John Horner and the Communist Party

Book excerpt: John Horner and the Communist Party is a biography of a leading trade unionist and activist who became disillusioned with the Communist Party. Known for creating the modern Fire Brigades Union during the Second World War, John Horner (1911-1997) resigned from the Communist Party in 1956. Formerly one of the Party’s leading members, he afterwards refused to speak or write about his communist past. Horner’s silence left him forgotten, but Horner’s daughter, Rosalind Eyben, has remedied this through her engrossing account of how and why John Horner and Pat, his wife, became communist, and the events that led them to resign from the Party. She pieces the story together from a wide range of sources, including Horner’s own lively unpublished memoir of his early years. The narrative occasionally diverges from the historian’s voice to deliver personal reflections on the author's communist childhood and on what her father told her shortly before his death about his shame and guilt for having so long denied uncomfortable truths about the Party and the Stalinist terror. This book is for anyone concerned with the problem of political allegiance, personal morality and associated states of denial that were to haunt Horner in later life. It will also be of interest to scholars and students researching communism and the Communist Party.