The Red Duchess and the dirtiest by-election in history
Feted by Stalin but doted on by Churchill, the extraordinary story of Scotland’s first female MP (who thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen) and her war on fascism
NESTLED in a bucolic corner of Highland Perthshire, the magnificent white turrets of Blair Castle appear an unlikely setting for a Communist assault. Yet it was here, among the long corridors and magnificent state rooms of this grandest of aristocratic seats, that the career of one of Scotland’s greatest female politicians came crashing to the ground thanks to the underhand manoeuvrings of Josef Stalin.
Before Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson, before Margo MacDonald and Margaret Thatcher, there was Katharine Stewart-Murray. The Duchess of Atholl was Scotland’s first female MP, a staunch Unionist and close ally of Winston Churchill and arguably the first British politician publicly to recognise the threat posed by Adolf Hitler.
It was a belief for which she was to pay the ultimate political price: losing her seat in 1938 in what was later described as ‘the dirtiest byelection in British history’, the hoopla culminating in Stalin sending his endorsement with a telegram declaring: ‘Moscow is proud of Katharine the even greater.’ It was all too much for the duchess’s genteel, Right-leaning Perthshire constituents, who choked on their Earl Grey at the thought of an MP with the backing of the Soviet dictator.
Nicknamed the Red Duchess, Stewart-Murray was a highly contrary figure. She declared a woman’s place was in the home and campaigned against votes for women, yet took on one of the toughest jobs available to her sex at the time by becoming a Member of Parliament. She was a blue-blooded aristocrat, yet stood on the side of the Communists during the Spanish Civil War.
And while she was loyal to her party the Scottish Unionists (the Caledonian branch of the Conservatives) she wasted no time in defying her party whips when she thought the country was in danger as a result of the rise of Hitler in 1930s Germany, becoming a key figure in the anti-appeasement movement.
So how did a woman who belonged to one of Britain’s greatest aristocratic families become an accidental heroine of the Soviet Union? And why, in an age where women now dominate Scottish politics, has she been almost forgotten?
‘She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind,’ says William Knox of the University of St Andrews, who devoted a chapter of his book, Lives of Scottish Women: Women and Scottish Society 1880-1980, to Stewart-Murray.
‘She was no great intellectual but she was hugely talented, very clever and incredibly astute. Yet she has become barely a footnote in political history.
‘Her moment in the light was her opposition to appeasement in the late 1930s. If you look at her historical legacy, she stood up to fascism and put her political career on the line in a way that no other politician was prepared to do.’
The young Katharine grew up in Edinburgh and Perthshire, where her father was Sir Henry James Ramsay, the Tenth Baronet of Bamff.
THE aristocratic Ramsays flitted between Scotland and London and at an early age Katharine displayed huge musical talent, so her parents sent her to the Royal College of Music. It was a solace from a cold and distant family. Her mother was a Christian Scientist and displays of emotion were frowned upon.
At music school she became an accomplished pianist and in 1893 at the age of 18 was awarded a scholarship, which she promptly gave to a less well-off student. She was a contemporary of both Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, and enjoying her freedom, formed a close bond with the son of her tutor.
Her horrified parents, anticipating a marriage of much higher breeding than a lowly piano teacher’s son, ordered her home to Perthshire and she never completed her studies.
Instead she became engaged to the Marquis of Tullibardine, heir to the magnificent Blair Castle in Perthshire’s Blair Atholl, and the pair married in 1899.
She then spent several years traipsing around the world after her husband while he engaged in various military campaigns including the Boer War and later in Egypt during the First World War, where the voluntary work she carried out in field hospitals earned her a damehood in 1918.
She had always been politically engaged, an early president of a local Women’s Unionist Association and a strong campaigner for her husband, who was elected MP for West Perthshire in 1910.
It was during this time she voiced her dissent for votes for women. She believed a woman’s place was in the home, and grandly declared that women with large families had no time for politics.
It was an odd stance for the woman who would go on to become Scotland’s first female MP, gaining access to the ultimate gentlemen’s club.
Says Knox: ‘She felt that women in general were not interested in politics. She also thought that because women did not defend their country giving them the vote would be a stab in the back for all those men who had fought in combat. Of course women were intrinsic to the war effort, but that was not how she viewed it.’
Her reasons may also have had something to do with her fractured personal life. Although her marriage to ‘Bardie’ as he was known was on the surface a happy one, she was unable to have children, and he is believed to have fathered two children out of wedlock.
‘It was not a love match,’ says Knox. ‘He was a serial adulterer, and that would have been difficult for her. If you consider that in those times the role of a woman in aristocratic circles was to provide heirs, she failed at the first hurdle. It must have rankled her. That was the extent of female ambition for many of her contemporaries.’
It was Lloyd George who persuaded Stewart-Murray to stand for parliament, coming to visit her in 1923 at Blair Castle to talk her into it, and she entered the House of Commons as MP for Kinross and West Perthshire later that year at the age of 49.
Neither did she fade into the background once she got there.
She was one of the first women to serve in a Conservative government, as junior education minister, and despite a fractious relationship with education minister Lord Eustace Percy, a noted woman-hater who took her appointment as a personal slur on his manhood, successfully opposed him on issues such as reintroducing fees for elementary education.
Despite her opposition to votes for women Stewart-Murray nevertheless campaigned on her gender’s behalf and in 1929, when she was relegated to the backbenches after the Tories’ defeat at the ballot box, spoke out against the practice of circumcision of young girls in colonial countries such as Kenya, forming the first Committee for the Protection of Coloured Women to do so.
It was her support for the Leftist Republicans in the Spanish Civil War that earned her the nickname the Red Duchess.
She travelled to Spain to see the fighting first hand, saw the devastation that Luftwaffe bombings had inflicted on various Spanish cities, and arranged the evacuation of 4,000 Basque children to the safety of England, a move which rankled with some on the Right of her party.
‘She correctly assessed that if Franco with the backing of Italy was successful then Britain was in danger, and she saw that danger at an early stage,’ says Knox.
‘But because she appeared on platforms with Left-wing figures to espouse those views, she received the nickname the Red Duchess. It was very unhelpful for her career.’
BUT Stewart-Murray also foresaw an even greater danger. Fluent in German, she read the original, unedited version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a watered down version of which was first published in English in 1933.
Highly alarmed by Hitler’s expansionist stance, she produced her own unedited version and distributed it among MPs, desperately trying to get across to her peers just how much of a threat the German Chancellor might be to Britain and her Empire.
One of her supporters was Winston Churchill, who was also deeply suspicious of Hitler and concerned by Neville Chamberlain’s determination to negotiate peace at any cost with the Fuhrer.
By 1938 Stewart-Murray had become so vocal about the threat from Germany that she lost the support of her
own constituency party, and sensing a revolt against her, resigned the party whip.
She stood down, triggering a byelection in which she stood as an independent candidate. It was as if all hell had broken loose.
‘The government viewed it as a referendum on their policy on appeasement,’ says Knox.
‘The Tories brought out every big gun they could find. If she had won it would have created a lot of difficulties. They were determined to win this by-election at any cost.’ Dubbed the dirtiest by-election in political history, landowners were persuaded to pay their workers extra if they voted a certain way, while the well-oiled Tory propaganda machine spoke out against her, using the ‘Red Duchess’ tag at every turn and papering the constituency with pro-Chamberlain leaflets.
She had an odd coterie of supporters during her campaign. Churchill called her every day to lend moral support, but to her dismay would not come up and join her on the hustings, as he was concerned for his own political future. Indeed, Churchill was warned by the Tory chief whip that if he dared to speak out in her defence, the party whip would be withdrawn.
Then there was Stalin, who effectively doomed her with his catty telegram to Blair Castle; and Dolores Ibarruri, the Spanish Republican heroine of the Civil War nicknamed La Pasionaria, who also sent a message of support. Curiously, Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the great titans of the suffragette movement, sent a note declaring that ‘every woman who prizes her vote should vote for you’.
In the end however it was not enough, and she lost, albeit by a slim margin of 1,113 votes. She is said to have consoled herself by playing Beethoven sonatas.
Stewart-Murray retired from political life and less than a year later her predictions were proved right when Hitler invaded Poland, plunging Europe into the Second World War. Despite what must have been desperate temptation, she never did say: ‘I told you so’.
She is also believed to have reconnected with her first love. They originally met again only two years into her political term, and although some claim the relationship with the piano tutor’s son, Ted Butler, by now married and a grandfather, was purely platonic, they nonetheless remained close until his death in 1952.
She later published an autobiography and died in 1960, at the age of 85, after breaking her femur while climbing over a wall.
‘She was the only member of parliament prepared to test the government on appeasement in public,’ says Knox. ‘She stood up to fascism at that time in a way that no one else, not even Churchill, did.’
For that, if nothing else, she deserves to be more than a footnote in Scotland’s colourful political history.