A Very Private Celebrity

by Hugh Purcell

  On the Privy Council:

  It nominates the new monarch, although what would happen if it nominated anyone other than the heir apparent is not known. I certainly remember being appointed to it. I went to the Throne Room, met the Queen, knelt in front of her and swore an oath of fidelity, to advise truthfully, keep secrets, defend her with my life. I’m glad it hasn’t arisen. She held her hand languidly to be kissed. I did. Then we got up and had a cup of tea together. I don’t know if I would drop my classes if I were to be called back to England for a meeting of the Privy Council. I might.

  On meeting Mahatma Gandhi – a very different account from the one he gave when he was High Commissioner to India!

  I’ll tell you the circumstances and show you what a shallow, frivolous, idiotic person I was. He was an extremely thin gentleman dressed in a white garment, and a surprising sight. He took a seminar in my high school when I was eighteen. He spent the evening with us. I had the privilege of attending but I made nothing of it. It appeared to me at the time that he was a stupid old man. It would be nice to tell you I sat at the old gentleman’s feet and was a better person thereafter. But this is a story of juvenile idiocy that I hope won’t be completely strange to all of you.

  On Lord Mountbatten:

  Mountbatten was a member of the royal family, a good naval officer, brilliant, impatient, fallible and arrogant. I knew him well. He was rather like General MacArthur in his forties: susceptible to flattery. Some of you think I know everyone. Kenneth Galbraith really does know everyone [the famous economist, diplomat and advisor to President Kennedy: co-incidentally, his very first job was as assistant professor of agricultural economics at Davis]. He wrote that Mountbatten was frequently turned to when people wanted more action, less thought, both of which he provided in full measure.6

  Freeman did have one fan in this class. She was Cynthia Basinger, a mature student: ‘I hung on his every word. “This guy is amazing,” I thought. After he told us about the Privy Council I called him “Mr Right and Honourable”, though not to his face.’ Professor Freeman had marked her essay B+ so she used this as an excuse to visit him in his office:

  The walls were lined with juvenile pictures [no doubt by Victoria who was a budding artist], none of VIPs. He was very approachable and easy to converse with. He smoked a pipe. He told me not to be discouraged by a B+. I ended up baby-sitting for him. ‘That will be wonderful,’ he said.7

  According to another colleague at Davis, Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Freeman was one of the few teachers who seemed to like setting and marking exams. These were written at the end of a ten-week course in the Blue Book, an eighteen-page, lined exercise book; three questions had to be answered over two hours. ‘It is fair to say John was under-whelmed by the results. He found the students hard-working but not challenging.’ He did not attend official staff meetings because he was not a member of the academic senate, but he was punctilious at coming to birthday or leaving parties held for the administrative staff at coffee time; sometimes he was the only teacher there. Perhaps this was Freeman’s army background again. He took his duty to ‘other ranks’ seriously. For instance, back in London he had not only attended the wedding of Cynthia Gomes, but he would also attend the wedding of her son many years later. John Freeman was admired and liked by all his professional colleagues; probably most of his students were impressed that he was on campus but took him for granted, like students everywhere.

  That summer of 1987, when Matthew Freeman was studying nearby on the University of California campus at Berkeley, he visited his father at Davis. In order to watch him in an academic setting he attended a political science seminar at which his father was questioned about his political career. Afterwards he wrote to his mother: ‘Dad’s style was slick, witty, with some sharp observations, but not terribly thoughtful or academic. He acknowledges this as his way and I can see how he flourishes. He acts as a foil to some of the high-minded, intellectual, but perhaps rather dull, professors.’

