For half a century or more, Sir Clement Freud and his wife Jill presented a wholesome image of middle-class respectability, radiating a benign pleasure at the successes of their high-achieving family.
Appearances, however, were deceptive. Their marriage of almost 60 years was far from conventional.
Seven years after his death, Sir Clement, once one of the most popular and enduring figures in broadcasting and public life, was unmasked as a serial sexual predator and paedophile who had fathered a secret love-child with his family’s teenage nanny.
As for Lady Freud – whose death aged 98 was announced this week – she, too, had her secrets. In 2001 it was revealed that she’d had a long affair with a teenage boy during the 1970s. Jill was 47 when it began and her lover, Jonathan Self, elder brother of fashionable novelist Will Self, was just 16.
She never publicly commented on Self’s revelations, which were contained in a shocking memoir of his unhappy childhood.
She could not, though, ignore the unsavoury allegations about Clement Freud’s behaviour. There was no protest of his innocence.
Instead, Lady Freud – better known as the actress Jill Raymond – offered an apology to the two women who told an ITV documentary in 2016 they had been groomed and raped by her late husband.
After viewing the programme in advance, she issued a statement saying: ‘This is a very sad day for me. I was married to Clement for 58 years and loved him dearly. I am shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry for what has happened to these women.
Sir Clement Freud (left) pictured with his wife, Lady Jill, celebrating his birthday in 1997
Lady Freud had a long affair with a teenage boy during the 1970s. Jill was 47 when it began and her lover, Jonathan Self, elder brother of novelist Will Self, was just 16
‘I sincerely hope they will now have some peace.’
The disclosures painted Freud as a vicious sex attacker, demolishing his image as a dry, acerbic wit and self-deprecating raconteur, whose funereal voice on Radio 4’s Just A Minute was the one that audiences most wanted to hear.
A cousin of one victim described how it ‘made her flesh creep’ to hear Freud’s voice in later years knowing what he had done.
In many ways Jill Raymond was the perfect foil for Freud.
She had a footnote in the history of children’s literature as the model for Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – and the succeeding six titles in his Chronicles of Narnia – and in her last film role appeared as the Downing Street housekeeper in Love Actually,
written and directed by her future son-in-law Richard Curtis. But it was as the wife of Sir Clement (he was knighted by Mrs Thatcher in 1987) that Jill achieved her widest fame and greatest notoriety.
The couple married in 1950 when Freud, the future broadcaster and Liberal politician, was a chef. She claimed that he never actually proposed and the first she knew of their engagement was on seeing a notice in The Times.
‘He’s a constant surprise, full of mischief,’ she said.
Life in the Freud household was rarely dull. She recalled the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas sleeping, drunk, on their floor one night and, another time, the painter Francis Bacon coming for Christmas dinner.
Her husband’s pursuit of fame was restless, but she was always there to support him as he moved from caterer and journalist to gambler and adventurer.
When he decided to stand as the Liberal candidate in a by-election for the Isle of Ely constituency in 1973, Jill Freud commuted to Cambridgeshire every day to campaign for him while performing in The Dame of Sark for the Oxford Festival in the evenings.
Jill gave up her acting career for many years to bring up her five children, who included Matthew Freud, the PR guru, and the television presenter and broadcaster Emma Freud.
‘I think our children have been lucky because they haven’t just got the highly sensitive, neurotic, hugely intelligent Freud genes, they’ve also got mine,’ she observed.
Clement Freud and Jill Raymond out walking in London following announcement of their engagement
‘I am pretty stable emotionally, you could say boring.’
Publication of Jonathan Self’s autobiography, Self Abuse, in 2001, suggested anything but boredom. Louche maybe, racy even, but certainly not dull.
In it, Self disclosed his schoolboy affair. He referred, coyly, to his married lover as ‘June’ and described the happy family home this woman had created in Suffolk.
It was not long before ‘June’ – which all literary types knew had been Lady Freud’s real name – was identified as Jill Raymond (her stage name), who ran a theatre company from her home on the Suffolk coast near Southwold.
‘I learned an awful lot, for me the experience was all positive… June taught and I learnt,’ wrote Self. ‘She nurtured and I grew. Sometimes with the callous indifference of a teenager, I inadvertently hurt her. I loved June and she loved me.
‘Nevertheless, despite the strength and depth of our feelings for each other, we both understood the impossibility of our situation…
‘There was no question of deceiving June’s husband as they had an “open” marriage.
‘Although [Clement] and I never discussed the subject, he was fully aware with how things stood between his wife and me.
‘Indeed, he treated me as a member of their family, offering me support, advice and even financial assistance. Over time, the two of us developed a lasting and quite separate, if somewhat unconventional, friendship of our own.’
When all this was put to Freud, he was evasive, parrying questions about a so-called open marriage by professing not to know what the term meant while describing Self as a ‘chum’ who had helped celebrate the Freuds’ golden wedding.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Self – known to the Freuds as ‘Joss’ – was keen to protect his seducer from censure.
