by Hugh Purcell
The Freemans were keen club members. They used to watch the club championships on a Saturday; they attended the annual dinner and were always gregarious. ‘They fitted in,’ club member Percy Kimber told me. ‘They were both really nice people. He always spoke to everyone the same. He was a man who would extend the hand of friendship and he didn’t want to say, “I am the big me.” He wanted to be an ordinary man. An ordinary man.’ His wife Isobel Kimber remembered how John would greet her across the street or in the supermarket. ‘He would come and give me a big hug,’ she said. This would surprise most of those who knew him from the old days, including his son Matthew, who described his father’s manner as ‘distantly polite, with the carapace of an Edwardian gentleman’.
When the Kimbers visited California on holiday, Freeman collected them from Sacramento airport and took them back to Davis for the day; the first stop was his bowls club. ‘He was a lovely man,’ added Percy, ‘and the thing I think about him, he always wanted to be ordinary. I spoke to Judith at John’s funeral and she said, “Yes, that was him.”’4
In Freeman’s playing days at Barnes Lonsdale Bowls Club he always ‘led’, meaning that he ‘set up the head’ or gave a good lead for others to follow. This requires a steady nerve. You need a cool temperament, the Kimbers told me, and a killer instinct, I would add, for there is surely a sadistic pleasure in sending down a fast bowl to knock either the jack or your opponent’s bowls out of play. This is called a ‘drive’. The game played to Freeman’s strengths. Percy recalled the first time they played together in a club pairs competition:
I really didn’t know who he was except his name was John Freeman. Things began to get tight. Their skip rolled a bowl out and it got right to the head and I said, joking, ‘what do you want to go and do that for? It’s right in my bleeding way.’ Suddenly, a voice very quietly in my ear says, ‘Concentrate, Kimber, concentrate!’ And I looked at John and he was looking down the green and his face was stony. Stony it was – it couldn’t have been him that spoke! I always remember him doing that. That was him!5
It is tempting to imagine what Freeman saw as he stared down the green: the German tanks at El Alamein? Winston Churchill on the opposition front bench? Tony Hancock sweating with nerves on Face to Face? But then, was it not Chan Canasta who always said, ‘Concentrate, concentrate’? Freeman probably just wanted to win a game of bowls.
John’s particular friend at Barnes was John Triggs, known by all as ‘Triggsy’. The two together, said the Kimbers, were like chalk and cheese, for John was ‘the English gent’ and Triggsy was all ‘gor blimey’. The two started learning bowls together at Barnes Lonsdale in the mid-1970s. Apparently Triggsy was very competitive, whereas John, although competent, preferred the more relaxed club games. Triggsy was a Brentford boy, an ex-boxer who had fought for money in Scottish boxing booths, and was a Barnes building contractor. ‘Whereas John would sit quietly in the club house, you always knew when Triggsy was around,’ said the Kimbers. He was loud, brash, a ‘rough diamond’ and no respecter of persons, and John was very fond of him.
Triggsy’s widow Janet, his third wife, told me that when the Freemans’ daughter Jessica was born in California, the first person Freeman rang, only ten minutes after the birth, was Triggsy. When they first met in the mid-1970s Triggsy had been in the midst of an acrimonious divorce from his second wife that left him with custody of his six-year-old son. He would bring young Jonathan along to Barnes Lonsdale where the two met the Freemans. John was full of admiration for the way Triggsy was bringing up his son on his own and frequently invited them for Sunday lunch in the Freeman household. They were popular with Victoria and Jessica too. In 1984 the Triggs, father and son, were on holiday in Swanage when Freeman arrived with a Harrod’s hamper and took them to lunch at Corfe Castle. An evening of very special importance for Triggsy was the black-tie boxing event organised by Ron Miller. He sat at the top table next to the former world heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson, who had come because Freeman had interviewed him for Face to Face many years ago, the two sitting in a boxing ring.
