A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  Freeman was also chairman of United Press International Television News (UPITN). This was a partnership between the American television news agency United Press International and ITN, which provided much of the footage and coverage in the United States. UPI was always short of money because it was not directly connected with any of the big American TV broadcast companies. In 1979 it was rumoured that the government of South Africa was indirectly bankrolling it, just when it was supplying an interview with the proapartheid Prime Minister John Vorster. This was too much for ITN. Freeman wrote more than a ‘dusty’ ultimatum: ‘My board do not find it acceptable to be associated in any way with a company that is not in a position immediately and unanswerably to refute the allegation that it may have been covertly penetrated by foreign government funds.’35

  The rumour proved to be true and much to the embarrassment of ITN it had to buy out the South African shares in UPI. Not long afterwards, UPI went bankrupt and in 1985 UPITN became World Television News (WTN), owned by ITN and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Apparently, at one stage in the negotiations with ABC in New York, Freeman turned to Elmer Lower, the president of ABC News and said, in exasperation: ‘Elmer, it’s time to crap or get off the pot.’ This revelation comes from Dan Moloney of ITN, who was there. He adds that ‘John spoke in his mellifluous voice, likened by one reviewer to a vicar’s.’

  By 1984 Freeman had enough. He wrote to me in 2004: ‘I served a very long sentence in public life of one kind or another, and I believe I have paid my dues in full.’ There speaks a man who must have wanted a rest. Now that Tesler, Birt and Miller were ‘operating on all legs’ as he put it, and the franchise bid had been successful, he thought the sooner he got out the better. Typically, he had ensured his successor was in place. ‘I decided what LWT needed was a businessman to look after the affairs of the company. Christopher Bland was young, go-getting and exactly the right sort of person.’ He became chairman of the main board of LWT (Holdings) to universal approval on 1 January: ‘a stellar talent, a toughie’ is John Birt’s assessment. Brian Tesler became chairman of the TV company, a dual chairmanship that found less than universal approval at first.

  One of Bland’s first decisions was to abandon the Freeman practice of holding a pre-board meeting in his office with the executive directors to work out their approach to the board meeting itself. ‘Whatever happened at the board meeting was choreographed in advance, which made the meetings rather dull,’ Sir Christopher Bland told me. ‘John didn’t like surprises or confrontation.’

  Freeman had stayed longer at LWT than in any of his other careers and enjoyed it the most. He told an interviewer:

  My temperament is such that I like to immerse myself in something and then, when I feel I’ve had all the experience from it I’m likely to get, say yes to something else. LWT was really the first time I hadn’t done that. I enjoyed it more than any other job partly because of the company and partly because the problems have been quite difficult ones.36

  At Freeman’s farewell dinner, Ron Miller gave the speech. He concluded with a quote from the American political commentator Walter Lippmann: ‘The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation that common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.’ Once again there was the sound of a closing door. Sir Christopher Bland told me: ‘He disappeared: went out of the room and shut the door, absolutely. He didn’t shut it on me personally but he didn’t ring up and say, “Why have you done that?” None of that. He didn’t look back.’

  The assumption was that Freeman would now retire. He said so himself, more or less: ‘I want to just drop out and spend time with my wife and daughter [Victoria was born in 1978]. I may do some voluntary work. But if anybody wants me to do something, they will have to arouse my interest.’ In fact, he had taken up bowls and a few months later he was signed up by Granada TV to commentate on the six-day Superbowl tournament in Manchester. One activity Freeman resolutely turned his back on was writing his autobiography:

  No, no memoirs. I don’t think I have anything to say that would be of real interest or edification. And there’s nothing I despise more than the sort of people who construct memoirs out of the gossip they have picked up on the basis of other people’s secrets. I’ve never kept a diary, not a single paper. I don’t think it’s a good way of carrying on.37

  As ever, he was true to his word.

