Clement Freud, Grandson of Sigmund Freud, Dies

Clement Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud who became a well-known writer, politician and urbane regular on British radio, has died. He was 84.

Freud died Wednesday at his home in London, his family said. The cause of death was not announced.

He was best known from his three decades appearing on the BBC game show, "Just a Minute," in which panelists compete to see who can talk the longest without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Freud's well-stocked vocabulary and his slow, deadpan speech made him a master of the game.

"Cheek is when someone of diminished responsibility goes to the British Broadcasting Corp. and elects to be chairman of a panel game on the basis that he might have some idea of how to control people whose multi-syllabic words he doesn't understand, whose meaning he is unable to comprehend," he once said during a typical delivery.

Freud had a testy relationship with his brother, the famed artist Lucian Freud, rooted in childhood suspicions that Lucian was his mother's pet.

Born in Berlin, Clement Raphael Freud came to England with his family in 1933 — "refugees from the Nazis before the habit had caught on," he said.

He knew his grandfather, who died in London in 1939, as a sickly older man with mouth cancer. "But he was to me not famous, but to me a good grandfather in that he didn't forget my birthdays."

Years later, as a member of a parliamentary delegation to China, Freud noticed that a fellow legislator — the grandson and namesake of the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill — was always given better accommodations. "It's the only time I've been out-grandfathered," Freud remarked.

He was educated at the prestigious St. Paul's School in London and then was an apprentice cook at the Dorchester Hotel, where he saw in the New Year of 1942 with 10 portions of Beluga caviar and a bottle of Dom Perignon pilfered from his employer.

"Sat in the store room having the most memorable New Year's Eve meal of my life to date," he recalled.