Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia
Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2019 8:08 am
Part 1 of 2
2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT
by Andrew Whitehead
© Andrew Whitehead 2019
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
2: The Gates of the World
'It was a very quiet little student that came up to St Hugh's College and wore the long exhibitioner's gown to lectures,' Freda Houlston recalled, but for a 'provincial girl ... it was really the opening of the gates of the world.' [1] If there was a timidity about Freda when she enrolled at Oxford, it had been banished by the time she emerged from her years as a student. Her horizons broadened immeasurably and she gained greatly in confidence. Freda made life-long friends at Oxford, engaged in politics for the first time, became absorbed in India and its claim to independence, and within days of finishing her final exams, was married in the city's registry office to a fellow student. It was a romance which broke rules and crossed boundaries and conventions. At the close of her Oxford years, rather than returning to Derby, she headed out with her Indian husband to Berlin, and from there to Lahore, the capital of the still undivided Indian province of Punjab. Oxford was the last chapter of her life in England, and of her English identity. From here on, she was Indian.
Freda arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1929. Her college was, like her school, all girls -- all the Oxford colleges at that time were single sex. Women's colleges had been established from 1879 but women had been able to receive degrees only as recently as 1920. Women students were outnumbered and marginalised, sometimes described patronisingly as 'undergraduettes' and in colleges which tended to be on the fringes of the university district. St Hugh's was the outlier. It's a little over half-a-mile north of the Bodleian Library, but 'Oxford undergraduates cocooned in city-centre colleges generally consider it to be situated somewhere in the vicinity of Dundee.' [2] The college was modern by Oxford standards. It had been established in the 1880s with a handful of students and began moving to its present location off Banbury Road in 1913. It would have still felt new at the time Freda matriculated. St Hugh's was also small, cosy even, at that time admitting fewer than sixty undergraduates a year. And it was 'not so snotty' as other women's colleges and cheaper too, making it 'the college of choice for those who could only just afford to come to Oxford.' [3]
At St Hugh's, Freda promptly became firm friends with two other young women who had also just arrived at the college, both of whom attained considerable fame. Olive Shapley, from a radical and Unitarian middle-class home in south London, went on to be a pioneering broadcaster and presenter of BBC radio's Woman's Hour'; 'a great human,' Freda recalled, 'whose tremendous spirit and humanity and whose love of art endeared her to me.' Barbara Betts, who became better known as Barbara Castle, was born in Chesterfield, not far from Derby, and brought up in the textile city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. Her family were socialists and she went on to be the most prominent British woman politician of her time, a formidable Labour cabinet minister who took on portfolios including employment and industrial relations. Barbara 'brought with her the flavour of the north of England that I was brought up in,' said Freda. All three engaged in left-wing politics while at Oxford, though in different fashion and degree -- but the strongest bond between them was that they stood out from the conventional, public school-educated girls who then constituted a large part of the college intake. Although the women's colleges were not quite as upper crust as the men's, it was still a forbidding atmosphere for middle-class youngsters from the provinces. 'Many grammar school girls recall feeling like outsiders at St Hugh's,' according to a historian of the college. 'They lacked the manners, conventions and sense of entitlement exhibited by a small but influential group of students from the top public schools.' [4]
All these friendships stood the test of time and of Freda's personal and spiritual journeys. Forty years after their Oxford days, Barbara Castle entertained her old friend to lunch at Westminster. 'She sailed into the House of Commons dining room in her flowing Buddhist robe, serenely indifferent to the covert stares at her shaven head.' [5] Olive Shapley took her two sons with her to visit Freda at a monastery in Sikkim. There were other St Hugh's friendships that persisted over the decades. Pam Bourne was in the next room to Freda at college, and gained renown as an ocean-going sailor -- she later moved to South Africa, and Freda met her again when visiting the country as a Buddhist nun. Olive Chandler was, said Freda, 'my good conscience' -- they wrote to each other over almost half-a-century, and it was Olive, a civil servant, who wrote her obituary for the college magazine. Freda certainly had the gift of making and keeping friends.
She had another gift, her good looks -- tall and slim, her fair hair often done up in twin buns over the ears, with a round and innocent-looking face and blue-grey eyes. 'She was strikingly beautiful,' Olive Shapley recalled, 'and was sometimes referred to by the other undergraduates as "the Mona Lisa".' [6] Barbara Castle also found Freda to be 'strikingly attractive' while adding that she 'was not as light-hearted as Olive and I were, alternating between bursts of gaiety and moods of deep and almost sombre seriousness.' [7] Freda was not a natural rebel in the way that Olive and Barbara were, but she too chafed at the restrictions endured by St Hugh's students which were, even by the standards of the day, petty and onerous- - especially when it came to men. 'There was not much to distinguish the social life of women undergraduates at that time from that of the pupils of the genteel boarding schools which a lot of them had just left,' Olive Shapley commented waspishly -- she said that 'chaperone rules' meant that the only way a St Hugh's student could meet a man alone was to have tea very publicly in a tea shop.
