13 Facts About Dona Torr

Dona Ruth Anne Torr was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the famous Communist Party Historians Group.

Dona Torr was the daughter of William Torr, afterwards vicar of Eastham and Hon.

Dona Torr attended University College, London, on and off, completing a BA Honours degree in English before the First World War.

Dona Torr 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.

Dona Torr 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.

Dona Torr's 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.

Dona Torr had begun work on her Tom Mann biography, publishing an interim booklet in 1936.

Dona Torr wrote to the party ideologue, Palme Dutt, that she saw the need to "breed new historians, awaken and train them".

Dona Torr was active in forming a "Marxist Historians' Group" in 1938, and the later "Historians' Group" in 1946.

Dona Torr described his gratitude to Dona Torr in the "Preface":.

Dona Torr has repeatedly laid aside her own work 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.

Hill, one of those most fond of Dona Torr, wrote the "Preface" for the editorial team and it is often quoted as evidence of her impact on the whole Group:.

Dona Torr cannot be seen as the founder of a new style of historical research, unlike Georges Lefebvre or the Annales School in France.