by Hugh Purcell
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:
Slender, youthful, well-groomed, red-haired, the major stood ramrod-straight and delivered, in the impeccable upper-middle-class accent of Westminster School and Oxford, a speech that was a model of its kind – diffident yet proud, proud of his constituents and of the armed forces in which he served, paying tactful tribute to the trade unions whose homespun representatives, seated around him, might be eyeing with a dubious surmise this new-image Labour member.3
Freeman’s conclusion echoes down the years:
The country is conscious of the seriousness of the years that lie ahead; but our people are not depressed by the outlook nor are they overwhelmed by their responsibilities. On the contrary, on every side is a spirit of high adventure, of gay determination, a readiness to experiment, to take reasonable risks, to stake high in this magnificent venture of rebuilding our civilisation, as we have staked high in the winning of the war. We have before us a battle for the peace, no less arduous and no less momentous than the battle we have lived through in the last six years. Today the strategy begins to unfold itself. Today we go into action. Today may rightly be regarded as ‘D-Day’ in the Battle of the New Britain.4
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 es
sential that, Freeman told him, was the most popular of all Labour policies, judging by the reaction in his Watford constituency.
Dalton was high-handed with his civil servants – ‘He shits for England in the Olympic Games,’ said one in 1948. Conspiratorial and a gossip, he was not trusted, and there is a story of him entering the Cabinet room ‘eyes blazing with insincerity’. He was a man of strong bias: miners, handsome young white men, socialists, and refugees from Nazi Germany were in; Germans, the rich or pompous, and Bloomsbury intellectuals were out. Freeman obviously liked this combination of public principles with private indiscretions. When the third volume of Dalton’s diary was published in February 1962, Freeman reviewed it for the New Statesman. As Dalton died the following week, it became an obituary:
Dalton is traditionally accused by his many enemies of insincerity, cynicism and malice. Look deeper and you will find a man of feeling, humanity and unshakeable loyalty, who never quite found an idea that matched his talent. In all walks of life are to be found a small army of friends who have been allowed to see beneath the surface of this many-sided, mercurial man. These people love him with all his faults. And I am one of them.8
Nevertheless, Freeman was also perceptive about his faults. In 1953 he reviewed another Dalton memoir, Call Back Yesterday:
He has no real political philosophy. He is the arch-pragmatist of the party. You choose your party; you back it through thick and thin; you fight its battle for power; and when you have won you do your best to confound your enemies and reward your allies. Even the wide circle of Dalton’s friends – and few men have the power to inspire a stronger affection – have learned to look elsewhere for philosophical guidance.9
If Dalton divided opinion then Driberg polarised it. Norman Mac-Kenzie told me Driberg was the vilest man he had ever met, while Catherine Freeman ‘liked him very, very much. He was just so worldly, so funny, so indiscreet, but also so intelligent and affectionate.’ He was forty when he listened to Freeman’s Humble Address that August afternoon, but unlike many others on the Labour benches, he had been a Member of Parliament for the previous three years, as an independent (in reality, a member of Common Wealth). He had not really wanted to transfer to the Labour Party – thinking it stuffy and bourgeois – and, after 1945, he felt let down by the Attlee government: ‘There was no fundamental or lasting change in the economic or social structure of Britain.’ Occasionally he worked up some enthusiasm – like on the second reading of the bill to nationalise the mines, when he saw MPs from mining constituencies trooping through the lobby in tears and singing The Red Flag – but most of the time he was detached; interested but not involved. ‘The whole bloody business bored him,’ said the Labour MP Ian Mikardo.10
Some thought he was a dilettante, and, according to John Freeman, he had few friends: ‘He remained an ambiguous, largely isolated figure … seen, I judge, by his Labour colleagues as not one of us, but whose heart was probably in the right place, who was a bit of a character, even though a character to be disapproved of.’11
This then was Freeman’s closest ally in Parliament – the friend with whom he spent many hours gossiping and drinking during parliamentary business.
One reason why Freeman saw so much of Driberg was because he found him entertaining. Driberg was a man of refined taste, who, after public school and Oxford, had considered becoming a poet. He was a socialite who loved gossip and indiscretion, a journalist with a curiosity that took him to the extremes of experience (like studying the satanist Aleister Crowley) and a foreign correspondent who courted danger when, for example, he was ‘embedded’ (in more senses than one) within the British troops in Normandy in 1944 and Korea in 1950. Colourful and mysterious, High Church with a lust for low life, no one could say that Driberg did not live life to the full.
Freeman enjoyed the house parties that Driberg held at his home, Bradwell Lodge in Essex. It was a beautiful former rectory of Tudor and Georgian architecture, with installed treasures like a Robert Adam fireplace inlaid with panels painted by Angelica Kauffman. Driberg liked Bradwell Lodge ‘better than anything else in the world’. He delighted in bringing together disparate guests for weekend house parties, as might a madam in a high-class brothel, he said mischievously.
