Jeanne Hoban - Early Years

Early Years

She was born in Gillingham, Kent. Her father, Major William Leo Hoban was a British featherweight boxer and former soldier of Irish roots, her mother, May Irene Free, was a small businesswoman of partly Jewish extraction. Her early life was spent in a variety of Army camps. In 1936 her father was appointed an instructor at Eton College, and they settled in Slough. She attended Slough High School for Girls, where she became Head Girl in 1942.

During the Second World War, she was once machine-gunned by a Nazi Luftwaffe aircraft. Although selected for London University, she had to do her two-year National Service as a government inspector in the Bristol aircraft factory at Staines. There she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1943. She was a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union and anyway came from a fairly radical background - the Merseyside branch of what would later become the Militant Tendency used to meet in her aunt's house in Birkenhead. To the end of her life she was to maintain that the members of the CPGB were the most dedicated and conscientious political workers she was ever to know

At University College London and LSE, she studied law. There she met her future husband, Anil Moonesinghe, who converted her to Trotskyism. and also a young conscientious objector called Stan Newens, who would later become a Labour Party MP and MEP.