A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  The new High Commissioner arrived in his Rolls-Royce at his official residence, known as ‘2 KG’ standing for 2 King George Avenue. It is impressive: a two-storey whitewashed mansion, designed by an Indian architect after the style of Lutyens, with a pillared veranda giving onto three and a half acres of lawns and shrubs – prime diplomatic real estate. The Union flag announces the High Commissioner’s presence. Obsessively tidy since his army days, Freeman found the High Commission itself, a ’50s Indian design in Chanakyapuri, to be run down and shabby. He sent for a ‘competent shit’ to sort things out so the Commonwealth Office gave him Counsellor John Waterfield. At the residence, Freeman waited for Catherine and the two boys, Matthew aged three and Tom aged eighteen months, to arrive by air. They did so in the company of former BBC boss Leonard Miall, who was on his way to advise the Indian government on setting up a television service.

  Soon after Freeman arrived, the Minister for Overseas Development asked the High Commissioner for the transfer to her department of a member of his staff. Legend has it that, as she was Barbara Castle and he was John Freeman, the exchange went something like: ‘John, dear, could you possibly spare young Snooks, love Babs’; to which the reply was along the lines of, ‘The High Commissioner is considering your request and you will be notified as soon as a decision has been reached.’ No doubt this story was not strictly true but the fact that the rumour circulated round the High Commission shows that the staff were getting to know their boss. Another door had closed.

  Stella Rimington found herself surrounded by the last vestiges of the Raj:

  In New Delhi, statues of British governor-generals still stood on their plinths at the intersection of the major roads, which were still called by British names. The largest and grandest colonial-style bungalows were lived in by British and American diplomats and most of the bathrooms contained lavatories and wash basins by Shanks and Thomas Crapper, their brass pipes polished to a brilliant shine. The dignified bearers in their splendid turbans and smartly pressed uniforms knew how to make a pink gin and how to cook jam roly-poly and bread and butter pudding. Any attempt to modernise the menus was met with firm resistance.

  Once again, however, she notes that the echoes of empire really were dying to a whisper:

  But India was changing fast and by the time we left in 1969, that era with its recall of the Raj had ended. The British were out of favour. The statues were being pulled down and replaced by local heroes and the roads were being renamed [2 KG is now 2 Rajaji Marg]. Mingled with a certain sadness at seeing the statue of King George V being pulled from beneath his canopy on Rajpath, there was a certain understanding among the British community of the justice of these proceedings. The British had simply stayed too long.9

  Two specific events hastened the exodus. On 6 June 1966, a date referred to by the British in India in apocalyptic terms, the rupee was devalued against the pound by one third, thus slashing the income British businessmen could send back to the UK. The devaluation, coupled with heavy taxation and the need to obtain Indian government approval for high salaries, meant that it became virtually impossible for an ‘expat’ to earn more than £2,750 per year in India. The second event was the looming 1969 India Companies Act that would abolish the system of management agencies. These mostly British conglomerates ran portfolios of Indian companies in Calcutta, the business centre of British India, and enabled young men out from public schools to earn a good income. By the time Freeman left, only a rump of 1,400 expats remained. Thus, wrote Geoffrey Moorhouse in Calcutta, ‘The British are reduced to roughly the same number of people as were in Calcutta a few years before the Black Hole happened.’10