One weekend just after the war, for instance, Driberg mixed the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan with the modern composer Constant Lambert and his wife Isabel, who was recently divorced from the famous journalist Sefton Delmer. As an Essex neighbour, Isabel was a frequent visitor: ‘There was always good wine and food, and conversation on all subjects, word games and Lena Horne singing in the evenings.’12 Freeman was another frequent guest, remembering ‘weekends spent in total tranquillity with a delightful host’. Driberg’s parties had quite a notorious reputation, which he did nothing to dispel. Catherine recalls a conversation with him soon after her marriage to John in 1962:
Louche is the word to apply to Tom Driberg. He once said to me, ‘I could tell you such stories about John, but I dare not, because one day you will lose your temper with him and you’ll mention them and then I’ll really be in hot water.’ So that was very irritating of him, to tell me only what he would have told me. But I remember him rolling his eyes and saying, ‘Such wild goings-on there were!’
The Driberg papers in Christ Church, Oxford, and Driberg’s diary for these years (published as The Best of Both Worlds), are silent on the matter.
Driberg may have been a ‘Jekyll’ at Bradwell Lodge most of the time, but in the lavatories of Russell Square, the House of Commons and elsewhere, he was a ‘Hyde’. He was a flagrant, promiscuous gay who boasted of his adventures in the rough trade, although practising homosexuality was illegal until 1967. For instance, he recounts in Ruling Passions a nocturnal liaison in Edinburgh in 1943 when he was campaigning in a by-election for the Common Wealth candidate Tom Wintringham. In the dark of Princes Street, he ‘bumped into a tall figure in a foreign naval uniform’. One thing led to another and they were in an air-raid shelter, Driberg on his knees:
Concentrating on a long, uncircumcised, and tapering, but rock-hard erection … Too concentrated, for the stillness of the shelter was broken by a terrifying sound – the crunching of boots on the gravelled floor. Instantly the blinding light of a torch shone full on us, and a deep Scottish voice was baying, in a tone of angry disgust: ‘Och, ye bastards – ye dirty pair o’ whoors.’ It was a policeman…
In desperation, Driberg threw caution to the wind. He took out his visiting card that showed he was both an MP and the author of the William Hickey gossip column on the Daily Express:
The policeman scrutinised the card gravely. Then he exploded. ‘William Hickey!’ he said. ‘Good God, man, I’ve read you all of my life!’ I swore I would never do such a thing again, and it worked. When we said goodnight we shook hands, and he even gave me a – not too formal – salute.13
Freeman delighted in these stories:
Much of the scandalous material now known about Tom he told me – and others – shamelessly and, for all I know, candidly. In the purgatorial boredom of the House of Commons he could be a lifesaver, and I for one enjoyed the entertainment that he was prepared to offer.14
Driberg was probably a spy when Freeman knew him. Although he was only ‘outed’ as such after his death in 1976, Freeman must have had his suspicions, because many others did. However, as with other supposed spies of this Cold War era, whose side Driberg was on and whether he was a real threat to security remain uncertain. He had been a member of the Communist Party until early in the war and he was an acquaintance of the traitor Guy Burgess, who he visited in Moscow after his defection in 1951.
In 1981, the veteran ‘spy-catcher’ Chapman Pincher wrote Their Trade is Treachery, in which he labelled Driberg as ‘in the KGB’s pay as a double agent’. Then the author Nigel West twisted the screw by claiming that Driberg had, for many years, been a double agent working for MI5 – secretly reporting on the British and Russian communist parties, while also serving as a s
py for Russia. Some said that Driberg’s homosexuality made him vulnerable to blackmail; others that he was far too indiscreet to be a spy. Freeman and Wyatt discussed their old friend’s spying over the dinner table in 1986. Wyatt recorded:
John thinks, from some of the observations he [Driberg] made to John, he was definitely a Russian agent and was almost certainly then turned by the British, so must have worked for both sides. He said a significant moment in his life was when he was going bankrupt: he got £50,000 from somewhere, which was never explained.15
Whatever the truth, Freeman seems to have been drawn to the mysterious double life of the spy. In the 1950s he was also a friend – and Freeman made few friends – of the New Statesman journalist and spy Aylmer Vallance (see Chapter 7). Was it the enigma of the spy that appealed to Freeman – the chameleon quality of appearing all things to all men, while keeping your own counsel?
One night in the 1960s, Catherine and John Freeman were reading in bed. Her book was The Portrait of a Lady and his, she noticed, was A Double Life.
Michael Foot, a fellow Bevanite MP in the post-war Labour governments, who worked closely with Freeman, said to me: ‘John had a cold manner but undoubtedly he had another side, as his friendships with Driberg and Boothby showed. He liked rough company.’
