Emil Torday

Emil Torday (22 June 1875 in Budapest, Hungary – 9 May 1931 in London, England), was a Hungarian anthropologist. He was the father of the romance novelist Ursula Torday.

Biography

Emil Torday was born on 22 June 1875 in Budapest, Hungary. He studied at the University of Munich, but without completing his degree started to work at a Brussels Bank.

During his stay in Congo, he developed his interest in anthropology. After his return to Europe, he met Thomas Athol Joyce, who worked at British Museum. In 1907, he undertook an expedition on behalf of the British Museum in the Kwango River Basin in Belgian Congo, when he amassed a collection of 3000 objects from the Kuba Kingdom for the museum. Particularly outstanding were the three royal Ndop figures he collected. His work was recognised in 1910 when he was awarded the Imperial Gold Medal for Science and Art by the emperor of Austria.

On 17 March 1910, he married Gaia Rose Macdonald, a Scottish, and on 19 February 1912, they had a daughter, the novelist Ursula Torday.

On 9 September 1931, he died of heart failure at the French Hospital Shaftesbury Avenue, at 55.^[1]

Bibliography

• On the ethnology of the South-Western Congo Free State (1907) (with Thomas Athol Joyce)
• George Grenfell and the Congo (1910) (with Harry Johnston and Lawson Forfeitt)
• Camp and tramp in African Wild (1913)
• The New Congo Collection (1913)
• On the Trail of the Bushongo (1925)
• Causeries Congolaises (1925)
• Descriptive sociology, or, Groups of sociological facts, classified and arranged by Herbert Spencer (1925) (with Herbert Spencer, David Duncan and Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie)

References and sources