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Jeffrey Gordon shaking hands with Paul Robeson II, son of the American actor and singer, and the late Jack Firestein |
Soap star leads tributes to a teacher who inspired pupils
TRIBUTES were paid this week to Jeffrey Gordon – for many years one of the most inspirational teachers at Camden and Islington schools – who has died aged 82.
Coronation Street star Jimmi Harkishin, soul musician Jazzie B and fellow teachers such as Dave Horan, a former Camden councillor, were among those who remembered him. “Jeffrey was my best teacher,” Jimmi Harkishin fondly recalled.
Jeffrey taught at Sir William Collins School in Somers Town (now South Camden Community School) but mainly at Holloway Boys’ School in the 1970s and 1980s. He was among the first in Britain to pioneer the practice of work experience for pupils.
While teaching at Holloway Boys’ School, Jeffrey soon realised that the best way to boost the confidence of struggling pupils from poor backgrounds, often from Afro-Caribbean and Greek families, was to find them part-time jobs.
So he scoured shops and businesses in his spare time, persuading employers to give his pupils a chance to take the first real step in life, often with a cash-in-hand job. He found jobs for hundreds of teenagers, many of whom had been “bunking off” from school or had been written off as virtually uneducable. If the headteacher found himself with an “aggressive” boy, he would always pass him onto Jeffrey, knowing he would be able to straighten him out.
In his retirement, former pupils, now in their 40s, would greet him in the street, warmly remembering the teacher who had turned their lives around.
As head of sociology at Holloway, Jeffrey could also get good exam results, and many of his boys went onto university or professional careers.
An accomplished violinist, he would teach youngsters in his lunch hour. He also encouraged pupils to engage in political debate by setting up the school’s 20th Century Club, where politicians Tony Benn, then a government minister, and Frank Dobson, and writer Paul Foot gave talks.
Because of his reputation in education, the then London education authority, ILEA, made him head of a work experience programme for north London.
In retirement, Jeffrey linked up with the Camden New Journal, providing his know-how to help organise successful job fairs for school-leavers in the 1990s.
Jimmi Harkishin, who was taught sociology by Jeffrey in the late 1970s, said: “I came from a poor Asian background and suddenly I was being taught about status quo, class and political ideas. It was the Margaret Thatcher era and thanks to Jeffrey I was able to understand what was going on in the world. He made a huge difference to my understanding.”
On leaving school with 10 GCSEs and 4 A-levels, the future soap star intended going to the London School of Economics. “In the end I went for an audition and ended up becoming an actor,” he said. “But I’ve never forgotten Jeffrey.”
Musician Paul McDonough, a former Holloway pupil, owes his love of the violin to Jeffrey’s gentle encouragement and supreme patience.
“When I went there Holloway School was a rough place, mainly for working class boys who often didn’t want to learn,” he recalled. “Not only did he keep the class quiet, which was an achievement in those days, but he wanted us to make something of ourselves.”
Now a member of two Irish bands, Shanxty and Back of Beyond, Paul first picked up the violin at primary school, where there was no one to help him. “But at Holloway I met Jeffrey and he offered to teach me,” he said. “He even gave up his lunch times to help me, which was extremely generous.”
Jeffrey, who came from a Jewish background, taught Paul to play hymns as part of his early tuition, but most of all inspired in him a love of classical composers, particularly Sibelius.
“I’ll never forget the Saturday Jeffrey took me down to Chinatown in the West End to buy a new violin,” he said. “It cost me £7.50, which was a lot for a boy of 12 in those days.”
Although Jeffrey sent Paul a Christmas card every year the two did not meet again for nearly 30 years – until earlier this year at Jeffrey’s birthday party in Primrose Hill. “It was a lovely evening and I played a couple of tunes for him” Paul said.
He still recalls Jeffrey’s advice when he started playing: “Never waste time. When you’re on a train get out your pen and practice moving your fingers as if it was a violin.”
At the age of 11, Jeffrey had won a place at the well-known King Edward’s School in Birmingham but had to leave at 15 to start work when his family were bombed out of their home at the beginning of the Second World War and moved back to Manchester, where they came from.
He served a seven-year apprenticeship as a precision tool engineer, making specialist equipment for bomber planes, and in the evenings and weekend learned the violin under one of the country’s leading orchestral players, Philip Hecht. A socialist, Hecht only made a nominal charge for tuition.
In his 20s Jeffrey worked first as an insurance clerk in London, then studied part-time for a degree until he took up teaching.
Inevitably, because of his socialist convictions, which had been encouraged by Hecht, he became a keen member of the National Union of Teachers.
Dave Horan, who taught at Holloway in the 1970s, said: “Jeffrey was not only an outstanding teacher he had an extraordinary empathy with boys. The more difficult or the more aggressive they were, somehow Jeffrey, of all the teachers at the school, was the only one who could relate to them.
“Perhaps, because of his own hard life as a young factory worker during the war he knew what real life was all about. He had something in him that boys immediately recognised. You cannot learn that in textbooks – it was just part of the man.”
Jeffrey was buried at the Jewish Orthodox Cemetery in Brighton. He leaves a wife, Janet, and step-daughter Harriet and a brother, Eric, and sister, Linda. |
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