All three women on occasions flouted the rules, though only Freda -- probably the least habitual transgressor -- got into serious trouble as a result.
'I think what first attracted Olive and Freda to me when I arrived at St Hugh's was my campaign for sexual enlightenment,' Barbara Castle recorded with customary mischief. Her own and fellow students' knowledge of what was coyly termed the facts-of-life was limited. By Barbara's own account, she organised a whip round in the students' common room, raising the six shillings to send off for a book entitled Planned Parenthood. 'Explicit and illustrated with diagrams, it became one of the most thumbed books in the college, but the revelations did not immediately precipitate me into a life of sin. My knowledge of sex remained second-hand.' [9] One of Barbara Castle's biographers has suggested that in her first few terms at Oxford, her passions may have been directed (probably in a fairly chaste manner) towards other women, Freda among them. [10] Crushes of this sort were not unusual. Castle included in her autobiography a rather grainy photograph of her and Freda in a punt on the river at Oxford, reclining and gazing into each other's eyes -- as much a pose as a statement of attachment but an indication of their closeness all the same. Olive Shapley got a little more of the action. She visited Barbara in the summer and discretely spent the night with Barbara's brother. The following day she travelled on the train to London with Barbara. 'Somewhere just before Stockport I suddenly thought, "I am no longer a virgin!" Barbara leaned across the railway carriage, tapped my knee and said, "And you can take that silly smile off your face."' [11]
As a fresher, Freda was determined to make the most of Oxford. She became her year's representative on The Imp, the college magazine, and both wrote for it and featured in it --
-- a snatch of student doggerel which suggests that her college contemporaries found her both bold and questioning. [12] 'I joined just about every society one could imagine, from the League of Nations society to the ornithological club,' she recalled. 'I listened to Bach in the college chapels; I went to Holy Communion; I went to Manchester College, a Unitarian college; I listened to Tagore; and to Dr Radhakrishnan when he first came with his magnificent lectures on Eastern philosophy.' [13]
These recordings made towards the end of her life also demonstrate another legacy of her college years: if she ever had a Derby accent then, by accident or design, it disappeared; her precise and clipped voice bore an Oxford cadence. The same can be said of Olive Shapley -- a manicured Oxford accent with no echo at all of south London. Only Barbara Castle retained a regional accent, perhaps because she reaped a political dividend from it.
Both Freda's close friends at St Hugh's remembered her as having a spiritual aspect. Olive Shapley described her as 'a romantic and an Anglo-Catholic and very interested in religion; I can remember her reading the lives of the saints and the mystics.' [14] She also had a telling memory of an early encounter of all three women:
But the spiritual and the aesthetic was not the defining aspect of Freda's time at Oxford. By her own account, she regarded herself as a seeker but no longer a Christian. She never returned to the religion of her birth. As a student, she was more absorbed by politics and above all by India and the man who introduced her to the country and its cause.
Freda relished the camaraderie of college life. We talked endlessly, mainly between nine and midnight over large cups of cocoa or Bourneville made in the College pantries. Everything from socialism to Karl Marx, Proust, D.H. Lawrence, the family, to the new fields of Birth Control and travel were the subjects of conversation.' [16] Initially, she worked hard -- the 'first year was one of study,' she recounted. But her enthusiasm for the course waned. 'Suddenly, I couldn't be bothered ... I could speak French fluently already. I wanted to learn other languages, to understand the world.' She was also concerned about what a modern languages degree would point her towards: 'It was the flash of understanding which showed me French could only lead me to becoming a teacher or lecturer. And I passionately did not want to go back into the world of childhood that being a teacher meant.' She was closing in on what she did wish to pursue as a career. 'My eyes were on journalism, writing [and] interpreting that incredible international adult world that poured into magazine and newspaper.' She even met the editor of the Derby Daily Telegraph who promised her an opening once she had her degree, but she never went back to her home city. She did eventually carve out a reputation as a journalist, and demonstrated curiosity and social concern as well as the ability to communicate, but only after several years in the line of work she had been so keen to avoid: teaching and lecturing.
