Alexander Tudor-Hart

Alexander Ethan Tudor-Hart (born Hart; 3 September 1901 – 1992)[1] was a British doctor in South Wales who was active in the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was the great grandson of American merchant Frederic Tudor and father of Dr Julian Tudor-Hart.

Early life and background

He was born in Florence, Italy, in 1901, the son of the Canadian artist (Ernest) Percyval Hart and his first wife, Éléonora Délia Julie Aimée Hart (née Kleczkowska), his cousin from Paris. Alexander had a younger sister Helena Beatrix, born in 1903. His father was born in Montreal to Frederick Levey L'Estrange Hart and Eleanora Elizabeth Tudor. The family was descended from Ephraim Hart, a Bavarian Jew who became a prominent merchant in New York, and was reportedly partners with John Jacob Astor. The name was originally Hirz.[2][3][4]

Percyval was the grandson of the successful American businessman Frederic Tudor. He and his brother William Owen Tudor-Hart DSO[5] both changed their surname to Tudor-Hart in adulthood, possibly to strengthen their ties to the Tudor name. Their parents were divorced owing to their father being a "constant and habitual frequenter of houses of ill-fame" in Montreal.[6] Percyval's first wife (Alexander's mother) was the daughter of his aunt Euphemia "Effie" Tudor-Kleczkowska, who had married the Polish-French diplomat Michel Alexandre Cholewa, comte Kleczkowski (Michał Kleczkowski; 1818–1886). Kleczkowski was the only son of Count Joseph Kleczkowski and Julie Sobieska, a direct descendant of John III Sobieski, king of Poland in the 17th century.[7][8]

Education and career

Alexander studied at Cambridge University under John Maynard Keynes. Later he studied orthopaedics in Vienna under the surgeon Lorenz Böhler.[9] He worked at Booth Hall Children's Hospital, St. Mary Abbott's Hospital, Hampstead General Hospital, and as a general practitioner in Llanelli, Brixton and Colliers Wood.[10]

He was an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He represented the South Wales Miners' Federation in a dispute. His home has been described as "a transit camp for anti-fascist refugees from Continental Europe".[11]

During the Spanish Civil War, he volunteered for the Republicans' Medical Aid Committee and was put in charge of the medical unit in December 1936. He was particularly concerned with the management of fractures.[12]

He used his experience in Spain in training other doctors to deal with problems they might expect in wartime. In April 1939 he delivered a lecture to the British Postgraduate Medical School on the Böhler technique for dealing with fractures and open wounds which he had refined in combat situations.[13]

He was a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps 1940–45 and served as assistant medical officer at Finsbury Air Raid Precautions. He was denounced as a communist, though the informant admitted that he did excellent surgical work.[14]

In the 1960s he left the CPGB and became chairman of anti-revisionist group, the Working People's Party of England, founded in 1968 by former members of the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity. In 1972 he split with a section of the membership to form the Committee for a Socialist Programme,[15] which published the "Workers Newsletter" and later renamed itself after its publication, before disbanding in the 1980s.

His first wife was Dr Alison Macbeth. Dr Julian Tudor-Hart is their son. He married the photographer Edith Suschitzky in Vienna in 1933; the couple divorced in 1940.[16]

Tudor-Hart died in February 1992 in Oxford.[9]

References
  1. England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1916–2007
  2. MacGregor, Alasdair Alpin (1961). Percyval Tudor-Hart, 1873–1954: Portrait of an Artist. P. R. Macmillan. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  3. "HART". Jewish Encyclopedia.
  4. TUDOR-HART (PDF). The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  5. "No. 29684". The London Gazette (Supplement). 27 July 1916. p. 7434.
  6. Gemmill, John Alexander (1889). The Practice of the Parliament of Canada Upon Bills of Divorce: Including an Historical Sketch of Parliamentary Divorce and Summaries of All the Bills of Divorce Presented to Parliament from 1867 to 1888, Also Notes on the Provincial Divorce Courts, &c. Carswell & Company. p. 253. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  7. Lijewska, Elżbieta (2016). "Kuzynki Norwida: Euphemia Tudor Kleczkowska i Ketty Kleczkowska-Kierkpatrick". Studia Norwidiana (in Polish). 34: 169–185. doi:10.18290/sn.2016.34-9.
  8. Tudor, John (1896). Deacon Tudor's Diary; Or, "Memorandoms from 1709, &c. Press of W. Spooner. p. 26. Retrieved 13 July 2017.
  9. "Alex Tudor-Hart". Spartacus educational. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  10. Tudor Hart, Julian (1988). A New Kind of Doctor. London: The Merlin Press Ltd. ISBN 0-85036-299-7. Retrieved 12 October 2015.
  11. Moorhead, Robert (March 2004). "Hart of Glyncorrwg". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 97 (3): 132–136. doi:10.1258/jrsm.97.3.132. PMC 1079328. PMID 14996965. Archived from the original on 8 June 2014. Retrieved 8 June 2014.
  12. Baxell, Richard (2014). Unlikely Warriors. London: Aurum Press. p. 206. ISBN 9781781312339.
  13. Palfreeman, Linda (2012). Salud. eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. p. 188. ISBN 9781845195014. Archived from the original on 20 November 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2015.
  14. Baxell, Richard (2012). Unlikely Warriors. London: Aurum Press. p. 442. ISBN 9781781312339.
  15. https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/index.htm
  16. Baxell, Richard (2014). Unlikely Warriors. London: Aurum Press. p. 429. ISBN 9781781312339.
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