Edith Tudor-Hart
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Edith Tudor Hart (née Edith Suschitzky; 1908–1973), an Austrian-British photographer, was born in Vienna but fled to London in 1933.[1] Some of her work is in the National Gallery in London.
The daughter of a bookshop owner in Vienna, she worked there as a Montessori kindergarten teacher but she had also studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau.
An anti-fascist activist and Communist, she saw photography as a tool for disseminating her political ideas. She married Alex Tudor-Hart, who belonged to a well-known radical and artistic family, and fled to England with him in 1933 so that she could avoid prosecution for Communist activities in Austria.
While her husband practised as a GP in the mining town of Rhondda in South Wales, she began to produce photographs for The Listener, The Social Scene and Design Today, dealing with issues such as refugees from the Spanish Civil War and industrial decline in the north-east of England. From the late 1930s, she concentrated more on social needs, such as housing policy and the care of disabled children—her own son, Tommy, became an incurable schizophrenic as a child and she separated from her husband after he returned from Spain.
When, in 1934, Litzi Friedmann and Kim Philby arrived in London from Vienna, Tudor-Hart is credited as having suggested to the NKVD recruiter, Arnold Deutsch (whom she had known since meeting him in Vienna in 1926 and with whom she worked in the OMS, the International Liaison Department of the Comintern), that the NKVD recruit them as agents.[2][3][4]
She acted as an intermediary for Anthony Blunt and Bob Stewart when the rezidentura at the Soviet Embassy in London suspended its operations in February 1940.
Her brother, Wolfgang Suschitzky, also became a well-known photographer in Britain.
[edit] References
- ^ Oxford University Press (2004). Edith Tudor Hart.
- ^ Genrikh Borovik (1994). The Philby Files - The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby. ISBN 0316102849.
- ^ William E. Duff (1999). A Time for Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Mally and the Era of the Great Illegals. ISBN 0826513522.
- ^ Nigel West (2005). Mask: Mi5's Penetration Of The Communist Party Of Great Britain. ISBN 0415351456.
