(William) Norman Ewer (22 October 188525 January 1977) was a British journalist, remembered mostly now for a few lines of verse. He was prominent as a writer on foreign affairs for the Daily Herald of London. Early life He was the only son of William Thomas Ewer, a silk merchant, and his wife Julia Stone, born at Hornsey in north London. He studied at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics for Part I of the Tripos (emerging as fifteenth Wrangler) and history for Part II. At Cambridge he was a member of the Fabian Society, where he made a lifelong friend in Alfred Louis Bacharach. Ewer became secretary to Maurice de Forest, through whom he met George Lansbury. His employer de Forrest opposed the United Kingdom's participation in World War I; Ewer was a pacifist and conscientious objector, and a lecturer for the Union of Democratic Control. An occasion in 1915 on which he spoke in pacifist terms for the UDC at East Finchley Methodist Church drew attention to him from MI5. Ewer was part of a group of National Guilds League members supportive of the October Revolution of 1917. Along with Robin Page Arnot, Rajani Palme Dutt, William Holmes, Will Mellor and Ellen Wilkinson, Ewer formed the Guild Communists, which became a founding element of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Journalist Ewer was recruited by George Lansbury and from 1912 was writing in the Daily Herald. Lansbury thought highly of his stamina: he is quoted as saying Ewer "has the constitution of a horse and the capacity of going without food of a camel." He was known in Fleet Street as Trilby Ewer: the nickname came from the eponymous heroine of the novel Trilby, and her habit which he shared of walking with bare feet. Ewer came onto the management committee of the Herald, representing his employer Maurice de Forrest who was a backer of the paper. He wrote in support of guild socialism and the National Guilds League during World War I in A. R. Orage's The New Age. In 1918 he wrote in the Workers' Dreadnought, defending the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a socialist revolution. After the end of the war Ewer returned to the Daily Herald, with the post of foreign editor. Activities on behalf of the USSR Ewer was a well-known writer in