Lives Remembered: Jeffrey Gordon

A few months after my wife and I and our 11-year-old son had been "disappeared" by the Chinese on 5 November 1967 while we were attempting to leave China during the Cultural Revolution – I was a journalist working there – my brother Jeffrey Gordon realised that something had gone wrong. For months the Chinese Embassy denied any knowledge of our whereabouts until Jeffrey launched a campaign.

In fact, we had all been locked up in a small hotel room in the middle of Beijing, under guard, and never allowed out, living on a poor diet. I'm sure we would have languished there for years if it had not been for Jeffrey's colourful campaign, lobbying the then Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, and winning the support of such well-known intellectuals as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm.

Frustrated by denials at the embassy, Jeffrey made a BBC appeal for people to send birthday cards on my son's 13th birthday in February, 1969 – and, later, we learned that 50,000 cards were sent to the embassy and the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. Seven months later we were released with the Chinese clearly embarrassed. A modest man, Jeffrey never talked about his campaign to rescue us – a silence typical of someone who knew he had no choice other than to do the right thing.

Equally, he never boasted of the fact that he had pioneered the practice of work-experience assignments at secondary schools long before it became part of school life as it is today.

He became a teacher in his thirties and started at the tough Holloway Boys School in Islington. Having worked in his teens in an engineering factory, he quickly recognised that his pupils – many of whom were written off as uneducable – needed the self-confidence given by work.

He wasn't surprised when he found they were often engaged in petty villainy. Bunking off school was second nature to them. Once, when he asked a boy what he was going to do in the evening, he replied, matter-of-fact, "A bit of stabbing, sir!" So, in his spare time Jeffrey visited practically every likely shop, department store or business in Islington and Camden Town until he had work placements or paid evening or Saturday jobs. He became such a legend at the school that the head, faced with a difficult pupil, would say: "Give him to Jeff."

Jeffrey would have gone to university but at 14 he was taken out of a Birmingham grammar school after our home was bombed in the Blitz and moved to Manchester, where he started work as an apprentice engineer. In the evenings and at weekends he learned the violin under a senior Hallé Orchestra violinist, and also became an accomplished instrumentalist. Typically, as a teacher he would give free violin lessons to pupils in his lunch hour. Before his retirement in the 1980s he was snapped up by the Inner London Education Authority to oversee a work-experience programme at several schools in north London.

In his teens he became a Communist and remained so until his death at 82 on 15 August. Though an atheist, he wanted a Jewish Orthodox funeral and is buried in Brighton with his parents and sister. He leaves his wife Janet, his daughter Harriet, his brother Eric and sister Linda.

A memorial meeting will take place at a committee room in the House of Commons on 17 November organised by the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, who knew Jeffrey.

Eric Gordon