Freda followed her friend Barbara Castle's example and switched from French to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), also known at that time as 'Modern Greats'. It may have been more congenial but she didn't shine academically. Freda's tutors' reports paint a picture of a diligent student, but one who found the transition from being the outstanding pupil in a small secondary school to the more exacting environment of Oxford rather daunting. There were a few positive remarks about her work, particularly in her optional subject of international relations. Some dons commented on her accomplished writing style, and one found her essays 'always stimulating and intelligent'. The chorus of misgivings, however, swelled towards the end of her university career: 'Still rather weak and slow'; 'has hardly found her feet in the subject'; 'still finding difficulty in marshalling her facts'; and most woundingly, 'she has great difficulty recognising the relevant parts of an argument'. Freda emerged from St Hugh's with third-class honours, not quite as damning a statement of mediocrity then as it would be now, but clearly not the degree she hoped for. Neither Barbara nor Olive fared any better; all three women got thirds. [17]
The only substantial published account that Freda has left of the University, written during her last year for the Calcutta Review, pointed to what must have been a personal grievance, the disparity between wealthy and entitled students and those with much more limited resources. 'The undergraduate of little or no money of his own has entered into the preserves of the rich and fortunate. Quite a considerable number of the men now -- even a larger portion of the women (about 75%) who have stiffer competition for entrance -- are students only because of State, School or College scholarships. There is bound to be a change of outlook: a more practical view of education.' She made clear that such a practical perspective needed to take account of the increasingly threatening international situation and the political and economic turbulence at home:
This was not simply an observation; it was the quiet declaration of a personal agenda.
Freda relished Oxford's internationalism, reflected above all in the students who gathered in the home of Alfred Zimmern, the University's first professor of international relations who played a part in the founding of the League of Nations (and also, though Freda doesn't mention this, an active supporter of the Labour Party). 'A Pole argues with a German -- Madame Zimmern who gathers the circle together is herself a Frenchwoman. Indians talk with Americans, a Chinese butts in, an English girl and an Italian pick up the thread of conversation ... A Chinese educationalist, a Jugo-Slav, and a Pole are among the latest speakers. Everyone criticises, suggests, tries to understand and appreciate. The informal circle round the fireplace is never still.' The gates of the world had not simply opened for Freda; she had ventured through enthusiastically. By the time she wrote this account, she had embarked on a relationship which also crossed boundaries -- of religion, race and nationality -- and which was to change her life utterly.
Baba Pyare Lal Bedi was the love of Freda's life. The romance was strengthened by the common causes they championed and their intellectual collaboration, but it was above all a love story. There is nothing to suggest that Freda had any other boyfriend. Her own account of how she met her husband is both poetic and charming. It may well be not so much as she remembered it as how she wanted their relationship to be remembered. 'My destiny was to go to India,' she confided. 'How it happened that I married an Indian, how it happened that I began to meet Indians, I really don't know. They were just part of the Oxford scene.'
In the recordings made in her son's home in Calcutta the year before she died, Freda spoke lyrically about how she first met B.P.L. Bedi, outside one of the University's main lecture halls:
Bedi realised that he had been boorish, and to make amends he sent Freda a note asking her to tea in his college room.
After a while, they started sharing a simple lunch in Bedi's room. He was at this time a vegetarian, and they would eat fruit and bread or whatever he cooked up on his stove.
This first-hand experience of racism was a defining moment. She could either back off, and accept that this was a border better not traversed, or she could make a point of challenging the prejudice she encountered.
St Hugh's college records for 1932 confirm that Freda was disciplined, though with no details of her alleged offence. 'Miss Houlston had been rusticated for the last week of the Hilary [spring] term for a breach of University and College discipline,' the Tutorial Committee recorded; 'this had been reported to the Derbyshire Education Committee.' The punishment was not severe but it must have been deeply humiliating. Rather than derailing the relationship, Freda recalled that it strengthened the bond between them. 'It was really the suffering that I had to undergo, going down early, and that he had to undergo, realising that he'd been the cause of it, that brought us closer together.' Barbara Castle set down her own account of how Freda and Baba became a couple. 'They decided to write a book together ... and most afternoons she went openly to his room in Hertford [College] to work on it with him. An officious porter reported them. She had committed a heinous offence and was rusticated [suspended] ... as a punishment. But she was a girl of spirit and was not going to be brow-beaten. On her return she resumed her visits to Bedi, in the digs outside college to which he had been moved, only this time she decided to give the disciplinarians their money's worth and started an affair with him.' [20]
The greater interruption to Freda's studies at Oxford was caused by a collapse in her health. College records show that she 'went down due to illness' in March 1931 (that's before she met Bedi) -- though it's not clear for how long. The recollection of her friends is that she later had to take time out from her studies as a direct consequence of her relationship with Bedi, or more particularly the disapproving reaction that ensued. 'Her mother, her friends and her college were all opposed to the match,' Olive Shapley wrote. 'She became ill and had a nervous breakdown, and was later admitted to a mental hospital. Barbara and I, still flouting the bigotries of the period, stuck by Freda and did all we could to see her through her illness.' [21] Often in her life, Freda took the road less travelled -- indeed there was almost a contrariness about her -- but it was at a considerable personal cost.
