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scotianostra · 2 years

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On April 10th 1936 Activists including the 'Red Duchess of Athol' formed a committee to send an ambulance to Spain in memory of three Dundonians killed while fighting for the Spanish Republican government.

I’m using this wee bit of history to actually tell you about one of the woman in particular here, I will touch on the Ambulance story during the post, but in the main it’s about one remarkable lady

The Red Duchess, or Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, as she was formally known, was Scotland’s first female MP, The Red Duchess tag is a bit of a misnomer, as Kitty was a Tory politician, but beffore you judge her on this, please don’t hold that against her though, read the post and then judge her.

Kitty shook up parliament with her high principles and disregard for old school tribal politics, she joined the House of Commons in 1923 after winning the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire for the Conservatives. She also realised the threat Hitler posed and defied her party whips – reading Mein Kampf in the original German and giving translations to Chamberlain and Churchill to try to convince them of the imminent danger.

She was a woman full of contraries, before women had received the vote in 1918 she had outspokenly opposed giving them the vote, arguing that they were not yet sufficiently educated!

In the late 1920s her attention shifted to international issues. She supported a campaign to prevent female genital mutilation in the British colonies in East Africa and she became concerned over developments in the USSR: her book The Conscription of A People exposed and denounced Soviet forced-labour practices.

Her understanding of the dangers the Nazi’s posed influenced her support for the Spanish Republic after the failure of the attempted military coup in July 1936.

The U.S. journalist Louis Fischer gave this assessment of her;

“In her old-fashioned black silk dress that fell to her shoe tops she would sit on the platform, at Spain meetings, with Communists, left-wing socialists, working men and disabled International Brigaders and appeal for help for the Republicans. She would interrogate everybody who had been to Spain and hang on their words and note many of them in a book filled with her illegible scrawl.”

It was the ease with which she aligned to the communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, that the Red Duchess name came about. It was much more than politics with Kitty though, she organised the evacuation of nearly 4,000 children from Bilbao and accommodated them in Britain.

It was Katherine Murray and another Scottish woman Fernanda Jacobsen who helped with humanitarian efforts during the war in Spain, Jacobsen became commandant of the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) which provided humanitarian assistance in three convoys.. Jacobsen led the first unit of six ambulances and a lorry, with a crew of 19, which set out from Glasgow on 17 September 1936. Over the course of the war there were three such convoys, all led by Jacobsen.

The Red Duchess toured Scotland to raise support, stirring audiences into action with her spellbinding oratory, and visited Spain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson. The fruit of her journey was the enormously affecting book 'Searchlight on Spain', which sold 300,000 copies in Britain. The aristocrat's work demonstrated the social breadth of the Aid for Spain campaign in Scotland, and inspired women from all backgrounds.

While casting aside the politics of left and right, Atholl believed in the right for the Republicans to legitimately govern and defend themselves. The Duchess, who was also an accomplished pianist and composer, proved to be a heavy weight and fearless operator - but her name today remains relatively obscure.

It wasn’t all about Spain though, The Duchess, even before she had taken her seat in Westminster, had already reported on the dire state of health provision in the Highlands and Islands as part of the influential Dewar Committee, whose findings became the blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.

As I said earlier this was a woman of contraries and her opposeition of women’s suffrage at 21,led to Lady Astor, the first English female MP to take their seat in Westminster, derided her as “Canute trying to keep the waves back.”

Later, her position changed and the Duchess would befriend Sylvia Pankhurst who was to publicly endorse her as an independent candidate in the 1938 by-election which she triggered after losing the support of her local party over her views on Nazi Germany. At the time there was a widespread feeling of appeasement towards Hitler and his policies, Kitty Murray was a lost voice in her opposition to them. Such was her belief that she resigned her seat and stood as an independent, fighting almost entirely on this single issue.

A telegram from Stalin supporting the Duchess' campaign inflicted further damage to a campaign that was set against the vast resources of the Conservative Party. She lost the election by just 1,305 votes.

Her friend and campaign organiser Frieda Stewart said: “The challenge was one of principle against a whole party-political machine; and the Tories were determined that they were not going to be put in their place by one dissident individual, whatever her title.”

Murray, who authored several books, largely stepped away from the fray of public and political life following her defeat.

Following the death of her husband in 1942, she became Honorary Colonel of the Scottish Horse Regiment and also served as President of the Perthshire Branch of the Red Cross Society. Kitty Murray, the Duchess of Atholl spent spent a lot of her private income on assisting refugees. With the support of the Foreign Office she broadcast a message of support in the autumn of 1944 to the Poles resisting the Germans in Warsaw. She was also very concerned for those suffering at the hands of the Soviets. Just before the war ended, the Duchess of Atholl, chaired the British League for European Freedom, a post which she held up to her death in 1960.

Katherine “Kitty” Murray, the Duchess of Atholl died in Edinburgh in 1960, aged 85, after falling from a wall.

Read more about this all but forgotten woman here https://www.basquechildren.org/-/docs/articles/atholl2019

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