A Very Private Celebrity (5 page)

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:

This was by way of saying that subsequently he discovered A. J. Ayer’s
Language, Truth and Logic
, which he was reviewing for the
New
Statesman
, 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
, Freeman compared Lucas with another ‘urbane essayist’ he had got to know – A. J. Liebling of
The New Yorker
: ‘They both wore the air of worldly pessimism in a becoming (basically cheerful) fashion.’

On 18 August 1938, John Freeman married his first wife, Elizabeth Allen Johnston, in St John’s Church, Chelsea. She was twenty-five and her father was a chartered accountant from Surrey. He was twenty-three and an ‘advertising consultant’, living at Walm Lane, London, NW2. He said later that he had only done it to annoy his father. It was a childless marriage that he later disparaged cruelly. ‘I went to war to get away from her,’ he used to say and, after the divorce in 1948, ‘I wouldn’t recognise her now if I saw her across the street.’ Susan Hicklin said Freeman treated the marriage as ‘a joke’.

A month later, on 30 September, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich waving his notorious piece of paper and declaring, ‘Peace with honour. Peace in our time.’ This was the Munich Agreement that sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Hitler for another year or so of peace. What Freeman thought of this at the time there is no knowing, but Flavus would probably have agreed with everything Freeman wrote in the
New Statesman
in June 1952, when reviewing the memoirs of Viscount Simon:

When Freeman got married he must have had a premonition of the war – a war he would fight in for over four years.

Chapter 2

Brigade major

W
HEN THE WAR
came, Freeman was determined ‘to get in on the ground floor’. This was not through any sentimental patriotism, he added, but because ‘that way you could get one of the more interesting jobs’. Presumably he thought he failed in this endeavour because he later told Tom Driberg that he had experienced ‘a completely undistinguished war’.
1

This self-deprecation is so far from the truth as to be perverse. Freeman fought through the war from November 1941 until the end of April 1945, first with the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade (the ‘Desert Rats’) in north Africa and Italy, and then with the 131st Infantry Brigade in France, Holland and Germany. He won two decorations for gallantry, the second one of which even his family does not know
about and is not mentioned on his official army service record. One of Freeman’s verbal decorations, so to speak, is that Field Marshal Montgomery called him ‘the best brigade major in the Eighth Army’ and, although I cannot verify the source of that quote, it comes to me from the historian and journalist Paul Johnson, who knew Freeman well and also served in the Rifle Brigade.

Understandably, Freeman did not like talking about the war. He told his stepdaughter Lizi in the 1950s: ‘War is a very bloody business and I’ve seen men with their heads blown off; you’re just like a piece of meat.’ He never used his title of major after 1945. Nevertheless, having ploughed through report after report of brigade war diaries signed by J. H. Freeman, as either brigade major or deputy assistant quartermaster-general (DAQMG), I can say with confidence that his war was distinguished, to say the least.

Freeman enlisted with the Coldstream Guards on 27 June 1940 as a rank-and-file guardsman, and was promptly put on a charge for giving a ‘wilfully false answer’ to his date of birth – it was a year out. This, then, was another occasion on which he gave false information about himself – and there would be several more.

Despite Freeman’s laconic references to ‘getting in on the ground floor’, he must have shared the trepidation of his fellow citizens. Only a few days before, France had surrendered in the face of the Nazi
blitzkrieg
. Only a few weeks before that, the British Army had been evacuated from Dunkirk and Churchill had become Prime Minister, announcing that he had ‘nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat’. That summer the British were left to await their fate, certain that Hitler would order an invasion across the Channel.

Freeman did his basic training – of legendary toughness – at the Caterham depot. After the war, he said he had enjoyed being a
guardsman for three reasons: he respected extremely high standards in any organised activity; he liked ‘the kind of mindless or irresponsible anonymity of life in the ranks, not intruding at all on one’s thoughts’; and, significantly for his later profession, he lived for the first time among working-class men. ‘The rough but friendly democracy of the barrack-room appealed to him strongly,’ wrote Driberg. So much so that Freeman thought being a guardsman was ‘a suitable way to see the war out’.

His commanding officer had other ideas. Sitting tight at Caterham depot had to come to an end. Commanding officer Captain Piggot Brown told him ‘pretty sharply’ (Freeman’s words) that he ought to apply for an officer’s commission, as his military conduct was ‘very good’ and he was ‘sober, honest and trustworthy’. Apparently, a ‘girl friend’s father’ suggested the Rifle Brigade, and so Freeman was given a Regular Army Emergency Commission on 21 December 1940.

Second Lieutenant Freeman spent the next ten months with the Rifle Brigade, which was regrouping in England after a bad mauling at Dunkirk. Young subalterns would usually be appointed to command an infantry platoon, but it is notable that the Rifle Brigade was forming a new motor training (MT) battalion, which provided specialist vehicle training for motorised battalions like the Rifle Brigade. Freeman was transferred to the 2nd MT Battalion in June 1941, and that presumably gave him some satisfaction. He later told his family that he had joined the Rifle Brigade because it was mechanised and ‘I wouldn’t have to walk everywhere’.

