A Very Private Celebrity Read Online Free Page B

of Tuesday 1 November [1932] a great army of hunger marchers attempted to force an entry into the House of Commons. These marchers had come to London from all parts of England and Scotland some days before and there had already been two demonstrations – one in Hyde Park, where a great deal of damage and injury had been done, and one of a more peaceful nature in Trafalgar Square. Then they requested that a deputation should be allowed to appear before the bar of the House of Commons. This request was foolishly refused with the result that about 10,000 unemployed assembled at Parliament Square. Strict orders were given that nobody from Westminster was to go outside Dean’s Yard. I went out alone to see what could be seen. After one or two truncheon charges the square was empty and the marchers were driven into the mouth of Victoria Street. A police barricade was thrown round with a Police HQ in the middle, from which Lord Trenchard directed operations by flashlight signals. As the crowd became confined between the Abbey railings and the Guildhall, it became rather ill tempered. However, under the control of Wal Harrington more serious rioting was avoided. All this time the crowd was being driven steadily along Victoria Street by mounted police. We heard a great deal of rioting in Great Smith Square, where rioters broke through the police cordon. All evening Dean’s Yard was used as a Police Reserve HQ with mounted police exercising their horses. It was all quite exciting.
    At this point I was expecting to read that the school had ‘heard the voice of England’s forgotten people’. In fact, Freeman ends unpredictably:‘But for the extreme tact and bravery of the police, the results might have been more serious – perhaps it’s a pity they weren’t.’ A successor head of Busby’s annotates in the margin: ‘Either a sadistic, snobbish or blatantly stupid point of view.’
    Freeman probably wrote his ‘forgotten people’ epitaph in the Busby House magazine (as opposed to the ledger), which is missing from the library now, but was possibly available just after the war, when the journalist Anthony Howard, who used the quote in his newspaper profile of Freeman in 1961, was also head of Busby House. The image remains of young Freeman wandering around on his own in the midst of a very large-scale riot and watching the confrontation between desperate marchers and mounted police – a confrontation unequalled until the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. It must have been a formative experience.
    It was Freeman who revived the Busby magazine, writing in the ledger with unintended precocity: ‘I have sacked the old printer, found a new one, organised advertising and asked all old Busbyites to contribute. I am editing it myself as I am the most suitable person.’ He ends: ‘Looking back over the whole year, I can see that I had a very happy year as head of Busby’s. I honestly believe that the other members of the house enjoyed themselves too.’ There can be but few occasions in later years when Freeman wrote so unguardedly, but then he cannot have conceived of a biographer accessing his report seventy-five years later.
    There follows a long break in the sequence of the ledger. A subsequent head of Busby’s accounted for it:
    This is due entirely to J. H. Freeman, who, in spite of continuous demands from subsequent heads of house, to which he either turned a deaf ear or returned a vague promise, persisted in keeping the ledger. After five years of absence it was in danger of becoming a myth. Theledger was eventually recovered by Hayward who visited Freeman several times at Oxford.
    The missing years of the ledger could be taken as a metaphor for Freeman’s missing years at Oxford University.
    John Horace Freeman, says the university register, was in residence as a Commoner at Brasenose College (1933–37), where he was awarded a third-class degree in Classics. To be specific, he was given a pass in Mods and a third in