When Triggsy introduced Janet, Freeman said, ‘I’m delighted to meet you’ and gave her a kiss. John was devastated by Triggsy’s unexpected death in 2007. Janet recalled: ‘There were about 150 people at his funeral and the cortege diverted past his local pub where all his drinking buddies and staff were standing outside.’ After Triggsy’s death, Freeman and Janet stayed in touch. ‘He always gave me a big hug when we met,’ she told me:
Many people couldn’t understand why he formed a lasting friendship with this man John Triggs. It was probably because Triggsy treated him like an ordinary bloke. As for John Freeman, he could hold a conversation with anybody, regardless of who they were or where they came from, without pomposity. He treated everyone as equal.6
The Freemans last entry in Woodrow Wyatt’s Journal was on 7 April 1992:
Dinner with David Montagu [Lord Swaythling], John Freeman was there with his wife, Judy. John is looking emaciated. He is taller and thinner than I am. He is seventy-eight. He did have some form of cancer but that has now gone out of his system. He now lives in complete retirement in Barnes. I said, ‘What do you do all day?’ He replied that he looked after the children, such as they were. He has got children by almost every marriage and he has been married four times. He does the household chores and washes up and a lot of the cooking instead of his wife. He said, ‘I send her out to work to earn some money.’7
Judith taught in a private junior school in the 2000s, where Victoria joined her to teach art. ‘Mother and daughter working in the same school – unusual I should think,’ wrote John proudly to Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith.8 In 1995 he celebrated his eightieth birthday with a small party. One of the guests was Paul Johnson, who afterwards wrote an effusive encomium for The Spectator entitled ‘A man of many epiphanies to remind us what England was once about’. Apparently the man concerned sent him a dusty response. His privacy had been invaded.
At this time John Freeman met Nigel Lawson (the Rt Hon. Lord Lawson of Braby PC) at a weekend house party in Northamptonshire. They had much in common. Both had been at Westminster School, both had been editors of political magazines (Lawson was editor of The Spectator, 1966–70), both had been in government (Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1980s serving under Margaret Thatcher) and both had moved subsequently into different areas of life (Lawson, for instance, wrote The Nigel Lawson Diet Book, became a campaigning critic of climate change and an opponent of the European Union under current conditions). More important, Lord Lawson told me that he shared with Freeman a determination to live in the present and not in the past. He did not keep up with political colleagues, he did not like to reminisce and he moved from one interest to another. He said this ‘did not require any explanation’; it was self-evidently the right way to lead your life. He had no intention of writing an autobiography and, moreover, he guarded his privacy. Both had given the broadcasting psychiatrist Anthony Clare a hard time. Despite warning the producer that he was not prepared to be introspective, Lawson had sat In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. The result had been ‘extremely boring for all concerned’.
Lord Lawson said he recognised John Freeman at that first meeting as ‘a man of great stature’ whom he would like to know better. Subsequently, he realised like everyone else that Freeman was not only fascinating but hard to know. The two went off to Lawson’s house in Gascony where they played pétanque, a French form of bowls. More important, Lord Lawson and Sir Christopher Bland nominated Freeman for the Beefsteak Club, an elite dining club in Irving Street, London, for men of the arts, letters and politics, where members sit round one long table and, apparently, call all the waiters ‘Charles’. For a radical, anti-establishment man like Freeman this was a gesture towards becoming a ‘joiner’. In fact, he thoroughly enjoyed the club and only stopped going when his frail legs could not negotiate the stairs. He told Lord Lawson that one of his few regrets was declining a peerage, because sitt
ing in the House of Lords seemed a congenial way for retired people to spend the afternoon.
When I failed to obtain John Freeman’s permission to write his biography in 2004, I asked Lord Lawson to intercede on my behalf. He had tried but replied, ‘You will not be surprised to know that I have been unsuccessful.’ In 2014 we discussed the subject again:
I would just say two things. John is a very cold fish, but I think there’s something else that explains his reticence. He said to me that he would not write about his life or talk to anybody who might because he was extremely critical of pretty well everybody. Tony Blair, for instance, he finds ‘ineffably insufferable’. At the same time he deeply dislikes unpleasantness and therefore he keeps his views largely to himself.9
The enigma of John Freeman is that just when you think you understand the man you have spent years thinking about, you discover a contradiction. For instance, those close to him over much of his life would agree that he was, in effect, ‘a cold fish’, but his colleagues at LWT, the teachers at Davis and the bowlers of Barnes would not agree. His own contradictory opinions of people, however, were clear, as was his tendency to slide away from confrontation behind a smokescreen of politeness. Time and again Freeman was complimentary to colleagues in print or in person but rude about them behind their backs: Harold Wilson is a good example. Whether or not this stems from the deeper psychological trait of disliking others because he disliked himself, as he told Catherine, is getting into Anthony Clare territory. I suggested to Lord Lawson that Freeman’s dislike of people might have been affected by his dislike of several of the professions he had spent time in, politics for example? ‘Everything he did, he wanted to do really well, because he would have been unhappy if he thought he was doing badly, but that didn’t mean he had respect for the people with whom he was working. That was quite different.’
Approaching ninety, life began to close in. The girls left home so the Freemans moved into a small house nearby in Charles Street. John crashed the car into a tree and decided to give up driving. He began losing his balance and found walking difficult, although he kept going for a while on public transport. They wintered in South Africa frequently, where Judith had a small house on the Eastern Cape, but stopped that in 2008 after John had a bad fall. At home he watched television a lot, particularly American football when he could find it. His reading was middle-brow and slightly old-fashioned; authors like Dorothy Sayers and Evelyn Waugh – the latter had been one of his more difficult guests on Face to Face. In 2007, he told Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith that he had set himself the task of re-reading books that had made an impression on him when he was young and comparing his judgements now with then – ‘a rewarding and occasionally humbling experience’.
The Freemans sent a letter to friends every year with family news, often with a photograph. Coincidence or not, it normally showed John with his back to the camera. Norman MacKenzie, an expert on Charles Dickens, said they reminded him of the letters that Scrooge – ‘not exactly but something of that sort’ – might have written after his change of heart. He meant that for years Freeman had presented a private front to the world – ‘John has the capacity to put up the shutters that is excelled by nobody except a shopkeeper during a time of riots’ is how he put it once – and now he was sending out a newsletter! It was at this time too that Freeman wrote to me, ‘I wish everybody would forget I was alive.’ The point is that ‘everybody’ referred to the public life he had left behind and the ‘change of heart’ to the ‘ordinary’ life of family and friends that he was now living. The letters were kind, warm, and upbeat: ‘In most respects my health is good and my mind is still active and alert. I am cared for with total selflessness by my beloved Jude and our two daughters who between them make me feel both wanted and part of their exciting and busy lives.’10
They entertained old friends from the LWT days, like the Teslers and Blands, and new friends like the Triggses, but reminders of a public life were less welcome. The Kissingers always tried to make contact when they were in London but found Freeman ‘inaccessible’. In 2011 Nigel Lawson’s son, Dominic, visited Freeman to find out more about his time at Westminster School:
I arrived at his modest terrace house in Barnes and was shown to his study. Even though he found it difficult to stand, he was still an imposing presence. And his memories were expressed with unfailing precision, in the clear tone of a great broadcaster.
What I found more striking was the nature of his study. A computer, very much in active use (we exchanged a number of emails), some full bookshelves; yet not a single photograph of the owner with famous people, as one normally finds in the homes of a retired politician or diplomat.
Like his character, this was a study in self-effacement.11
Freeman told MacKenzie at their last meeting in 2010: ‘I don’t remember the past because I’ve always put it behind me. Not just now, I’ve always been like that. I like to think about the present and even the future but my past is a closed book, even to me.’
In 2012, Freeman’s health declined to the extent that he thought he was becoming a burden to his family. He decided he would call on his military service from the Second World War and move into the Star and Garter Home in Richmond for disabled ex-service men and women. So, at the age of ninety-seven, he said goodbye to his friends and closed another door.
‘An actress I used to know in New York called Bette Davis said “old age is not for wimps”,’ Freeman told the family. He described in a last email to Norman MacKenzie in October 2012 what these twilight months were like:
I’ve reached the age when life consists of little more than waiting to die without the comfort of knowing when that will be. I find, curiously, that I have a deeply irrational, but I suppose instinctive, compulsion not to do anything at all to end it accidentally. So I sit or lie here twenty-four hours a day trying to make sure I don’t have an accident. I don’t want visitors. I believe I do not yet suffer from dementia, though others must obviously judge that. I can always understand what people are saying providing I can hear them, but I am now very deaf. And that’s about that.
Behind a door with the rather forbidding nameplate ‘Major John Freeman: The Rifle Brigade’, he lived a solitary life except for family who paid brief visits on a rota. Occasionally he would go out in a wheelchair with Judith. The Star and Garter in Richmond, he said, was by no means ‘a grand officers’ club: ‘It’s a tumbledown, ludicrously inconvenient old barn with nowadays only about forty or fifty residents, mostly what we used to call “other ranks”. The care, however, is simply first-class, particularly the food.’
Before long he was moved to a new, purpose-built Star and Garter home in Surbiton. But this was one community he did not want to join. When his second son Tom visited from California, where he now lives, to say goodbye, he heard the sounds of ‘If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands’ drifting from the residents’ lounge. Freeman called it ‘the last bastion of Pooterism’, Charles Pooter being the fictional character in Diary of a Nobody who was full of self-importance.
In his last year Freeman was hard of hearing, short of sight and unsteady, but he could use email and he would sit in a chair for a few hours a day. Brian Tesler thought that he had such control over his life that he would celebrate his century in February 2015 and then close the final door. Probably this anniversary meant nothing to him. In December 2014 he carefully arranged for book tokens to be sent to his grandchildren and then, on the morning of Saturday 20 December, he died.
The funeral service was held in the local parish church of St Michael and All Angels in Barnes on 12 January 2015. As the congregation assembled, Matthew escorted Catherine up the isle to the second row of pews. A small, grey-haired woman turned round and said, smiling, ‘I’m so glad you came.’
Catherine was puzzled and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met.’
The woman replied, ‘I’m Judith.’ It was an absurd moment and they both laughed, for they had not seen each
other for forty years, and so a potentially awkward moment was defused. The families were all there, apart from Tom who was in America and one of Matthew’s children, Lily, who was in India. Judith sat with her daughters Tors and Jess in the front pew. Catherine sat behind with her daughter-in-law, Rose, and Cynthia and Javid Akhtar. Lizi was there with her family and Lucy brought her son Conor. The two sat with Matthew and his son James, who were pall bearers. The congregation was predominantly local, many including the Kimbers and Janet Triggs from the bowling fraternity. A few friends from the past paid their last respects – Paul Johnson from New Statesman days, Sir Christopher Bland and Brian Tesler from the LWT era, and Lord Lawson. Matthew read Psalm 43 which ends: ‘Why, my soul, are you downcast? / Why so disturbed within me? / Put your hope in God / For I will yet praise him / My Saviour and my God’. Victoria read a P. G. Wodehouse short story. At John Freeman’s request there was no eulogy. It was, said Catherine, a plain, peaceful occasion. Matthew and Lucy accompanied the coffin to the crematorium and then joined their mother.
Freeman had told Tom Driberg sixty years before that although he lacked the ‘the gift of faith’, he ‘had no difficulty in doing anything officially expected in this field’. Presumably he would have approved of his own funeral. Such an outstanding contributor to British life over the second half of the twentieth century deserved a memorial service, but the very suggestion would probably have received a dusty reply. Catherine’s epitaph comes to mind: ‘John was a well-known man but he was a man who was hard to know well. And that’s just how he liked it.’