B.P.L. Bedi was a Sikh, though he didn't wear a turban, and two years older than Freda. He was handsome and well-built, jovial and outgoing. He had been all-India champion at throwing the hammer and a wrestler, and he continued to be a sportsman at Oxford. Bedi was, by his own account, from a well-off, feudal-style family and bore the distinction of being a direct descendant of the religion's first guru. His home village of Dera Baba Nanak, on the banks of the river Ravi and now just yards on India's side of the international boundary that Partition drove through Punjab, has a particularly honoured place in the annals of Sikhism. His father, who had died in his mid-thirties a few years before his younger son went to study overseas, was a magistrate and had land in the village. Bedi studied at Government College, Lahore, and while not then particularly active in politics, he read Gandhi's newspaper Young India regularly and absorbed the increased nationalist and anti-British sentiment evident at that time. After getting a degree in Punjab, Bedi enrolled at Hertford College, Oxford, in October 1931 to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was following in the footsteps of his older brother in preparing for the hugely competitive Indian Civil Service exams. While his brother was successful, B.P.L. quickly decided that he had no intention of becoming part of India's administrative elite, a decision which disappointed his family and marked a decisive break with the bulk of India's England-returned establishment.
By the time Freda reached St Hugh's, there were approaching 2,000 Indian students in Britain -- but only forty-two were at Oxford. 'There were very few of them,' Olive Shapley remarked, and 'mostly rich.' [22] In spite of the modest numbers, Indian students were prominent, not least in the elite Oxford Union debating society, at this time a male preserve. Dosoo Karaka, a Parsee from Bombay, was elected the first Indian president of the Oxford Union in November 1933. Indian students may have been largely from their country's elite, but they were not immune from discrimination. Karaka made his career in journalism, and in what he called his first newspaper article of any consequence, he wrote that 'even Oxford is not free from the Colour Bar. No doubt there is a generation of Englishmen now "up" at Oxford which realises the unfairness of such prejudices. Yet there are still some among them, brought up in the old school of thought, who cannot regard their fellow-undergraduates from among the coloured races as their equals. Somehow they are instinctively aware of colour in a man.' [23]
2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT
by Andrew Whitehead
© Andrew Whitehead 2019
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
2: The Gates of the World
'It was a very quiet little student that came up to St Hugh's College and wore the long exhibitioner's gown to lectures,' Freda Houlston recalled, but for a 'provincial girl ... it was really the opening of the gates of the world.' [1] If there was a timidity about Freda when she enrolled at Oxford, it had been banished by the time she emerged from her years as a student. Her horizons broadened immeasurably and she gained greatly in confidence. Freda made life-long friends at Oxford, engaged in politics for the first time, became absorbed in India and its claim to independence, and within days of finishing her final exams, was married in the city's registry office to a fellow student. It was a romance which broke rules and crossed boundaries and conventions. At the close of her Oxford years, rather than returning to Derby, she headed out with her Indian husband to Berlin, and from there to Lahore, the capital of the still undivided Indian province of Punjab. Oxford was the last chapter of her life in England, and of her English identity. From here on, she was Indian.
Freda arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1929. Her college was, like her school, all girls -- all the Oxford colleges at that time were single sex. Women's colleges had been established from 1879 but women had been able to receive degrees only as recently as 1920. Women students were outnumbered and marginalised, sometimes described patronisingly as 'undergraduettes' and in colleges which tended to be on the fringes of the university district. St Hugh's was the outlier. It's a little over half-a-mile north of the Bodleian Library, but 'Oxford undergraduates cocooned in city-centre colleges generally consider it to be situated somewhere in the vicinity of Dundee.' [2] The college was modern by Oxford standards. It had been established in the 1880s with a handful of students and began moving to its present location off Banbury Road in 1913. It would have still felt new at the time Freda matriculated. St Hugh's was also small, cosy even, at that time admitting fewer than sixty undergraduates a year. And it was 'not so snotty' as other women's colleges and cheaper too, making it 'the college of choice for those who could only just afford to come to Oxford.' [3]
At St Hugh's, Freda promptly became firm friends with two other young women who had also just arrived at the college, both of whom attained considerable fame. Olive Shapley, from a radical and Unitarian middle-class home in south London, went on to be a pioneering broadcaster and presenter of BBC radio's Woman's Hour'; 'a great human,' Freda recalled, 'whose tremendous spirit and humanity and whose love of art endeared her to me.' Barbara Betts, who became better known as Barbara Castle, was born in Chesterfield, not far from Derby, and brought up in the textile city of Bradford in West Yorkshire. Her family were socialists and she went on to be the most prominent British woman politician of her time, a formidable Labour cabinet minister who took on portfolios including employment and industrial relations. Barbara 'brought with her the flavour of the north of England that I was brought up in,' said Freda. All three engaged in left-wing politics while at Oxford, though in different fashion and degree -- but the strongest bond between them was that they stood out from the conventional, public school-educated girls who then constituted a large part of the college intake. Although the women's colleges were not quite as upper crust as the men's, it was still a forbidding atmosphere for middle-class youngsters from the provinces. 'Many grammar school girls recall feeling like outsiders at St Hugh's,' according to a historian of the college. 'They lacked the manners, conventions and sense of entitlement exhibited by a small but influential group of students from the top public schools.' [4]
All these friendships stood the test of time and of Freda's personal and spiritual journeys. Forty years after their Oxford days, Barbara Castle entertained her old friend to lunch at Westminster. 'She sailed into the House of Commons dining room in her flowing Buddhist robe, serenely indifferent to the covert stares at her shaven head.' [5] Olive Shapley took her two sons with her to visit Freda at a monastery in Sikkim. There were other St Hugh's friendships that persisted over the decades. Pam Bourne was in the next room to Freda at college, and gained renown as an ocean-going sailor -- she later moved to South Africa, and Freda met her again when visiting the country as a Buddhist nun. Olive Chandler was, said Freda, 'my good conscience' -- they wrote to each other over almost half-a-century, and it was Olive, a civil servant, who wrote her obituary for the college magazine. Freda certainly had the gift of making and keeping friends.
