Opening the Books: The Personal Papers of Dona Torr

This paper discusses the significance of the collection of papers deposited by Dona Torr with the Communist Party archive, and now held at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester. Torr was a founder member of the Communist Party, and later a pioneer of 'history from below'. Although she would not have recognised the term, we can see her now as one of the first generation of socialist feminists. Torr was certainly an influence on Christopher Hill and Edward and Dorothy Thompson, and through them Sheila Rowbotham and others of the Ruskin generation. Radicalised as much by the Great War as by the campaign for suffrage, Dona Torr became a socialist activist in her late thirties. In common with other middle-class campaigning women of her generation, Torr was able to leave the confines of the domestic sphere. Yet in her public work and in her published writing, there is little sense of personal memory or private emotion. The journey was traveled in one direction, and not returned. For these reasons, Torr's private papers give an important access to a personal story that is not well known.

This paper begins with a summary of Torr's public life, before moving on to describe the papers deposited with the archive in Manchester.

Dona Torr: Historian and Communist

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) brought together a remarkably talented generation of historians, including Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, A. L. Morton, George Rudé, John Saville, Edward (E. P.) Thompson and Christopher Hill. This generation transformed the way in which history was written, pioneering the method of history from below, the notion that the past should be studied through the lived experiences of ordinary people. Hill's accounts of the English revolution, Thompson's William Morris and his Making of the English Working Class, and Hobsbawm's books, Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire and Age of Extremes, remain some of the most powerful works written from within the Marxist tradition. If such a thing exists as a distinctly 'British Marxist' tradition, then it is one which has been continued primarily through the medium of written history.

One of the most influential members of the group was a woman, Dona Torr, but she is today one of the least well-known. Since her death, there have been few attempts to remember her, or to understand her place within the socialist tradition. Her obituaries aside, there are no articles devoted to her, no biographies of her life. There are reasons, however, for this silence. Torr's great work, Tom Mann and his Times came out in 1956, and Torr herself died in January 1957. The generation of historians who understood her life's work were then in the midst of a bitter factional battle against the leadership of their party, which would take them out of the CPGB. By the time of her death, according to Dorothy Thompson, 'the people who could have written about Dona were outside the party'. Perhaps it is also true that Torr is forgotten because she was a woman, at a time when women were often given a subordinate role, even within socialist organisations. Her skills were as an editor and translator, and her accomplishments were in creating, encouraging and inspiring a younger generation of historians. It was to be the children of her labour who gained the recognition and the reward.

There is not much to say about Dona Torr's early life. She was always a quiet person, unwilling to draw attention to her work. Torr hid behind a caustic wit which she used to great effect, although not unkindly. Unlike several of her contemporaries, she did not leave any significant collection of private records. The collection discussed here consists only of seventeen exercise books left among her personal papers. The general absence of sources suggests that Dona did not think that her own life was remarkable. Dona Torr was born in 1883, the child of privileged parents. Her father was an Anglican priest and the Canon of Chester Cathedral. There have been others of the left whose parents were religious in a similar way, including Olive Schreiner, who was born into a strict Anglican and later Wesleyan family, and Hugh Dalton whose father was the canon of St. George's Chapel in Windsor. Many of Torr's charges in the history group would come from a parallel Methodist background.

One of Dona Torr's brothers became a military attaché to Franco's government in Spain, while her cousin Rosita Forbes was in the 1930s one of the first western women to explore the Islamic world. Having studied at Heidelburg and University College London, Torr herself became a journalist. Horrified by the slaughter of 1914-18, she worked for the left-wing paper, the Daily Herald, which took an anti-war line, and then the Communist Workers' Life, which was the forerunner of the Daily Worker. In 1920, Torr was an original member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, while in the 1930s she worked for the Communist publishing house, Lawrence and Wishart, and married another party member, Walter Holmes. According to Dorothy Thompson, who knew her well, Dona was tremendously wonderful, warm and kind. 'Her conversation was full of wit and insight - on at least one occasion I became so involved in discussion with her that we missed our stop on the underground and had returned to central London before we realised that we had been to Stanmore and back.'

The Communist Party was formed at a moment when the working class movement around the world was on the rise. It contained a number of activists with experience going back to before the war. Many of the leading members of the party were sent by the Communist International to assist in the building of Communist Parties throughout the world. Torr was appointed in 1925 to the CPGB's Colonial Committee, and spent some years overseas. Although it is difficult indeed to establish anything concrete about her work for the Comintern, we do know that Torr's work was seen as a success: on her return Torr was friendly with Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the party, and she seems to have used her authority in the 1940s to protect the limited independence of her supporters among the Communist Party historians.

