My parents were both doctors. Here is my mother,
Dr Alison Macbeth (1896-1952), around 1934 (source unknown).
She became the medical director of the UK branch of Organon
Laboratories (based in the Netherlands).
My father, Alexander Tudor-Hart (1901-1992) graduated as an
economist, a pupil of J M Keynes. After he met my mother he moved
first to medicine, then to Marx. Traumatic surgery and the Communist
Party became his main interests. He studied it in Vienna under Böhler,
its founder as a modern specialty, who was an ardent Nazi but an
excellent and innovative clinician.
My parents divorced when I was about 2 and a half, so my mother became a more
than usually dominant influence, with extremely wide cultural interests.
She was also a socialist. When she heard the first news of the Munich
agreement in 1938 she vomited through the railings into somebody’s
basement. She was an occasionally active member of the Labour Party,
and from 1942 to 1944 became a secret member of the Communist Party.