A strangely captivating portrait of an unexpected pioneer | Conservative Home

Red Duchess: Kitty Atholl, A Rebel in Westminster by Amy Gray

In 1923 Kitty Atholl was elected the first woman MP for a Scottish constituency, from 1924-29 she was the first woman to serve in a Conservative government, and in the autumn of 1938 she was one of the few Conservatives with the courage and clear-sightedness to oppose the immensely popular, but profoundly shameful, deal Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler at Munich.

Kitty, as she will be called here, remains the only duchess to have sat in the House of Commons, to which she was elected in 1923 at the age of 49, but is today almost totally forgotten.

For when Chamberlain withdrew the Whip from her, and her local association in Kinross and West Perthshire voted to replace her with a new candidate for the general election (expected at latest in 1940), she resigned the seat. In December 1938 she fought the resulting by-election as an Independent, and lost by 1,313 votes.

Amy Gray has rescued her from oblivion by writing this wonderfully readable account. Unlike some of the books reviewed here, Red Duchess can be read with pleasure in a day or two.

Gaza is just now making many MPs’ relations with their constituency parties impossible. Gray describes how the Spanish Civil War wrecked relations between the Duchess and her local party.

The Duchess was already a firm opponent of Hitler, and had drawn Winston Churchill’s attention to inflammatory passages omitted from the English version of Mein Kampf.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936 she sided with the Republicans, the elected government, against the Nationalists, led by General Franco, who were being supplied with arms by Hitler and Mussolini.

In December 1936 she chaired the launch of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, which co-ordinated the work of such organisations as the Salvation Army, the Quakers and Save the Children, and in the next two years sent 29 ships to the Republicans loaded with food and other aid.

Kitty visited Spain and became a fierce critic of the British Government’s refusal to supply arms to the Republicans. This made her an anti-Fascist, but put her on the same side as the Communists, which led to her being dubbed “the Red Duchess”.

After the attack on Guernica in April 1937, she chaired the Basque Children’s Committee, which arranged for the evacuation of 4,000 children from the Basque region to Britain, with the Duchess flinging herself into every aspect of their welfare, and in great demand as a fund-raiser.

George Orwell thought she lent her authority to every lie the Communists in Spain were telling. More seriously for her, a substantial number of her constituents were enraged by her willingness to make common cause with the Communists, and her attacks on British Government policy.

In 1937 the Unionist (i.e. Conservative) Association in Kinross and West Perthshire, a vast constituency about 65 miles wide and 80 miles long, had 40 branches and 1,500 members.

In the northern part, round Blair Castle, seat of the Dukes of Atholl, the Duchess could count on considerable support. But at Braco, 50 miles to the south, Colonel Rupert Dawson was one of a number of prominent Catholics who were strongly pro-Franco, insisted Hitler posed no threat, and looked for every chance to make life difficult for the Duchess.

In May 1937 Dawson requested a special meeting of the Executive Council to discuss “The Spanish Question”, and at it said the Duchess had “ceased to represent the principles and interests of the Conservative Party”.

While claiming he would “indulge no personal animus”, he was outraged that the Duchess had “expressed sympathy with Communism or Anarchism”, and that “our Member, in this 20th century of ours, solicits our sympathy with monsters whose deeds would have appalled a Danton and sickened even Robespierre!”

By September 1937 Kitty was alarmed by reports of regular fascist meetings in Crieff, in the southern part of the constituency.

Most politicians would have coined some insincere form of words to try to keep the association together, and would have tempered their provocations. Kitty was not really a politician. She was a public servant who studied the “facts” and drew firm conclusions from them. At the Annual General Meeting of the Association in November 1937, she delivered a furious speech, fully reported in The Scotsman:

“If you muzzle me, and if you say you don’t want me to be free to speak on this question, I shall have to ask myself whether we do all uphold the democracy that Colonel Dawson has been speaking of, because the most precious thing in democracy is freedom of speech. It is not only the members of this Association to whom I am responsible, but the electors as a whole, and you have no right to keep from the electors what are the true facts about Spain.”

Her husband, the Duke of Atholl, who chaired the association and before inheriting the dukedom had himself been MP for West Perthshire, strove to calm things down.

In 1900, during the Boer War, he had raised a regiment, the Scottish Horse, in South Africa, and he tried appealing to Dawson by talking to him at a regimental dinner as an old comrade, and by writing afterwards to him, “my dear Rupert…you know the Duchess well enough to know that if there is a breeze she always faces it”.

