the Executive of the Labour Leagues of Youth, later being put on the list of Labour Party Parliamentary candidates. She and Anil were associated with the MP for Slough Fenner Brockway and with George Padmore, the prophet of Black African Liberation. After graduating from University College, she studied International Law at the London School of Economics. However, she was unable to complete her master's degree as she was forced to accompany Anil to Sri Lanka in 1952. Sri Lanka In Sri Lanka, Jeanne joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and worked in the Lanka Estate Workers' Union (LEWU), which organised labourers on the tea and rubber plantations. At the time the British were still very powerful on the island, in spite of the country having obtained a form of independence in 1948. The British planters, aghast at the idea of a white woman speaking on behalf of coolies, prevailed upon the government to deport Jeanne, but she went into hiding with Vivienne Goonewardena and the LSSP fought successfully to prevent the deportation, in a repeat of the Bracegirdle affair. Lake House and the CMU She joined the Lake House group of newspapers as a journalist, recruited by chief editor Esmond Wickremasinghe (the father of Ranil Wickremasinghe) along with other left-oriented intellectuals such as Herbert Keuneman and Regi Siriwardena. She had a column (under the pseudonym Jane Freeman) in The Observer and also worked on the Jana magazine. In 1955, she was called upon by Wickremasinghe to help write the a speech for Sir John Kotelawala, the then Prime Minister. This was the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Movement, and the speech, which became quite famous, was a joint effort with the brilliant B.J.B. Fernando (Bonnie). In the mid-1950s, she joined Sri Lanka's first co-operative housing scheme, the Gothatuwa Building Society, founded by Herbert Keuneman, Seneka Bibile, Bonnie Fernando and other members of the radical intelligentsia. This led to the foundation of the Welikadawatte housing estate, which attained some fame as an island of intellectual creativity. Jeanne formed a journalists' branch of the Ceylon Mercantile Union (CMU) at Lake House, much to the chagrin of the management which had strenuously upheld a no unions policy. She was elected national Assistant Secretary of union, a post she held for several years. In 1960, she and several other trade-unionists were sacked from Lake House and were not reinstated. At this time she edited