  Notes

  1 An Autobiography Part 1: From Congregations to Audiences by David Frost, HarperCollins, London, 1993, pp. 259–65

  2 Cited in Running the Show: 21 Years of London Television by David Docherty, Boxtree, London, 1990, p. 7

  3 Independent Television in Britain: Vol. 3 Politics and Control 1968–1980 by Jeremy Potter, Macmillan, London, 1989, p. 34

  4Docherty, op. cit., p. 40

  5 Potter, op. cit., p. 42

  6 Docherty, op. cit., p. 60

  7 Potter, op. cit., p. 49 (see also: Docherty, op. cit., p. 71)

  8 Docherty, op. cit., p. 76

  9 Sir Christopher Bland interview with the author, 2014

  10 Cited in Docherty, op. cit., p. 82

  11 Akhtar interview with the author, 2014

  12 ‘Face to Face with the New Boss’, Sunday Times, 14 March 1971

  13 Ibid.

  14 Potter, op. cit., p. 55

  15 Docherty, op. cit., p. 82

  16 Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Braby, interview with the author, 2014

  17 Brian Tesler interview with the author, 2014

  18 Ron Miller correspondence with the author, 2014

  19 Docherty, op. cit., p. 90–91

  20 Michael Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth, interview with the author, 2014

  21 Cited in Docherty, op. cit., p. 99

  22 Tesler interview with the author, 2014

  23 Docherty, op. cit., p. 96

  24 Cited in Potter, op. cit., p. 232

  25 Tesler interview with the author, 2014

  26 Cited in Docherty, op. cit., p. 116

  27 Cassen interview with the author, 2014

  28 Michael Grade interview with the author, 2014

  29 John Freeman interview with Ivan Rowan, Sunday Telegraph, 14 March 1971

  30 John Birt interview with the author, 2014

  31 John Freeman memorandum to executive directors of LWT, August 1981 (cited in Docherty, op. cit., p. 148)

  32 Bland interview with the author, 2014

  33 The Independent, 22 December 2014

  34 And Finally…?: The History of ITN by Richard Lindley, Politicos, London, 2005, pp. 174–6

  35 Ibid.

  36 ‘Face to Face with John Freeman’ by Sue Summers, Sunday Times, February 1984

  37 Ibid.

  Chapter 12

  University professor

  IN THE LATE 1950s John Freeman was travelling by train to Monte Carlo when he met a young American painter called Dan Snyder. They shared a bottle of wine and started a friendship. Dan was also a stage designer who worked for ITV in London on the glamorous cabaret show Chelsea at Nine. Perhaps this appealed to Freeman. In any event, the friendship lasted over the years. Dan married Jean, an Anglo-Brazilian ballet dancer, and John and Catherine became godparents to their son. Much later the Snyders moved to the University of California campus at Davis, near Sacramento, where he taught in the dramatic arts department. In 1984 the Freemans, John and Judith, were in California so they called in to see them. They went for a walk together by the lawns, streams and trees on the rural, car-free, campus.

  ‘This looks a good place to retire to,’ said John.

  ‘So why don’t you come and teach here?’ replied Dan, who was always on the lookout to attract international figures to what was then, in university terms, something of a backwater.1

  Randy Siverson was then chair of the political science department:

  I got a phone call from the vice-chancellor for academic affairs telling me there was an unusual opportunity to be pursued and he wanted me to come ove
r and have a talk about it. So I went and he said there was a man in the art department by the name of Dan Snyder who had a very good friend by the name of John Freeman. And Freeman had been in the past a British High Commissioner to India, and then ambassador to the US, and he wanted to come to Davis and I think he said to retire.2

  Larry Wade was on the committee that reviewed academic appointments: ‘The feeling was that he had had a remarkable career in public life that would be of interest to our students.’ What persuaded Siverson was that Freeman’s ‘reasonable salary’ would come out of the vice-chancellor’s fund and not from his department’s allocation. What caused him concern was that Freeman had no training as a political scientist and the bureaucracy forbade the creation of new courses. So a schedule for his teaching was drawn up with the history department and together they put him down for ‘Political Elites’, ‘End of Empire’, ‘British Foreign Policy since 1920’ and ‘Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century’.

