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Police hunted him. His father tried to shelter Arthur, but the house on Clare Street was not safe enough. On New Year's Eve 1918, he left his father's house and took the mountain path up Aberdare. He walked all night and all day into the New Year till he saw the little mining town of Maerdy in the valley below. It was there that Arthur Horner's vindictive rise to power began.
The Prisoner. Together with a red-haired Welsh miner called Charlie Jones, he organized the miners of Maerdy. When the police got after Horner again, he fled to Ireland, and under the name Jack O'Brien served in the Irish Republican Army. When he heard that his wife had borne him a son, he returned to Britain. The minute he came ashore, the police arrested him. During his term at Wormwood Scrubbs Prison, he was the most obstreperous prisoner the wardens ever knew.
On his release, he was forcibly inducted into the Army, forcibly dressed in uniform; a tall Welsh Guardsman, who was to escort him back to Wales, ordered him to shoulder his pack. Homer refused. The deadlock continued till a crowd gathered. Finally a grey-haired little man stepped forward, quietly picked up the pack and murmured: "Come along, Arthur." It was Arthur Horner's father. Arthur's finish to the story: "Of course, as we got round the corner, I took the pack from the old man—but I was damned if I was going to cave in under the eyes of everyone there." Old Jim Horner has a topper to that finish; he claims that before they had traveled back to Wales, Arthur had converted his Guardsman escort to pacifism.
When Arthur still refused to serve in the Army, he was imprisoned again. His father traveled hundreds of miles to prisons all over the country, taking him clean clothing, cozening prison officials to allow him a few words with his son. Released, he went back to Maerdy, resumed his organizing work. "He was a bloody nuisance to everybody," said one of his critics. "Maerdy was run like a blasted Soviet." Soon Maerdy became known as Little Moscow.
In the great strike of 1921, Horner even forced the safety crew to walk out of the Maerdy mines. Without the safety men, the mines were flooded. Arthur Horner was jailed again. It was not until seven years later that some of the Maerdy mines were reopened, but they ran at a loss and had to be sold. The owners were beaten, but so was Maerdy. Today it is a silent town in which not a pit wheel turns.
The Devil. While his adopted town was decaying, Horner forged ahead, became one of the first members of Britain's Communist Party, visited Russia, helped build up his union into one of Britain's strongest. He achieved genuine betterment of the British miners' lot, and they loved him for it.
Today, a small, bespectacled, inconspicuous man, he sits in a dingy office in a dingy building, hiding behind the union's figurehead president, Will Lawther. He lives quietly in suburban Kenton. His power grows. He has distributed Communists in key positions throughout his union, is now trying hard to pull members from Ernie Bevin's Transport and General Workers into his own union.