The 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade embarked for an unknown destination on 28 September 1941. They rounded South Africa, headed for the Red Sea – by which time the destination was no secret – and disembarked at Suez, in the rain, at the end of November. Freeman
must have seen the sign that his friend Lieutenant Peter Luke, also of the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, describes evocatively in his autobiography
Sisyphus and Reilly
:

Lieutenant Freeman was in B Echelon of the 1st Battalion. ‘Red Freeman came up yesterday from B Echelon,’ writes Lieutenant Luke in a letter home in August 1942.
3
The commander of B Echelon was usually a captain (Freeman was promoted to temporary captain on 24 April 1942), responsible for the battalion’s workshop vehicles, ammunition, fuel and water supply; as such, it was a staff appointment in the rear, behind the fighting forces. It led, in Freeman’s case, up the ladder to DAQMG and then brigade major, both of which carried wider and greater responsibilities. Someone early on had decided that Freeman’s strengths lay in his organisational control, his efficient
management of resources and his maintenance of a clear, cool head for decision-making.

No personal diaries or letters home written by Freeman survive, if he even wrote any. He left no photographs and, after the war, he did not join any Rifle Brigade associations. His official army service record, which I obtained after his death, gives his theatre of war, his rank, and his dates of promotion, but no account of what he actually did as a member of headquarters staff. The official war diaries of the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, written at the time and now held in the National Archive, are confused and chaotic because that was the nature of the fighting. It is not possible, therefore, to provide a full narrative of Freeman’s war in the Western Desert, even if anybody would want to read it. What
is
possible is to take an episodic approach, describing briefly (in cases where evidence definitely exists) some of the dramatic events that Freeman experienced.

In April 1942, Acting Captain Freeman was posted to the headquarters of the 22nd Armoured Brigade, which was defending the Gazala Line to the west of Tobruk. The brigade consisted of four or five battalions, including the 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, a Royal Tank regiment, the County of London Yeomanry (infantry) and the 2nd Regiment of Royal Horse Artillery. In other words, it was a mixed fighting force of about 5,000 men, and Freeman was on the staff providing its operational and logistical needs – a B Echelon function. This was the first of the brigade appointments that would see him through the war. The Gazala Line was a series of defensive ‘boxes’, each defended by a brigade and laid out across the desert behind minefields and wire, watched by regular patrols between boxes. It was intended to prevent General Rommel and his Afrika Korps from breaking through, capturing Tobruk (which was
rich in Allied supplies) and storming across the desert into Cairo, 500 miles to the west.

On 25 May, the German offensive began. By brilliant
blitzkrieg
tactics, Rommel outflanked the Gazala Line and pounded towards Tobruk. The Eighth Army retreated even before the panzer divisions arrived, proving the Napoleon dictum that ‘in war the moral is to the material as three is to one’. The Allied commander General Ritchie, despite his superior forces, decided to abandon the frontier ‘to gain time with distance’. Tobruk fell. Then commenced the headlong flight of the 22nd Armoured Brigade and the rest of the Eighth Army – those who had not been captured or killed – towards Egypt, pursued by the Afrika Korps. The atmosphere was close to panic. In Cairo, staff began to burn records and British civilians crowded on trains to Palestine. Peter Luke was on leave in Cairo and adopted a racing metaphor, displaying the familiar Rifle Brigade cool: ‘The Gazala Line ought to have held. They’re off in the Msus Stakes [scene of an earlier Rifle Brigade
retreat], Rommel leading the field. All you need is an iodine pencil [for infected wounds] and a pair of running shorts.’
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The Eighth Army retreated back over the Egyptian border, as described by the Rifle Brigade official history:

Where was Freeman in this headlong retreat? The official history describes ‘the final nightmare’: when the supply echelons of the 22nd Armoured, among others, could not replenish petrol because of the enemy surrounding them, so vehicles were abandoned. A rifleman wrote afterwards: ‘In addition to the dilapidated state of our transport, we were exposing B Echelon, with our vital supplies, to unacceptable hazards in reaching us.’
6
In London, the chief of
the general staff, Alan Brooke, wrote in his diary: ‘The Middle East situation is about as unhealthy as it can be, and I do not very well see how it can end.’
7

By early July, the 22nd Armoured Brigade had arrived at the edge of the Qattara Depression, an area (partly below sea level) of shifting sand dunes interspersed with dangerous salt marshes – a strategic line that could stop any invader. To the north was a bottleneck extending to the coast called the Alamein Line. The Afrika Korps’s advance came to a halt of its own volition as they had outrun their supplies, including petrol. With the Royal Air Force controlling the sky and fresh troops re-enforcing the Eighth Army, it was time for both sides to stop.

It was at that point that Lieutenant Luke arrived on the scene: ‘We are digging in at Alam el Halfa in the centre of the line. It is to be a last-man-and-last-round operation.
No pasaran
and all that.’ Thus began the second episode of Freeman’s desert war and his walk-on part in Lieutenant Luke’s account. The 1st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade was preparing for the battles ahead and displaying its very own code of desert manners: