A Very Private Celebrity (8 page)

A world away, in the dormitory town of Watford, Elizabeth was fighting John’s other battle. It was 19 April and a reporter from the
West Herts & Watford Observer
was covering it:

Freeman may have regarded his marriage as ‘a joke’ but his wife came to the rescue on this occasion. She was coached by Raymond Blackburn who encouraged her from the back of the hall: ‘Then she was called back onto the platform and told, roughly speaking, that she could now go and have her tonsils out in peace, because her Major John had been adopted.’

About ten years before his death, John Freeman surprised his old friend Norman MacKenzie with a question so out of the blue that, coming from Freeman, he could not dismiss it: ‘Did I ever tell you that I was the conducting officer who took the German generals to surrender to Monty at Luneberg Heath?’

MacKenzie told me: ‘John may have refrained from telling the truth, but I don’t think he told an outright lie in his life. That phrase “conducting officer” is such a precise, John-like phrase.’

The war diaries reveal that Freeman’s statement was based on an actual incident, although the claim was much exaggerated. Freeman was not at Luneberg Heath on 4 May, when the German armies of the Netherlands, Denmark and north Germany surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery, but he was in Hamburg on 29 April, when General Wolz (the Kamp Kommandant in Hamburg) sent a medical staff officer and a junior staff officer to Freeman’s headquarters with a letter offering surrender, subject to negotiations. The envoys were ‘conducted by 131st Brigade to HQ’. As brigade major at HQ, Freeman may well have received or conducted them himself. However, it was not until 3 May that General Wolz, with two staff officers, came through the lines of the 9th Durham Light Infantry to discussed unconditional surrender.

That evening in the Hamburg Rathaus (town hall), the conditions of surrender of the German Army of Hamburg were ratified – but Freeman was not there. Brigade records state: ‘On 30 April,
the brigade major went to England as candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Watford, Herts.’ All orders from the brigade major from 30 April onwards were signed by his deputy. On 23 May, the return states categorically: ‘Major R. Sellers, Middlesex Regt, arrived at bde HQ as BM to replace Major J. Freeman MBE, who had proceeded to England as election candidate in April.’
35

On 8 May, VE Day was celebrated by the 131st Brigade with a double issue of rum. But Freeman was already back home. His ‘completely undistinguished’ war had ended.

Chapter 3

Government minister – the rise

T
HE LABOUR PARTY
closed its conference at Blackpool on 25 May, 1945, by singing
Jerusalem
with evangelical fervour:

A new spirit had taken over the party – it had won back its will to win. Its leader, Clement Attlee, said in 1940: ‘The world that must
emerge from this war must be a world attuned to our ideals.' Those ‘ideals' were based on socialism.

Tom Driberg, who was now a Labour candidate, wrote: ‘The next parliament could be epoch-making: it could inaugurate the socialist epoch in Britain.' He remembered the soldiers he had met on Charing Cross Road on the evening of VE Day. One held a red flag, another wrote on it in ink: ‘We will now proceed to the establishment of socialism – Lenin, 1917.'

Freeman was a favoured son. At the Blackpool conference, chairman Ellen Wilkinson summoned him to the platform: ‘I give you a Desert Rat, who has just received the German surrender of Hamburg.' Legend has it that this rousing call was followed by silence – as Freeman was in the bath sipping whisky and soda and reading
The New Yorker
. This legend needs a sprinkling of salt, because Freeman told exactly the same story in reference to the announcement of his victory at Watford in the general election of 1951. It is the kind of story he would have encouraged, of course, because it displayed his nonchalant behaviour and his dislike of publicity – that Rifle Brigade cool again. When Professor Harold Laski, the chairman of the Labour Party, spoke for Freeman at Watford on 29 June, he recalled Blackpool: ‘No person attending the conference made a greater impression than Major Freeman. A few weeks ago I was passed a cheque to give to a young candidate most deserving of honour. Without a moment's hesitation, I passed the cheque to Major Freeman.'

Nevertheless, that summer Freeman felt sure he would lose the election at Watford. It had been a safe Tory seat and perhaps he did not really want to win. In any event, he travelled back to Germany and applied for a permanent job with the control commission, just in case. He told his family years later that he had been offered a senior post with the Allied control council in Berlin.

Freeman's electioneering followed the Attlee line, which blamed the Tories for wanting to bring back the past, while Labour promised to bring in the future. Freeman said that this had been clear before the war as well as after:

Freeman's opponent, Commodore W. Helman, displayed just such ‘privileged behaviour' in his conduct at the hustings. He arrived late for the Conservative meeting in the town hall on the eve of the poll and then refused to answer any questions: ‘It is not my policy during elections.' According to the
West Herts & Watford Observer
, the chairman then announced ‘with deep regret that at Freeman's final meeting when Mr Churchill's name was mentioned it was greeted with boos and shouts of Vote for Freeman'. The Tory's right to rule was overturned the next day and a framed photo of Freeman hung on the wall in the Labour Party offices for many years.

In fact, despite the scent of glorious victory in the air, Freeman found the counting of votes so disagreeable that he vowed never to go through it again. He wrote in the
New Statesman
in May 1955, when he was on the verge of leaving Parliament:

When the general election results were announced on 26 July, Labour had won by a landslide: a gain of 212 seats and a popular vote of 12 million. Raymond Blackburn won for Labour in his Birmingham Kings Norton constituency and remembered ‘the hall seemed to be full of shining eyes aglow with the sight of the Promised Land'. Woodrow Wyatt won in the next-door constituency of Birmingham Aston and John Freeman overturned a big majority at Watford to win by 2,194 votes (he had predicted 2,000). The Manchester Labour journal proclaimed: ‘POWER! The
revolution
without a single cracked skull! The pioneers' dream realised at last. Now there is nothing to stand in the way of laying the
socialist
foundation of the new social order.'

On 1 August, Labour MPs gathered in the House of Lords (the Commons was closed because of war damage) to elect a new Speaker. They included many first-time MPs who would govern Britain or lead Labour in the years ahead: two future prime ministers (Harold Wilson and James Callaghan) and two future leaders of the party (Hugh Gaitskell and Michael Foot). Future deputy leaders Roy Jenkins and Dennis Healey had not yet been elected. In an atmosphere of excitement and some belligerence, they sang
The Red Flag
– the
only time, wrote Woodrow Wyatt, that this ‘bloodthirsty and ridiculous anthem' was sung in Parliament.

They were back again on 15 August to hear the new Prime Minister announce the terms of the Japanese surrender. Attlee ended by moving ‘that this House do now attend at the Church of St Margaret's Westminster to give humble and reverent thanks to Almighty God on the victorious conclusion of the war'. When they returned to the House of Lords – the bells of St Margaret's still ringing victory peels – they listened to the King's speech, which laid the foundations for the New Jerusalem.

Parliament can rarely have witnessed such drama in its long history. The next day it was the turn of Major John Freeman MP to take centre stage. Far from avoiding the spotlight, this time Freeman rose to the occasion. The Prime Minister had invited him to give the traditional Humble Address of Thanks for the Most Gracious Speech – it was a definite honour and a hint of future promotion. Hansard records that Freeman spoke in military uniform – the black-buttoned uniform of the Rifle Brigade – indicating the change in the character of the Labour Party. Driberg witnessed the speech as the newly elected MP for Maldon:

Freeman's conclusion echoes down the years:

Barbara Castle, the new Labour MP for Blackburn, was another who witnessed this singularly dramatic maiden speech. She wrote in her memoirs: ‘John was a charismatic figure who seemed to have a dazzling career in front of him. As he stood there in his uniform, erect, composed and competent, everyone felt his star quality.'
5

The Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, spoke third and congratulated Freeman and his seconder, Fred Willey (the newly elected Labour MP for Sunderland), for speaking with ‘so much decorum and becoming taste. We hope they will shine in our debates and we trust that important political careers may await both of them.' Later in the day, Attlee introduced Freeman to Churchill in the smoking room and the great man broke down and wept: ‘Now all the best men are on the other side.'
6

John and Elizabeth Freeman rented a flat on Marsham Street, within five minutes' walk of Parliament. Despite the elegance of the address, it was a shabby property owned by Westminster city council, situated above a snack bar and surrounded by a bombsight overgrown with weeds. Next door was Roy Jenkins and his wife Jennifer. Jenkins
described Freeman as ‘the very model of a modern Labour major', but they seldom met.

At the end of July, Hugh Dalton had been made Chancellor of the Exchequer. After the new government was in place, he celebrated by hosting ‘the young victors' dinner party' at St Ermin's Hotel in Victoria. John Freeman was there, together with Raymond Blackburn, Harold Wilson, George Brown, Hugh Gaitskell, Dick Crossman, Christopher Mayhew and a few others. As Mayhew observed, ‘It seemed to be composed almost entirely of future ministers, with a few prime ministers thrown in.'

It was a dinner several attendees remembered years later for the mood of triumph, as they speculated who would be the first new MP to be appointed straight into government. The answer was the academic Harold Wilson, who immediately became parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Works. But Freeman was to follow shortly. In October 1946, he became financial secretary to the Minister for War, John Lawson.

Hugh Dalton became Freeman's patron. In
The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1945–1960
, he refers many times to seeking preferment for Freeman, using his status as one of the ‘Big Five' (the others were Attlee, Bevin, Morrison and Cripps) to lobby for his promotion. He found Freeman attractive, and noted this repetitiously: ‘One of the most attractive younger members of the party'; ‘I took John out to dinner – he is very attractive and intelligent'. He was another person star-struck by Freeman's parliamentary debut, as he told the Prime Minister on 20 February 1951 (when he was angling, once again, for Freeman's promotion): ‘I recalled Freeman's magnificent first speech of the first day of the 1945 parliament. That was something I should never forget.'

Although Dalton was married, he was well known for his Hellenic
– chaste but homoerotic – fondness of brilliant and, it must be stressed, heterosexual young men like Freeman. ‘My love', wrote Dalton in his diary, ‘is the Labour movement and the best of the young men in it.'

Tom Driberg very soon became Freeman's closest friend on the Labour benches. He was boastfully homosexual, though not, again it must be stressed, in his relations with Freeman. As Driberg's biographer put it, ‘Tom and Dalton fought for Freeman's hand like rival suitors.'
7
It was a tug of love with homoerotic undertones, at least on Dalton's part. He confided to his diary on 4 January 1951: ‘Freeman, I fear, has had a great fall since the first wonderful summer day in the 1945 parliament. I am very grieved about this. But he's a bloody fool in his own interest, and what can he see in Driberg to justify
so much
public clinging?' Shortly after, Freeman was ignored in a government reshuffle. Dalton moaned: ‘I fear John Freeman's stock is badly down, because of Driberg.'

There are two entwined themes of Freeman's life in this decade, particularly after the general election of 1950. These are: his gradual disenchantment with Westminster, as viewed in part through Dalton's diary; and the diversions of his private life with Driberg, sometimes louche, like all-night gambling, and occasionally outrageous, like Driberg's wedding in 1951 when Freeman was best man.

Dalton was an unlikely socialist. He was an Old Etonian and the son of a Canon of Windsor, who was also a tutor to the future George V. In the '30s he had become a socialist and anti-appeaser, all of which made him a class enemy to the Tories. Now, post-war, he was a radical Chancellor of the Exchequer (1945–48), using a policy of cheap money (low interest rates) and a progressive budget to make Britain a more equal society. His first achievement was to nationalise the Bank of England, a socialist essential that, Freeman told him,
was the most popular of all Labour policies, judging by the reaction in his Watford constituency.