Arthur Lewis Horner (5 April 1894 – 4 September 1968) was a Welsh trade union leader and communist politician. During his periods of office as President of the South Wales Miners Federation (SWMF) from 1936, and as General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1946, he became one of the most prominent and influential communists in British public life. Early career Arthur Horner was born in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, the eldest surviving son of a family of seventeen children only six of whom lived past infancy. Horner's father was a chargehand porter in the railway goods station. His maternal grandfather and two maternal uncles were miners. His earliest employment was as a grocer's assistant and delivery boy in the coalfield communities around Merthyr. After a short spell in Merthyr railway goods station he was drawn into coalmining employment in 1915 due to his growing interest in the political radicalism of trade union activists in the nearby Rhondda coalfield. Early political allegiances Horner's first political affiliation was socialist and Keir Hardie, who had been elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil in 1900, was his first political hero. After he had joined the Independent Labour Party in Merthyr, Horner moved to the colliery village of Ynyshir in the Rhondda where he became a protégé of Noah Ablett, trade union militant, executive member of the South Wales Miners Federation and also convenor of local classes in Marxist education which Horner attended. During this period Horner gradually relinquished the strong Christian faith of his teenage years during which he had been baptised into the Churches of Christ. This small but intellectually inclined Protestant sect, had recognised his potential talent as a preacher and financed a period of training for him as a lay evangelist from which he gained considerable confidence in public speaking and debate. Opposing the First World War from the standpoint of class solidarity, in 1917 he fled to Dublin to avoid arrest for ignoring his call-up papers. Horner was a supporter of demands for Irish Home Rule and became involved with the rebel factions from the 1916 Easter Rising, joining the Irish Citizen Army. Horner said that he chose Ireland because he believed the "Irish are the only people waging a war of real freedom" On his return to Britain he was arrested by the police and handed over to the army. For disobeying orders he was sentenced