John Horner and the Communist Party: Uncomfortable Encounters With Truth [Hardcover]

Foreword by Kevin Morgan? Prologue? 1. Walthamstow Wide Awake!? 2. A Sense of Class? 3. At Sea? 4. The Lady of Shalott? 5. No More War? 6. The Coming Struggle for Power? 7. Marx for You and God for Me? 8. Hampstead? 9. Pale Pink and Deeper Red? 10. Close to Death, August-September 1939? 11. Imagination and Decision 1939-40? 12. Bombed But Far From Beaten? 13. Known to Keep Strange Company 1941-43? 14. The Campaign for a Second Front? 15. Go to it, Housewives!? 16. Dare to Make it Known? 17. Sliding into the Deep Freeze? 18. The World Shall Yet Live in Peace? 19.? The Childrens Perspective? 20. Both Betrayed and Betrayer? 21. Exit? Epilogue: Uncomfortable Encounters with Truth

John Horner and the Communist Party?is a biography of a leading trade unionist and activist who became disillusioned with the Communist Party.

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 Partys leading members, he afterwards refused to speak or write about his communist past. Horners silence left him forgotten, but Horners 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 She pieces the story together from a wide range of sources, including Horners own lively unpublished memoir of his early years. The narrative occasionally diverges from the historians 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 uncomfortablly