Back in England in the 1920s and 1930s, Dona Torr did not rest on the prestige of her international work, but took full part in branch life. Even when she was busy writing, it never occurred to her that she should take time off from her political duties. Fellow Communists remembered her working in her branch, selling the Daily Worker, and delivering leaflets from her bicycle during the General Strike. Although in her writing Dona Torr would step beyond the limits of Communist politics, and developed a socialist history that was more alive to the concerns of ordinary workers than the mechanical Marxism which dominated within the party, this is not how she would have seen her own work at the time. Torr was very much part of the CPGB leadership, and placed herself within the loyal mainstream of the party's politics.

Some of Torr's most important work was in collecting and publishing socialist classics. She was a linguist with an interest in modern and classical languages. She translated and edited Karl Marx and Frederick Engels' Selected Correspondence (1934), wrote supplementary notes for a new edition of Marx's Capital: Volume One (1938), and also translated Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property And The State (1940) and Marx's articles On China (1951). She edited two volumes of extracts from the Marxist classics, published as Marxism, Nationality and War (1940), as well as translating Dimitroff's Letters from Prison, the story of the Bulgarian Communist charged by Hitler in 1933 with starting the Reichstag fire.

Later Dona Torr contributed to the formation of the Communist Party Historians' Group. In 1940, she took part in the debates surrounding the publication of Christopher Hill's short book, 1640: The English Revolution. The Communist Party's leadership originally rejected Hill's book, maintaining that he was wrong to see the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. Torr was later to tell other historians of her enormous gratitude for Hill's 'pioneer work in this sphere', suggesting also that his victory was responsible for the atmosphere of greater intellectual freedom in which the historians' group flourished, 'we all owe it to him in the first place and it was a victory for politics as well as theory.'

In 1946, Torr attended the first meetings of the Communist Party Historians' Group. Later Torr acted as patron to the party's historians. One of a small number of women Communist historians, she was very much the predominant presence in the history group. In 1954, E. P. Thompson brought out his biography, William Morris. The Foreword described his gratitude to Dona Torr, '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.' This historical work culminated in the publication of Tom Mann and His Times, an extraordinary biography of Mann, a history of his times, and of the workers' movement in the 500 years before his birth. It was one of the first works of Marxist history, written with a living appreciation of the creativity of ordinary people.

With the first volume of Tom Mann and his Times complete, but the rest unfinished, Dona Torr died on 8 January 1957. Throughout her last months, the Communist Party was deep in crisis. Following Kruschev's speech and the 1956 Russian invasion of Hungary, ten thousand members left the British party. Many of Torr's young charges, the party historians, resigned at the same time from the CPGB. John Saville and E. P. Thompson began a stenciled newsletter, The Reasoner, which was a bridge along which former Communists joined the New Left, which grew outside the CPGB and often in opposition to the old party. However Torr herself took no part in the debate. According to Dorothy Thompson, 'She was very ill, and couldn't understand the issues'. Yet after 1956 Hill, Thompson and the other historians saw themselves as continuing Torr's work. In their history and politics, they carried on her legacy after her death.

Seeking the Person beneath the Books

I have made the point that Dona Torr kept her personal life to herself. It is difficult to find a single surviving photograph of her. Torr did not enjoy the limelight, her personality and her gifts were expressed through the labour of others. Her friends and contemporaries (including Yvonne Kapp) are mostly dead now, and it is hard to construct the events of her private life. Yet there is one source for the historian trying to make sense of Dona Torr the person. The Communist Party archive held at the National Museum of Labour History in Manchester contains several folders of correspondence relating to Dona Torr's book, Tom Mann and his Times. Among these papers are seventeen exercise books, with green and orange covers. The covers are loose-leaf, sheets of paper have been added inside the covers, and are bound together by treasury tags. From comments inside, it is clear that there had been more than the seventeen books which remain, but the others have been lost.

