentieth century deserved a memorial service, but the very suggestion would probably have received a dusty reply. Catherine's epitaph comes to mind: ‘John was a well-known man but he was a man who was hard to know well. And that's just how he liked it.'

The obituary writers gave the impression that they were surprised Freeman had only just died. Indeed, Norman MacKenzie in
The Times
and Anthony Howard in
The Guardian
had pre-deceased their subject. He was squeezed off the
Today
programme on Radio 4 because of the death later in the weekend of the actress Billie Whitelaw, which would probably have afforded him pleasure had he been able to foresee it. Two of the obituaries took opposing views. Dominic Lawson saw Freeman as a model of achievement and public service who shunned celebrity status; a survivor from a better age:

Terence Blacker, writing in
The Independent
, shared the general admiration for Freeman but not for the archetype:

Let those who knew Freeman personally react as they will. I do see him as an extreme example of his age with all the stiff upper lip and the repression that implies. But the fact is that he lived well beyond his age, and those who saw him cycling through Davis or playing bowls in Barnes in the last decades of his life must have recognised a mellow old man trying his best to fit in with the community around him. Whatever his faults, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, ‘The history of the world is but the history of great men' – and John Freeman deserves his place in the British history of his time, even though he did not want it.

Acknowledgements

I
N A BIOGRAPHY
like this that ranges over very different areas of twentieth-century life, I have necessarily relied on several authors whose books have quoted the source material. I am particularly grateful, therefore, to: Francis Wheen, author of
Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions
; Richard Lindley, author of
‘Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride and Paranoia
; Paul McGarr, author of
The Cold War in South Asia, Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent 1945–1965
; John W. Young, author of
The Washington Embassy: British Ambassadors to the United States 1939–1977
; and David Docherty, author of
Running the Show: 21 Years of London Weekend Television.

For interviews, I am particularly grateful to my friend, the late Professor Norman MacKenzie; also to the late Susan Hicklin, the late Anthony Howard, the late Rt Hon. Michael Foot PC and the late Anthony Clare, all of whom I interviewed between 2004 and 2012.
My thanks to those I interviewed in 2013–15. In the United States I spoke to: Dr Henry Kissinger; Joanna Rose; Corinna Metcalf; Wes Pruden; and Professors Larry Berman, Randy Siverson, Larry Wade and Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith at UC Davis. Also in the US were Jean Snyder, Cynthia Basinger and Elizabeth Sherwin. In the UK I interviewed, in order of chapters: Lizi Freeman; Michael Peacock; Peregrine Worsthorne; Paul Johnson; Margaret Vallance; Lord Renwick; Professor Robert Cassen; Cynthia Akhtar; Sir Christopher Bland; Lord Lawson; Brian Tesler CBE; Ron Miller; Lord Grade; Lord Birt; Matthew Freeman; Isobel and Percy Kimber; and Janet Triggs.

For permission to use archive material, I thank: Elizabeth Wells of the Westminster School archives; K. Petvin-Scudamore of
www.findasoldier.co.uk
for Freeman’s army service record; Jeff Walden of the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham; Jason Crawley of the
New Statesman
; and, again, Professor Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith and Elizabeth Sherwin of the University of California at Davis. I made use of: the British Library; the National Archives at Kew; the Bodleian Library in Oxford for
Cherwell
magazine; Christ Church, Oxford, for Tom Driberg’s papers; and the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme at Churchill College, Cambridge.

For permission to quote written extracts I am grateful to: the family of Lord Birkett; Sharon Rubin at Peters Fraser & Dunlop for Edith Sitwell; the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; Emma Cheshire at Faber & Faber for Wendy Cope’s poem ‘Being Boring’; the permissions departments of Arrow Books for
Open Secret
by Stella Rimington, Carlton Books for
Sisyphus and Reilly
by Peter Luke, Random House and Jonathan Cape for Dalton’s
The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton
and HarperCollins for Woodrow Wyatt’s
Confessions of an Optimist.

For photographs I thank the Westminster School archives, the Imperial War Museum, the A&I photo library at the BBC archives,
and Gigi and Harry Benson. For maps I am grateful to Barry Lowenhoff and to Frances Walker for helping with copyright clearances. I gladly acknowledge Prakash Dehta, who suggested I write this biography over ten years ago when we met in India. My agent, James Wills of Watson Little, arranged for this book to be published by the Robson Press, where Jeremy Robson and my editor Melissa Bond have always been very helpful – my thanks to them.

Above all, I want to thank Catherine Freeman, without whose constant encouragement this biography would not have been written; also, my wife Margaret Percy, whose research and technical assistance were invaluable.