I first met Robin in the 1970s, campaigning in Haringey against school mergers and closures. As a teacher himself, Robin was absolutely committed to the principle of an inclusive and rounded education to allow the talent of every child to flourish, whatever their background.

He was a committed socialist and a ceaseless opponent of imperialism. He was around right from the early days of the Stop the War Coalition and was a very important player in the anti-war movement.

At the height of the opposition to the Iraq War there were something like seven Stop the War local groups in Haringey alone, largely down to Robin’s efforts. But he was more than just an exceptional organiser, he was a strong advocate of the cultural side to the anti-war movement, using music and poetry to draw people in.

Our media routinely ignores the impact of social movements. It’s a world they don’t understand. But the truth is people coming together can change history. The anti-war movement that Robin was so central to changed politics in this country, revived the left, and set the scene for the re-emergence of socialist ideas that we see today. I know Robin would be rightly proud of the part he played in that.

Robin was a good friend and a wonderful comrade who dedicated himself to creating a peaceful world. He will be a great loss to our movement. It was a privilege to know him, and through him to become friends with Manuela and the children.

Robin passed away on the 29th May at the Royal Free Hospital surrounded by his family. He’d had a heart attack the week before in the street close to his home while out on a walk with his wife Manuela. She said he was reciting a passage from the Tempest at the time.

The heart attack was a shock to us all because Robin, although in his seventies, was one of the healthiest people that we knew. We thought that he would live forever such was his spirit and engagement with the world.

I first met Robin in the early years of Stop the War Coalition. He was running Muswell Hill STW one of the largest groups with several hundred members and a mailing list of thousands. For many years his group ran a weekly stall on the Broadway. In 2005 STW put out a call for help with the International Peace Conference that we were organising in London. We had scores of international delegates that needed hosting. Robin immediately responded offering help from his group. The entire US delegation some thirty strong were looked after by Muswell Hill STW.

The following year he took over running the central STW office organising the massive demonstrations that took place in the wake of the war on Lebanon in 2006.

He was hugely talented and efficient and for many years ran the STW website almost single handedly. He admired good writing and sought it out promoting those those he considered the best writers. For STW and subsequently on his own Public Reading Rooms website these included STW Convenor Lindsey German and others such as Matt Carr, Jonathan Cook, Tansy Hoskins, John Wight, Caitlin Johnstone and the late great Heathcote Williams among many others.

It was his love of Heathcote both as a person and a writer that led to our closest work together. Heathcote had written a series of pieces on Boris Johnson whom Heathcote hated with a vengeance. Heathcote wanted the articles published as a book and as he said – a weapon. He approached Robin and myself with this as a plan. We agreed and set up a publishing house, the Public Reading Rooms, to launch the book. At the same time Robin set up a PRR website to promote the book and also to be a voice for a shared politics and future publishing.

The book was published as Brexit Boris from Mayor to Nightmare and was illustrated with cartoons featuring Boris Johnson from the leading cartoonists of the day. The two printings of the book have sold out.

Over the last four years Robin continued to develop the website and build the publishing continuing to promote the writers that he admired. He was an editorial board member of the radical left journal Transform and he was central to building the successful European conference that the journal organised this March against the rise of the far right.

Robin never wavered in his support for the work of STW remaining a member of its steering committee until his death. Robin was a strong supporter of the Palestinian struggle and he was on the National Demonstration for Palestine only a couple of weeks before he died.

He was also very concerned at the lack of support from the left, as he saw it, for the case of Julian Assange whom he felt had been abandoned.

Robin had been a long time member of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s and early eighties and he retained an affection for comrades from that period and for the work of the organisation particularly its anti-racist and anti-fascist organising. However like many who’d been involved with the far left, myself included, he was drawn back into political life through the anti-war movement.

When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader Robin joined the Labour Party to support him. He saw Jeremy’s election as opening up a real possibility for social change. He and Manuela canvassed energetically for the Labour Party in the 2015 general election. In the great Brexit debate he plumped for Remain but he was opposed to the right wing in the Labour Party using the Brexit question to attack Jeremy’s leadership. He was very critical of me when I went on the two People’s Vote marches and in the usual Robin very straightforward way demanded that I explain myself.

Robin would have been absolutely furious about his own death. He was extraordinarily careful in guarding against that great thief. He said he hadn’t had a drink in forty years and was very proud of his specialised juicer and swore by the medicinal properties of ginger and according to Manuela had recently discovered the benefits of magnesium. For those of his friends who like myself who were/are in relatively poor health he had lots of advice. During my chemotherapy treatments he provided an endless supply of films and books to help me pass the recovery time.