The first task is to establish when these quotations were collected. A note on a scrap of paper, perhaps written by Dona's husband Walter, suggests that the books pre-date Dona Torr's political commitments. The files are listed as juvenilia, 'Early notebooks on miscellaneous non-political and non-historical subjects'. It might follow that these notes were of less consequence, mere cuttings before Dona came to her political maturity. Yet these notebooks were not written early in Torr's life. On the contrary, quotations are taken from Stephen Zweig's biography of Romain Rolland, dated 1921. The book marked 'ethics' includes a cutting from the Observer in 1926. Following the 1924 decision of the Turkish National Assembly to remove the spiritual powers of the caliphate, a conference had been called to discuss the future of religious authority in Islam. 'No elected caliph', commented the Observer, 'will command more than a fractional assent on the part of a sadly divided Moslem world.' In other words, Torr was in her early forties when she collected these jottings. She had been a Marxist for six years, and she was at the height of her influence within the Communist Party and the international movement.

The second task is to establish what the notebooks were for. Many of Torr's contemporaries kept commonplace books, collections of poetry and quotations which helped the editors to make sense of their own lives. The first thought is that Torr's notebooks were kept for a similar purpose, yet several notes give a contrary impression. The celebrated Protestant John Calvin's account of his conversion is written down from the 1563 edition of his Commentary on the Psalms. The original French is used, except that Torr had modernised the spelling. But why would she do this? Surely a writer who could understand mediaeval French would see no need to update these remarks, in a book of quotations collected for her own use. Next to a transcription of the Renaissance poet Dante's infatuation with Beatrice, Dona wrote 'If this quotation is used, a reference should be added to the "Note on Poetical Quotations". The same applies to the illustrations of Brynhild, Paolo and Francesca.' The Note on Poetical Quotations has been lost, but the implication is clear. These quotes were collected as the basis for a book. Torr never finished this book, and possibly never even started it - but the motive was there.

If these were the notes towards an unfinished book, then what would its subject have been? Beyond the passages already mentioned, Dona Torr also culled passages from Malinowski's work on Australian aborigines and Westermarck's book, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. The notebook on 'Freud/ Havelock Ellis' contains a long cutting from Sigmund Freud's comments on 'organ-pleasure'. This was Freud's challenge to himself, 'Why are you set on declaring as already belonging to sexuality those indefinite manifestations of childhood out of which what is sexual later develops, and which you yourself admit to be indefinite?' In Torr's Communist circles, Freud was hardly flavour of the month. Yet his ideas were at the height of their popularity among the literary circles of 1920s London. Consequently, Dona Torr was not the only British Marxist to take an interest in Freud's work. John Strachey's brother-in-law translated Freud, and Strachey himself secretly underwent psychoanalysis. Returning to the notebooks, there are also references to the work of the Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis, 'Excretory organs Vol III 3, 58-62. Glottal region and excretory organs Vol V 47-70; 133-34. Early experiences associated with them Vol V 42, 53, 67, 133, 241. Bisexuality Vol II 310-316. Bisexual cases Vol II 173, 179, 182, 186. Early inverted development Vol II 100, 109, 146. Married inverts Vol II 334.' Lest anyone think that Torr only had sex on her brain, it is worth listing the cover titles of her seventeen notebooks.

Love/ Welfare of the Object

Religious Conversion

Marriage

Respect

Honour

Pity and Gratitude in Relation to Love

Hate/ Nature and Development

Freud/ Havelock Ellis

Joy

Charles Darwin

Animal Psychology/ Fabre/ Köhler

Pride/ Vanity/ Ambition

Ethics

Children's Love

Sex-Love/ Misc

WH Hudson/ Love for Nature

Love (Misc)/ Desire/ Energy of Love

It should be clear from this list that Torr's interests were broad, and generally chaste.

If these titles are taken as possible chapters for a book, then the impression is of a 1920s equivalent to Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, a work on emotion, a study of men and especially women's passions, written around the core theme of love. This quotation from the novelist Joseph Conrad was underlined, 'The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life ... Of all the creations of man she is the closet partner of his toil and courage. From every point of view it is imperative that you should do well by her. And as always in the case of true love, all you can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in your heart.' Beside this extract, Torr wrote, 'We value highly what we can benefit greatly.' The passages from Dante and Calvin are similar. In each, the theme is of intense and unselfish love, the sort of love which philosophically-minded Christians have sometimes termed agape. Indeed, the tone of the collection is striking, it reads more like the work of a pious woman of the nineteenth century, than of the labour historian that Torr would become.

