Dona Torr
Encyclopedia
Dona Ruth Anne Torr was a British
Marxist
historian
, and a major influence on the 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).
. 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 she was a librarian at the Daily Herald (run by George Lansbury
), where she met her future husband, Walter Holmes. A minor figure, she was a founder member in 1920 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 traveled 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 (note the initials, being "M.L." for 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
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
.
biography, publishing an interim booklet in 1936. She wrote to the party ideologue, Palme Dutt, that she saw the need to:
Hence her active role 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':
While there can be no doubt of her assiduousness, what sort of actual "influence" she had on Thompson's later methodological developments in history is debatable. Rightly famed for his main pioneering works of "History From Below" (or "From the Bottom Up"), Thompson's first major work, Morris, shows little if any such techniques or approaches. His major work, The Making of the English Working Class, was penned well after Torr's death, many years after he had left the party in a blaze of acrimony.
Other well-known academic members of the party's Historians' Group, including Christopher Hill and John Saville
, published a collection of essays in her honour, Democracy and the Labour Movement, many other members sought to contribute, but there were too many. Hill, one of those most fond of Torr, wrote the 'Preface' for the editorial team and it is often quoted as evidence of her impact on the whole Group:
Much of her work with these young academic historians in the party was to promote their use of Marxist analysis in the then nascent field of "Labour History" - and especially to give it a Communist spin. As both 'Prefaces' state, she was very generous with her time, and when draft work was sent to her she made a major effort to check it and comment accordingly. In this sense she was an ideal type of 'editor' for young writers, who due to hostility to Communism could usually only have their work published by the party publisher Lawrence and Wishart and/or its wholly owned subsidiary "Cobbett Press", or its (few) allied firms (e.g. "Frederick Muller" being one).
Apart from a sophisticated grasp of Marxism-Leninism, she showed no signs of adopting original methodologies, nor showed a remarkable use of archives in her other works. There is also no evidence of an attempt to pioneer oral history in her own main work with Tom Mann as she researched with him on the biography of him for the party's commemorative efforts with the old veteran. Hence, she cannot be seen as the founder of a new style of historical research, unlike Georges Lefebvre, and the Annales, in France.
Nonetheless, one form of enduring organisational influence stemmed from Torr's circle, from the creation by Historians' Group members of two offshoots: the academic journal Past and Present, and later, the Labour History Review. The former went on to create an associated society, more often associated with Medieval and "Early Modern" studies. After her death, the "Moderns" (a sub-section of the group) reached out to others to form the 'Society of Labour History' which has continued to this day publishing a distinguished journal of its own. Indirectly, the Historians' Group which she helped to found, and its members, also led to the formation of 'History Workshop' and to other leftist conferences and events to further the study of history in Britain. Often rejected by the mainstream of academic historians, these efforts by successors of Torr and her Historians' Group, have persisted, some in Adult Education, or precariously on the edges of academe, but they have never died out, proving to have a long and healthy life of their own, crafting a wide variety of cultural studies, feminist works, and more traditional Labour Histories.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, and a major influence on the Communist Party Historians Group
Communist Party Historians Group
A subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain , from 1946-1956 the Communist Party Historians Group formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to "history from below." Famous members included such leading lights of 20th-century British history as...
. 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
Tom Mann was a noted British trade unionist. Largely self-educated, Mann became a successful organiser and a popular public speaker in the labour movement.-Early years:...
, Tom Mann and his Times (London, 1956).
Biographical Introduction
William Torr, her father was to become Vicar of Eastham, and Hon. Canon of Chester CathedralChester Cathedral
Chester Cathedral is the mother church of the Church of England Diocese of Chester, and is located in the city of Chester, Cheshire, England. The cathedral, formerly St Werburgh's abbey church of a Benedictine monastery, is dedicated to Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary...
. She had three sisters and two younger brothers. The Torr family was listed in Burke's Landed Gentry
Burke's Landed Gentry
Burke's Landed Gentry is the result of nearly two centuries of intense work by the Burke family, and others since, in building a collection of books of genealogical and heraldic interest,...
and her grandfather, John Torr, had been a wealthy merchant in Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
, a Conservative M.P., and staunch Anglican
Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion is an international association of national and regional Anglican churches in full communion with the Church of England and specifically with its principal primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury...
. 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 she was a librarian at the Daily Herald (run by George Lansbury
George Lansbury
George Lansbury was a British politician, socialist, Christian pacifist and newspaper editor. He was a Member of Parliament from 1910 to 1912 and from 1922 to 1940, and leader of the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935....
), where she met her future husband, Walter Holmes. A minor figure, she was a founder member in 1920 of the Communist Party of Great Britain
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
. Thereafter she worked in behind the scenes roles, aiding with party publications, and acting as a courier during the General Strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
in London in 1926. She also traveled 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 (note the initials, being "M.L." for Marx and Lenin), which later merged with a leftist literary firm to become Lawrence and Wishart
Lawrence and Wishart
Lawrence & Wishart is a British publishing company formerly associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was formed in 1936, through the merger of Martin Lawrence, the Communist Party's press and Wishart Ltd, a family-owned liberal and anti-fascist publisher.It publishes the journals...
, where she was to work closely with former poet Douglas Garman. To celebrate the tercentenary of the English Revolution
English Revolution
"English Revolution" has been used to describe two different events in English history. The first to be so called—by Whig historians—was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, whereby James II was replaced by William III and Mary II as monarch and a constitutional monarchy was established.In the...