  His students were undergraduates, mostly between nineteen and twenty-one, and he was described on the official course lists as visiting lecturer or visiting professor. Larry Wade says his appointment was as distinguished lecturer. The point is that he was fully integrated into the international relations section of the political science faculty; he taught a regular syllabus three or four times a week for ten week terms, marked essays and set exams. He was not a VIP who gave prestigious guest lectures to an invited audience, nor did he want to be. ‘Please do not call me Mr Ambassador, or Professor Freeman, I am just John,’ he said.

  Professor Larry Berman, now Dean of the Honors College at Georgia State University, remembers:

  Initially, we thought this was a VIP deal, and that would have been great because Berkeley and UCLA got people of his stature so that John was certainly the most distinguished foreign visitor we ever had. What was even better was that he was part of the faculty; he was engaged; he went to meetings. Some people described him as aloof, standoffish. This is NOT the John Freeman I knew at Davis at all.3

  The appointing staff did not seem concerned that Freeman had no experience as a teacher; that probably did not concern him either. He had already mastered seven very different careers, in advertising, the army, government, television interviewing, editing a political magazine, diplomacy and the TV industry. Why should the eighth create difficulty? In fact Jean Snyder remembers him coming over especially to give a trial lecture, on the stage of the dramatic arts department: ‘The powers that be all thought it was wonderful.’ So Freeman, Judith and their daughter Victoria moved to rented accommodation just off the campus for the academic year of 1985. He told Randy he was surprised not to find any shelves to put books on. Soon after their second daughter, Jessica, was born.

  The following summer the British journalist Hunter Davis arrived to write about this small-town university that had started as an agricultural college, in 1909, and was making a name for itself as among the greenest and most environmentally friendly campus anywhere. Much to his surprise he came across the Rt Hon. John Freeman PC riding around on a bicycle. What was he doing at Davis?

  I must admit that when I told people in London I was coming out here, the only person who had heard of Davis was my wine merchant. He said it was world famous for its oenology department. Hmm. I’d better get a dictionary. I’m not sure how you spell that either.

  In his study he gave Hunter Davis a more reflective answer:

  I have got a small number of years left to do something. I thought perhaps it would be rewarding to put back some of what I have taken out. I have had above-average wide experience in my career. I wanted to use it somehow. Some friends in California knew of my feelings, and I was offered this position. So I took it. I’ve given up all my British jobs, except one, trustee of Reuters.

  Today, UC Davis has a high reputation. It is classed as a ‘public ivy’, that is a publicly funded university to rival in its league the privately funded Ivy League universities like Harvard, Yale and so on. Using the American predilection for rankings, it is the ninth best publicly funded university in the States and the thirty-eighth best overall. Its research departments in Agricultural Science and Veterinary Medicine are among the best in the world and it has first ranking as ‘Coolest Campus’ for its devotion to environmental sustainability and climate change.

  In Freeman’s day it was getting there. Although Davis had become a general university in the 1950s, it still carried the legacy of its foundation, which was the farm for the University of California and then an agricultural college. The ‘Aggies’, embracing vegetarians, conservationists and ecologists as well as those studying green subjects, were more prevalent than the ‘Jocks’ (sports hearties) or ‘Greeks’ (members of fraternities). The student restaurant, the Blue Mango, was, in Freeman’s day, a workers’ cooperative that was vegetarian and teetotal. ‘We at the Mango’, proclaimed the menu, ‘have defined our purpose as promoting nourishment, consciousness and creativity.’ According to Hunter Davis, there were more bicycles in the town per head, 30,000 in all, than in any other American city. He found it bemusing. At the Blue Mango a student ordered what sounded to him like a ‘Doubledee Caf Cap Togo’. It turned out to be a large, decaffeinated cappuccino to take away. Freeman liked it all:

