At the age of 20 Stephen Freer was recruited as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park straight from university in what he described as “a rather unorthodox way”. In fact there was nothing orthodox about the assembling of that remarkable group of individuals who worked at Bletchley, and would turn the course of the Second World War.
That Freer was a scholar with a brilliant and original mind may have explained why he stood out, but it was by chance, after he had failed his army medical, that he was brought to the attention of MI6. A friend of an uncle knew the chief personnel officer at the agency and suggested he might be interested in a young man who had won the top scholarship to Eton, and another at Cambridge, where he was reading classics.
At an interview in London in 1940, Freer was told, “in strict confidence” that the job was in naval intelligence and had to do with breaking the enemy’s codes and cyphers. Later, he was summoned to an interview in Oxford. He missed his train, had no time to change, and turned up in an old jacket and grey flannel trousers to find himself being questioned by Commander Alastair Denniston, head of the Government Code and Cypher School, and founder of Bletchley Park. Denniston had already brought in brilliant men like Alan Turing, who cracked the German Enigma code.
Denniston asked Freer whether he was “air-minded” — interested in planes — to which he replied, “Not at all,” and then if he did crosswords, to which the answer was that he hated them. Far from falling down on these obvious qualifications, he was immediately offered a job by Denniston, who was impressed by his frankness.
Training in London was eventually followed by assignment to Bletchley Park, where Freer worked under Gerry Morgan, the head of the research section, using the Hagelin machine to crack ciphers from the Italian navy, which was supplying the Germans in north Africa. “Every now and then, after we had deciphered a message about a convoy from Naples, a few days later we would read in the paper that a convoy had been bombed on its way to north Africa, and we thought we had achieved something there,” he said recently.
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Freer also worked with William Tutte, who gained fame as the solver of the “Tunny” cipher, which was used by Hitler to communicate with his generals.
In early 1942 Freer followed Denniston, who had been replaced at Bletchley Park by Edward Travis, to London. The research operation moved to an old hat shop in Berkeley Street, where the hats were still in store, and incoming traffic was received and noted down by two women who had started as telegraph clerks in the reign of Queen Victoria. Freer was attached to the Japanese section, where he found a way of decoding diplomatic messages sent from Germany and Italy, despite knowing no Japanese. The team did so without machines, establishing word patterns, and noting recurring differences that let them decipher messages, which were passed to translators.
Stephen Drake Freer was born at Little Compton, Warwickshire, in 1920. His father, Reginald Charles Freer, was a retired army officer. His mother, Mina Kindersley, was the daughter of an Eton housemaster. Stephen and his two brothers grew up in an intellectual household. His mother insisted that they had cold baths every morning. Stephen became a fearless rider who hunted with the Heythrop hounds.
His love of languages was soon apparent. Aged 12 he wrote a Greek grammar for his younger brother, Tom, which was far better than the one provided by their prep school, Scaitcliffe. In due course he went to Eton, which he enjoyed, and was at Trinity College, Cambridge when war broke out.
The strain of his wartime work exacted a toll on his health, and it took him some time to settle into civilian life. He then found congenial work with the Historical Manuscript Commission, much of it in the libraries and archives of country houses, and in the Bodleian Library, where he worked on medieval manuscripts with two great scholars, Richard Hunt and Bill Hassall.
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His extraordinary memory meant that he never forgot a date or a detail discovered during his research. In 1996 the Oxford University Press published his translation of Thomas Wharton’s Adenographia published in Latin in 1656, which was the first European treatise to describe glands as a separate organ system. This was followed in 2007 by his translation of Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica, and his Musa Cliffortiana (1736), which reveals the mysteries of the reproductive system of the banana. These translations gained international interest and led to new friendships with, for instance, Professor Staffan Müller-Wille of the University of Lübeck, whose tribute was read at Freer’s funeral. As the professor pointed out, although Stephen was a man of few words, Latin words were not dead for him, but teemed with eternal life.
In 1974 Freer had married Frederica Dennis, the daughter of the novelist and playwright Nigel Dennis. Their daughter, Isabel, known as Zazie, now works in films. At Freer’s 97th birthday party he announced Zazie’s engagement to Christy Hawkins, a young intellectual after his own heart.
Although he became frail, Freer’s mind remained sharp, and, having overcome his earlier aversion, he enjoyed the Times Latin crosswords. A man of deep faith, he was a Church of England lay reader. His sermons will be remembered for their succinct explanations of such theological problems as the Nestorian heresy. He was buried at Chastleton, where his mother once played the organ, and it was more than appropriate that the last journey of a classical scholar should be along the Roman road, the Fosse Way, which leads from Cirencester — the Roman Corinium — towards Chastleton.
Stephen Freer, codebreaker and classical scholar, was born on February 18, 1920. He died on April 26, 2017, aged 97