  He included some of his father’s one-liners on prime ministers he had known. On Attlee: ‘He was saved from anonymity and perhaps even ignominy by his blinkered view.’ On Wilson: ‘A quick thinker able to turn any situation to his advantage but with no political vision.’ On Thatcher: ‘I dislike her but would certainly have voted for her.’ This last statement obviously provoked the audience because he was then asked about his own change of political allegiance, from hard left to hard right. Matt noted his answer with care:

  I would bore you almost as much as myself if I talked about that at length, but it suddenly struck me, and it now seems self-evident, that if you pursue policies of economic collectivism and dirigiste policies [state directed] – which is what is implied by the left wing in Europe – then you necessarily end up with a dirigiste government. I realised that was something that I did not want, but not until I had already done considerable harm by supporting such ideas.8

  This reminds me of an interview Freeman had given in his Face to Face years. ‘The one thing I really care about is dissent,’ he told the interviewer. ‘All establishments ought to be kicked against, struggled against, teased, prodded and made human. Emblazoned in letters of fire in every classroom should be the words, “Remember, the teacher may be wrong”.’9 For ‘teacher’ read ‘state’ and there you have Freeman’s dislike of the dirigiste government. That, at heart, was his political philosophy.

  For Matt the experience of watching his father required to talk about himself was an eye-opener. ‘I learned a lot more about his politics than I’ve ever managed to get out of him myself.’ His father was in the hot seat and the experienced eye could tell that he loathed it: ‘You know how reluctant he is normally to discuss his past life,’ Matt reminded Catherine, ‘well, he was unable to avoid it this time!’10

  Soon after he arrived, Freeman handed in a proposal ‘for an interdepartmental scrutiny of a subject of major international or domestic importance to senior professors in business administration, economics, governmental affairs, history and political science. This recommended an invitation to a statesman of the calibre of Dr Henry Kissinger to give a keynote speech to invited members of the public and students from the different disciplines. It would be called the President’s Lecture. It would be followed by a week of scrutiny in group work, which would close with a seminar under the chairmanship of the departmental head most concerned in order to draw conclusions. There would be a rapporteur and video-taping.11

  The concept does not seem to have been followed up but the proposal did result in the visit of Henry Kissinger in October 1987. As the set piece of a three-day visit organised jointly by Gary Walton, Dean of the Graduate School of Management, and John Freeman, Kissinger spoke to an audience of several thousand, the largest ever gathered at Davis for this kind of lecture. When Cynthia Basinger saw Professor Freeman introduce the former Secretary of State she was amazed, for he had told none of his students about his friendship. Dr Kissinger remembers his visit without the rosy glow of Freeman’s ‘Indian summer’: ‘John was in his declining years and working below his capabilities; but he carried out his work without complaint and with aplomb.’12 Freeman was also responsible for the invitation as Visiting Professor of his old New Statesman colleague Paul Johnson, now an historian and author of Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s (1984). He reported on his visit in The Spectator that Freeman was ‘universally revered, by staff and students alike, as a fount of wisdom, a mould of everything an English gentleman and scholar should be’.13

  Freeman developed a particular friendship with Larry Berman, who succeeded Siverson as chair of the political science department. His expertise covered the Nixon years about which he took a critical view. The author of Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam, he held a course called ‘Watergate’ that was the most popular in the department, attracting up to 300 students. Berman remembers that Freeman took a particular interest:

  John was one of those people who like all Nixon defenders s
ay, ‘If not for Watergate…’ John greatly admired his foreign policy, his worldview, his détente, opening with China, all of these things. Of course, now we know that Nixon was wire-tapping and tracking Kissinger around wherever he was going, never mind the break in and all those criminal activities. I recall discussing all this with John. As our relationship developed we were having banterings all the time on this. He ended by thinking, yes, he was quite critical of Nixon for his breaking of the law. But he was still a strong defender of his foreign policy.14

