J. F. Horrabin
Portrait of Horrabin byHoward Coster, ca. 1945
Born	James Francis Horrabin (1884-11-01)1 November 1884 Peterborough, England
Died	2 March 1962(1962-03-02) (aged 77) London, England
Occupation(s)	Writer, politician, cartoonist, cartographer
Years active	1905–1950
Spouse	Winifred Horrabin
Member of Parliament forPeterborough
In office 30 May 1929 – 7 October 1931
Preceded by	Sir Henry Brassey, Bt
Succeeded by	David Cecil, Lord Burghley

James Francis "Frank" Horrabin (1 November 1884 – 2 March 1962) was an English socialist and for some timeCommunist radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he wasLabour Member of Parliament forPeterborough. He attempted to construct a socialist geography and was an associate ofDavid Low andGeorge Orwell.

Born inPeterborough and educated atStamford School, he studied metalwork design at theSheffield School of Art, where he met his future wife,Winifred Batho, whom he married in 1911. He became a staff artist on theSheffield Telegraph in 1906, and art editor for theYorkshire Telegraph and Star in 1909.^[1]

In 1911 he moved to London as art editor ofThe Daily News.^[2] He drew his first maps for this paper during theBalkan War of 1912–13. He became editor ofThe Plebs, journal of the workers' education campaign group thePlebs' League, to which he also contributed caricatures, in 1914 and aguild socialist in 1915. He also lectured at theCentral Labour College.^[1]

In 1919 he createdThe Adventures of the Noah Family inThe Daily News, originally a daily panel cartoon, later a continuing four-panel comic strip. It featured a suburban family who shared their names with the Biblical Noah and his sons, who lived at "The Ark", Ararat Avenue with their petbear cub, Happy. The strip continued into the 1940s, in theNews Chronicle after 1930, and was collected into several hard back books, most notably theJaphet and Happy Annuals and Summer Books between 1932 and 1952, and had a fan club, The Arkubs.^[2][3] He illustratedH. G. Wells'The Outline of History in 1920.^[1] In 1922 he createdDot and Carrie, a strip about two office workers, forThe Star, which continued until 1962, moving to theEvening News in 1960.^[3]

His 1923 textAn Outline of Economic Geography, which sold in large numbers and was translated into nine other languages, attempted to provide workers with an account of economic (and political and historical) geography that used bourgeois "pure geography" but put it within a socialist andhistorical–materialist framework.

In 1924 he co-wroteWorking Class Education with his wife Winifred. He supported thegeneral strike in 1926,^[1] and co-wroteThe Workers History of the Great Strike (1927) withEllen Wilkinson MP andRaymond Postgate. He had a long-standing affair with Wilkinson. He was the Labour MP for Peterborough from 1929 to 1931,^[1] under the premiership of the first Labour Prime Minister,James Ramsay MacDonald. In 1930, he was one of seventeen Labour MPs to sign the"Mosley Memorandum", drawn up byOswald Mosley. He lost his seat at theGeneral Election of 1931 occasioned by the split in the party consequent on MacDonald forming aNational Government.

In 1932 he joined the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, becoming chairman in 1936. He also joined the national council of theSocialist League, becoming editor of its journalThe Socialist and Socialist Leaguer, giving up the editorship ofThe Plebs. He promoted socialism through his journalism, his appearance on radio programmes likeYour Questions Answered, and by illustrating educational texts likeLancelot Hogben'sMathematics for the Million (1936) andScience for the Citizen (1938), andJawaharlal Nehru'sGlimpses of World History (1939 edition).^[1] From 1934 on he produced several editions ofAn Atlas of Current Affairs, for which he also drew the maps.

Horrabin also supported the British Provisional Committee for the Defence ofLeon Trotsky, and signed a letter defending Trotsky's right to asylum and calling for an international inquiry into theMoscow Trials.^[4]

In 1937, only a few months after its institution, theBBC Television Service produced an occasional political discussion programme calledNews Map, which was usually presented by the former MP.News Map did not leave the studio and was mainly interested in foreign affairs stories.

In the 1940s he co-founded the Fabian Colonial Bureau (later the Fabian Commonwealth Bureau) withRita Hinden andArthur Creech Jones, and edited its journal,Empire. He was chairman of the Bureau from 1945 to 1950. He also wrote a regular column for the monthly magazineSocialist Commentary, edited by Hinden. In 1947 he and Winifred divorced, and the following year he married Margaret Victoria McWilliams, a widow with whom he had been having an affair since the early 1930s. He scaled back his political activities from the 1950s due to failing health. He died ofbronchopneumonia at home inHendon, London, on 2 March 1962 aged 77. He had no children.^[1]

• Bor, M.,The Socialist League in the 1930s (London, 2005)
• Gibson, I.,'Marxism and Ethical Socialism in Britain: the case of Winifred and Frank Horrabin' (BA Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008)
• Hepple, Leslie W.‘Socialist Geography in England: J. F. Horrabin and a Workers’ Economic and Political Geography’.Antipode 31, no. 1 (1999): 80–109
• McIlroy, J., ‘Independent Working Class Education and Trade Union Education and Training’ in Roger Fieldhouse (ed.),A History of Modern British Adult Education (Leicester, 1996), ch.10
• Macintyre, S.,A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-33 (Cambridge, 1980)
• Millar, J.P.M.M.,The Labour College Movement (London, 1979)
• Phillips, A. and Putnam, T., ‘Education for Emancipation: The Movement for Independent Working-Class Education 1908-1928’,Capital and Class, 10 (1980), pp. 18–42
• Rée, J.,Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940 (Oxford, 1984)
• Samuel, R., "British Marxist Historians, 1880-1980: Part One",NLR, 120 (1980), pp. 21–96
• Samuel, R.,The Lost World of British Communism (London, 2006)
• Simon, B., `The Struggle for Hegemony, 1920- 1926’ inidem (ed.),The Search for Enlightenment: The Working Class and Adult Education in the Twentieth Century, (London, 1990), pp. 15–70

• Hansard 1803–2005:contributions in Parliament by J. F. Horrabin
• Moreinformation and maps by Frank Horrabin can be found at theCornell University, PJ Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography
• Pathé newsreel featuring Horrabin and his Dot and Carrie cartoon strip

• 1884 births
• 1962 deaths
• English geographers
• People educated at Stamford School
• People from Peterborough
• Labour Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
• UK MPs 1929–1931
• British comic strip cartoonists
• Members of the Fabian Society
• English cartoonists

• EngvarB from August 2014
• Use dmy dates from August 2014
• Articles with hCards