She had another gift, her good looks -- tall and slim, her fair hair often done up in twin buns over the ears, with a round and innocent-looking face and blue-grey eyes. 'She was strikingly beautiful,' Olive Shapley recalled, 'and was sometimes referred to by the other undergraduates as "the Mona Lisa".' [6] Barbara Castle also found Freda to be 'strikingly attractive' while adding that she 'was not as light-hearted as Olive and I were, alternating between bursts of gaiety and moods of deep and almost sombre seriousness.' [7] Freda was not a natural rebel in the way that Olive and Barbara were, but she too chafed at the restrictions endured by St Hugh's students which were, even by the standards of the day, petty and onerous- - especially when it came to men. 'There was not much to distinguish the social life of women undergraduates at that time from that of the pupils of the genteel boarding schools which a lot of them had just left,' Olive Shapley commented waspishly -- she said that 'chaperone rules' meant that the only way a St Hugh's student could meet a man alone was to have tea very publicly in a tea shop.
A walk in a park, a punting expedition, a ride in a car or a meal in a restaurant were all regarded as highly suspect activities, and heavily penalised. You could go to a men's college for afternoon tea, but only in pairs. You could entertain a gentleman yourself for tea in your room, but also of course with a college friend there. For this you also had to drag your bed out into the corridor, a task which often required the help of your male guest and was guaranteed to cause hilarity if not acute embarrassment! [8]
All three women on occasions flouted the rules, though only Freda -- probably the least habitual transgressor -- got into serious trouble as a result.
'I think what first attracted Olive and Freda to me when I arrived at St Hugh's was my campaign for sexual enlightenment,' Barbara Castle recorded with customary mischief. Her own and fellow students' knowledge of what was coyly termed the facts-of-life was limited. By Barbara's own account, she organised a whip round in the students' common room, raising the six shillings to send off for a book entitled Planned Parenthood. 'Explicit and illustrated with diagrams, it became one of the most thumbed books in the college, but the revelations did not immediately precipitate me into a life of sin. My knowledge of sex remained second-hand.' [9] One of Barbara Castle's biographers has suggested that in her first few terms at Oxford, her passions may have been directed (probably in a fairly chaste manner) towards other women, Freda among them. [10] Crushes of this sort were not unusual. Castle included in her autobiography a rather grainy photograph of her and Freda in a punt on the river at Oxford, reclining and gazing into each other's eyes -- as much a pose as a statement of attachment but an indication of their closeness all the same. Olive Shapley got a little more of the action. She visited Barbara in the summer and discretely spent the night with Barbara's brother. The following day she travelled on the train to London with Barbara. 'Somewhere just before Stockport I suddenly thought, "I am no longer a virgin!" Barbara leaned across the railway carriage, tapped my knee and said, "And you can take that silly smile off your face."' [11]
As a fresher, Freda was determined to make the most of Oxford. She became her year's representative on The Imp, the college magazine, and both wrote for it and featured in it --
When Socrates bore / Down upon F--- H---,
She vanquished him clean / With 'what quite do you mean?'
-- a snatch of student doggerel which suggests that her college contemporaries found her both bold and questioning. [12] 'I joined just about every society one could imagine, from the League of Nations society to the ornithological club,' she recalled. 'I listened to Bach in the college chapels; I went to Holy Communion; I went to Manchester College, a Unitarian college; I listened to Tagore; and to Dr Radhakrishnan when he first came with his magnificent lectures on Eastern philosophy.' [13]
Through the League of Nations, where the influence of the Milner Group was very great, the RIIA was able to extend its intellectual influence into countries outside the Commonwealth. This was done, for example, through the Intellectual Cooperation Organization of the League of Nations. This Organization consisted of two chief parts: (a) The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory body; and (b) The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, an executive organ of the Committee, with headquarters in Paris. ... Its director was always a Frenchman, but its deputy director and guiding spirit was Alfred Zimmern from 1926 to 1930. ....
