Dangerous Hero. Tom Bower
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