Allan Horsfall

Allan Horsfall born 20 October 1927 (d. 2012)

Allan Horsfall was a pioneering British gay activist.

He was brought up in Burnley and Nelson. He spent three years in the Royal Air Force. When a member of the RAF Association, at the age of 21, he met Harold Pollard who was a teacher, and later became a headmaster. They became life-long partners.

In June 1958 Allan Horsfall offered support to A E Dyson who was in the process of founding the Homosexual Law Reform Society.

Allan Horsfall was a Labour Party councillor in Nelson from 1958 to 1961. During this time he introduced the local Labour Party to the idea of homosexual law reform. In 1959 he tabled a motion to back the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

From 1963 he lived in Bolton. In 1964 he co-founded the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee with Colin Harvey.

After the 1967 Sexual Reform Act, the committee became the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. Allan Horsfall was successively its secretary, chair, and president.

Most of his working life was spent with the National Coal Board, in the estates department. For his last few years before retirement he worked for the Salford Education Department.

In the mid-1990s he became involved with the campaign around the case of the Bolton 7.

Harold Pollard, his partner for 48 years, died in 1996.

In March 2000 Allan Horsfall received The Pink Paper Award for his services to the gay community.

Allan Horsfall and other gay rights campaigners who lobbied for a change in the law for 40 years were honoured in a ceremony at Manchester Town Hall in October 2004.

Horsfall died from heart failure, aged 84, in August 2012. British gay and human rights activist Peter Tatchell acknowledged Horsfall's contribution to gay rights and obituaries credited him as 'arguably the grandfather of  the modern gay rights movement in the UK'.