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