It is interesting to note that from 1931 to 1939 the Indian representative on the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In 1931 he was George V Professor of Philosophy at Calcutta University. His subsequent career is interesting. He was knighted in 1931, became Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford in 1936, and became a Fellow of All Souls in 1944.
Beginning in 1928 at Berlin, Professor Zimmern organized annual round-table discussion meetings under the auspices of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. These were called the International Studies Conferences and devoted themselves to an effort to obtain different national points of view on international problems.
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
These recordings made towards the end of her life also demonstrate another legacy of her college years: if she ever had a Derby accent then, by accident or design, it disappeared; her precise and clipped voice bore an Oxford cadence. The same can be said of Olive Shapley -- a manicured Oxford accent with no echo at all of south London. Only Barbara Castle retained a regional accent, perhaps because she reaped a political dividend from it.
Both Freda's close friends at St Hugh's remembered her as having a spiritual aspect. Olive Shapley described her as 'a romantic and an Anglo-Catholic and very interested in religion; I can remember her reading the lives of the saints and the mystics.' [14] She also had a telling memory of an early encounter of all three women:
During the first walk that the three of us took together in the University Parks, we were passing some poplars and Freda said. 'How lovely they are without their leaves. The boughs look like the hair of some Botticelli angel.' Barbara stopped dead in her tracks, looked at her and said, 'My God, what a damnably silly thing to say. I hope you're not going to go on like this all the time!' [15]
But the spiritual and the aesthetic was not the defining aspect of Freda's time at Oxford. By her own account, she regarded herself as a seeker but no longer a Christian. She never returned to the religion of her birth. As a student, she was more absorbed by politics and above all by India and the man who introduced her to the country and its cause.
Freda relished the camaraderie of college life. We talked endlessly, mainly between nine and midnight over large cups of cocoa or Bourneville made in the College pantries. Everything from socialism to Karl Marx, Proust, D.H. Lawrence, the family, to the new fields of Birth Control and travel were the subjects of conversation.' [16] Initially, she worked hard -- the 'first year was one of study,' she recounted. But her enthusiasm for the course waned. 'Suddenly, I couldn't be bothered ... I could speak French fluently already. I wanted to learn other languages, to understand the world.' She was also concerned about what a modern languages degree would point her towards: 'It was the flash of understanding which showed me French could only lead me to becoming a teacher or lecturer. And I passionately did not want to go back into the world of childhood that being a teacher meant.' She was closing in on what she did wish to pursue as a career. 'My eyes were on journalism, writing [and] interpreting that incredible international adult world that poured into magazine and newspaper.' She even met the editor of the Derby Daily Telegraph who promised her an opening once she had her degree, but she never went back to her home city. She did eventually carve out a reputation as a journalist, and demonstrated curiosity and social concern as well as the ability to communicate, but only after several years in the line of work she had been so keen to avoid: teaching and lecturing.
Freda followed her friend Barbara Castle's example and switched from French to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), also known at that time as 'Modern Greats'. It may have been more congenial but she didn't shine academically. Freda's tutors' reports paint a picture of a diligent student, but one who found the transition from being the outstanding pupil in a small secondary school to the more exacting environment of Oxford rather daunting. There were a few positive remarks about her work, particularly in her optional subject of international relations. Some dons commented on her accomplished writing style, and one found her essays 'always stimulating and intelligent'. The chorus of misgivings, however, swelled towards the end of her university career: 'Still rather weak and slow'; 'has hardly found her feet in the subject'; 'still finding difficulty in marshalling her facts'; and most woundingly, 'she has great difficulty recognising the relevant parts of an argument'. Freda emerged from St Hugh's with third-class honours, not quite as damning a statement of mediocrity then as it would be now, but clearly not the degree she hoped for. Neither Barbara nor Olive fared any better; all three women got thirds. [17]
The only substantial published account that Freda has left of the University, written during her last year for the Calcutta Review, pointed to what must have been a personal grievance, the disparity between wealthy and entitled students and those with much more limited resources. 'The undergraduate of little or no money of his own has entered into the preserves of the rich and fortunate. Quite a considerable number of the men now -- even a larger portion of the women (about 75%) who have stiffer competition for entrance -- are students only because of State, School or College scholarships. There is bound to be a change of outlook: a more practical view of education.' She made clear that such a practical perspective needed to take account of the increasingly threatening international situation and the political and economic turbulence at home:
Oxford -- any university -- is a community of young people, not a beehive of book students. The Oxford of today which refuses to be lured by the calm of mellow buildings is going to be of far greater use to the future than the scholastically inclined students of the past. When Gandhi fasts in India, when Manchuria is a scene of conflict, when disarmament is having a hard struggle to survive, and the unemployed, reaching alarming proportion, march footsore and hungry into the town -- is it any wonder that the 'dreaming spires' are of minor importance? The problems facing the world today are so great that there is little time for dreaming even in Oxford. [18]
This was not simply an observation; it was the quiet declaration of a personal agenda.