Dawson replied in a chilly tone, “Dear General”, admitted the Duchess had done much for the Scottish Horse, but said he was so horrified by her apparent sympathy for the Soviet Union that he must oppose her.

The Duke blamed local Catholic priests for preaching “a Jehard” [sic] against the Duchess. In May 1938 he wrote to his friend the Earl of Home, whom he had known when they were both in the Commons, to ask why his son, Lord Dunglass MP, was coming to speak against Kitty in Perthshire. The Duke explained to the Earl that “every Roman Catholic laird in the district went against her, and they are really at the bottom of the whole mischief”.

The historical parallels are not exact: they never are. But Gray offers us a fascinating account of religious loyalties, and suspicions, inflamed in the 1930s by an issue every bit as emotive as Gaza.

Dunglass was to become better known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Prime Minister from 1963-64. He was Chamberlain’s PPS, and one of dozens of Conservative and Unionist MPs who campaigned against the Duchess in the by-election in December 1938, when the whole might of the party machine was turned against her.

The Duchess had herself driven from meeting to meeting during that campaign, often travelling 200 miles a day on icy roads, but could not defeat Chamberlain’s massed forces, who among other things could muster far more cars to drive voters through a blizzard to the poll.

Churchill rang her almost every night to see how she was getting on, but could not come to campaign for her. To have done so would have been to play into the hands of his opponents in Epping, who at the behest of Conservative Central Office were working hard to get him deselected.

He was not cowed into silence. On 5 October 1938 he delivered one of the greatest speeches of his life, telling the House of Commons, which did not wish to listen to him, that at Munich “we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat”.

Kitty was at this point on a speaking tour in the United States, raising money for Spanish refugee children. She ought to have come home and added her voice to the debate, but instead she stuck to her programme.

Gray’s account is so good because she writes in an understated manner which suits the Duchess, who was the most unshowy of women: Gray quotes the description by an ardent parliamentary supporter of Chamberlain, Chips Channon, of the Duchess as looking like “a downtrodden secretary”.

On turning to the full entry in Simon Heffer’s edition of Channon’s Diaries, one finds this, written on 3rd April 1938:

“I see that mad, governessy, Duchess of Atholl has been speaking in Paris, a flood of her usual pink tripe. She was booed. She is a sex-starved, intelligent, semi-crazed little creature who looks like a downtrodden secretary; once she showed promise but soon became a famous bore.”

Channon was witty, glamorous, louche, a brilliant diarist who shows us which way the wind is blowing and reminds us how easy it is to misread events, but Gray is right to use him only in tiny doses, for he would spoil the flavour of her book.

The Duchess was born in 1874, and all her life had a rather inhibited, late Victorian attitude to the expression of emotion. Her family, the Ramsays, had lived at Bamff, in east Perthshire, for seven centuries, since 1666 as baronets, and had academic interests.

Kitty was educated at Wimbledon High School, could have gone to Oxford, but instead studied at the Royal College of Music, for she was a brilliant pianist.

Her half-sister, Agnata, the outstanding classicist of her year at Cambridge, married Henry Montagu Butler, Master of Trinity College, when she was 21 and he a 55-year-old widower with five children from his first marriage.

Kitty at the age of 20 formed an attachment to one of Butler’s sons, Ted, a schoolmaster at Harrow, but was told, it is not quite clear by whom, she could not marry him. About this, according to Gray, “she nursed an uncharacteristic and lifelong bitterness”.

She instead met, and to her surprise liked, the Marquis of Tullibardine, always known as Bardie, a cavalry officer and the son and heir of the Duke of Atholl.

He fought in 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman, where he was awarded the DSO for rescuing an Egyptian trooper, and in 1899 he and Kitty were married at St Margaret’s Westminster. She had a miscarriage, followed by an operation which she hoped would enable her to have children, but she never did.

Her virtues included honesty, hard work and courage. She was a woman of principle who could be relied on to do whatever she believed was the right thing, and at frequent intervals discovered some new cause.

This may not sound like promising material for a book. But by immersing herself in the sources, and declining to engage in the prurient speculations which are a staple of the modern biographer’s art, Gray has entered the Duchess’s world, and given us a strangely captivating portrait of an unexpected pioneer.