  As early as 1986, Freeman wrote to his old friend Woodrow Wyatt that he ‘wished to stay in California’. He added that he had asked Tony Howard ‘to get references that would make sure the authorities would allow me to stay’. ‘Odd,’ adds Wyatt in his diary, ‘considering he had been ambassador in America.’15 It soon became clear to their friends at Davis that the Freemans were not just passing through. They seemed relaxed and happy, although John was showing early signs of prostate cancer, which he never spoke about. The life was ideal for small children; the weather balmy, the avenues free of traffic except bicycles, the play facilities excellent. Victoria went to the local school in north Davis. John cycled around smoking a pipe and wearing blue jeans, a sign for students that he was accessible. He joined a local bowls club, went for long walks, and together with his old friend Dan made a habit of bartering at garage sales (the equivalent of car boot sales). He was particularly fond of the twice weekly farmers’ market, where local farmers sold organic produce direct to the public: ‘the bounty of California, with berries, figs, olive oil, chestnuts, asparagus and dozens of other offerings,’ boasted the local YOLO County magazine, acronym for ‘You Only Live Once’. Although Davis was a small-town university with a combined population of only 50,000, the social life around campus was cosmopolitan and the Freemans enjoyed the parties.

  Geoffey Wandesforde-Smith joked that John was turning into ‘Mr Chips’, as in the British film of 1939 Goodbye Mr Chips, meaning that he was like the rigidly orthodox schoolmaster who married a young wife, moved with the times and ended up as a beloved and inspiring figure round the school. I doubt if Freeman liked that comparison. It looked as if, Wandesforde-Smith continued, he was putting down roots as part of the community, wanting to lead as ordinary a life as possible, the sort of life denied to him before. When Elizabeth Sherwin asked him if she could write a profile for a San Francisco paper, she was given one of his dusty answers: ‘No.’ As ever he guarded his privacy.

  The Freemans bought a typical 1960s ranch-style bungalow, timber-framed, with the kitchen and master bedroom at the front and a ‘grand room’ (combined dining/sitting room) at the back, facing a patio with a play area. He put in for, and was given, a pay rise. The political science faculty planned for him to continue beyond the age of seventy-five. In 1988, he and Judith left for a long vacation in South Africa, leaving Cynthia Basinger with her two young children to look after the house. On the way they stopped over in London and found themselves in Woodrow Wyatt’s Journal. He is writing up a dinner party held by Lord Montagu:

  John has removed himself from life like an Indian sanyasi. He is teaching at a university in California. He says that he and his plain but nice wife Judith, his fourth, live in a little cottage about a mile off the campus. He is very happy though the poor chap has cancer.

  I am very fond of him. He is a strange, interesting man with one of the highest talents I have ever known and a disinclination to use them, not because of laziness but because he is utterly unworldly. He is seventy-four.

  He was quite startled when I said of my first wife [Sue Cox, then Wyatt, then Hicklin] that he was the first person with whom she had an affair. I said, ‘But this is all over fifty years ago.’16

  Freeman liked the United States. It appealed to his egalitarian instincts. He wanted to be what Americans call ‘a regular kind of guy’, though how far he succeeded is debatable. Politically he was increasingly drawn to the free market economy and the libertarian values that are exhibited to the full in California. In fact he intended to end his days as an American citizen, which, for someone who always travelled light and believed life should be a sequence of change, had its own logic. He asked Henry Kissinger and Wes Pruden to act as referees and Pruden is certain that this request was not for an extension of his Green Card, which would expire after five years, in 1990, but to begin the process of citizenship. It was not to be.

  Judith probably liked the California life less than he did and she was sure the girls would get a better education in England. John confided to Larry Berman that this time he was going to put his family first, but it was a hard decision. She returned to London with the girls several weeks before John. He remained to finish the term and attend hospital appointments for his prostate cancer. Larry Berman acted as his chauffeur and remembers that when Freeman left him at the airport he was almost too weak to lift his bags unaided. ‘We’ll stay in touch,’ they promised each other, but Berman never heard from him again. Freeman asked Cynthia Basinger to sell his Dodge minivan and when she transferred the money to London he wired back a commission. ‘I didn’t expect this; he was so gracious, that’s the word I always use about him.’

  A few months later, Freeman returned to sell the house in Oak Road. The California idyll was over. ‘I really enjoyed teaching. I wish I had tried it before,’ was his verdict on the Davis experience.

