Biography
Gertrude Davenport came from a musical family: she was the grand-daughter of the composer George Alexander Macfarren and the daughter of the composer Francis William Davenport (1847–1925). She was educated at convent schools in Belgium, France, Italy and England, and studied music in Germany.
She was a member of the Independent Labour Party from 1912 to 1919, and Secretary of the British Section of the Women's International Council of Socialist and Labour Organizations from 1917 to 1919. She married Eden Paul, and from 1915 onwards was active - under the name of Cedar Paul - as a translator and writer in collaboration with her husband. The pair became members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Cedar served on the executive committee of the Plebs League in the 1920s. Together with Lyster Jameson, the Pauls made "strenuous attempts to develop psychology" as a component of working-class education in the Plebs League. However, some working-class League members resented them:
In the labour colleges there was considerable resentment against the middle-class intellectuals who came into the Plebs League during and immediately after the war. Two books written by Eden and Cedar Paul, Creative Revolution (1920) and Proletcult (1921), attracted criticism for their obscure vocabulary - they coined words like 'ergatocracy' to replace the ugly 'dictatorship of the proletariat' - and generally school marmish toneCedar and Eden Paul were extraordinarily prolific translators in the interwar years, translating a range of socialist and psychotherapy works, as well as novels, particularly historical novels. They were the official translators for Stefan Zweig and Emil Ludwig, and their translations from German also included works by Karl Marx, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Jaspers, Stefan Zweig and Heinrich von Treitschke). However they also translated work from French, Italian (including a work by Robert Michels) and Russian (including works by Joseph Stalin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time).
After Eden Paul's death in 1944, Cedar Paul published only a small number of translations under her own name. A. J. P. Taylor, who had read the Pauls' work as a teenager, observed that the pair were no longer much remembered fifty years later.
Read more about this topic: Cedar Paul
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