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.
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.
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.
Assessing the party purposes of Torr is essential to any analysis of her relationship to the historians from both the pre-war and the post-war periods.Her husband, Walter Holmes, was a journalist on the Daily Herald and during the 1920s for the Communist Party, he worked on the Sunday Worker and during the 1930s was to be a significant and politically orthodox writer for the Daily Worker with postings in Russia, and even visiting Manchuria to cover the Japanese attacks on China, which he recounted in Eyewitness in Manchuria, it is possible that Dona Torr went with him.
It has been a privilege to be associated with a Communist scholar so versatile, so distinguished, and so generous with her gifts.While there can be no doubt of her assiduousness, what sort of actual "influence" she had on Thompson's later methodological developments in history is debatable.
Hill, one of those most fond of Torr, wrote the "Preface" for the editorial team and it is often quoted as evidence of her impact on the whole Group: She made us feel history on our pulses.
There is also no evidence of an attempt to pioneer oral history in her own main work with Tom Mann as she researched with him on the biography of him for the party's commemorative efforts with the old veteran.
Nonetheless, one form of enduring organisational influence stemmed from Torr's circle, from the creation by Historians' Group members of two offshoots: the academic journal Past & Present, and, later, the Labour History Review.
After her death, the "Moderns" (a sub-section of the group) reached out to others to form the Society of Labour History, which survives to the present day, and publishes a distinguished journal of its own.