His great love of culture is reflected in the many posts he made on the Public Reading Rooms website. The breadth of his knowledge of plays, films and music was vast and his loves stretched from Doris Day to Frank Sinatra to Rai, Lowkey and the Young’uns and beyond. He loved his family above all else and he made the teasing of Manuela into an art form. He was immensely proud of all his children. The last song I heard Robin sing was ‘the wheels of the bus go round and round’ which he performed live with his 2 year old grandson in his sitting room. Great fun.

I shall miss Robin terribly and miss our long telephone conversations which we considered to be serious political analysis but were really time well spent endlessly gossiping about the left and its foibles. I shall also regret the fact that I never asked Robin for any of the passwords or log-ons for our website and social media and you tube platforms which may now be locked for eternity. Robin was meticulous in protecting against any possibility of us being hacked. He succeeded. RIP.

I first met Robin at the Stop the War Coalition. Like me, he had completed his working years and was happy to spend many hours as a political activist.

Outside office hours, I liked my pints and curries, music and a good film. Robin only had interest in the last two. He seemed to regard eating as a necessity and drank nothing stronger than tap water.

When I watched him open his lunch box of biscuits and cheese, waving his hand to reject the offer of coffee the rest of us tanked up on, I wondered if he’d always lived such a spartan existence. It did cross my mind that he might have left behind a once-dissolute life filled with drunken evenings and ribald songs, leaving him like those medieval hermit-monks who retreated to their caves to do penance.

Robin never spoke much about his life before arriving in London as a teacher, but when he did, he dropped the odd clue. When I told him I had been a devotee of The Pretty Things and found The Rolling Stones too tame, he said The Pretty Things had played at the club he once ran. When I said I had seen Muddy Waters on his London visits, it turned out that Robin, too, had been there. ‘Chuck Berry in 1964 at the 100 Club?’ Yes that too.

When I told him I was unable, post-stroke, to play my guitar he recommended I get myself a harmonica. There then followed a detailed email with suggestions of where to buy my Hohner Marine Band in C and suggestions for the best online tutorials with links.

Despite our shared love of Blues and Rock ‘n Roll, we disagreed about Scott Walker. Robin said that he was a fan of his “in all his incarnations, including his later avant-garde albums”.

Robin was always the ‘go to’ person for me on what films to watch. He was a devotee of American film noir and would send me emails with lists of ‘not to be missed’ films. I did watch Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, but confess that I still have a long list of films to be ticked off his recommendations. I promise him, posthumously, to track them down and view.

At his prodding I occasionally wrote for Public Reading Rooms. Among my contributions was A Face to be Punched about Boris Johnson. Recently he tried to get me to review The Deceit Syndrome written by Paul Hobday. Google Books says, “Becoming more and more alarmed about the extra misery and sickness he sees on a daily basis, his concern turns to anger when he realises this is a direct result of Government policy.” Robin said about it, “Even as a graduate with a degree in English literature, I’m obviously not the person to do this review.” At 600+ pages and on a subject I am over qualified to comment on I agreed. I turned the job down. This was not a task for me either.

Despite my occasional refusals, Robin and PRR would promote articles I had written for other online publications and generously offered me a sales platform for my memoir, Left Field.

When I was in hospital after my heart operation and again after my stroke, Robin would visit me. I was to find out later that he too had a heart ‘condition’ but he rarely spoke about himself and was more eager to bring his politics to my bedside for discussion.

Our political ‘platforms’ had taken the same route as our music; ex-SWPers but never anti those we recognised as involved in the same fight. With Jewish ancestry he was incensed by the Zionist attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and helped me with my article for The London Economic on the plight of Julian Assange. I will miss him badly from these ongoing struggles.

A few weeks after Mick Jagger had a heart operation, Robin wrote to me, “Being rich, the procedure was by trans-catheter aortic valve replacement. The technique was used to cure Tony Blair of the condition. I have atrial fibrillation. Not being rich, I was refused the procedure under the NHS.”
That was the first I knew he shared heart problems with me. We were in that fight together as well. I am so sad that he lost that one so tragically.

RecentIy I have lost a few friends to that ‘dark night’, but Robin’s parting has been exceptional. When I look at his photo I not only see the man, I hear him speaking. And I cry. Something else exceptional. Manuela tells me that one minute after his last child, his son Sam, joined Manuela and his sisters at Robin’s bedside, he died. They say he had been unconscious for several days with no electrical activity in his brain. Really?

I used to ring him two or three times a week. Although our conversations started with the political struggle they soon moved on to music. I enjoyed interacting with his caustic sense of humour which made him seem curmudgeonly to some people. But once your metaphoric eyes adjusted to his emotional headlights you became aware of a wonderful soul who was trying to take those around him out of a very dark tunnel. He was, in fact, lighting and enlightening the way. I will miss his headlights.

Robin is survived by his wife Manuela, daughters Dany and Alice and son Sam. Unlike Robin and me, Sam doesn’t just talk music. He was a keyboard player for Amy Winehouse and today performs with his own group, Hejira.

