A Very Private Celebrity (23 page)

Chapter 8

New Statesman
editor

W
HEN FREEMAN BECAME
editor of the
New Statesman
in January 1961 he did not intend to stay long:

There speaks Freeman as chief of staff. But there was a more fundamental issue beneath the surface, which Edward Hyams identified in
his
History of the First Fifty Years
(of the
New Statesman
) – an issue endorsed by Freeman in his introduction to the book.

For the first twenty years or so of Kingsley Martin’s editorship, the paper and most of its readers believed in the implementation of socialism. Martin was a preacher who believed in socialism just as his Nonconformist minister father had believed in Christianity. To deny socialism was almost wicked and during the ’30s and ’40s its advent could be preached with revolutionary zeal. After that time, however, the identification of socialism with Soviet communism and the iniquities thereof, together with an aggressive American capitalism, meant that democratic socialist parties in the West were on the defensive. In Britain the socialist hopes of the 1945 generation, fully endorsed by John Freeman, had turned into the Butskellism of the 1950s. Freeman wrote in his introduction:

Edward Hyams put it more graphically: ‘The
New Statesman’s
cry of dissent will be sustained, but it will not cry, “You are wicked!” but, rather, “You are mistaken!” John Freeman’s
New Statesman
is more likely to be more “grown-up”, more rational, penetrating and enquiring.’
3

Tony Howard said much the same thing: ‘Soft-heartedness went
out and hard-headedness came in, with adjectives like “well-balanced” and “judicious” replacing familiar epithets such as “outrageous” or “unforgivable”.’
4

Anthony Howard was one of Freeman’s first appointments. He came from
The Guardian
and was the first professional parliamentary correspondent the
New Statesman
employed. He had no preconceived view and had access to information from all sides. The second was Karl Meyer as Washington correspondent. John Kennedy was now President and Freeman was determined that the
New Statesman
’s anti-American bias of the Cold War should be replaced by a recognition that the centre of power in the western world must lie in Washington. The third appointment was Karl Miller as literary editor. Having poached him from
The Spectator
, Freeman let him get on with the job of professionalising the literary criticism in the back half of the paper. At editorial meetings he occasionally offered suggestions for the music coverage, music being his first artistic love (his favourite composers were Ravel, Mahler and Shostakovitch), but otherwise he left well alone. ‘Culturally I am a complete conservative,’ he said.
5

A good example of the
New Statesman
’s ‘more rational and penetrating’ articles to point up the inequalities of the 1960s and the need for social justice, were the essays by Peter Townsend on ‘The Meaning of Poverty’ and Richard Titmuss on ‘Income Distribution and Social Change’, both published in 1962. The four essays of Richard Titmuss are hard going. Norman MacKenzie introduced them with an article on ‘The Double Standard’ that resonates today: ‘Professor Titmuss has reminded us that all through public life there runs a double standard – one criterion for the “fiscal welfare” of the prosperous payer of income tax and another for the “benefit welfare” of the retirement pensioner, the chronic sick and the claimant of national assistance.’

On 9 January 1962 the
New Statesman
published an obituary of
the economic historian, socialist and educational, R. H. Tawney. It has Freeman’s imprint:

After six months of Freeman’s editorship, Anthony Howard reported that:

In July 1961, the circulation rose to a record 85,000.

These changes were taking place while Kingsley Martin was editorial director, an appointment Freeman had given him for twelve months after his retirement. It was a mistake. ‘The paper had to be given a new look,’ said Freeman, and this was difficult while Kingsley occupied ‘half the editor’s chair’. For his part, Martin could not stop interfering, demanding an office and attending the Monday meeting. As a friend of his said, ‘Kingsley had a genius for stepping back into the limelight.’ Freeman’s method of coping with this was to encourage Martin to take long trips abroad, to South America, to Cuba, to the United States, and then to cut his copy very short – without explanation – when it was sent in. On one occasion the price of this cutting
down to size was heavy. Kingsley correctly predicted the ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba by Florida exiles in April 1961, and wrote a despatch to that effect from Washington, but Freeman did not use it. Kingsley expressed ‘grave concern about your [Freeman’s] attitude to me in the future’; Freeman rang him in Washington and told him to write ‘very short or not at all’. After Kingsley ceased to be ‘editorial director’ relations improved but were never resolved until both had left the
New Statesman
behind them. Freeman told C. H. Rolf after that happened: ‘We had conversations of apparent friendliness. It may be that on some days he felt genuinely affectionate and on other days remembered past bitterness.’
6
Martin continued to write for the
New Statesman
until he suffered a stroke in 1963.