‘I was very much in love with June,’ he said. ‘If at my age (at the time he was 42) I started dating a 16-year-old girl or heard of some other man who did, I’d be really suspicious.
‘But I’d be very slow to condemn June in this respect. She certainly made the first move, but I wasn’t unenthusiastic. Much is made of any romance where there is a large age difference. But not every relationship conforms to a stereotype.
Jill Raymond and Clement Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the psychologist, photographed after their wedding at St James’s Church in London
‘In the case of June, she was physically very attractive whereas I was gangly and spotty. Furthermore, our relationship lasted a long time.
‘I was drawn to June for many different reasons. I was in love with her in the romantic sense though, obviously, we both knew at the time that this wouldn’t be a “get married and live happily ever after” sort of relationship. She was happy, too – and happiness was in short supply when I was growing up – which made her all the more attractive.’
There were other reasons, he explained. ‘I’d just ended three years in an abusive homosexual relationship and was very worried about being gay. I was quite keen to have relationships with members of the opposite sex.’
Their affair, he said, was accepted by mutual friends and by her family.
‘If anyone thought it unusual, they said nothing to us about it. Of course, one of the difficulties for me was that I felt there was something wrong with me for wanting to be with someone so much older. Also, because it was an impossible situation, there was always a feeling of doom hanging over us.’ The relationship ended only when Self, by now in his early 20s, met his first wife.
But for his mid-life book, the extraordinary affair might have remained secret. Certainly, Lady Freud drew a discreet veil over this highly charged coupling and offered no public explanation.
Was it, perhaps, because of her open marriage that she apparently turned a blind eye to her husband’s depravity?
When they emerged, the details of her husband’s actions were truly shocking. They are no less shocking now.
Freud, who admitted morality ‘was not a tremendously important part of my life’, met 11-year-old Sylvia Woosley and her wayward mother in France in 1948.
Four years later, back in London, Freud became the girl’s unofficial guardian following the break-up of her mother’s marriage and she moved in with him.
By now Freud was supposedly safely married to Jill.
But in her shocking testimony Sylvia described, aged 14, joining the couple for breakfast in their bed. While Jill went to get the breakfast things, she told Sylvia to stay there.
‘I knew what was going to happen,’ she later recounted. ‘I was in my nightdress, and he pulls it up and pulls me against him, touching me and kissing me.’
SIr Clement was unmasked as a serial sexual predator and paedophile who had fathered a secret love-child with his family’s teenage nanny. Pictured: Clement and wife Jill in 1954
Three months after these claims, another Freud family secret was exposed. It was disclosed that Freud had got their 17-year-old nanny, Barbara, pregnant.
She was sent to a home for unmarried mothers and her baby girl, who was born in 1957, was put up for adoption. A relative of Barbara said Freud had ‘behaved abominably. Every time you saw his face on television you had to pinch yourself to realise what this genial and charming so-called gentleman was really like’.
The disclosures, however, led to Lady Freud’s earlier amorous exploits being raked over, which some saw as a cruel act of disapproval for a woman who had once been described by CS Lewis as ‘without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known’.
She was born June Flewett in London in 1927, the second of three daughters of a classics master at St Paul’s School.
On the outbreak of war in 1939 she was evacuated to Oxford where she was later offered accommodation at the Kilns, CS Lewis’s home, where she worked as a domestic help.
A devotee of Lewis’s religious writings, she realised only after she had been in residence for two weeks that ‘Jack’ Lewis, as he was known, was in fact her literary hero.
She developed a ‘tremendous crush’ on the writer, who took her to tea with fellow writer JRR Tolkien and scientist Alexander Fleming at a time when penicillin was first being developed.
Determined to be an actress, June won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), but she repeatedly deferred it until Lewis reluctantly told her that she had to leave and pursue her ambitions. He paid her fees. Although Lewis sent her a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when it was published in 1950, she did not identify herself with its young heroine, Lucy Pevensie, until in old age she was informed by Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham: ‘I suppose you know you are the prototype for Lucy?’
After Rada, she made her screen debut alongside Jean Simmons.
The production company promoted June as a promising starlet and organised a competition to find her a more stylish name: Jill Raymond was the winning entry.
She became a leading stage actress appearing as Michael Redgrave’s daughter in The Father. A newspaper reported her wedding to Freud under the headline ‘West End star marries cook’. Jill gave up acting not long afterwards, although she had a part-time job in the long-running BBC radio serial, Mrs Dale’s Diary.
In later years, she returned to her theatre roots through the non-profit summer repertory company she established in Suffolk, which was financially supported by screen star Peter O’Toole.
Jill attributed her long life to keeping busy and eating the same lunch every day: A glass of red wine and a packet of crisps.
By the time of her death, the scandal of her husband’s wicked behaviour might just have started to fade.
Jill’s daughter Emma posted that her mother’s final evening was spent ‘surrounded by children, grandchildren and pizza [before] she eventually told us all to f*** off so she could go to sleep’.