  Yes, their obsession with ecology. It is rather sweet. Their refusal to eat salt can be amusing. There must be students who sniff drugs, but I’ve not seen one yet. They’re relaxed and friendly. They’ll just drop in to pass the time of day with the professors. At the same time, I find them frightfully intelligent. They work like stink.4

  Whereas today 40 per cent of the 30,000 students are Asian-American (and only 3 per cent Afro-American), in Freeman’s time the majority of the 19,000 students were from white, middle-class, three-car families. The small number of foreign students, 1,000, were based at International House. Here they were looked after by a Scotswoman, Julia Blair, who told Hunter Davis: ‘I have to admit there are a great many more pro-Reaganites, blond, blue-eyed, south California types, than you might expect.’ A behavioural scientist on the campus had just carried out a survey of 15,000 Davis graduates from the mid-’60s to mid-’80s. She concluded that the ’80s generation was more serious, more trusting, more religious and more accepting of authority than those twenty years before. ‘A new kind of student has emerged,’ she concluded. ‘They are not like the “me” generation. They seem warm and caring and concerned about other people.’ Freeman could not make it out:

  My colleagues told me I would find Davis very laid back, rather Ivy League and conservative, which I suppose is true, but they are also liberal with a small l. They’re rational, quiet and gentle. I’ve kept wondering why this should be so. It is remarkable. I can only think a process of self-selection is at work.

  I don’t feel any dullness here. I don’t think the students do either. If they did they would do something about it. I’ve totally fallen in love with Davis. It’s a new experience for me and it’s very stimulating.5

  Julia Blair put the peacefulness down to Davis being ‘a spiritually small campus. There aren’t wide gaps. The students are all on good terms with the professors. People in Davis are extraordinarily gentle. It’s a very safe place.’

  The director of International House in 2015 is Elizabeth Sherwin. In the 1980s she was a journalist on a local paper, the Davis Enterprise. She obtained Freeman’s permission to ‘audit’ one of his classes because, much as he sought privacy, he had quickly become a local celebrity: ‘the English ambassador’. Afterwards she gave ‘The Sherwin Notes’ to the Weber Museum at Davis. The class she chose, History 155a ‘The End of Empire’, held in the fall term of 1987, gave Freeman the chance of adding his personal recollections to what the set books had to say. And who can blame him? For once he could use the past in the service of the present.

  Regrettably, perhaps, the unique opportunity of being lectured to in rural California by an eyewitness, indeed a maker of modern history, was somewhat lost on his audience. According to Elizabeth
Sherwin, few of the class were curious or confident enough to ask questions or respond in any way. Although he was talking about the end of the Raj there were no Indians present (today many of the students at Davis are of Indian descent): ‘Professor Freeman lectured and we listened.’

  To set the scene: Freeman stood at a classroom podium, lecturing from notes for up to an hour to thirty or forty undergraduates, average age twenty. He was tall and imposing and dressed quite formally with a tweed jacket and tie. He was self-deprecating but not self-effacing. He was a most fluent, relaxed lecturer, who tried to engage with the audience. He did not ‘bore on’ and he was not ‘stagey’, Elizabeth Sherwin told me. These are verbatim extracts from her notes.

  On David Lloyd George:

  I remember him as a very compelling public figure. He was Welsh, abundantly endowed with gifts as an orator, had a passion for causes, a horror of war, and was prejudiced against the Church, landlords and capitalism. He was one of the most brilliant political figures I ever met but he had a biting tongue and a sense of humour not easily forgiven by those victimised by it. He was involved in scandals you’ve seen nothing like in this country. He sold peerages. He caused a scandal at the Versailles Peace Conference when he left to play golf. He lived with his secretary. He was a larger than life man but his reputation is now in the trough in the cycle of history.