  This lugubrious comparison would not have been wasted on the High Commissioner, nor that it happened during the regime of Indira Gandhi. Freeman’s difficult relationship with the Indian Prime Minister would dominate diplomatic relations for the second half of his posting. Already, however, soon after his arrival, he was reminded that the legacy of the British Raj could be an embarrassment; that a nostalgia for the past had to be replaced by a hard-headed view towards a commercial future. Lord Mountbatten came to stay. In May 1965, Mountbatten was Britain’s chief of the defence staff, but he had been the last viceroy of British India and the first governor general of the newly independent India. Mountbatten had supported Freeman’s appointment as High Commissioner, but now he embarrassed him with his Raj attitude, culminating in an incident at the residency when he suggested showing guests round his ‘old house up the road’. He was referring to the Viceregal Lodge, now the state home of the Indian President, the Rasthrapati Bhavan. This patronising insensitivity, Freeman noticed, played on the ‘neurosis’ of the Indian government and press, ever ready to feel slighted when none was intended. Catherine Freeman noticed this too: ‘He was an embarrassment. He wanted his old troops lined up outside his old house. I thought our Indian hosts were very decent.’11 Mountbatten himself noticed a change in atmosphere. At a meeting with Indian military commanders, ‘He sensed a feeling of restraint on the Indian side and it was clear to him that relations were very different from the last time he had visited India.’12 Always keen to receive honours of one kind or another, he was dismayed that plans to offer him the honorary colonelcy of an Indian Army regiment were vetoed.

  A year later Freeman was more explicit about the legacy of the Raj. The CRO asked him to advise on a possible visit from Jennie Lee, a left-wing government minister and widow of Aneurin Bevan; also an old friend of Mrs Gandhi. Harold Wilson’s proposal was that she would ‘establish a cordial atmosphere for his own visit’ later in the year. Freeman replied:

  A most friendly welcome awaits those who had sympathised with India during the final stages of the struggle for independence. At the same time we must be under no illusion that these slightly nostalgic associations with the past play no real part in shaping present-day Indian attitudes towards contemporary events. In a rather different context we have experienced something of this in the diminishing returns yielded by Lord Mountbatten’s recent visits.

  My own feeling is that the Prime Minister would be well advised to relate his visit to the future pattern of Indo–British relations. Events of the last eight months [the British attitude to the Indo–Pakistan War, see later] have made a clean break with the sort of associations that India wistfully held for the Labour Party of the ’30s and ’40s. We can no longer depend on warm feelings from the past and we must look forward to a pragmatic relationship of mutual benefit in the future.13

  Indians felt they were entering a new era too. With the death of ‘Panditji’ Nehru after seventeen years of shaping Indian independence, the sophisticated Indians of New Delhi were hoping for the end of the maa-baap sarkar, that is the paternalistic ‘mother and father state’ of the Congress Party that had smothered India politically and socially since 1947. There was a growing sense of liberation. This was reflected in the parties the Freemans gave at the residency. The writer Prem Shankar Jha told me that they were like going into ‘a room full of fresh air’14 and the novelist Khushwant Singh agreed. Both gave the credit to Catherine. ‘I found Freeman cold and distant,’ Khushwant Singh wrote, ‘despite his socialist pretensions he behaved like a pukka sahib’,15 meaning in this context an aloof administrator of the Raj.

  One of their visitors was Tom Driberg. He agreed that John Freeman was spoken of with respect rather than affection, since ‘he retained his cool, withdrawn (though courteous) manner’. Catherine, on the other hand, was the subject of affection because she was most definitely not a patronising, affected, memsahib:

  Catherine Freeman is the most un-memmish of women. With her dark hair, lovely oval face, creamy-pale skin, and lustrous eyes, she might almost be Indian herself: though her looks are, in fact, Irish. She has in conversation an Irish, slightly fey, highly humorous abandon. Some Indians paid her the highest compliment they could: they compared her with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last viceroy, who had the same gift for warm, unforced, un-self-conscious fr
iendship; and, of course, real equality in companionship included the right to contradict – even to tease, which she does enchantingly – without causing offence.16

  So the Freemans’ entertaining had none of the stiffness of the Raj. They attracted a diverse assortment of cultivated guests without the Raj protocol and strict hierarchy. Catherine’s own production skills came into play when she was planning a party for top civil servants out from London:

  We organised a moonlit, midnight picnic among the ancient graves of Old Delhi. I got a flute player to sit on top of one of the marble tombs and he tootled away. We took silver candelabra, which lit up the ruins. It was such a beautiful evening, never to be forgotten.17

  Catherine loved the Indian experience and sought it out. John stayed more in the High Commission, hearing about it from her. ‘He sends me out into the market place and tells me to report back to him,’18 she said at the time. During the Bihar drought of 1967, he allowed Catherine to travel by Jeep through the stricken villages in order to write a report for the Foreign Office. Afterwards she raised funds to build wells in remote parts of the country to she staged the premier of the film Shakespeare Wallah as a glamorous fund-raising event. The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was there with the director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant. All became good friends. The actors Madhur Jaffrey and Marlon Brando came too.

