Mining and landscape painter and illustrator, born in Ashington, Northumberland. Like his father a pitman, he began work in the local colliery aged 13, later moving nearby to Ellington Colliery. While there, in 1934 he joined a Workers’ Educational Association art appreciation course under Robert Lyon. This spawned the Ashington Group of painters, which included notable talents such as Jack Harrison and George Jude McLean. The Group’s first show was at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, in 1936, in which Kilbourn participated, and his pictures were in all subsequent exhibitions in Britain and overseas. He was also a regular exhibitor at the Artists of the Northern Counties shows at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. The last Ashington Group show was in 1986, organised by the Workers’ Educational Association’s Wansbeck branch to mark the first anniversary of the end of the Miners’ Strike.