Freda relished Oxford's internationalism, reflected above all in the students who gathered in the home of Alfred Zimmern, the University's first professor of international relations who played a part in the founding of the League of Nations (and also, though Freda doesn't mention this, an active supporter of the Labour Party). 'A Pole argues with a German -- Madame Zimmern who gathers the circle together is herself a Frenchwoman. Indians talk with Americans, a Chinese butts in, an English girl and an Italian pick up the thread of conversation ... A Chinese educationalist, a Jugo-Slav, and a Pole are among the latest speakers. Everyone criticises, suggests, tries to understand and appreciate. The informal circle round the fireplace is never still.' The gates of the world had not simply opened for Freda; she had ventured through enthusiastically. By the time she wrote this account, she had embarked on a relationship which also crossed boundaries -- of religion, race and nationality -- and which was to change her life utterly.
Curtis and his friends stayed in Canada for four months. Then Curtis returned to South Africa for the closing session of the Transvaal Legislative Council, of which he was a member. He there drafted a memorandum on the whole question of imperial relations, and, on the day that the Union of South Africa came into existence, he sailed to New Zealand to set up study groups to examine the question. These groups became the Round Table Groups of New Zealand. (2)
The memorandum was printed with blank sheets for written comments opposite the text. Each student was to note his criticisms on these blank pages. Then they were to meet in their study groups to discuss these comments, in the hope of being able to draw up joint reports, or at least majority and minority reports, on their conclusions. These reports were to be sent to Curtis, who was to compile a comprehensive report on the whole imperial problem. This comprehensive report would then be submitted to the groups in the same fashion and the resulting comments used as a basis for a final report.
Five study groups of this type were set up in New Zealand, and then five more in Australia. (3) The decision was made to do the same thing in Canada and in England, and this was done by Curtis, Kerr, and apparently Dove during 1910.
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
Baba Pyare Lal Bedi was the love of Freda's life. The romance was strengthened by the common causes they championed and their intellectual collaboration, but it was above all a love story. There is nothing to suggest that Freda had any other boyfriend. Her own account of how she met her husband is both poetic and charming. It may well be not so much as she remembered it as how she wanted their relationship to be remembered. 'My destiny was to go to India,' she confided. 'How it happened that I married an Indian, how it happened that I began to meet Indians, I really don't know. They were just part of the Oxford scene.'
The Foreign Office in its topmost ranks was held by the Cecil Bloc, with Balfour as Secretary of State (1916-1919), followed by Curzon (1919-1924).... In Washington, Balfour had as deputy chairman to the mission R. H. Brand. In London, as we have seen, Robert Cecil was Parliamentary Under Secretary and later Assistant Secretary. In the Political Intelligence Department, Alfred Zimmern was the chief figure.
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
The Political Intelligence Department (1918–1920) was a department of the British Foreign Office created towards the end of World War I. It was created on 11 March 1918 by Permanent Under-Secretary Lord Hardinge. It gathered political, economic, and military conditions in both allied and enemy countries and prepared reports for the cabinet, the Foreign Office, and other departments. The director of the department was William Tyrrell, with James Headlam-Morley serving as assistant director. Most of the staff were drawn from the Department of Information's Intelligence Bureau, including historians Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Namier, and Alfred Zimmern.
-- Political Intelligence Department (1918–1920), by Wikipedia
In the recordings made in her son's home in Calcutta the year before she died, Freda spoke lyrically about how she first met B.P.L. Bedi, outside one of the University's main lecture halls:
I was always known for being a little late. But one morning -- for some reason known only to the cosmos -- I was twenty minutes early. And that morning too, for some reason, B.P.L. was also twenty minutes early. And I thought to myself, well, I think I'd better say good morning to him or say something inconsequential because, after all, he'll think that I'm snubbing him because he's an Indian student and I shouldn't do that. So I said 'good morning' and made some remark about the day's news -- and he said 'good morning' and also made some remark or said yes or no or something like that. And that was all. [19]
Bedi realised that he had been boorish, and to make amends he sent Freda a note asking her to tea in his college room.
I was quite surprised to receive the invitation. And college rules were such in those days that I had to take with me a chaperone -- you were not allowed to go alone to the room of the men students . . .. But we found him warm and interesting, a very interesting mind, and of course knowing each other over a cup of tea made us friendly and we used to meet at the Majlis, the Indian club, and we used to meet at lectures and so on, so I got to know him quite well.
