Shortly before Christmas 1938, with weeks of heavy snow carpeting the lands around her Highland home, the birdlike frame of an aristocratic lady sat down wearily at her piano and began to play.
Seeking solace in the classical repertoire she mastered as a girl, the Duchess of Atholl allowed her thoughts to turn away, albeit briefly, from her recent public humbling.
At the time, ‘Kitty’ Atholl was one of the most famous women in the country – a child of privilege from an ancient Scottish family who grew up in a 400-year-old castle and was expected to marry the right husband and live the vacuous life of society’s elite.
And while Kitty grew up to be a true-blue toff as the wife of the Eighth Duke of Atholl, a life of cosseted indolence was quite beyond her. While her marriage was scarred by infertility, infidelity and near insolvency, she had yearned to fill her days with civic duty.
It fired in her a political ambition which, in the 1920s, took her to Westminster as Scotland’s first female MP – the only duchess to sit in the Commons and the first woman ever to serve in a Conservative government.
Kitty Atholl was the only duchess to sit in the Commons and the first woman ever to serve in a Conservative government
The 8th Duke and Duchess of Atholl
Less than a decade later, her fearful vision of the gathering storms of war made her a voice in the wilderness, crying out to an Establishment that could not identify the threat to world peace of the growing fascist movements in Spain, Italy and Germany. It was the age of appeasement and Right-wing ruling class sympathy for Franco, Mussolini and Hitler.
Kitty Atholl would have none of it. Rather than toe the party line, she castigated Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for his non-interventionist stance during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, in which General Franco’s rebel Nationalists were supported militarily by his fellow tyrants against the elected, Left-wing Republican government.
It was clear to her, at least, that Italy and Germany were using the Spanish conflict as a rehearsal for war with Britain.
Branded the ‘Red Duchess’ for defying her own government, she felt she had no option but to resign her seat and force a by-election to put the issue of appeasement to the ballot box.
By that snowy winter of 1938, however, a year before her fears were realised with the outbreak of war, she was hounded from Parliament – never to return – in a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign with the full might of Chamberlain’s party deployed to crush this principled and colourful maverick.
During that doomed but electrifying by-election, in which she was supposedly cheered on by Stalin himself, one newspaper famously declared: ‘Anything the Duchess does is news.’
Even after losing her seat, the duchess continued to draw headlines, facing down Communist hecklers from a Cromwell tank, and later raising eyebrows when a charity she helped set up to deal with a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe was suspected of being a front for an elaborate MI5 spy ring using former Nazi war criminals.
But while Nancy Astor is still celebrated as Britain’s first woman MP, the name of Kitty Atholl is almost forgotten 65 years after her death – an injustice which a new biography now seeks to address.
In ‘Red Duchess: Kitty Atholl, A Rebel in Westminster’, author Amy Gray portrays a complex and contradictory character, who managed to become one of the most influential women of her time.
‘Kitty was an outlier in every movement she was part of,’ she says, ‘so she was not fully embraced or celebrated by any of them. She ploughed her own, often lonely, furrow.’ Born Katharine Marjory Ramsay in 1874 in Edinburgh, Kitty spent her childhood at Bamff Castle in Perthshire, ancestral seat of the Ramsays, who had been granted the lands in 1232 by Alexander II. A talented musician, she studied piano at the Royal College of Music, but was never expected to have a career.
In 1899, aged 25, she delighted her father by marrying John George Stewart-Murray, Marquis of Tullibardine, who became the Duke of Atholl in 1917. Known as ‘Bardie’, he brought with him the grandeur of Blair Castle – and its huge debts.
Kitty received an unsolicited telegram purportedly from Stalin, which simply said, ‘Moscow is proud of Katherine the even Greater’
It was a marriage of its time. Initially, she stayed at home while he philandered, fathering a number of illegitimate children.
Kitty would remain childless but she was far from a stereotypical Victorian wife, argues Ms Gray.
She soon warned that waiting at home was not for her. When he served in South Africa during the Boer War, she went with him as a nurse, a role she repeated during the First World War in Egypt. In 1918, she was rewarded for her war work by being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire.
When he went into politics, she loyally supported his career – and then surpassed it, with his backing.
Her work with social services and local government led to her adoption as Scottish Unionist Party candidate for Kinross and West Perthshire in the 1923 General Election.
She won, but the Tories lost their overall majority and she soon became a member of the opposition to Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party. In the 1924 General Election she increased her vote and would hold the seat for 14 years.
She returned to a Tory government and was made an education minister, but she found herself increasingly at odds with her colleagues. A series of disagreements revealed her as a woman who, by today’s standards, was a mass of contradictions.
She was a humanitarian who fought for the rights of children but was opposed to universal suffrage for her gender. She voted against the reduction of the voting age for women from 30 to 21, despite becoming one of the first handful of women MPs.
Not above the prejudice of her class, she said it would not be proper for ‘tinker girls’ to vote.
But in 1935 she began to make real enemies. Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ (My Struggle) was doing the rounds and the duchess, who had read the original, was appalled by the ‘sanitised’ English version.
She paid to have it translated properly and gave copies to colleagues trying to highlight the dangers inherent in Hitler’s ideology.
The telegram Kitty Atholl received, supposedly from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin
She visited Spain, becoming involved in the care of Republican refugees and helped rescue more than 3,000 Basque children who were sent to Britain.
Devastated by her own inability to have children, she found a maternal role in caring for these young souls.
On a tour of the country in 1937, she exposed how the Luftwaffe had slaughtered civilians in Guernica, describing the atrocity in her book Searchlight on Spain.
Her closeness to the anti-Franco forces inflamed her enemies on the right of her party and gave rise to her infamous moniker, the ‘Red Duchess’. George Orwell, himself a civil war veteran, dismissed her in his memoir ‘Homage to Catalonia’ as one of the many naïve ‘English’ visitors who failed to notice the many shortcomings in the Republican cause.
