Born in London on 29 May 1872, fourth son of the Very Rev the Hon William Henry Fremantle, Dean of Ripon, and Isabella, his wife, daughter of Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet, the religious philanthropist (for whom see *DNB*). The Dean was the second son of Thomas Francis Fremantle, 1st Lord Cottesloe (see *DNB*), who had been Secretary of War in 1844, and grandson of Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Francis Fremantle, GCB (see *DNB*), who commanded HMS *Neptune* at Trafalgar. Francis Fremantle was educated in College at Eton (King's Scholar 1886 election) and at Balliol College, Oxford, 1891-94, where he distinguished himself as an athlete and took second-class honours in physiology. He entered Guy's Hospital Medical School in 1895, qualified in 1897, and served as house physician under George Newton Pitt, MD, FRCP. In 1942 he was elected a Governor of the Hospital. During the Boer war he volunteered for active service in South Africa as a civil surgeon with the field force. He sent home to *Guy's Hospital Gazette*, which he had edited, trenchant letters on the medical administration of the army. On his return to England he published *Impressions of a doctor in khaki*, 1901, and was appointed assistant secretary to the Departmental Committee on the reorganization of the Army Medical Service. In 1902 he became Medical Officer of Health for Hertfordshire, where he had landed interests and subsequently inherited his mother's property of Bedwell Park, Hatfield; and in 1908 he became also Chief School Medical Officer for the county. In 1903, however, after taking the FRCS and the MCh, he went to India as Plague Medical Officer in the Punjab, and in 1904 was special correspondent of *The Lancet* at the Russo-Japanese war. He held a commission dated 1902 as surgeon-captain in the Herts Yeomanry and took a prominent part in the public life of the county. In 1906 he was adopted as prospective unionist candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Rotherhithe, but at the general election of 1910 was disqualified, as a public servant; this disability was later removed from Medical Officers of Health. He resigned the post of Medical Officer of Health in 1916 and was appointed Consulting Medical Officer of Health for Hertfordshire. In 1919 he was elected Conservative MP for St Albans, and was re-elected at subsequent general elections, for the last time in 1935 with a two to one majority of 17,510 votes. Meanwhile he again saw active service in the first world war, as DADMS (Sanitary) in Gallipoli, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and was mentioned in despatches; he was created OBE in the birthday honours ("peace list") in 1919. He was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Hertfordshire in 1926, and was created a Knight Bachelor in 1932. He was a Justice of the Peace and held the Territorial Decoration. Fremantle took a full share of public and professional duties, inside and outside Parliament. He was elected FRCP in 1910 and served on the Council 1930-32. In 1920 he was president of the Incorporated Society of Medical Officers of Health, and in 1928 of the section of epidemiology and state medicine at the Royal Society of Medicine, and he was a vice-president of the Royal Sanitary Institute 1933-43. He was also a strong supporter of the Institute of District Nurses. He delivered the Jenner Lecture at Guy's Hospital, and examined for some years in public health for the final Oxford MB. He also took an active part in the work of the British Empire Cancer Campaign, the National Institute for the Deaf, the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association, the British Social Hygiene Council, and the Central Association for Mental Welfare. He served on the Central Medical War Committee and as chairman of its aliens' sub-committee did much for the benefit of refugee medical men during the Hitlerite terror in Europe. He was a promoter of the London School of Hygiene, and a member of its first Court of Governors. In the British Medical Association he was vice-president of the section of public health at the Glasgow meeting in 1922, and vice-president of the section of medical sociology at the Belfast meeting in 1937. He served on various special committees, on the Parliamentary sub-committee, and on the Central Emergency Committee at the time of the second world war; gave evidence on behalf of the Association before the Royal Commission on the Insurance Acts in 1924-25, and in 1938 was one of four medical MPs specially invited to address the annual Representative Meeting. From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the London County Council and served as chairman of its housing committee. He was also chairman of the council of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, and a director of Welwyn Garden City. Though personally a Conservative and elected on the party platform, he took an independent and idealistic view of the "doctor's mandate in Parliament" as he called it in his Chadwick lecture of 1936; and held himself to represent the special experience of the medical profession in its knowledge of the nation's health and way of life, with the widest reference to general policy and administration. He liked to think of himself as in the direct tradition of John Somerset, MD, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and personal adviser to King Henry VI, the founder of Eton, forgetting perhaps that Somerset's advice was chiefly astrological. Fremantle spoke and wrote much on public health questions. In 1927 he published two books, constructively critical of current public health policy: *The Housing of the Nation* and *The Health of the Nation*, both with prefaces by Neville Chamberlain, then Minister of Health. He had previously published *A Traveller's study of Health and Empire*, but he was best known by his speeches and his frequent letters to *The Times*. For eighteen years (1925-43) he was chairman of the Unionist Health and Housing Committee, later called the Conservative Social Services Committee, of the House of Commons, and from 1923 he had been chairman of the Parliamentary Medical Committee, whose business lay very near his heart. He was a most assiduous and industrious Member, and one of the few for whom a special table was reserved in the library of the House of Commons. He was a member of Lord Trevethin's Committee on Venereal Diseases in 1923, served on the Industrial Health Research Board 1930-34, on the Departmental Committees on the Rent Restriction Acts in 1923, 1931, and 1937, and on that on the Midwives Act of 1908. He was a member of the Central Housing Committee of the Ministry of Health and of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Nursing Service. He also served on the Select Committee on Publications and House of Commons Debate Reports. He endeared himself to the House by occasional "spoonerisms", as when in a debate on birth control he mentioned "the sale of conservatives". In one of his last speeches, on 16 July 1943, he spoke earnestly of the causes and effects of a declining birth-rate. Fremantle was an active Churchman, a member of the St Albans diocesan conference and of the Church Assembly. He addressed the Modern Churchman's Conference at Oxford in the summer of 1943 not long before his death, on "The layman's rights and duties". Fremantle married in 1905 Dorothy Marion Travers, only daughter of Henry Joseph Chinnery, of Frigford Manor, Bicester. Lady Fremantle survived him with one son, Lieutenant-Colonel David Fremantle. He died suddenly at Bedwell Park, Hatfield, on 26 August 1943, aged 71, and was buried at Essendon, Hertfordshire. A memorial service was held in St Albans Abbey. His principal writings are mentioned above.