Frank Horrabin

Who was Frank Horrabin?

James Francis Horrabin was an English socialist radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he was Labour Member of Parliament for Peterborough. He attempted to construct a socialist geography and was an associate of David Low and George Orwell.

Born in Peterborough and educated at Stamford School, he studied metalwork design at the Sheffield School of Art, where he met his future wife, Winifred Batho, whom he married in 1911. He became a staff artist on the Sheffield Telegraph in 1906, and art editor for the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star in 1909.

In 1911 he moved to London as art editor of The Daily News. He drew his first maps for this paper during the Balkan War of 1912-13. He became editor of The Plebs, journal of the workers' education campaign group the Plebs' League, to which he also contributed caricatures, in 1914 and a guild socialist in 1915. He also lectured at the Central Labour College.

In 1919 he created The Adventures of the Noah Family in The 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 pet bear cub, Happy. The strip continued into the 1940s, in the News Chronicle after 1930, and was collected into several hard back books, most notably the Japhet and Happy Annuals and Summer Books between 1932 and 1952, and had a fan club, The Arkubs. He illustrated H. G. Wells' The Outline of History in 1920. In 1922 he created Dot and Carrie, a strip about two office workers, for The Star, which continued until 1962, moving to the Evening News in 1960.