Up for auction a RARE! "Duchess of Atholl" Katharine Stewart-Murray Signed TLS dated 1934.
ES-3526D
Katharine Marjory Stewart-Murray, Duchess
of Atholl, DBE (née Ramsay;
6 November 1874 – 21 October 1960), known as the Marchioness of
Tullibardine from 1899 to 1917, was a Scottish noblewoman and Scottish Unionist Party politician
whose views were often unpopular in her party. Katharine Marjory Ramsay was
born in Edinburgh on 6 November 1874, the daughter of Sir James Henry Ramsay, 10th Baronet. She was educated
at Wimbledon High School and
the Royal College of Music.
During her school years she was known as Kitty Ramsay. On 20 July 1899, she
married John
Stewart-Murray, Marquess of Tullibardine, who succeeded his father as
8th Duke of Atholl in
1917, whereupon she became formally styled Duchess of Atholl. Known
as "Kitty", Stewart-Murray was active in Scottish social service and
local government and in 1912 served on the hugely influential "Highlands
and Islands Medical Service Committee" (authors of the Dewar Report) that has been widely credited with creating the
forerunner of the National Health Service.
She was the chairman of the Consultative Council on Highlands and Islands
As
the Marchioness of Tullibardine she was an opponent of female suffrage, with
Leah Leneman describing her as 'a key speaker at the most important Scottish
anti-suffrage demonstration', which took place in 1912. In 1913 she became
vice-president of the branch of the Anti-Suffrage League based
in Dundee. Despite this opposition to women
gaining the right to vote in parliamentary elections, she went on to be
the Scottish Unionist Member of Parliament (MP)
for Kinross and West Perthshire from 1923–38, and served
as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education from
1924–29, the first woman other than a Mistress of the Robes to
serve in a British Conservative government. She was the first woman elected to
represent a Scottish seat at Westminster.
The
historian William Knox has argued that, like other early female MPs in the UK,
"she literally inherited" her seat from her husband, but Kenneth
Baxter disputes this, noting that her husband had stood down from the
former West
Perthshire seat in 1917 when he succeeded to the duchy and that
it had been won by a Liberal candidate in
1918 and 1922.
Moreover,
Baxter claims her victory in 1923 was not seen as "a foregone
conclusion". The fact that, prior to 1918, Atholl had been opposed to
women's suffrage led to her being criticised in parliament by her Conservative
colleague Nancy Astor.
She
resigned the Conservative Whip first in 1935 over the India Bill and the
"national-socialist tendency" of the government's domestic policy.
Resuming the Whip, she resigned it again in 1938 in opposition to Neville Chamberlain's
policy of appeasement of Adolf Hitler and to the Anglo-Italian agreement.
According to her biography, A Working Partnership she was then
deselected by her local party. She took Stewardship of the
Chiltern Hundreds on 28 November 1938. She stood unsuccessfully
in the subsequent by-election as an Independent candidate.
She
argued that she actively opposed totalitarian regimes and practices. In 1931,
she published The Conscription of a People—a protest against the
abuse of rights in the Soviet Union. In 1936, she
was involved in a long-running battle in the pages of various newspapers
with Lady Houston after
the latter had become notorious for her outspoken support of Benito Mussolini. Stewart-Murray had taken issue with Houston
calling in the pages of the Saturday Review on
the king to
become British dictator in imitation of the European fascist regimes.
According
to her autobiography Working Partnership (1958), it was at the
prompting of Ellen Wilkinson that
in April 1937 she, Eleanor Rathbone, and
Wilkinson went to Spain to observe the effects of the Spanish Civil War. In Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid she saw the impact of Luftwaffe bombing on behalf of the Nationalists, visited
prisoners of war held by the Republicans and considered the impact of the
conflict on women and children, in particular. Her book Searchlight on
Spain resulted from the involvement, and her support for the Republican side
in the conflict led to her being nicknamed by some the Red Duchess.
Shortly
before or even during 1938, she travelled to Romania where she visited "Satu Mare Romanian Women
Association" in the city of Satu Mare aiming to support the Romanian cause to
preserve the state borders established in 1918 and keep Hungary from regaining the territory that it lost then.
She
campaigned against the Soviet control of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary as the chairman of the League for European Freedom in Britain from 1945. In
1958, she published a biography of her life with her husband entitled Working
Partnership.