Firefighter talks to Rosalind Eyben, daughter of the wartime FBU general secretary John Horner and his wife Pat, about her new book on their lives
Can you set out who John Horner, your father, was? What was his background before becoming a political figure, and what memories do you have of him?
John Horner was born in Walthamstow in North East London in 1911. My grandmother had left school aged 11 to scrub doorsteps. She wanted a proper education for John and was immensely proud when he won a scholarship to grammar school.
His father was a shy, semi-literate building worker, not paid when it rained. He went on strike when told to by the labourers’ union but neither he nor John’s mother were interested in politics. Teenage John became a socialist after the general strike when the fee-paying pupils at his school had jeered at workers like his dad.
John joined the merchant navy at 17 and during the depression in the 1930s was appalled by the sight of unemployed men on the wharves of Buenos Aires, starving while the silos were stuffed with unsold wheat. If this was capitalism, John would have no part in it.
I remember him as a loving father, a broad-shouldered, approachable man, deeply curious about people and their worlds. He read art, philosophy, poetry and travel, but history was his passion.
When a young firefighter, he believed history was on his side – in the ultimate class struggle the workers would win, as they had already in the Soviet Union.
My book is also about my mother Pat, housewife, activist and peace campaigner. She had met John at a Quaker evening school. He was to write: “She watched much of her life become submerged in the affairs of the Fire Brigades Union until at times it was impossible to disentangle our lives together from the vicissitudes of that organisation”.
How did Horner build the FBU into a serious force?
John was unemployed when he became a London firefighter in 1934 and soon made his name in the FBU for his gift of the gab.
He was only 27 when elected FBU general secretary in 1939. With no management experience, he asked his father-in-law, a failed businessman, how to read a balance sheet.
John’s election pledge had been to strengthen the FBU’s links with the new Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) but the Second World War started before he could develop a proposal.
Auxiliary firefighters were flooding into fire stations with employment terms that threatened to dilute the pay and conditions of regular firefighters. The solution was to recruit the auxiliaries into the FBU and campaign to improve their lot.
The TUC general secretary, Walter Citrine, was against it, as were many FBU members. But John went ahead, creating a separate AFS section in the union.
FBU membership had increased 15-fold when, in May 1940, FBU conference retrospectively approved his decision.
When regulars and auxiliaries had to work together in the Blitz, the value of firefighters’ solidarity as members of a single union became apparent
The FBU now had the numbers to be taken seriously and when regulars and auxiliaries had to work together in the Blitz, the value of firefighters’ solidarity as members of a single union became apparent.
In 1943, the regular and AFS sections merged and by the end of the war the FBU was not only fully recognised by the home office in negotiating employment conditions, but had also secured a voice in fire service policy.
What role did he have in the wider world and workers’ movement?
My parents were passionate about world peace and under John’s leadership the FBU supported a communist front organisation, the British Peace Committee.On leaving the Communist Party (CP), John became a prominent speaker for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The FBU also helped found the Movement for Colonial Freedom, but during the Suez crisis in 1956 John antagonised many members when, without consulting them, he called for a general strike.
Your book is called John Horner and the Communist Party. Can you explain a bit about the role of the CP in Horner’s life and in British politics at the time, and how he eventually broke with it?
John had been a “fellow traveller” until joining the party secretly during the war when many leading positions in the FBU were held by communists.
He publicly joined in 1945 and sat on the party’s executive committee. During the early years of the Cold War he was instructed by the party to speak at the TUC against German re-armament and for colonial liberation.
Despite his undisputed qualities as general secretary, letters to the Firefighter show members divided as to the wisdom of having a communist leader.
My book’s subtitle is “Uncomfortable Encounters with Truth”. In 1955 John resigned from the Communist Party’s executive committee after having obeyed a party instruction to do something wrong that he knew he should not have agreed to. Soon afterwards Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s terror regime triggered a breakdown. Feeling “both betrayer and betrayed”, he left the party during the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Afterwards he hated being asked about his time as a communist. Shortly before he died he confessed to me how he had hidden from himself the truth about Stalinism.
How do you think we should remember him? What was his legacy for the fire and rescue service?
John Horner had the courage to confront truths he had tried to ignore when supporting what he had believed to be a great cause. As for his fire service legacy, according to his obituary in The Times, he was a “relentless opponent of cost-cutting and carelessness” that saved innumerable lives.
John Horner and the Communist Party Uncomfortable encounters with truth By Rosalind Eyben Published 2 April, 2024 by Routledge ISBN 9781032670775 Paperback £25.99
