Personal Collections photographs - Arthur Horner

Photographs of Arthur Horner and his colleagues, friends and family at conferences, meetings and in less formal situations.

Arthur Horner was born in 1894 in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. He was employed variously in his youth at a barbers, as a grocer's delivery boy and also at the local railway office. He had a religious upbringing and at seventeen obtained a scholarship to attend the Baptist College in Birmingham but he left after six months to pursue politics instead. He was employed at Standard Collieries in the Rhondda valley. He opposed the war effort of World War I and this led to him being imprisoned, but he was released in 1919 when he was appointed as checkweighman at Maerdy colliery. In 1920 he became a member of the British Communist Party and along with Noah Ablett, A.J. Cook and S.O. Davies, established the Miners' Minority Movement. As an active trade unionist he became a member of the executive committee of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain in 1926, but his radical views led to him being removed from this and also the Miners' Minority Movement in the early 1930s. He became the South Wales Miners' Federation president in 1936 and was appointed General Secretary to the National Union of Mineworkers in 1944, a position he held until his retirement in 1959. He died in 1968.

Arthur Horner Study (audio recordings) GB 217 SWCC : AUD/Project/10