Edith Tudor Hart

Edith Tudor Hart (née Edith Suschitzky; 1908–1973), an Austrian-British photographer, communist-sympathiser and spy for the Soviet Union. Some of her work is in the National Gallery in London.

Contents

Early life and education

Born in Vienna, her father was a bookshop owner. She studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau, but worked in Vienna as a Montessori kindergarten teacher. Her brother, Wolfgang Suschitzky, also became a well-known photographer in Britain.

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. The couple fled to London, England in 1933, so that she could avoid prosecution for Communist activities in Austria.[1]

London

While her husband practised as a GP in the coal mining area of Rhondda Valley in South Wales,[2] 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. This change in work may have been because after separation from her husband who had just returned from the Spanish Civil War, their son, Tommy, became an incurable schizophrenic.

Spying recruitment

Tudor Hart was key in recruiting both the Cambridge Spy ring which damaged British intelligence from World War II through to their discovery in the late 1960s.

Tudor Hart had met Arnold Deutsch in Vienna in 1926, and with him she worked in the OMS, the International Liaison Department of the Comintern.

When, in 1934, Litzi Friedmann and Kim Philby arrived in London from Vienna, Tudor Hart is credited as having suggested to Deutsch in his role as the now London-based NKVD recruiter, that the NKVD recruit them as agents.[3][4][5]

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.

See also

References

  1. ^ Oxford University Press (2004). Edith Tudor Hart. http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101045802/. 
  2. ^ Eric Hobsbawm, Everybody behaved perfectly, London Review of Books, 33(16), August 2011
  3. ^ Genrikh Borovik (1994). The Philby Files - The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby. ISBN 0316102849. 
  4. ^ William E. Duff (1999). A Time for Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Mally and the Era of the Great Illegals. ISBN 0826513522. http://books.google.com/books?id=cHlWhjZEwXYC. 
  5. ^ Nigel West (2005). Mask: Mi5's Penetration Of The Communist Party Of Great Britain. ISBN 0415351456. http://books.google.com/books?id=lR6nuEkieQ8C. 

Edith Tudor Hart: The Eye Of Conscience. Nishen. The Photo Pocket Book 1. Text by Wolf Suschitzky. 1987. ISBN 185378401X