Anne and I send our love, our condolences and our tears to them all.

I never asked Robin if he liked Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ – but I know he would have agreed with the lyrics. After all, he lived them. I can see him walking beside these two down that path, but he would have turned back at the door and refused the offer of a drink. Watch this, listen and think of this dear friend of mine.

By David Wilson

http://www.davidwilson.org.uk/2019/06/robin-beste-rip.html

Robin’s father Raymond Vernon Beste worked for Unity Theatre and Robin’s early commitment was to music.

Leaving school at 16 he became a promoter on the south coast and managed The Birdcage club in Portsmouth; a shrine to the sixties Mod music scene.

He was an anonymised figure in Mary Morse’s seminal Penguin book The Unattached (1968) which reported on new approaches to social work with adolescents.  He dropped out of school before taking his A Levels, doing these at the age of 27 through self-study and evening classes, in between earning a living doing early morning milk rounds and late evening coal deliveries.

As a mature student Robin studied English Literature at Sussex University, and met partner Manuela on their teaching training year 1974/5. Brighton International Socialist Gill Poole recruited both Robin and Manuela before they both found work in London from 1978.

Robin became a Special Educational Needs (SEN) teacher in Greenfields and then The Vale schools in Haringey, north London. He was active in his union branch and a contributor to the Rank and File Teacher magazine. He went on to specialise in the use of computer-based learning for SEN students, writing innovative programmes such as First Keys and became a borough-wide adviser.

In retirement Robin organised a vibrant local Stop the War Coalition (StWC) branch. He went on to manage its national online work as an officer of StWC.

By turn an erudite, witty, pernickety, motivational man Robin definitely contributed to the sum of human kindness. His sudden death on Wednesday 29 May was a shock to us all, none more so than Manuela, his daughters Dany and Alice, son Sam and partner Saoirse, and their son Shea. Solidarity and deepest condolences to them all.

By Nick Grant

https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/48475/Robin+Beste%2C+1944+2019

Robin once told me a story about a turning point in his life. An organizer with the Socialist Workers Party had been recruiting Manuela and him to join the Party for quite a while, but Robin was taking his time. Finally, during a house visit, the organizer made the hard sell. “You know,” he said, “you need us more than we need you”. 

It was the sort of encounter that shakes a person free from his sense of self-importance. It was a reminder that, when left to our own devices, we drift toward lives of private concern. A political community, however, can hold us accountable to a much greater cause. It can push us beyond self-imposed limits and help us flourish as members of a larger movement.

For me, the day I met Robin and Manuela was just such an encounter. In September 2002, I arrived in Muswell Hill with a group of American university students for year-long study abroad program. While out for a jog with a friend on a gorgeous fall day, we quite literally ran into Robin and Manuela handing out Stop the War leaflets.

Within a few minutes, Robin had convinced us to join them at their stall the following Saturday. Within a few weeks, he had us organizing our fellow students. Within a few months, he has us speaking at public meetings. By February 15, the day of the massive national anti-war march, we had established a partnership with Iraqi students and were fielding interview requests from BBC stations in London and Manchester.

His recognition of the potential for public good in our private lives was unwavering. His enthusiasm for our involvement was overpowering. How could we resist?

Over the next 17 years, I returned to London to visit Robin, Manuela, and Sam several times and even lived with them for four months in the fall of 2005. In the long intervals between visits, we exchanged countless emails about books, music, and politics.

These exchanges often left me unsettled for days afterward because Robin’s manner of conversation was, in a word, pugilistic. If he sensed even the slightest lapse in your commitment to a more equitable and peaceable planet, he would jab and jab at you until you were mentally exhausted and emotionally frayed.

In moments like these, I often wondered – sometimes with great frustration – why it was so difficult for Robin to temper his political opinions with a personal touch. But now, I would give anything to go a few more rounds with him.

I would tell him that I’d never met anyone so damnably willing to set aside private pleasures for the public good. I would tell him that his decision 17 years ago to treat a 20-year old kid from Montana as a serious person with real political power changed my life forever.

I think I always needed Robin’s friendship more than he needed mine. I think I will always miss his voice – which, for me, is the voice of the movement – calling after to me to be my best. His voice saying, “You need us more than we need you.”

By Gabe Furshong

He had the combination of tremendous energy and organising abilities which are relatively rare even in socialist activists, and these qualities remained with him his whole life. He was on the Palestine demo only two weeks before he became ill.

Robin Beste, who died on May 29th, was a stalwart of the Stop the War movement, an active and inquiring socialist and a man of many and varied talents.

He was involved in Stop the War from its inception in 2001, working for a period in our office and then subsequently editing the website, which he did until 2015. Right up until his death he continued to be a member of our elected Steering Committee, contributing his knowledge and opinions to our discussions. He encouraged particularly the younger members of our organisation and was very supportive to them.

