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Authors: Hugh Purcell

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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.”’

O
N
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”.’

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