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Rebel With a Cause

The Corbyns could trace their roots in England back to the eighteenth century and beyond. Farmers, priests, a tailor, a chemist and a solicitor conformed to a traditional middle-class background which in 1915 produced David Corbyn. David met his future wife Naomi Josling in 1936, at a meeting about the Spanish Civil War, when both were twenty-one-year-old students at London University. Naomi was studying science.

On 4 October that year Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, organised a march through London’s East End to assert his power. Met with fierce opposition by socialists and local inhabitants, the ensuing ‘Battle of Cable Street’ entered folklore, especially among British Jews, as an example of their resilience. According to Jeremy Corbyn, David and Naomi’s fourth son, both his parents were present at the famous confrontation, in which 175 people were injured. Those who later met his parents have cast considerable doubt on this claim. Similarly, Corbyn would boast that his father considered volunteering to fight in Spain, but that is also unlikely. Neither parent was an adventurer: rather they were hard-working, intelligent professionals. Their son, it appears, added Cable Street and the Spanish Civil War to their life stories to camouflage his comfortable middle-class roots.

David Corbyn, a skilled engineer, was employed by Westinghouse Brake & Signal Co., a British manufacturer of electrical devices used by the railways. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, his then employers, English Electric, moved their factory to the West Country, to avoid German bombs. The family settled in Chippenham, a historic market town between Bristol and Swindon. David’s income increased, and he was able to buy a large stone house surrounded by a garden, fields and woods in Kington St Michael, a village three miles north of the town. In that pleasant environment, Corbyn’s three older brothers were born – David, Andrew and Piers. All of them were clearly intelligent: David would become an electrical engineer and Andrew a mining engineer, while Piers pursued his childhood hobby to become an acknowledged weather expert.

By the time Jeremy was born, on 26 May 1949, the Corbyns owned a car, an unusual luxury in the immediate post-war years, but the whole family dressed scruffily, and were renowned for their unconventional lifestyle, not least because in a Tory area both parents were members of the local Labour Party. In that era there was nothing unusual in socialists sending their children to private primary schools to guarantee a good education and success at the 11-Plus exam. Indeed, most of the ministers in Clement Attlee’s Labour government had been either privately educated or sent to grammar schools. Nor was it unusual that the Corbyns moved to another area after their second son, Andrew, failed his 11-Plus. He successfully re-sat the exam and entered Haberdashers’ Adams grammar school in Newport, Shropshire. Jeremy would follow him there four years later. The family’s new home, Yew Tree Manor, a five-bedroom seventeenth-century farmhouse, was exceptionally luxurious compared to that of most families, who struggled through post-war austerity with shortages of food and fuel and urban winter smog. Living an unconventional, slightly chaotic lifestyle, Naomi Corbyn, a grammar-school maths teacher, maintained a vegetable garden, while her husband converted their garage into a workshop where he would turn wood and build toys and carts.

The four sons were not detached from political or literary life. Naomi read modern fiction and contemporary history, and gave her youngest son a collection of George Orwell’s essays for his sixteenth birthday. Jeremy never claimed to have read them, although in 2016, he said he had been influenced by The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a novel written in 1910 by Robert Tressell, the pseudonym of Robert Noonan, a house painter. The book describes the politically powerless underclass in Edwardian England, and its ruthless exploitation by employers and by the civic and religious authorities. Corbyn’s reference to the novel fitted his narrative after he became Labour’s leader, but in truth, as a teenager he did not read any literature. Rather, he sat in his bedroom poring over Ordnance Survey maps of the surrounding countryside and gazing at a world atlas, dreaming of future journeys. In the corner was a hand-operated Gestetner duplicator, used to produce leaflets for the local Labour Party. By that time he was already a political animal.

