J. F. Horrabin

James Francis "Frank" Horrabin (1 November 1884 – 2 March 1962) was an English socialist and for some time Communist 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. He illustrated H. G. Wells' The Outline of History in 1920.

In 1937, only a few months after its institution, the BBC Television Service produced an occasional political discussion programme called News 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) with Rita Hinden and Arthur 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 magazine Socialist 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 of bronchopneumonia at home in Hendon, London, on 2 March 1962 aged 77. He had no children.