This article was updated 11/1/2018
WE FOUND HIM!
JEREMY CORBYN’S JAMAICAN MYSTERY LIFE IS NO LONGER A MYSTERY
Its no longer a mystery. Several sources in Jamaica have confirmed that Kingston College, one of Jamaica’s premier Boy’s schools IS the place at which Jeremy Corbyn taught whilst he was in Jamaica in the late 1960s. A spokesman for Mr. Corbyn has also confirmed that KC is indeed where he taught between 1967 and 1968 as a VSO volunteer.
Walter Bygrave, today a Civil Engineer practicing in Kingston, was a student in Corbyn’s 4th form geography class and remembers “Beardman” very clearly as a strict disciplinarian whom the boys had difficulty in understanding because of his “strange” accent. Corbyn would have been at KC during the school’s glory years when it dominated both the football competition among Kingston’s High Schools and Track and Field in the island wide inter-secondary schools Boys Athletic Championships popularly known as ‘Champs’.
Corbyn also confirms that in addition to teaching at KC, he volunteered at the ‘Barn’ a small experimental theatre founded by the late Trevor Rhone and Yvonne Jones Brewster (OBE) who later became an important figure in British theatre. Corbyn’s humanitarian side also saw him volunteering at what was then known as the Mona Rehabilitation Centre, the English-speaking Caribbean’s first and only centre for the treatment of persons suffering from polio.
Jamaica was a good experience for Corbyn. Will Corbyn be good for Jamaica?
Original Article
The facts are well established by British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn himself, by colleagues like fellow activist and friend of the 1980s, Lord Anthony Gifford, and even by fellow VSO volunteers who vaguely remember him. Jeremy Corbyn spent two years as a teacher in Jamaica between 1969 and 1970.
But beyond that, very little is known about Corbyn’s sojourn in Jamaica – not even the school at which he taught except that it was a rural school and probably in St Elizabeth parish, but this too is mere speculation. Even less is known or remembered by anyone about what social life the young 19 year-old lived or even what his teaching experience was like.
Corbyn does however provide some revealing insights into the state of education in the immediate post-independence years from his own experience. As he tells the story, he arrived in Jamaica in 1969 fresh out of school on a ‘gap year’ as a volunteer with what was then known as Britain’s Volunteer Services Overseas (VSO). It is not known whether Corbyn chose Jamaica or was simply assigned to a school on the island. Michael Morrissey a fellow volunteer who came to Jamaica that same year, says he was offered Bangkok but chose Jamaica instead. Morrissey and others stayed after the two years and taught at various schools and in his case settled in Jamaica.
For Corbyn, it was ‘amazing’ experience:
“I was then confronted with a class of 70 kids to teach [Caribbean]geography, something I was barely aware of. If you are a chapter ahead of the class, you are ok until you have a really bright kid, and then you have got a problem…….so I learnt tactics of crowd control during the process and also a great deal about people and how you deal with a crisis.” Corbyn’s Jamaican experience as an impressionable young man and the exposure to real poverty served to shape his politics.
Writing for the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper in 2015, Lord Anthony Gifford who also settled in Jamaica in the 1980s describes Jeremy Corbyn as a ‘friend of Jamaica’ and expressed the hope then that Jamaica would be able to welcome him back. Corbyn’s much-aired BBC Channel 4 interview added credence to the claim of his love for Jamaica when he described the island’s culture as amazing and Jamaica as a fantastic place. He told his interviewer that Britain owed a lot to the Jamaican people because of the wealth that Britain acquired from the island. Pressed about what form of help he had in mind, Corbyn stopped short of suggesting any kind of compensation and argued instead for better trading relations and increased investment in the country.
Now Flashback to the 1970s; in an article in the Gleaner newspaper of December 3,2017, columnist Martin Henry vividly describes his experience as a young country boy going to high school for the first time and coming face to face with a phalanx of white expatriate teachers. Henry says it was his first working encounter with white people and with foreigners and attributes much of the breath and depth of his high school education, the most transformative phase of his whole education to this band of mostly very young teachers. It was they who opened his eyes to the world both through the content of the lessons they imparted, but by their diversity and their warm interest in their students. Jeremy Corbyn was not one of Henry’s teachers at Morant Bay High School but it describes the milieu in which he must have taught in those formative years ‘somewhere in Jamaica’.