At school, he was regarded as an outsider. Unlike his three elder brothers, he was a poor student, uninterested in sport, insouciant and gauche. ‘He was not noticeably clever,’ recalled Lynton Seymour-Whiteley, his finely-named Latin teacher. Striking out against the school’s mainstream, Corbyn joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Young Socialists at Wrekin’s Labour Party, and the League Against Cruel Sports, the last an unusual show of contrariness in a Tory shire famous for hunting and shooting. Considering that the school motto was ‘Serve and Obey’, his refusal to join the Combined Cadet Force, and instead to hoe a vegetable plot, was principled defiance, and a singular reason for being remembered. In 1967 he sat his A-Levels, passing two exams with a grade E, and failing the third. With no chance of following his three brothers to university, he risked being marooned in Shropshire. On his last day at school, John Roberts, the headmaster, harshly predicted that fate: ‘You’ll never make anything of your life.’ In embarrassment, his mother would later tell people that it was her youngest son’s poor handwriting that had prevented his getting to university. Without any status, he was a downstart. He came to loathe achievers, especially undergraduates with ambitions to get to the top, disdained those who enjoyed material wealth, and showed little respect for religion. Most of all he hated the rich and successful, and identified with losers. In his self-protection he became conspicuously stubborn.

He drifted into odd jobs for nearby farmers and a local newspaper, but his main focus was to organise the Wrekin Young Socialists. May Day in 1967 was marked by taking a home-made red banner to the top of the nearby Wrekin hill, tying it to the trig point and singing ‘The Red Flag’. Soon after, the Young Socialists held their annual dinner at the Charlton Hotel in Wellington. Clean-shaven, Corbyn arrived in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, looking like a typical middle-class teenager. Except that he faced an uncertain future.

His salvation was his parents’ suggestion that he apply to join Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), a Foreign Office initiative funded since 1958 to send young male volunteers to work in Britain’s former colonies for £12 pocket money per month and free board and lodging. Most recruits were graduates, not eighteen-year-olds with poor A-Levels. Corbyn’s luck was to be sent as a ‘cadet teacher’ to Kingston, Jamaica. He was contracted by VSO to stay on the island for two years. On 28 August 1967 he boarded a BOAC Boeing 707 with about thirty other volunteers for the twelve-hour flight.

The contrast between Shropshire and Kingston was dramatic. Jamaica had become independent in 1962, but that had done little to change the extreme divisions between rich and poor. ‘It was impossible not to be influenced by the gulf between the iconic haves and the have-nots,’ recalled Michael Humfrey, the head of the island’s Special Branch. ‘That would certainly have affected Corbyn deeply.’ The ‘haves’, especially the twenty-one families who dominated the island, lived in luxury, while the ‘have-nots’, who inhabited three areas about a mile from Corbyn’s school – known as Dunkirk, Tel Aviv and McGregor Gully – survived on a subsistence diet, without mains water or electricity, under zinc roofs resting on cardboard walls. The gap was aggravated by racism – whites at the top, followed by the Lebanese and those with light-brown skin, known as the ‘high browns’, then the Chinese, with blacks at the bottom. Jamaicans, quipped the locals, had ‘an eye for shade’.

Corbyn was based at Kingston College, an elite grammar school for 1,600 fee-paying and scholarship pupils. Contrary to his version, the college was not in a ‘deprived’ area, nor in this period did he, despite his assertion that he was known throughout the school as ‘Mr Beardman’, grow a beard. Contemporary photographs show him mop-haired and clean-shaven, and none of his pupils or fellow teachers recalls him with a beard.

His one task was to teach Caribbean geography four times a week to third-form boys, all of whom had passed the 11-Plus, in classes of about thirty-five. Later, he would exaggerate that there were seventy pupils in his class. ‘It was a really defining moment of my life,’ he would say, ‘because I was thrown in at the deep end as an eighteen-year-old.’ He kept ahead by the time-honoured ruse for beginner teachers of reading the textbook in advance of the lesson, then reciting it. In years to come, he would not admit to the school’s elite status. Dissembling further, in January 2018 he told GQ magazine that he had been ‘working at schools and theatres and taught polio-stricken children in camps for the victims’. In truth, he worked at just the one school, helped with a single production in one theatre, and only briefly appeared at one camp for polio victims. There was a charity for such children attached to the town’s university, and a local organiser recalls ‘one white man helping’, but did not identify him as Corbyn. His only job was to teach. Years on, he would boast that his experiences taught him to control a crowd and to deal with a crisis. His students recall the opposite.

