A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  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 ab
out 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 Assem
bly 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.’