ABSTRACT
John Horner (1911–1997), leader of the Fire Brigades Union, became a communist in the 1930s and twenty years later resigned from the Party. Shortly before he died, he told his daughters of his guilt and shame for having chosen to believe the Communist Party’s lies about Stalin’s Soviet Union and for enabling it to control the union. John Horner’s confession decided his younger daughter to write this account of her father’s life up until he left the Party. She draws on his unpublished memoir to discover how and why he and her mother became communist and she investigates their experience as Communist Party members and the circumstances of their leaving the Party about which the memoir is silent. It never comes easy to admit to an uncomfortable truth about a cause to which you have committed so much.