Standing out with his pale skin, strange ‘bouncy walk’ and unusually long hair, and always wearing the same clothes – later dubbed ‘Oxfam-reject style’ – he faced a class which, Robert Buddan, one of his pupils, recalls, ‘teased him. We were a bit troublesome and didn’t make things easy for him. He was a good target.’ Asking his charges to explain Jamaican swearwords did not improve Corbyn’s standing. Faced with boys who spoke out in class and directly challenged any poor mark, he regularly exploded in anger. ‘He would shout at us and turn red,’ says Buddan. The apprentice teacher was also unable to add up the marks he awarded for classwork accurately, and the boys frequently complained that his final totals were wrong. He was soon mocked across the school as ‘Fire Red’, especially after one particularly humiliating incident. While Corbyn’s attention was distracted, a boy called Michael (‘Mad’) Reid crept up behind the seated teacher and clipped a lock of his long hair. Corbyn leapt to his feet, lunged at the laughing boy and chased him through the school, at one point squeezing through a window on the first floor, keeping up the chase until he lost the trail. Sheepish and red-faced, he returned to the classroom. No one was punished by a detention or a caning.

At weekends the VSO volunteers would join up with Peace Corps aid workers from Canada and the USA, and meet local girls to drink Old Charlie’s rum and dance to rock music. Corbyn never took part. ‘He didn’t mix with us,’ recalled Dennis Dawes, another VSO cadet and later a Hampshire police officer. ‘He was serious-looking.’ Corbyn even avoided the Christmas Day party at the British High Commission. The unsociable teenager came to notice just once, in November 1967, when he was working as a lighting technician at The Barn, the island’s first professional theatre, which was staging a production called It’s Not My Fault, Baby. Otherwise, he spent weekends with groups of ten Kingston College pupils hiking across the hills above the town and towards the 7,402-foot peak of the Blue Mountain. On one trip to the north coast they watched refugees from nearby Cuba landing on the beach. One hundred miles to the north, a heroic figure dressed in military fatigues was fighting American imperialists.

During Corbyn’s first year in Jamaica, the island was on the edge of turmoil. Fascination with Fidel Castro’s Cuban republic, and the recent death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, had spread unrest across the region – although, unlike those in South America, Fidel’s few disciples in Jamaica were cautioned against violence. Castro had judged Jamaica to be unsuitable for guerrilla warfare, and his intelligence service made only limited contact with the island’s young Marxists. These were led by Hugh Small, Trevor Munroe and D.K. Duncan, each inspired to overthrow the white colonial legacy by America’s Black Power movement, especially Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and, most importantly, Malcolm X’s anti-Semitic Nation of Islam, which condemned ‘Zionist dollars’ bankrolling colonial oppression. ‘We were young, black agitators looking for answers,’ recalled Small. Ever since two British soldiers had been killed by black nationalists inspired by an American Trotskyist in 1965, Small had led the fight against Washington’s influence, but his group, dispirited and fragmented, was failing to throw off the shackles of British rule.

Towards the end of 1967, the socialist People’s National Party (PNP) unexpectedly lost a second successive general election to the centrist Labour Party. Many suspected electoral fraud. Following that defeat, Leroy Cooke, a Marxist, was appointed as the PNP’s youth organiser to agitate in schools. Peter Croft, a VSO cadet teacher who arrived at the same time as Corbyn, recalls their ‘endless discussions about Jamaican politics and the personalities involved’. Both young men read reports of the local socialists’ tirades against colonialism, imperialism, racism and the capitalists’ exploitation of Third World countries, and witnessed from the periphery the raw struggle between Jamaica’s rich whites and impoverished blacks. In conversations over a beer in a bar on Friday after school with four other teachers, Corbyn would discuss the unrest. ‘He asked about the difference between Labour and the PNP,’ recalled Victor Chang, one of his drinking companions, ‘and was interested in socialism. He was curious about Jamaican Marxism.’

