1. Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu was an English filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, film critic, writer, table tennis player, and Communist activist and spy in the 1930s.
26 Facts About Ivor Montagu
1. 2.
Ivor Montagu helped to develop a lively intellectual film culture in Britain during the interwar years, and was the founder of the International Table Tennis Federation.
3.
Ivor Montagu attended Westminster School and King's College, Cambridge, where he contributed to Granta.
4.
Ivor Montagu became the first film critic of The Observer and the New Statesman.
5.
Ivor Montagu did the post-production work on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger in 1926 and was hired by Gaumont-British in the 1930s to work as producer on several of Hitchcock's thrillers.
6.
Ivor Montagu joined the Fabian Society in his youth, then the British Socialist Party, and then the Communist Party of Great Britain.
7.
In 1930, he accompanied his friend Sergei Eisenstein to New York and Hollywood; later in the decade Ivor Montagu made compilation films, including Defence of Madrid and Peace and Plenty about the Spanish Civil War.
8.
Ivor Montagu directed the documentary Wings Over Everest with Geoffrey Barkas.
9.
In 1933, Ivor Montagu was a founder member of the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians, holding positions in the union until the 1960s.
10.
Ivor Montagu held post on the World Council of Peace.
11.
Ivor Montagu had a keen interest in wildlife conservation, and was a council member of the Fauna Preservation Society for several years.
12.
Ivor Montagu was friends with the eminent Soviet conservationist and zoologist Prof.
13.
Ivor Montagu had contacts in Mongolia, and was a champion for the conservation of the endangered Przewalski's horse.
14.
Ivor Montagu was a champion table tennis player, representing Britain in matches all over the world.
15.
Ivor Montagu helped to establish and finance the first world championships in London in 1926.
16.
Ivor Montagu founded the International Table Tennis Federation that same year, and was president of the group for more than forty years, not retiring until 1967.
17.
Ivor Montagu helped expel apartheid South Africa from the Federation during the 1950s.
18.
Ivor Montagu founded the English Table Tennis Association, and served several terms as chairman and president.
19.
Ivor Montagu was inducted into the International Table Tennis Foundation Hall of Fame in 1995.
20.
Ivor Montagu later wrote a best-selling account of that adventure, The Man Who Never Was.
21.
Ivor Montagu himself turned out to be working, albeit briefly, for the other side.
22.
Ivor Montagu knew of his elder brother's intelligence work, but it seems doubtful his brother knew of his.
23.
In 1952, MI5 intercepted a telegram from Ivor Montagu telling Charlie Chaplin how sorry he was to miss him in London when the star visited England that year; the British agency had agreed to spy on Chaplin for the FBI, who were looking for ways to keep him out of America at the height of McCarthyism.
24.
Ivor Montagu was awarded the prestigious Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, given by the Soviet government to recipients whose work furthers the cause of socialism, primarily outside of the USSR.
25.
Ivor Montagu wrote many pamphlets and books, such as Film World, With Eisenstein in Hollywood, and The Youngest Son.
26.
Ivor Montagu wrote two books about table tennis: Table Tennis Today and Table Tennis.