  ‘Camelot in Delhi’ Driberg called the socialising at the residency, referencing Kennedy’s Washington – but it was often Camelot without the King. ‘Of course, John was there,’ Catherine says:

  He always did his duty, but he was very proud of his ability to shake hands and then disappear. If we were in a large reception tent, a shamayana, he would greet his host and then slip out discreetly through the flap at the back. He had the whole routine down to three minutes.

  When he did stay he would seek out the company of young journalists. The First Secretary at the High Commission was Robin, now Lord, Renwick:

  John was not the glad-handing type of ambassador. He was a reserved intellectual who enjoyed a quiet discussion over dinner with people he respected. He didn’t especially enjoy 150 people swarming around his garden. He would give a reception if he had to – I don’t think he really enjoyed it – but in terms of intellectual understanding of all the issues going on in the country he was absolutely first class.19

  The young Rimingtons found themselves stuck in the High Commission compound where they were welcomed by the last British chief justice of the Punjab and the British chief administrator of Madras, both of whom had moved to the Indian civil service after independence and were still in post. It was ‘the Anglo-Indian community, some still clinging to their topis’,20 she said metaphorically. On one occasion the Rimingtons had the Freemans to dinner and Stella, lectured in advance about the protocol of such visits, became anxious when a fat Indian woman sat on the right-hand end of the settee, the place formally reserved for the High Commissioner.

  When Stella Rimington observed that the British were ‘out of favour’, a point picked up by Lord Mountbatten, she was not referring to the last fluttering of the Raj, embarrassing though that might be to hard-headed realists. The cause was the Indo–Pakistan War (the ‘three-week war’, as Freeman called it), which broke out in August 1965. This major conflict, leading to one of the biggest tank battles since the Second World War and, Freeman reported, ‘causing in India more excitement than any other news since 1947’,21 quickly escalated to draw in the super powers. On the diplomatic front Freeman was heavily involved. On behalf of the UK, he found himself incurring the fury of the Indian government and at the same time he was ‘driven to despair’ by the attitude of the British government, in particular by Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It was a baptism of fire no diplomat would relish, least of all one so new to diplomacy.

  Since 1949 a jittery ceasefire had existed between the two powers on the Indian subcontinent partitioned in 1947, India and Pakistan. The bone of contention was the beautiful Vale of Kashmir, which both countries claimed as their own – the Pakistanis because most Kashmiris were Muslim and the Indians because the ruler, the Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh, had acceded his state to India. Since then Indian and Pakistan armies had been camped either side of a ceasefire line monitored by the United Nations. The Indian government refused to hold the agreed plebiscite until the Pakistan Army, which had originally begun hostilities in 1947, withdrew.

  In order to test Indian resolve for border conflict, in April 1965 the 6th Brigade of the Pakistan Army launched Operation Desert Hawk several hundred miles to the south in the Rann of Kutch. This desolate region of salt marshes is partly in the Indian state of Gujarat with the Arabian Sea to the west, and partly in the Pakistani province of Sind to the north. One visitor described it as ‘a reeking reach of black tidal mudflats bounded with sand dunes and etched by dead streams of salt and scum’; uninhabited save by a few camel herdsmen. ‘It seemed ridiculous’, wrote Freeman to the CRO, ‘that two countries should quarrel so fiercely over a barren tract of land.’22 The Pakistan intention, however, was not ridiculous. It was to conquer a tract of land, bloody the nose of the Indian Army, wait for the UK to arbitrate between two Commonwealth countries and then agree to peace terms that would not include surrendering the land taken. This is what eventually happened at the end of June, but not before the two states threatened a general war against each other that could have led, wrote Freeman, ‘to the double shock of widespread military conflict and communal massacre on a vast scale’.23 Freeman and his opposite number in Karachi, Morrice James, acquitted themselves well in the successful negotiations, much to the pleasure of Harold Wilson, who received a note of congratulation from Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, and the thanks of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the new Prime Minister of India. The British arbitration proved that ‘credit was still good in the subcontinent’, wrote Freeman but he added, ominously: ‘We have remedied a symptom but the basic malaise still exists.’24