Unknown to Chang, Corbyn was unsettled by Kingston College. His classroom overlooked the school’s large chapel, where once a week Bishop Gibson, the Anglican cleric who had founded the school back in 1925, still preached. The pupils were focused on academic excellence, and were proud of the school’s reputation as a powerhouse of sport. The grounds were located close to the island’s famous Sabina Park cricket ground, and England played the West Indies there in February 1968, but Corbyn was uninterested in that intense contest, or in the endless track competitions outside his classroom. The school’s motto – Fortis Cadere Cedere Non Potest (The Brave May Fall But Never Yield) – was painted in large letters on a wall overlooking the sports field. Equally irritating to him were the boys’ well-pressed khaki uniforms and ties, the compulsory combined cadet force, and the choir. Lest he forget religion’s importance, he could see Holy Trinity Catholic Cathedral across the road and, a little further down, St George’s school, a rival private college rigorously overseen by Jesuit priests. Taken together – education, sport, tradition, the army, organised religion and the quest for achievement – Kingston College epitomised nearly everything Corbyn loathed.

As 1968 began, the mood in Kingston became tense. Walter Rodney, a twenty-six-year-old Guyanese, arrived from Havana to forge an anti-capitalist alliance between radicals, Black Power supporters and what were called ‘the discontented’. Rodney was already well known to the island’s Special Branch. In 1962, while studying at University College of the West Indies in Kingston, he had travelled to Havana, where he met Fidel Castro, and returned to Jamaica with a plan to spread Marxism across the West Indies. Later that year he flew to a so-called peace congress in Leningrad, earning the CIA classification of ‘convinced Communist with pro-Castro ideals and an interest in Black Power’. Back in Jamaica, he took a small group of young Marxist graduates to ‘Reasonings’ – meetings across the island with the dispossessed and Rastafarians. Encouraged by Armando Velazquez, the Cuban consul on the island, he spoke about revolution at secondary schools, churches and youth centres. Although Rodney was banned by the school’s administrators from speaking at Kingston College, Corbyn heard about his lectures, and about CIA plots to overthrow governments in Cuba and across Latin America. He learned about the importance of the Soviet Union’s contribution to Castro’s revolution. Without Moscow’s assistance, the left’s ambitions across South America would have been snuffed out by America. And ever since the failed CIA-inspired invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Jamaica had been treated as Washington’s appendage, and hated for that.

In the summer of 1968 Corbyn was joined at Kingston College by Paul Wimpory, a physics graduate from Birmingham, also on a VSO contract, and the two became friends. By that time Corbyn had moved into a rented room in a house on Easton Avenue, a residential area in New Kingston, owned by the aunt of Dawn Tapper, one of the school’s English teachers. On the eve of her marriage, Tapper asked Corbyn to be the chief usher in the church. He agreed, only to forget his principal chore – he left all the wedding programmes in the house, and there was no time to return to collect them. As a result, the ceremony was confused, the minister omitted parts of the service, and the congregation did not say the responses. ‘He felt very bad about it,’ Tapper recalled.

Walter Rodney lived in an adjoining road to Corbyn. Wimpory believed that Corbyn, no longer under the direct supervision of the High Commission, was ‘rebelling against his affluent background’ and his links with traditional Britain. None of the VSO students who attended a drinks reception at the High Commission in early September recall seeing Corbyn. By then, about to start his second year of teaching, Corbyn frequently expressed to Wimpory his dismay about the ‘vast inequalities’ on the island, 137 years after slavery in Jamaica was abolished. He became convinced that the British Empire had not benefited Jamaicans, and that it had left behind a legacy of guilt for the gross exploitation of innocent, impoverished people.