What sort of editor was John Freeman? According to Norman MacKenzie:

Freeman, said MacKenzie, was a chief-of-staff type of editor – with a radical streak: ‘He could have been a kind of radical soldier in Cromwell’s army. I could well imagine him taking part in the Putney debates. He liked the army very much, its structure and its sense of a well-oiled machine. He brought some of that to the
New Statesman
.’
7

One or two of Kingsley’s old guard thought the magazine had become ‘professional’ and this was not said as a compliment. They
preferred the wild enthusiasm of the old days to Freeman’s insistence on ‘getting it right’ and selling more copies. Tony Howard agreed with MacKenzie; Freeman’s editorship was one of administrative and editorial efficiency: ‘It was a tight ship, with John Freeman every inch the captain. He set himself high standards and expected, and exacted, them from his staff.’
8

MacKenzie and Howard agreed that Freeman gave little away about himself, that he hated intrusions into his privacy. Howard recalled when a professional photographer took photo after photo of the editor at his desk. He was trying, he said, to ‘catch you in an unguarded moment’. ‘Alas,’ Freeman told him, ‘there are not many of those.’ Howard noticed Freeman’s ‘thin-lipped smile with just a suggestion of self-mockery in it’.

MacKenzie and Freeman would visit a pub on Thursdays near the
New Statesman
printers in High Wycombe. On one occasion Mac-Kenzie remembered ‘a man at the bar put his finger up at John and said, “You can’t get away without me recognising you. I know who you are. Yes, you’re the chap on the
Chan Canasta
show.” John was absolutely livid and stalked out. He hated any kind of personal publicity.’

He was very self-aware and on guard. Someone said: ‘John Freeman gives a brilliant impression of being John Freeman – and he will never turn in other than a good performance.’

MacKenzie found Freeman’s manner ‘intimidating’:

Francis Hope experienced the contrasting sides of Freeman’s office manner. He joined the staff as Karl Miller’s literary assistant and in his first week he had the temerity to tell the editor, who had just given him advice on a minor typographical point, that he would just check it out with the literary editor: ‘I was confronted by steady, if not steely, blue eyes. “My dear Francis. Let me make one thing quite clear. What I have just said was not a suggestion. It was a decision.”’
10
Later, Freeman took him out to the Garrick Club, perhaps before making him diplomatic correspondent: ‘I suppose I feel more at home here than anywhere,’ said Freeman to Hope. Then he qualified this as a ‘shaming confession’. And so he might because, although the Garrick was and is most popular among writers and actors, it is still one of the bastions of clubland, and Freeman was a professed ‘non-joiner’ with strong egalitarian views. He wriggled out of this by claiming that he preferred the conversation of the Garrick Club’s servants to that of its members.

The editor’s prerogative was the ‘London Diary’, although other writers contributed to it. Freeman, writing as Flavus, did not enjoy the weekly duty. He would shut himself in his office on Tuesday afternoons and ‘slog it out’, as Howard put it. MacKenzie remembered that he wrote carefully and competently but he was not a diarist:

Howard went further and said Flavus was ‘boring and flat’ because Freeman ‘would not give anything of himself’. Considering that Freeman was writing scripts for broadcast during this time, which had to be direct and precise, Flavus could be infuriatingly passive, devoid of the letter ‘I’:

Or:

A welcome exception was a mellow Flavus bringing in the New Year of 1962 from the village of Chilham in north Kent. Freeman had bought a cottage here from Edward Hyams, the ‘countryside correspondent’ of the
New Statesman
.