Family and Early Career
Geoffrey de Freitas was the son of Sir Anthony and Lady (Edith) de Freitas. Sir Anthony was Chief Justice of St. Vincent in Geoffrey's youth, and later of British Guiana, having held a variety of legal and administrative posts in the British West Indies.
After boarding school at Haileybury in England, de Freitas went to his father's old college: Clare College, Cambridge, where he was a successful student and athlete, and was president of the Cambridge Union for a term.
Two years at Yale followed, with a Mellon Fellowship in international law, and in 1936 on the voyage home he met his future wife, Helen Graham Bell, a Bryn Mawr graduate and daughter of Laird Bell, a prominent Chicago lawyer and Democrat.
In 1938 they married, and lived in London where de Freitas was pursuing a career as a barrister, gaining political experience as a Labour councillor in Shoreditch, and co-leading a boys' club in Hoxton. During the war he became a Squadron Leader, but returned to politics in 1945, the family living at Loughton and then Cambridge.
Read more about this topic: Geoffrey De Freitas
Famous quotes containing the words family, early and/or career:
“One banquet in a rich family could feed a poor man’s family for half a year.”
—Chinese proverb.
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)