So, here’s John Archer (extreme right in the photo), my cousin John, twin of Bryan, receiving in Oxford Town Hall, from the Lord Mayor of Oxford, and the Lady Mayoress, with John’s wife Grace (extreme left in photo).
Because John’s father, Arthur Archer, married (in 1924) 12 years before his brother Fred my father married, John and his siblings were born long before us (me and Michael and Edward, their cousins), so John, though not the youngest of his siblings, was born 11 years before me, and thus was almost a generation older than me, and was almost unknown to me, except when we worked together on the vans at Archer Cowley & Co, in my school summer holidays. The age difference may also not be unrelated to the fact that Arthur Archer and his wife Rosie (as they said in their Golden Wedding piece in the Oxford Mail in the 1970s) did not "seek permission" to marry, but just went off and got married anyway. So characteristic of Uncle Arthur - and so uncharacteristic of his brother Fred!
But, here, John is doing the ‘right thing’ by the family in a formal way, and as his grandpa William wished, and becoming a freeman of the City. This gives him, as was needed in former centuries, the right to trade in the city, though now it is much more of a merely formal role. Though one wonderful thing that the Freemen of Oxford do certainly do is look after Port Meadow, and patrol it and make sure that it is not violated in any way. John was living in Australia in the 1950s when he became a freeman, and came over specially to do so. His sister-in-law Rosemarie, Roland’s wife well-recollected this colourful event, when we were catching-up on family history on 29th June 2015. My impression is that John was very much a chip off his father Arthur’s colurful block in terms of his life story. John and Grace’s daughter Linda died in March 2015. I assume that Linda and her sisters Jeanette and Sandra were all born in and live/lived in Australia. More information needed.