After a while, they started sharing a simple lunch in Bedi's room. He was at this time a vegetarian, and they would eat fruit and bread or whatever he cooked up on his stove.
We became very good friends, very good companions, and slowly I didn't bring with me any chaperone; I used to go to his room without a chaperone. Now this was done by practically all the students in the university because this chaperone rule was obviously nonsense, and people just didn't take chaperones. But in my case, because I was a white English student and he was a brown Indian student, the gatekeeper of the college reported against us, that I was going to his room without a chaperone. And I had to suffer the indignity of being sent down from Oxford for a week or two at the end of term. Nothing very serious but it brought me up against the question of racial discrimination.
This first-hand experience of racism was a defining moment. She could either back off, and accept that this was a border better not traversed, or she could make a point of challenging the prejudice she encountered.
St Hugh's college records for 1932 confirm that Freda was disciplined, though with no details of her alleged offence. 'Miss Houlston had been rusticated for the last week of the Hilary [spring] term for a breach of University and College discipline,' the Tutorial Committee recorded; 'this had been reported to the Derbyshire Education Committee.' The punishment was not severe but it must have been deeply humiliating. Rather than derailing the relationship, Freda recalled that it strengthened the bond between them. 'It was really the suffering that I had to undergo, going down early, and that he had to undergo, realising that he'd been the cause of it, that brought us closer together.' Barbara Castle set down her own account of how Freda and Baba became a couple. 'They decided to write a book together ... and most afternoons she went openly to his room in Hertford [College] to work on it with him. An officious porter reported them. She had committed a heinous offence and was rusticated [suspended] ... as a punishment. But she was a girl of spirit and was not going to be brow-beaten. On her return she resumed her visits to Bedi, in the digs outside college to which he had been moved, only this time she decided to give the disciplinarians their money's worth and started an affair with him.' [20]
The greater interruption to Freda's studies at Oxford was caused by a collapse in her health. College records show that she 'went down due to illness' in March 1931 (that's before she met Bedi) -- though it's not clear for how long. The recollection of her friends is that she later had to take time out from her studies as a direct consequence of her relationship with Bedi, or more particularly the disapproving reaction that ensued. 'Her mother, her friends and her college were all opposed to the match,' Olive Shapley wrote. 'She became ill and had a nervous breakdown, and was later admitted to a mental hospital. Barbara and I, still flouting the bigotries of the period, stuck by Freda and did all we could to see her through her illness.' [21] Often in her life, Freda took the road less travelled -- indeed there was almost a contrariness about her -- but it was at a considerable personal cost.
B.P.L. Bedi was a Sikh, though he didn't wear a turban, and two years older than Freda. He was handsome and well-built, jovial and outgoing. He had been all-India champion at throwing the hammer and a wrestler, and he continued to be a sportsman at Oxford. Bedi was, by his own account, from a well-off, feudal-style family and bore the distinction of being a direct descendant of the religion's first guru. His home village of Dera Baba Nanak, on the banks of the river Ravi and now just yards on India's side of the international boundary that Partition drove through Punjab, has a particularly honoured place in the annals of Sikhism. His father, who had died in his mid-thirties a few years before his younger son went to study overseas, was a magistrate and had land in the village. Bedi studied at Government College, Lahore, and while not then particularly active in politics, he read Gandhi's newspaper Young India regularly and absorbed the increased nationalist and anti-British sentiment evident at that time. After getting a degree in Punjab, Bedi enrolled at Hertford College, Oxford, in October 1931 to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was following in the footsteps of his older brother in preparing for the hugely competitive Indian Civil Service exams. While his brother was successful, B.P.L. quickly decided that he had no intention of becoming part of India's administrative elite, a decision which disappointed his family and marked a decisive break with the bulk of India's England-returned establishment.
By the time Freda reached St Hugh's, there were approaching 2,000 Indian students in Britain -- but only forty-two were at Oxford. 'There were very few of them,' Olive Shapley remarked, and 'mostly rich.' [22] In spite of the modest numbers, Indian students were prominent, not least in the elite Oxford Union debating society, at this time a male preserve. Dosoo Karaka, a Parsee from Bombay, was elected the first Indian president of the Oxford Union in November 1933. Indian students may have been largely from their country's elite, but they were not immune from discrimination. Karaka made his career in journalism, and in what he called his first newspaper article of any consequence, he wrote that 'even Oxford is not free from the Colour Bar. No doubt there is a generation of Englishmen now "up" at Oxford which realises the unfairness of such prejudices. Yet there are still some among them, brought up in the old school of thought, who cannot regard their fellow-undergraduates from among the coloured races as their equals. Somehow they are instinctively aware of colour in a man.' [23]