  Notes

  1 Jean Snyder interview with the author, 2014

  2 Professor Randy Siverson interview with the author, 2014

  3 Professor Larry Berman interview with the author, 2014

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Elizabeth Sherwin notes on Freeman’s lectures (collated by Professor Geoffrey

  Wandesforde-Smith, Weber Museum, UC Davis)

  7 Cynthia Basinger interview with the author, 2015

  8 Letter written by Matthew Freeman to his mother, 21 September 1987 (in

  possession of C. Freeman)

  9 The Grillers Grilled, 1961

  10 M. Freeman letter to his mother

  11 John Freeman proposal, 11 June 1985 (Special Collections Library, UC Davis)

  12 Kissinger interview with the author, 2015

  13 The Spectator, 4 March 1995

  14 Berman interview with the author, 2014

  15 Wyatt, 1998, op. cit., p. 140

  16 Ibid., pp. 595–6

  Chapter 13

  ‘The ordinary man’

  IN 1990, JOHN Freeman and his third family moved to a 1930s semi-detached house with bay windows looking onto Suffolk Road near the Thames in Barnes, south-west London. He was now looking old, wasted by cancer, though in recovery. So began the ninth of his lives, the two decades of ‘the ordinary man’. He had tried to be ordinary at Davis, but he could not avoid standing out as a celebrity, ‘the English gentleman and scholar’. In any event, the role he had given himself was university professor and that was now behind him: another closed door. A profile of Freeman written in the 1960s said, ‘This is a man who lives in the present; he is rarely an ex or future anything’ – and this was as true in the 1990s as it had been then.1 He was always self-aware and self-controlled, and the part to which he applied himself now, with his usual concentration, was as ‘an ordinary bloke’, a phrase that kept coming up when I spoke to former friends of his from the Barnes Lonsdale Bowling Club. Forty years before Freeman had written a tribute in the New Statesman to the socialist and educationalist R. H. Tawney: ‘Man cannot be whole or dignified until he lives in a community where his private motives lead him to seek the public good.’2 Much as he closed his mind to the past, I wonder if this truth resonated with him in old age?

  His girlfriend from university days sixty years before, Susan Hicklin, was clear that the famous Freeman concentration was now being applied to joining a community. When she went to stay with the Freemans for the weekend, John took her shopping at Sainsbury’s:

  He inspected every potato thoroughly – he was exact, perfectionist, thor
ough – he was trying to be appropriate, to fit into a real community, in which he was living for the first time in his life. It was the same thing with his bowls. He wanted to be accepted not as an ex-ambassador or what have you, but as an old man with a place in the local community. After the weekend I sent him a poem by Wendy Cope. I told him, ‘This epitomises your attitude.’ He liked that!3

  Being Boring

  ‘May you live in interesting times’– Chinese curse.

  If you ask me ‘What’s new?’ I have nothing to say

  Except that the garden is growing.

  I had a slight cold but it’s better today,

  I’m content with the way things are going.

  There was drama enough in my turbulent past:

  Tears and passion – I’ve used up a tankful.

  No news is good news and long may it last.

  If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.

  I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for,

  If you don’t want to find a new lover?

  You drink and you listen and drink a bit more

  And you take the next day to recover.

  Someone to stay home with was all my desire

  And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring,

  I’ve just one ambition in life; I aspire

  To go on and on being boring.

  Freeman and Judith had joined Barnes Lonsdale Lawn Bowling Club before they went to Davis. When they returned the club had closed down and its members had moved to Priory Park in Kew. He had stopped playing serious bowls by then but he would often go along to Sheen Common for a ‘roller’, that is a casual game to include all-comers. He also played at Richmond Indoors because the playing surface is more of a smooth carpet and, unlike grass, does not require much effort to propel the bowl onwards. He still smoked a pipe and carried it in a holster when he was playing. At Richmond the games were in the morning and John is remembered among the elderly bowls fraternity for frequently arriving late. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he would say, ‘I’ve been taking my little daughter to school.’ That was Jessica.