Campbell’s brutal pursuit of Communists forced Freddie on the run, leaving his girlfriend Ada Shelby behind. Freddie and Ada had been seeing each other in secret, because of his feud with Tommy, and her brothers’ fearsome reputation. While Freddie was gone, Ada realised she was pregnant, and just when Polly was taking her on the train to Cardiff to have her pregnancy terminated, Freddie arrived and proposed. Freddie and Ada married, and then through Polly, Tommy offered them £200 and tickets on a ship to New York. Freddie refused to go and told Tommy that he’d loved Ada since he was twelve and she was nine, and that she loved him back.
Grace Betrays Freddie
Wanted by the police and feuding with Tommy, Freddie was forced to leave town again. On the night Ada went into Labour – the day of John’s wedding to Esme Lee – Tommy agreed a truce until dawn so that Freddie could come and see his new-born child.
However, when Freddie arrived to see Ada and baby Karl, he was immediately carted off by the police. Everybody assumed that Tommy had reneged on his truce and shopped Freddie to Campbell, but he hadn’t. Grace (at that point Grace Burgess, an undercover police operative working at the Garrison to spy on Tommy and his gang) had overheard the men say that Freddie was coming back to see the new baby, and had informed Campbell.
Freddie and Tommy Reunited
“One day, me and Tommy will be on the same side again,” Freddie told Ada, a prediction proved right after Tommy broke Freddie out of police custody by bribing an officer to stage a break-out. Freddie then joined Tommy’s side in the Garrison Lane fight against Billy Kimber’s men, a battle which Ada put a stop to by pushing baby Karl’s pram into the middle of the fight and refusing to move.
Ada, Freddie and Karl (named after Karl Marx) moved to London, but inside two years, he was dead. Freddie died of “pestilence”, which most likely refers to the Influenza that killed millions in the immediate aftermath of WWI.
At Freddie’s funeral, Ada’s Communist beliefs have distanced her from Tommy and she refuses to come home to Birmingham. Like Freddie, she questions Tommy’s politics asking him “Do you know how unfair it is that you’ve got four Bugattis while half the country’s starving?” and declares herself to be neither a Shelby nor a Thorne now, but “free.” She spends the next years yo-yoing back and forth from her family – none of whom is ever really “free” – and in season six, reluctantly steps up to the role of matriarch vacated by Aunt Polly. “It’s a very dangerous world they’re heading into,” explains Rundle, “and Ada has to use everything in her arsenal to try and find a safe way through it.”
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