Is there a more freighted story than the rise and fall of the Communist Party in the 20th century, with its hopes and triumphs, its betrayals and defeats? Brighton-based author, historian and activist Rosalind Eyben was a close witness to the second half of the epic narrative. Her father was a senior member of the party and she watched him struggle with the secrets that he kept and the conflicting emotions they stirred within him and his family.
Rosalind’s new book, John Horner and the Communist Party, is sub-titled ‘Uncomfortable Encounters with Truth’. It’s not a description you might expect to be flagged up so obviously in an otherwise warm account of her father’s many achievements.
John Horner came of age under the enduring influence of 19th-century poet and socialist William Morris, was elected as General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union at the age of only 27, led it through the darkest days of the 1940 blitz, then after the war climbed to the highest level in the trade union movement, eventually ending up on the CND Executive Committee along with others of the ‘star-studded gang of worthies’ such as Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot, JB Priestley and AJP Taylor, finally becoming a Labour MP in 1964.
However, until 1956 he was also one of the Communist Party’s leading members and activists, sticking with the party through the terrors and purges and show trials of the 1930s, only leaving when the brutal invasion of Hungary made further involvement unbearable.
Writing the history
Although he himself prepared a lively memoir of his early years, Horner’s writing avoided the difficult questions and he refused to say much about them. Shortly before he died, however, he did talk to Rosalind about what she calls his shame and guilt at having so long denied many uncomfortable truths.
Busy with her own life and work, it was several years before she started work on a book about it all. She undertook a two-year Master’s degree in history in order to learn about historiographical research methods and attended classes in creative writing before finally getting down to writing during lockdown.
The huge amount of work she has done is immediately apparent, but while there is an impressive array of well-sourced detail there is also much pleasing personal reflection, as the author considers the impact of various events on her father and his wife, Rosalind’s mother.
It is the skill with which she balances her intimate knowledge with an analytical eye that makes the book work so well. The reader really does get a sense of how seismic incidents echo down the years, reaching into the generations below.
Building the Good Society
Rosalind is an Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and is active in the progressive think tank Compass. This has a key objective of building ‘the good society’ and, as we go into the Starmer years, Compass members are even now debating what exactly this means. Rosalind is only too aware of the resonances of her father’s earlier somewhat utopian language.
Didn’t the communists also talk about a society where there would be no more exploitation of man by man, a better world for everyone everywhere?
When I talked to her in her flat on the Brighton seafront, she spoke of her concerns as to what can go wrong when you commit yourself to a progressive cause and how to avoid the “trap of letting your convictions blind you to disagreeable truths about means and ends”. She thought this was why she was so keen to ensure that Compass lived up to “being the change it wants to see”.
There are many accounts of what it was like to be brought up in a Communist family, with the perpetual feeling of being an outsider.
David Aaronovich’s family lived in a state of “complete otherness”. They associated only with other communists, and life involved a certain amount of deprivation. As a child, unlike his friends, David was not allowed to read the Beano because the workers at its publisher, DC Thomson, were forbidden to join a union.
Michael Rosen, whose parents joined the Young Communist League around 1935, writes about how he learned to live with “the stories and meanings from my family but also a reaction against its allegiance to the God that failed”.
Alexei Sayle wrote a memoir called Stalin Ate My Homework. He said: “I just wanted to be honest. It’s an affectionate book, but without shying away from the blinkered attitude we took in not looking at things that were wrong.” In an interview to promote the book he said he now feels “really ambiguous about the psychology of people trying to do good in the world”.
Rosalind covers all this and more. She is particularly concerned with political allegiance and how it connects with personal morality, and with the various states of denial required and how these would haunt her father in later life. And haunted he certainly seemed to have been. Even though John had a distinguished public life after leaving the party, Rosalind recognises that this is not the point of the story. The 40 years left to him after the invasion of Hungary are covered in just four pages.
Making peace with the past
There are actually several stories going on in the book, and the deftness with which Rosalind handles them suggests her creative writing classes paid dividends. This is not the dry academic history that the cover of the book perhaps suggests it might be. It’s much more engaging than that.
We have the working-class boy rising to the highest levels in the trade union movement, getting to hobnob with Barbara Castle and other Wilson-era dignitaries. Then there is the whole story of the politically committed 1930s’ generation and how some were drawn into the communist cause and learned to negotiate the various ethical evasions required. There is the story of Rosalind’s mum and the way the ‘party wives’ were sidelined despite their strengths, insight and obvious talent. And then the way the whole edifice of her father’s life becomes harder and harder to sustain as time passes and the true nature of the Soviet Union becomes impossible to ignore.
By the end, Rosalind makes a peace with her father even if there are still uneasy silences, unanswered questions and a deal of pain on the page. She wisely avoids the issue of why the CP continues to spin different versions of the same old stories even now. She can perhaps take some consolation in the fact that, unlike Alexei Sayle, she didn’t have to spend her childhood summer holidays on fraternal visits to East German State farms.
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