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 and, family, early and/or career:
“O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food—”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)
“The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)