  On the night of 5–6 August, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar. Over 1,000 Pakistani insurgents in civilian clothes crossed the 500-mile-long ceasefire line that had separated Indian and Pakistani forces in the Kashmir since the end of the first war in July 1949. This was the start of the second Indo–Pakistan War. Pakistan was clearly the aggressor and the paper trail shows that Freeman pointed this out to the CRO from the beginning. Yet in a most unfortunate statement that he later tried to excuse, Prime Minister Wilson blamed India, thus causing lasting resentment between the two countries. Wilson’s gaffe, which he made worse with subsequent attempts to wriggle out of responsibility, cannot have improved Freeman’s opinion of him, to say the least.

  This is the story: the aim of the Pakistani insurgents in disguise was first to foment disorder leading to a popular uprising against Indian rule. Then regular Pakistani forces would enter the Kashmir on the pretext of restoring law and order. This would lead, President Ayub Khan hoped, to the external powers, led by Britain and the United States, stepping in and brokering a Kashmir settlement – to Pakistan’s advantage. On 8 August, the Indian Minister of External Affairs, C. S. Jha, briefed the British High Commissioner about the Pakistan insurgency. Lest there be any doubt, the Pakistan newspaper Dawn carried the headline the next day: ‘Revolutionary Council Held in Kashmir: Liberation War to be Waged’. Freeman reported all this to the CRO in his fortnightly summary of 17–30 August: ‘The Indians are satisfied that they have ample evidence that Pakistan planned and organised a massive infiltration into Kashmir under the guise of a liberation movement.’ He further reported on 25 August that the UN military observer, General Nimmo, was ‘amazed and aghast’ at the Pakistan infiltration and had warned General Chaudhuri, the Indian commander-in-chief, that there was more of it coming: ‘suspicions of reserves, activity etc. behind the ceasefire line’.25 On 28 August the Indian Army went on the offensive, crossed the ceasefire line in Kashmir and engaged enemy forces.

  The attempt to raise a revolution in the Kashmir ha
ving failed, on 1 September Pakistan significantly escalated the conflict with Operation Grand Slam, an armoured thrust across not only the ceasefire line but also the international border dividing the two states in the Chamb area to the south of Kashmir. This endangered the Indian town of Jammu, sandwiched between the Vale of Kashmir and the Daman Koh Plains to the south. Jammu was of huge strategic importance to India because through it ran the only road linking India with Kashmir and beyond that to Ladakh, to the north of which Indian troops were facing the Chinese, who had successfully wrested land from India in 1962. The Pakistan Foreign Minister Bhutto declared: ‘We have taken a solemn pledge to [end India’s] barbaric policy of eliminating the Muslim majority in Kashmir by Hitlerite extermination.’26 On 2 September an Indian air strike on Chamb failed to dislodge Pakistani forces and the ensuing tank battle, considered the largest since the Second World War, was similarly unsuccessful. On 3 September the UN and the British government called for a ceasefire.

  Three days later the Indian I and XI corps retaliated by a surprise lateral move. The army crossed the Indo–Pakistan border in the Punjab and headed for Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital. This was greeted in Delhi by wild scenes of enthusiasm, reminding someone at the High Commission of the public reaction in Europe to the outbreak of war in 1914. Vigilantes roamed the capital rounding up suspected Pakistani agents, causing another High Commission official to warn ‘to be a Muslim is now to be in some degree of danger’. 27 In the UK, Wilson told journalists that: ‘The war between India and Pakistan is one of the gravest international developments since the end of the war against Japan.’28 He responded by another call for a ceasefire ‘in the most urgent terms’.