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:
“I duly acknowledge that I have gone through a long life, with fewer circumstances of affliction than are the lot of most men. Uninterrupted health, a competence for every reasonable want, usefulness to my fellow-citizens, a good portion of their esteem, no complaint against the world which has sufficiently honored me, and above all, a family which has blessed me by their affections, and never by their conduct given me a moment’s pain.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)