LISTOWEL, Judith (de Marffy-Mantuano) 1904-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 12, 1904, in Kaposvar, Hungary; died July 15, 2003. Journalist and author. Listowel was an ardent anti-communist, conservative journalist who spent over seven decades reporting on events in eastern Europe and Africa. The daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, she studied economics in Budapest and history at the London School of Economics, where she earned a B.Sc. in 1929. She then embarked on a career as a freelance journalist, writing for Hungarian newspapers while living in England. In 1933 she became the countess of Listowel after marrying the fifth earl of Listowel, but the marriage broke up a few years later. Listowel never remarried, instead devoting herself to reporting on the rise of Nazism and lecturing in England and the United States. These activities quickly put her on the Nazi black list, which meant she would have faced execution if the Germans had conquered England. When World War II started she worked as a civilian lecturer for the British Armed Forces and also trained as a nurse and worked in a hospital to help support herself. With the defeat of the Nazis, Listowel's next concern became the spread of Communism within the Eastern Bloc. Beginning in 1944, she edited and published the weekly journal East Europe, which was later renamed East Europe and Soviet Russia, and then Soviet Orbit. The journal remained in publication for about ten years and had subscribers in over forty countries. Banned from entering her native country because of her reportage, Listowel attempted to smuggle herself in to Hungary during that country's 1956 revolution; she succeeded briefly, but left when it became clear she would be executed if caught by Russian authorities. In the 1960s, as more and more African nations won independence from European imperialists, she became hopeful of a new beginning for Africa. However, as she witnessed the corruption of the petty military dictators who gained power in that continent, Listowel became dismayed and reported against their power-hungry activities. She was sued by Ugandan President Idi Amin for her book Amin (1973), which portrays the ruler in a very negative light, and because her reports could not be substantiated because witnesses were too terrified to testify against Amin, she lost the lawsuit. Despairing of the future of Africa, Listowel gained new hope for eastern Europe in the 1980s after the collapse of the USSR; she returned to her reportage of events there, especially in Hungary and Poland, continuing her work as a journalist into her nineties. In addition to her journalism, she published nine books during her career, including Crusaders in the Secret War (1952), The Making of Tanganyika (1966), Dusk and the Danube (1969), and A Hapsburg Tragedy: Crown Prince Rudolf (1978).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Daily Telegraph (London, England), July 22, 2003, p. 1.

Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), August 2, 2003, p. 18.

Times (London, England), July 30, 2003, p. 27.