Many of the passages chosen are moving, some powerfully so. Torr extracted the following verse from William Blake's autobiographical poem, 'William Bond', 'Seek love in the pity of other's woe/ In the gentle relief of another's care/ In the darkness of night and the winter's snow/ In the naked and outcast, seek love there.' The notebooks are made up of quotations, there are few notes in Torr's hand. In the notebook marked 'Pity and Gratitude', Torr makes the following remark, 'Where love's end of Reciprocity is satisfied the lover gladly accepts the pity of the beloved and is eager in gratitude. but a lover unsatisfied most fiercely rejects pity, withholds gratitude, and prefers indifference.' It is hard to make sense of such passages. This could have been a book with links to events in Dona Torr's own life. Yet the book was unfinished, and the connections unmade. There is too great a gap between the source and the few details we know of Dona's private circumstances to use this as a key to unlock the emotions of Torr's life.

Dona Torr's notebooks have not been published, and could not be in their present state. They are the beginnings of an idea, they are not the idea itself. Yet one final passage deserves comment. I have mentioned that many extracts came from religious sources. Other passages were taken from the new disciplines of psychology and anthropology. The one Marxist author chosen was the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg, dead since 1919 (and already by the mid-1920s subject to suspicion within the International). One of Dona Torr's extracts was a passage taken from a letter which Rosa Luxemburg addressed to her friend Sophie Liebknecht. Luxemburg had spent three years in jail for her opposition to the war, but she expressed no regrets and only happiness at her confinement:

My heart beats with an immeasurable and incomprehensible inner joy, just as if I were moving in the brilliant sunshine across a flowery mead. In the darkness I smile at life, as if I were the possessor of a charm which would enable me to transform all that is evil and tragical into serenity and happiness. But when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause and can only laugh at myself.

This was Luxemburg's love for humanity. For Torr it was 'Joy', the 'best possible conception' of unselfish love for one's fellow human being. We cannot know if Torr felt the same unselfish love herself when she took down this passage, or more consistently, yet we can be sure that she took Rosa Luxemburg as her model. This passage from Rosa Luxemburg spoke to Dona Torr's innermost emotions, it explained feelings of her own.

The significance of these effects

These papers could be compared to a piece of oral history. Jo Stanley has described the difficulties of interviewing former party activists. She argues that surviving Communists are likely to approach the story of their own life in a certain way, which continues from the political education which they received within the CPGB. 'Much Communist autobiography is written by men ... who felt that they had to act as an example for others and a credit to the party.' Even when speaking to sympathetic interviewers, former members of the CPGB retain old habits of caution, and a sense of political responsibility. Surviving Communists feel that they must present themselves and the party in an exemplary light. Personal details are left out. So too are doubts, friendships, sexual and family life, stories about the physical self. Such personal histories, self-disclosure and feelings, can be reconstructed, but only by a historian who demonstrates a real sympathy for their subject. Dona Torr's deposited papers return us to a world of emotion and feeling, distant from the formal, public concerns of the 'Good Communist', with their natural desire to promote the party line.

But reading Torr's papers is not the same as interviewing a living participant. At its most effective, oral history can draw the historian into a realm of experience which challenges the norms of traditional historical writing. 'Oral history', argues Alessandro Portelli, 'changes the manner of writing history much in the way that the modern novel transformed literary fiction; and the major change is that its narrator, from outside the narration, is pulled inside and becomes a part of it.' That could not be done with these effects. Torr herself has been dead for forty years and more. There is no person to interview who could explain the personal significance of each passage quoted. Without an author, the process of finding meaning is more opaque. Perhaps the single fact to take from these books is the dazzling range of sources, which spoke to this veteran Communist, not just Rosa Luxemburg, but Sigmund Freud, Calvin, Havelock Ellis, William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Aristotle and William Blake as well.

For Torr herself, the significance of her life lay in the success of her party and in the success of the party historians, who she encouraged and to some extent protected. Indeed, to reconnect the private and the public stories, it may be that Torr's independence of mind is one of the factors which helps to explain the relative independence of the historians' group. In the crucial first decades of their work, such figures as the young Hill and Thompson received the support of Dona Torr, a leading member of the party, with a reputation in the International. This enabled them to think and develop a new style of writing, both informed by their active Marxist politics, and distant from the immediate party line. Her reading in turn was not the reading of a simon-pure Stalinist. And of all the party's scientific, literary and cultural committees, her historians' group is the only one whose influence remains to this day.