Ralph Miliband

His father, Samuel (1895–1966), was a skilled craftsman who made leather goods, and his mother, Renia (or Renée, née Steinlauf 1901–1975), travelled around selling women's hats.

In 1922, they were among the Polish Jews who migrated westward, to Brussels in Belgium, after the First World War.

It was here that Miliband's parents first met, and they married in 1923.

Ralph Miliband (born Adolphe Miliband; 7 January 1924 – 21 May 1994) was a British sociologist.

He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.

Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants.

Their son, Adolphe, was born in Brussels on 7 January 1924.

She was embarrassed by having to work in this profession, hiding it from her neighbours, but required the extra income due to the economic troubles of the Great Depression during the 1930s.

Renia spoke Polish fluently, but her husband had only had a very basic education and, as such, probably only spoke Yiddish, but he taught himself French by reading newspapers.

He grew up in the working-class community of Saint-Gilles, and in 1939, aged 15, he became a member of Hashomer Hatzair ("Young Guard"), a socialist-Zionist youth group.

He fled to Britain in 1940 with his father, to avoid persecution when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium.

Learning to speak English and enrolling at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl Marx.

In May 1940, following the outbreak of the Second World War, the armies of Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, and the Miliband family, being Jewish, decided to flee the country from the antisemitic Nazi authorities.

They missed the train to Paris and, although Adolphe – who was then sixteen – wanted to walk to the border, the family recognised that his younger sister Anna Hélène, who was only twelve, was too young for such a trek.

It was decided that Renia and Anna Hélène would stay in Brussels, while Sam and Ralph would go ahead and make the journey to Paris.

However, along the way Sam decided to change the plan and went with his son to Ostend, where they caught the last boat to Britain.

They arrived there on 19 May 1940.

In London, Miliband abandoned the name Adolphe due to its connection with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and instead began calling himself Ralph.

He and his father gained work in the Chiswick area removing furniture from houses bombed in the Blitz and, after six weeks, were able to send news to Renia and Anne-Marie that they were in London.

Discovering that the Jews of Belgium were being rounded up by the Nazis to be sent to extermination camps in the Holocaust, Renia and Anne-Marie managed to escape to a rural farm, where they were hidden by a French family until after the end of the war, when they were reunited with Sam and Ralph.

However, several of Miliband's relatives and his best friend, Maurice Tan, were killed in the Holocaust.

To his dismay, the teenage Miliband came across antisemitism in London.

In a diary entry made shortly after he arrived in Britain, he wrote:

"The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world ... When you hear the English talk of this war you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the continent in general and for the French in particular. They didn't like the French before the defeat ... Since the defeat, they have the greatest contempt for the French Army ... England first. This slogan is taken for granted by the English people as a whole. To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation."

Learning to speak English, Ralph gained a place at Acton Technical College (now Brunel University) in west London with the help of the League of Nations' Commission for Refugees in January 1941.

After completing his course there, he gained the help of the Belgian government in exile to study at the London School of Economics (LSE).

He had become interested in Marxism and revolutionary socialism, and visited the grave of Marxism's founder Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in north London, to swear an oath to "the workers' cause".

Meanwhile, with the constant aerial bombing of London by the Luftwaffe, the LSE was evacuated to the premises of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Harold Laski, the historian and socialist theorist, was a dominant figure in the LSE at this time.

Miliband studied under Laski, and was considerably influenced by him politically.

Miliband volunteered to be sent to Belgium to assist the resistance movement, and passed his medical in January 1942, but as a Polish national he was not allowed to join until the Polish authorities gave consent.

He asked Laski for help in joining the services, and shortly afterwards A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote advising him to "go and see a vice-admiral at the Admiralty, who would fix it up".

Miliband joined the Royal Navy in June 1943.

After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he settled in London in 1946 and naturalised as a British subject in 1948.

By the 1960s, he was a prominent member of the New Left movement in Britain, which was critical of established socialist governments in the Soviet Union and Central Europe (the Eastern Bloc).

He published several books on Marxist theory and the criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism (1961), The State in Capitalist Society (1969), and Marxism and Politics (1977), and he edited the Writings of the Left series (Jonathan Cape and Grove Press, 1972–1973).

Both of his sons, David and Ed Miliband, went on to become senior members of the Labour Party following their father's death.

David was the British Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010, whilst Ed became Energy and Climate Change Secretary and was later elected party leader, serving between 2010 and 2015.

Miliband's parents had grown up in the impoverished Jewish quarter of Warsaw, Poland.

Samuel Miliband had been a member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Warsaw.