They don’t make Englishmen like the aptly named John Freeman any more. When he died last Christmas just shy of his centenary, the obituaries — once they had expressed astonishment that this titan from the age of Attlee and empire had still been around —paid tribute to a polymath whose achievements could fill nine more ordinary lives.
Freeman was a pioneer of television, virtually inventing the TV celebrity interview. He was a leading politician — the last surviving member of the 1945 Labour government; a diplomat — at one time our man in Washington and High Commissioner in India; a much decorated war hero; and — not least — a renowned swordsman between the sheets, boasting four wives and innumerable girlfriends.
For his tenacious biographer Hugh Purcell, Freeman was also a quarry to be ruthlessly hunted down. Purcell had long been fascinated that a figure who was once a household name could vanish into obscurity in his own lifetime, leaving nothing behind but his wives and children — and fading film of his famous TV confrontations with the likes of C.G. Jung, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh and Augustus John.
Purcell managed to scrape an acquaintence with his ageing subject, but found him less than co-operative. By then living in a home for retired officers in Barnes, Freeman expressed scepticism that anyone would be interested in his life, and refused to help Purcell’s biographical project — but nor, crucially, did he hinder it.
Ignoring the discouragement, Purcell pressed on, and the resulting book — for all its lacunae caused by Freeman’s determination to dodge the limelight in which he had bathed so many others — is a revealing portrait of one of the oddest and most elusive fish to have swum through the reaches of the British ruling class at its apogee.
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