Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something to knowledge base
Content stats: 0 posts, 0 articles, 0 media, 0 notes
Members stats: 0 subscribers, 0 contributors, 0 moderators, 0 supporters
Subscribers
Supporters
Contributors
Moderators
Hub AI
Dona Torr AI simulator
(@Dona Torr_simulator)
Hub AI
Dona Torr AI simulator
(@Dona Torr_simulator)
Dona Torr
Dona Ruth Anne Torr (April 28, 1883 – January 8, 1957) was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the famous Communist Party Historians Group. Aside from her translations of many Marxist classics into English, she is perhaps best known for her unfinished biography of the important labour activist, Tom Mann, Tom Mann and his Times (London, 1956).
Dona Torr was the daughter of William Torr, afterwards vicar of Eastham and Hon. Canon of Chester Cathedral. She had three sisters and two younger brothers. The Torr family was listed in Burke's Landed Gentry and her grandfather, John Torr, had been a wealthy merchant in Liverpool, a Conservative M.P., and staunch Anglican. Dona attended University College, London, on and off, completing a BA Honours degree in English before the First World War.
Before the formation of the Communist Party Torr was a librarian at the Daily Herald (run by George Lansbury), where she met her future husband, Walter Holmes. In 1920, she was a founder member (albeit not a prominent one) of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Thereafter she worked in behind-the-scenes roles, aiding with party publications, and acting as a courier during the General Strike in London in 1926. She also travelled to Moscow as a translator for the Fifth Congress of the Communist International where the proceedings were largely conducted in German, which was her main linguistic skill, it is unlikely she was fluent in Russian. She also was to do work at the Marx-Engels Institute, where she translated into English the official Soviet German language edition of the Correspondence of Marx and Engels (London, 1934). This made her name as something of a Marxist scholar back in Britain, and she was thereafter to oversee the preparation of a special facsimile edition of Marx's Capital for George Allen and Unwin.
Torr worked at the party publishing house, Martin Lawrence (the initials, "M.L.", being an allusion to Marx and Lenin), which later merged with a leftist literary firm to become Lawrence and Wishart, where she was to work closely with former poet Douglas Garman. To celebrate the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1640, in 1940, they commissioned young Oxford don, Christopher Hill to edit a set of three essays English Revolution, possibly connected with the plans for a "Faculty of History" at the party training centre, Marx House in London. This was intended.
to be a central party text with associated articles and pageantry. [...] The role of Dona Torr has been underestimated. Assessing the party purposes of Torr is essential to any analysis of her relationship to the historians from both the pre-war and the post-war periods.
Her husband, Walter Holmes, was a journalist on the Daily Herald and during the 1920s for the Communist Party, he worked on the Sunday Worker and during the 1930s was to be a significant and politically orthodox writer for the Daily Worker with postings in Russia, and even visiting Manchuria to cover the Japanese attacks on China, which he recounted in Eyewitness in Manchuria, it is possible that Dona Torr went with him. However, she seldom wrote any material for the main papers published by the party, and only occasionally wrote for party journals such as Labour Monthly, controlled by Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt.
As early as 1936, Torr had set herself the task of promoting historical study in the party. She had begun work on her Tom Mann biography, publishing an interim booklet in 1936. She wrote to the party ideologue, Palme Dutt, that she saw the need to "breed new historians, awaken and train them". She was active in forming a "Marxist Historians' Group" in 1938, and the later "Historians' Group" in 1946.
One of those most generous in his praise of Torr was E.P. Thompson, who spent many years working closely with her on a biography of William Morris, which was published by the party. At that stage in his party career, he was best known, not as an historian, but as a prominent member of the party's Writers' Group. He described his gratitude to Dona Torr in the "Preface"[clarification needed]:
Dona Torr
Dona Ruth Anne Torr (April 28, 1883 – January 8, 1957) was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the famous Communist Party Historians Group. Aside from her translations of many Marxist classics into English, she is perhaps best known for her unfinished biography of the important labour activist, Tom Mann, Tom Mann and his Times (London, 1956).
Dona Torr was the daughter of William Torr, afterwards vicar of Eastham and Hon. Canon of Chester Cathedral. She had three sisters and two younger brothers. The Torr family was listed in Burke's Landed Gentry and her grandfather, John Torr, had been a wealthy merchant in Liverpool, a Conservative M.P., and staunch Anglican. Dona attended University College, London, on and off, completing a BA Honours degree in English before the First World War.
Before the formation of the Communist Party Torr was a librarian at the Daily Herald (run by George Lansbury), where she met her future husband, Walter Holmes. In 1920, she was a founder member (albeit not a prominent one) of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Thereafter she worked in behind-the-scenes roles, aiding with party publications, and acting as a courier during the General Strike in London in 1926. She also travelled to Moscow as a translator for the Fifth Congress of the Communist International where the proceedings were largely conducted in German, which was her main linguistic skill, it is unlikely she was fluent in Russian. She also was to do work at the Marx-Engels Institute, where she translated into English the official Soviet German language edition of the Correspondence of Marx and Engels (London, 1934). This made her name as something of a Marxist scholar back in Britain, and she was thereafter to oversee the preparation of a special facsimile edition of Marx's Capital for George Allen and Unwin.
Torr worked at the party publishing house, Martin Lawrence (the initials, "M.L.", being an allusion to Marx and Lenin), which later merged with a leftist literary firm to become Lawrence and Wishart, where she was to work closely with former poet Douglas Garman. To celebrate the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1640, in 1940, they commissioned young Oxford don, Christopher Hill to edit a set of three essays English Revolution, possibly connected with the plans for a "Faculty of History" at the party training centre, Marx House in London. This was intended.
to be a central party text with associated articles and pageantry. [...] The role of Dona Torr has been underestimated. Assessing the party purposes of Torr is essential to any analysis of her relationship to the historians from both the pre-war and the post-war periods.
Her husband, Walter Holmes, was a journalist on the Daily Herald and during the 1920s for the Communist Party, he worked on the Sunday Worker and during the 1930s was to be a significant and politically orthodox writer for the Daily Worker with postings in Russia, and even visiting Manchuria to cover the Japanese attacks on China, which he recounted in Eyewitness in Manchuria, it is possible that Dona Torr went with him. However, she seldom wrote any material for the main papers published by the party, and only occasionally wrote for party journals such as Labour Monthly, controlled by Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt.
As early as 1936, Torr had set herself the task of promoting historical study in the party. She had begun work on her Tom Mann biography, publishing an interim booklet in 1936. She wrote to the party ideologue, Palme Dutt, that she saw the need to "breed new historians, awaken and train them". She was active in forming a "Marxist Historians' Group" in 1938, and the later "Historians' Group" in 1946.
One of those most generous in his praise of Torr was E.P. Thompson, who spent many years working closely with her on a biography of William Morris, which was published by the party. At that stage in his party career, he was best known, not as an historian, but as a prominent member of the party's Writers' Group. He described his gratitude to Dona Torr in the "Preface"[clarification needed]: