November 20th 1938

A visionary Duchess

Katherine, Duchess of Atholl was the first woman MP to be elected in Scotland and from 1924-30 she was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education. In politics she was a Conservative and passionately opposed to the granting of further powers to the provisional authorities in India which had been proposed by the Simon Commission. She also wrote a book ‘The conscription of a People’ which was a popular and effective expose of conditions in Russia. She was in fact in the mainstream of Conservative politics and seemed unlikely material to be either a rebel or a martyr.

The change began when Hitler achieved power in 1933. It was a time when the government of the day was prepared to believe that the Nazism was ‘a good thing’. The Duchess saw things differently. She was horrified, for instance, to read the unexpurgated version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and as a patriotic Conservative she was furious when German troops entered the Rhineland in 1935. Her beliefs led her to join that small group of conservatives, of which Churchill was the most prominent, who showed a deep and increasing mistrust of German intentions. They were not very popular within their party but were tolerated.

In July 1936 General Franco started his revolt against the left-wing, though democratically elected, government of Spain. The British Government adopted a policy of non-intervention, a refusal to supply help or armaments to either side. This policy however was a good deal less even handed than it might appear. Quite apart from the circumstance that the Republican Government was a legitimate government and that Franco was a rebel general, there was the fact that Franco was being armed and supplied with ‘volunteers’ from both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, while the legal government was starved of material help. Once again the Duchess’ mistrust of German policy predisposed her towards supporting the Republicans. But she went further; she visited Spain and was impressed by what she saw. She became convinced that the Government was not Communist as was suggested by many right-wing papers, she was also impressed by the support manifested by the ordinary people. In June 1938 she produced a book ‘Searchlight on Spain’ giving her views not only on the war itself but the background of agrarian poverty which had led to the fall of the Monarchy. The book created a great deal of interest and sold over 100,000 copies.

There had already been rumblings within her own constituency party of Perth and Kinross. The Duchess now met her critics head on by applying on November 20th for the Chilton Hundreds (a means of resigning her seat in Parliament) and then standing in the subsequent by-election as an Independent rather as an Independent Conservative. She received support from Winston Churchill and tacit support from the Liberal and Labour parties and addressed enthusiastic meetings throughout the constituency. Polling day on December 22nd coincided with arctic conditions in Perthshire so that getting the voters to the polling stations was to be of supreme importance. The Duchess had the use of 100 cars, the Official Conservatives of 500. When the result was declared McNair Snadden, a local farmer and Conservative candidate had 11,808, the Duchess of Atholl 10,495.

It was an unhappy end to the parliamentary career of a brave, independent minded, and as it turned out, far sighted woman. If it did not reflect too well on the voters of West Perth and Kinross it is probably true to say that their attitudes were mirrored by constituencies all over the UK. The promise of ‘Peace in Our Time’ brought back by Neville Chamberlain from Munich was still believed by many millions who should have known better.

Less than a year later we were at war with Germany.