Rapist Freud had child with nanny aged 17
SIR Clement Freud fathered a secret love child with his family’s teenage nanny, a relative of the girl said yesterday.
The child-abusing former Liberal MP got the 17-year-old pregnant after she was hired to look after his young daughter Nicola.
It is unknown if he raped the nanny, Barbara, who was sent to a home for unmarried mothers. Her baby girl was born in 1957. The teenager’s cousin described yesterday how it ‘made her flesh creep’ to hear Freud’s voice on the radio in later years knowing what he had done.
Barbara named her daughter Christine and gave her up for adoption. Christine would now be 59, and a half- sibling to Freud’s children with his actress wife Jill who include PR executive Matthew, 52, and television presenter Emma, 54.
It is possible Christine was given a new adoptive name and has no idea she is connected to the former BBC Radio 4 Just A Minute star – unmasked in June as a predatory child abuser, seven years after his death. But a cousin of Barbara, who grew up with her and knew her dark secret, told the Daily Mail last night: ‘As one of the few members of the family in the know, listening to Freud on the radio on Just A Minute made my flesh creep.
‘Barbara’s parents disowned her for a time so she kept as quiet about it as possible with her immediate family, who never talked about it.
‘He behaved abominably. Every time we saw his face on television you had to pinch yourself to realise what this genial and charming socalled gentleman was really like.’
Freud was hailed a ‘national treasure’ by Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009 when he died aged 84, but a string of women have since come forward to say he raped or attempted to rape them as teenagers. Many of the attacks took place when he was a Liberal MP, sharing a House of Commons office with Sir Cyril Smith, also since exposed as a paedophile.
In June, Sylvia Woosley, 78, told an ITV documentary how Freud groomed her from the age of ten. She went to live with the Freuds in their family home in St John’s Wood, London – once even being invited into the marital bed with his wife – and remembered a nanny saying ‘something strange’. She told the programme: ‘ She asked whether having a bath with a man can make you pregnant. People were more innocent in those days.’
Barbara’s parents were ‘strict, moral and working class’, said her cousin, and when they discovered she was pregnant they disowned her and forbade her to return to their Essex home.
Barbara turned for support to her mother’s sister, who lived near London. According to the cousin, Freud first planned to deal with the inconvenience of the pregnancy by ‘marrying off’ the nanny, arranging for her to travel by train to Manchester to meet a man who would become her husband and care for her and the child.
But the man failed to turn up so Barbara returned to London and Freud initiated ‘ Plan B’. This involved having the baby adopted, which the cousin recalled was arranged via some sort of charitable organisation that in the 1950s helped unmarried mothers.
After the adoption Barbara moved into the aunt’s home and is remembered as being ‘a very attractive and vivacious teenager who loved pop music’. She subsequently married and had two children.
Barbara – whose full name is not being disclosed – died three years ago, aged 74. Her husband is also believed to be dead.
Freud’s widow, Lady Freud, 89, has said she is ‘profoundly sorry’ for what her husband of 58 years did to his victims, but has issued no further statements. The Freud family were unavailable for comment yesterday.
Listening to him on the radio on Just A Minute made my flesh creep Surviving cousin of nanny Barbara, who died in 2013 ‘He behaved abominably’