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
Marx House
The Marx House is a private house located at in 2630 Biddle Avenue in Wyandotte, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1976. It is now used by the Wyandotte Historical Museum....
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. (Summary of 2004 doctoral dissertation)
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
Daily Worker
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
with postings in Russia, and even visiting Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
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
Labour Monthly
Labour Monthly was the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain .-Authors published:* Alexander BogdanovLabour Monthly was the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain .-Authors published:...
, controlled by Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt
Rajani Palme Dutt
Rajani Palme Dutt , best known as R. Palme Dutt, was a leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain.-Early years:...
.
Influence
As early as 1936, Torr had set herself the task of promoting historical study in the party. She had begun work on her Tom MannTom Mann
Tom Mann was a noted British trade unionist. Largely self-educated, Mann became a successful organiser and a popular public speaker in the labour movement.-Early years:...
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."
Hence her active role 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
William Morris
William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...
, 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':
- 'She has repeatedly laid aside her own work in order to answer my enquiries or to read drafts of my material, until I felt that parts of the book were less my own than a collaboration in which her guiding ideas have the main part. It has been a privilege to be associated with a Communist scholar so versatile, so distinguished, and so generous with her gifts.'
While there can be no doubt of her assiduousness, what sort of actual "influence" she had on Thompson's later methodological developments in history is debatable. Rightly famed for his main pioneering works of "History From Below" (or "From the Bottom Up"), Thompson's first major work, Morris, shows little if any such techniques or approaches. His major work, The Making of the English Working Class, was penned well after Torr's death, many years after he had left the party in a blaze of acrimony.
Other well-known academic members of the party's Historians' Group, including Christopher Hill and John Saville
John Saville
John Saville was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with Hull University. He was one of the most influential writers on British Labour History in the second half of the twentieth century.- Life and career :...
, published a collection of essays in her honour, Democracy and the Labour Movement, many other members sought to contribute, but there were too many. Hill, one of those most fond of Torr, wrote the 'Preface' for the editorial team and it is often quoted as evidence of her impact on the whole Group:
- 'She made us feel history on our pulses. History was not words on a page, not the goings-on of kings and prime ministers, not mere events. History was the sweat, blood, tears and triumphs of the common people, our people.'
Much of her work with these young academic historians in the party was to promote their use of Marxist analysis in the then nascent field of "Labour History" - and especially to give it a Communist spin. As both 'Prefaces' state, she was very generous with her time, and when draft work was sent to her she made a major effort to check it and comment accordingly. In this sense she was an ideal type of 'editor' for young writers, who due to hostility to Communism could usually only have their work published by the party publisher Lawrence and Wishart and/or its wholly owned subsidiary "Cobbett Press", or its (few) allied firms (e.g. "Frederick Muller" being one).
Apart from a sophisticated grasp of Marxism-Leninism, she showed no signs of adopting original methodologies, nor showed a remarkable use of archives in her other works. There is also no evidence of an attempt to pioneer oral history in her own main work with Tom Mann as she researched with him on the biography of him for the party's commemorative efforts with the old veteran. Hence, she cannot be seen as the founder of a new style of historical research, unlike Georges Lefebvre, and the Annales, in France.
Nonetheless, one form of enduring organisational influence stemmed from Torr's circle, from the creation by Historians' Group members of two offshoots: the academic journal Past and Present, and later, the Labour History Review. The former went on to create an associated society, more often associated with Medieval and "Early Modern" studies. After her death, the "Moderns" (a sub-section of the group) reached out to others to form the 'Society of Labour History' which has continued to this day publishing a distinguished journal of its own. Indirectly, the Historians' Group which she helped to found, and its members, also led to the formation of 'History Workshop' and to other leftist conferences and events to further the study of history in Britain. Often rejected by the mainstream of academic historians, these efforts by successors of Torr and her Historians' Group, have persisted, some in Adult Education, or precariously on the edges of academe, but they have never died out, proving to have a long and healthy life of their own, crafting a wide variety of cultural studies, feminist works, and more traditional Labour Histories.
Selected articles/works
- Tom Mann (1936) (a Communist Party booklet for his 80th birthday celebrations)
- "Correspondence: Marx and Engels" (1934), translated by Torr from the approved Soviet German language version.
- Marxism, nationality and war / a text-book (editor) (1940)
- Marxism and war (1943)
- History in the making (General Editor) (1948) (4 volumes - real editors of vols. 2, 3 & 4 were J. Jeffreys, C. Hill & E. Dell, E. Hobsbawm)
- Tom Mann and his Times, vol. 1 (1956) (prepared for publication after her illness by Christopher HillChristopher HillChristopher Hill may refer to:*Christopher Hill , English bishop*Christopher J. Hill, International Relations scholar, Professor and Director of the Cambridge Centre of International Studies*Christopher R. Hill, U.S. Ambassador in Iraq...
and A.L. Morton.) - Democracy and the Labour Movement. Essays in honour of D. Torr (edited by John Saville ("Editorial Secretary"), Christopher Hill, George Thomson and Maurice Dobb) (1954)
- "Tom Mann and his Times, 1890-92," originally in the CPGB "Our History" series of booklets, later as a chapter in Lionel Munby (ed.), The Luddites and Other Essays, (London, 1971)
External links
- The history woman by Dave Renton.
- Page with some family history