On 15 October, Walter Rodney attempted to return to Jamaica via Canada. By then his trips to Cuba and Moscow, combined with reports of student revolts in Europe and guerrilla warfare financed by Moscow in Asia, Africa and Latin America, had aroused fear among pro-Western Jamaicans. In that mood, the government banned his entry. Three days later, the university campus in Kingston erupted. For two days, left-wing students rioted, burning buildings and cars in what became known as the Rodney Riots. The unrest was put down, but the government failed to recover its authority. Remarkably, none of the young Marxists recalls seeing Corbyn during the rioting, and neither Wimpory nor Chang ever discussed those tumultuous events with him. He has never mentioned witnessing the uprising, and has never since met the Marxist students who subsequently became prominent Jamaicans. Yet their influence on him would seem to have been profound. Within eight weeks of the riots, Corbyn decided he could no longer tolerate Kingston College. To his good fortune, the school had been underpaying him by £1 per week, so he received a lump sum of £52 (about £900 today), and planned in secret how to escape.

The first casualty of his leaving was one of the college’s pupils, Derrick Aarons, a fourteen-year-old weekend hiker and a participant in the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Aarons had completed all the requirements for the award’s Bronze Medal, and had been assured by Corbyn that the necessary forms had been sent to London, and that in January 1969 he would receive his medal from Jamaica’s governor general. The excited boy frequently asked Corbyn if he had received a reply yet from London. The answer was always no. In January Aarons returned from his holidays, and was told that Corbyn had decamped back to Britain. The medal never materialised. ‘I was,’ recalled Aarons, ‘a very disappointed teenager.’ Had Corbyn even submitted the forms? During a recent trip to London, Aarons, today a prominent Caribbean doctor, contacted Corbyn’s office to arrange a reunion. ‘I was convinced,’ he said, ‘that he would remember me as the keenest of his hikers, but I never received any acknowledgement.’

The more important casualties of Corbyn’s decision to quit early were the pupils in his four geography classes. No replacement could be found. ‘I always thought how curious to leave part of the way through the school year,’ observed Paul Wimpory. ‘It was not very professional.’ Corbyn left Jamaica, Dawn Tapper recalled, just days after her wedding on 14 December. ‘Jeremy told us that he was returning to Britain,’ she said. ‘I gave him a piece of my wedding cake to eat on his journey.’

Corbyn has always concealed what he did after leaving Kingston. ‘I spent my youth in Jamaica,’ he told Channel 4 News in 2015, but did not elaborate. According to his account, he left Jamaica in July 1969, having fulfilled his two-year contract. Not only is that untrue, but he has never honestly revealed what happened during the missing seven months. His description of the journey from Jamaica is vague: ‘I took a sailing boat around the Caribbean, and then a fishing boat to Guyana.’ The only local passenger ship leaving Kingston and going as far as Trinidad was a small island-hopping freighter. That left 430 miles along the coast to Georgetown, Guyana’s capital – hardly the route for a ‘fishing boat’.

Corbyn says that he ‘spent some time in Guyana’, a pertinent revelation. The former British colony was then Walter Rodney’s home. Until 1964, Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist, had been the country’s leader, but with the connivance of the British and the CIA he had been replaced by a pro-Western prime minister. Nevertheless, in 1968 the strong Cuban presence in Guyana, Castro’s base for guerrilla warfare in South America, remained undiminished, and with Rodney’s help Corbyn could have flown to Cuba via Mexico. He has never said when he first visited Cuba, and the extent of his Marxist education in Guyana remains unknown. Like so much of his account of his life until he left Guyana, it is partly romanticised, and possibly an invention.

According to Corbyn’s version, he travelled from Guyana to Brazil, and on to Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, back to Buenos Aires, and then sailed to France in 1970. He has said that during the year he spent travelling he had been impressed by the culture of South America’s indigenous tribes, the history of the European settlers’ revolts against the colonial powers, and the countries’ battles during the 1950s against rapacious American corporations and CIA subversion. The journey confirmed his socialist ideals. Here was a cause that suited his ‘loser’ personality – he would fight for the downtrodden against their oppressors.

More recently, Corbyn has claimed that he was influenced by Open Veins of Latin America, by the Uruguayan journalist, writer and poet Eduardo Galeano, a critique of the exploitation of the continent’s Indians by monarchs, the Catholic Church and multinational American corporations. That is doubtful. The book was first published in 1971, a year after Corbyn returned to Britain, and he could not read Spanish. Pertinently, shortly before his death in 2015 Galeano repudiated the book as a distortion of the continent’s economic history, and confessed that he was embarrassed by his youthful prejudice in favour of South America’s left-wing dictators. In his enthusiasm for the book, Corbyn ignored Galeano’s disclaimer. He was enchanted, he said, by the indigenous customs and languages of South American civilisations – Incas, Quechua and Aymara – all smothered by Spanish colonialism.

He would also claim to have been influenced by Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, which described the Caribbean search for identity after the end of colonialism. Rodney’s and Galeano’s ideas, picked up after his year in Jamaica, thereafter became the foundation of Corbyn’s principles and way of looking at the world. He loathed imperialism – Spanish, American or British. He never sought to understand how Greek, Roman and successive European empires were the foundation of Western civilisation, but stuck resolutely to his belief in the unalleviated evil of white colonial oppression. In 2015 he demanded that the then prime minister David Cameron apologise to Jamaica for Britain’s ‘brutal’ involvement in the slave trade. ‘It’s a history of the most gross exploitation of people,’ he said. He would never condemn Russian, Chinese or Arab oppression in similar terms. Nor, as a self-proclaimed pacifist, could he explain how the victims of imperialism – either the local Indians in Latin America or Europeans as the prey of the French, Soviet and German empires – could have regained their liberty without fighting.

In 1970, three years after leaving Britain, Corbyn returned to his family’s Shropshire home. He had not once spoken with his parents during his time away. On the single occasion he telephoned his home, there was no reply.

He returned to a seemingly empty future. Not only did he have no prospects, but he had missed the best of the swinging sixties. Although he would later claim to have joined his brother Piers on an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in London, that famous clash between the children of the counter-culture and the police had erupted during his absence, back in 1968. He also missed the big anti-apartheid marches of the 1960s, only joining their mini-successors two decades later, such as the Trotskyist ‘Non-Stop Picket’ breakaway group championing illegal protests in London, during which he was arrested. In speeches or interviews he never mentioned the outbreak of urban terrorism – Baader Meinhof in Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, the Red Army in Japan, the Weathermen in America, the Quebec separatists in Canada, the Angry Brigade in Britain. Unlike every other leftist, he did not march with CND from Aldermaston to London every Easter. The politics of the sixties philosophers who had so influenced young undergraduates had no relevance to someone filled with Walter Rodney’s protests against colonial oppression. Perhaps a particular loss, he had missed the election in November 1970 of Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist president. His only contemporaneous eyewitness experience was the resurgence of the IRA’s war against colonialism.

On his return to Britain, now twenty years old, he had good reason to be apprehensive. Minimally educated, unqualified and unable to engage in hard work, he was isolated in Shropshire, forced to take a series of local jobs. In May 1972, after rejoining the Wrekin Labour Party, he arrived at the Young Socialists’ annual congress in Skegness with Andrea Davies, a nurse from Telford, his first British girlfriend. Although ostensibly a Labour Party function, the camp for five hundred members was run by Liverpool’s Militant Tendency, a group of revolutionary socialists formed in Liverpool in 1955 with the express purpose after the mid-1960s of infiltrating Labour to make the theories of Trotsky, Marx, Lenin and Engels official party policy.