Robin was also a keen activist, who for many years was the key organiser in the Muswell Hill Stop the War group in north London. He had the combination of tremendous energy and organising abilities which are relatively rare even in socialist activists, and these qualities remained with him his whole life. He was on the Palestine demo only two weeks before he became ill.

He was born into a Jewish family and brought up in Brighton and was part of that generation which came of age in the 1960s. He became a firm socialist in the revolutionary tradition and, while his allegiances to organisation varied, he never gave up on those ideas. He was a huge enthusiast for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and saw this as opening up new avenues for the left. While he was a remain voter, he was extremely critical of the way that debates on this were used to attack Corbyn.

He also had a great love of music which led him to run a Soul club in the 1960s, and this was something that stayed with him all his life, as attendance at many events testifies – some of which he organised for Stop the War. He was very cultured in the widest sense of the term, with knowledge of languages, and love of the poetry of Heathcote Williams. He encouraged his children to develop their artistic and other talents.I first met Robin in the 1970s when he was a teacher, a job he left many years ago with apparently few regrets. Our paths crossed only very occasionally until the events of 9/11 and the subsequent wars, opposition to which helped to forge a new left in the early years of this century.

Working with Robin could be a challenging experience. His dry sense of humour was remorseless, and his sometimes-cynical veneer concealed a deeply caring and thoughtful person. Robin never accepted anything at face value and there were often discussions and sometimes arguments about which way we should go. Robin also had ascetic tastes – water and unadorned vegetarian food were the rule when he worked in the office, and he was exasperated at the amount of coffee the rest of us drank.

He was devoted to his family and was delighted when he became a grandparent. Their loss is very great, and we send our condolences to his wife, Manuela, to his three children and to his wide circle of friends and comrades. Robin is a huge loss to our movement and will be very sadly missed.

By Lindsey German

http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/news-comment/3381-robin-beste-an-active-socialist-and-a-man-of-many-talents

By Heathcote Williams and Mark Wilkinson. Read at Robin’s funeral by Peter Cleall, Robin’s closest and life-time friend.

An Angel You Know

Every day, without a second thought,
You wish someone goodbye;
Then, out of the blue, there comes a time
When you call out and there’s no reply.
The person you knew has disappeared
And their warmth has turned to ice.
Cold shadows confirm an unspoken fear:
The life that seemed free had a price.
But when you lose somebody you love
You gain an angel you know.

At first every twist and shock of remorse
Is only relieved by more pain;
But then slowly the atmosphere changes
And a still, small voice in your brain
Tells you there’s someone familiar nearby,
Maybe even in the same room,
And the air seems charged with their presence
Softly melting away the gloom.
Because when you lose somebody you love
You gain an angel you know.

They always say no one ever comes back
From the kingdom of the dead;
But there’s no need since energy can’t be destroyed
And their memory’s alive in your head.
They’re around all the time, dying to live,
And to give you the life they never led.
Just listen quietly and you’ll hear someone say:
‘I’m not dead. I’m not dead. I’m not dead.’
For when you lose somebody you love
You gain an angel you know.

‘I’m surfing across the River Jordan,
Communicating through ultra-sound;
I’m at the invisible end of the spectrum;
Open your inner eye and look round.
‘Where I am is the place you once lived
In the dream-time before you were born.
The spirit enters a shell and then leaves;
Linked by a thread that can never be torn.

Their end is a new beginning
Where grief gives way to a glow
And they gather up light through time and through space
With someone they care for in tow.

When you lose somebody you love
You gain an angel you know.

As someone who strives for a degree of elegance but who is fated never to achieve it, I was always struck by Robin’s natural elegance, poise and charm. It was a privilege to know him and to feel a little of his favour so I can imagine the warmth and love extended to you all and to Manuela, Dany, Alice and Sam.

While some say that death is a symptom of life’s limited state I would hope it is merely the malady of the soul endured as part of its path towards ascension. At this painful moment for his family and all of his friends, colleagues and comrades, I wish him the safest and purest of flights. Among many others, he and Heathcote Williams will now be able to talk endlessly into the light.

This poem was written when I heard the sad news.

FOR ROBIN BESTE AND FAMILY

It is only through dark
That light achieves its full measure.
Against its lines we gain purchase
On the presence and gift
Of life’s charm.

None were as charming
Or sleek,
From his urbane stance
To the treasure
Of his good looks and viewpoint
On the counter cultural dance
As we stumble
Towards
The oncoming political storm.

As devoted to change
As he was to The Action (Robin’s
Favourite band)
He was totem
To standards and time
Unsurpassed.

On this dreadful day
When what was Beste
Has been taken
We will commit love and friendship
To honouring his soft shadow
Sharpening as we listen
To all that he shared.

Robin lasts.

by David Erdos, 31st May 2019