Donna Torr papers

Catalogue record

Notes

CP/IND/TORR. A Marxist editor and translator of the 1930s, Dona Torr became the doyenne of the party's younger historians initially through her involvement in writing a biography of Tom Mann. Begun in 1936, while Mann was still alive, only a first volume of the full biography had been published by the time of Torr's death in 1957.60 Nevertheless, Torr was a mentor generously acknowledged by some younger communist historians, E.P. Thompson in particular; though others - Eric Hobsawm being one - thought her work more of propagandist than of historical value. Torr's study of Mann would certainly have been massively documented, and doubtless would have met its object of underlining Mann's crucial legitimising role in linking the CPGB to Britain's indigenous socialist revival of the 1880s. Torr's working papers include many original items of Mann's, whose correspondents included contemporary labour and socialist figures like Keir Hardie, H.M. and Hyndman and Peter Kropotkin. There is also a memoir by Harry Pollitt, described as remarkable by Mann's biographer Joseph White, as well as Torr's own extensive historical correspondence.

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