Dona Torr

Dona Ruth Anne Torr (28 April 1883 – 1957) 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).

Dona Torr was the daughter of William Torr, afterwards vicar of Eastham and Hon. Canon of Chester Cathedral. 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 Torr was a librarian at the Daily Herald (run by George Lansbury), where she met her future husband, Walter Holmes. In 1920, she was a founder member (albeit not a prominent one) 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 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. 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.

...
Wikipedia