By then, she sensed war with Germany was looming and called for some form of ‘national training’.
A close friend of Winston Churchill, she had written to him that ‘if the international situation is as serious as we know it to be, it seems to me terrible to think how unprepared the men of this country are’.
Unlike Churchill, she was prepared to put her views on appeasement to the electorate.
Within a year, she resigned her seat and decided she would fight the subsequent by-election in late December as an independent.
The Nazis felt so threatened by Kitty Atholl that they celebrated her parliamentary demise
It was a massive gamble which failed to factor in how determined senior Tories were to be rid of her.
The party machine swung into action behind the official Tory candidate William Snadden.
Shopkeepers around Perthshire refused to display Kitty’s posters for fear of antagonising influential customers, while local tenants reportedly received 15 per cent rent rebates, ostensibly due to a poor harvest, but they came with a note suggesting that they would ‘know which way to vote’. One Liberal who was supporting Kitty told her, ‘you have been deserted by your ain class!’.
Towards the climax of the campaign, Kitty received an unsolicited telegram purportedly from Stalin, which simply said, ‘Moscow is proud of Katherine the even Greater,’ and was signed by the dictator himself.
Sent from Holborn in London, it must have been a practical joke, but it was seen as key to turning public opinion and, inevitably, she lost the by-election.
The ‘smear’ tactics appalled honourable politicians. Josiah Wedgwood, the eminent Labourite and scion of the pottery dynasty, said: ‘To Socrates they gave hemlock. Gracoleus they killed with sticks and stones. The greatest and best they crucified. Katharine Atholl can hold up her head in good company.’
Chamberlain, by contrast, was delighted by this early Christmas present as Kitty Atholl was cast into the political wilderness.
There would be no appeasement here. Tellingly, the book reveals how a satisfied Nazi government spokesman told The Scotsman: ‘We are glad to know that the electorate was not carried away by the demagogic propaganda of this drawing room Bolshevist.’
It was a measure of how seriously Hitler’s regime took the slightly-built but wilful duchess that they would celebrate her parliamentary demise.
For Kitty, there was a brief retreat to the sanctity of Blair Castle and her beloved piano.
Life during wartime brought fresh heartache when her husband of 43 years died in 1942 with his devoted wife at his bedside.
Their marriage celebrated a very modern ‘ideal of comradeship, of partnership in life’s happiness and difficulties alike’, says Ms Gray. After the war, life began to open up and Kitty started to attend parties again, receiving Princess Elizabeth at the first post-war Caledonian Ball in June 1946.
She laughed when a journalist told her she was in the Nazis’ ‘Black Book’ of British leaders whom the Gestapo would have rounded up, alongside Churchill, Nancy Astor, and others. ‘I feel very honoured… I realise I wouldn’t have had a pleasant time had Britain been invaded but I’d have been in good company’, she said.
She kept up links with her late husband’s regiment, the Scottish Horse. In 1948, Communist protestors tried to disrupt one meeting in Aberdeen, which Kitty addressed from the top of a 28-ton Cromwell tank.
The sight of the 73-year-old duchess in a regimental bonnet was irresistible to the ‘huge crowd whose cheers drowned the “boos” of the Reds’.
She campaigned against Soviet control of Eastern Europe, belying her characterisation as a Communist sympathiser. Even here, though, Kitty Atholl found herself embroiled in controversy.
Meeting once a week under the auspices of the Scottish League for European Freedom (SLEF), the douce matrons of Morningside, Craiglockhart and Cramond believed they were hosting tea dances and coffee mornings to raise money for the ‘oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe’.
The SLEF arose out of the friendship and common cause of the Duchess of Atholl, who was chair of the British League for European Freedom (BLEF), and Elma Dangerfield, journalist and one-time intelligence officer.
But while the Edinburgh ladies thought they were helping a charity to rescue refugees from the clutches of the Soviets, they were, in fact, assisting a clandestine operation set up by MI6 spy chiefs.
Astonishingly, the ‘refugees’ included 956 members of the infamous SS Galizien Division, some of them known war criminals, who were brought to Scotland between 1948 and 1951 to work ostensibly as agricultural labourers.
The book cites research by journalist Douglas Macleod which disclosed the tea dances were part of a talent-spotting operation run by MI6 who were looking for potential agents to establish spy rings among the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union and foment destabilisation within the USSR.
Ms Gray adds that others helped by the BLEF and SLEF did not deserve their charity, including Dr Vladislav Dering, who convinced enough of Kitty’s friends that he had been an ordinary doctor at Auschwitz that the BLEF helped him avoid extradition to Poland.
In fact, as a libel trial heard in 1964, Dering had willingly carried out experiments on thousands of Jewish prisoners.
‘Had Kitty and the BLEF heard the horrifying evidence given in court by survivors of these operations, they would not have been so quick to defend him,’ she says.
For his part, Mr Macleod concluded Kitty ‘was never an MI6 agent but was an asset’, although ‘she was probably too naive to become involved in the world of spies’. However, Ms Gray says: ‘It is impossible to know for sure what Kitty knew.’
Sadly, her final years were characterised by dementia and she died in Edinburgh in 1960, at the age of 85, after a fall.
Since then, the remarkable life of the Red Duchess has faded from the history books, erased or forgotten by her male colleagues.
As Ms Gray puts it: ‘Perhaps they were embarrassed that she was right, and told them all so loudly, when they did not have her courage. Perhaps it is that she lost. History is, after all, written by the victors, and she lost the biggest gamble of her political life.’
■ Kitty Atholl, A Rebel in Westminster by Amy Gray is published on September 18, priced £22
