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Articles
Cancellation Attempts, 1939: Kitty Atholl, Winston Churchill
- By RICHARD COHEN
- | June 5, 2023
- Category: Churchill Between the Wars Explore
Katharine Marjory Ramsay
Born 1874 to an aristocratic Scottish family, Katharine became Duchess of Atholl when her husband, John Stewart-Murray, inherited the Dukedom. Known as “Kitty,” she trained as a pianist, but dedicated herself to public service. Before 1914 she served on a committee to improve health services in the sparsely-populated Scottish highlands and islands. During the First World War she helped to organise nursing services for the British Army.
In 1923 she was elected to parliament as Conservative Member of Parliament for Kinross and West Perthshire. Her constituency included Blair Atholl, the family estate, previously represented by her husband. In the 1924-29 Baldwin government she was a junior minister for Education. The first Scottish woman MP, she was the second woman to serve as a government minister. There was some irony in this. Before the war she had outspokenly opposed female suffrage, arguing that women were not yet sufficiently educated.
In the late 1920s “Duchess Kitty” shifted her attention to international issues. She supported a campaign to prevent female genital mutilation in British East Africa. Simultaneously she became concerned over developments in Russia. Her book, The Conscription of a People (1931), exposed and denounced Soviet forced-labour practices. Nevertheless, after reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, she concluded that Nazi Germany was a greater threat than the USSR. She sent translations of the book to Neville Chamberlain and Churchill, including original passages expunged from official editions.
The not-so-Red Duchess
Her views on Hitler led Atholl to support the Republic during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. Affronted right-wing newspapers began calling her the “Red Duchess,” which was wide of the mark. In fact she was very conservative, a backer of the British Empire and a natural ally of Churchill’s. In 1935 she had temporarily resigned from the Conservative Party in protest over the India Act, certain it would foster Indian independence. The American journalist Louis Fischer concluded, “she is no radical.”1
Kitty Atholl stressed the dangers of a wider European war which, by 1938, looked increasingly likely. France, she said, would be surrounded by three hostile powers (Germany, Italy and Spain). She highlighted the dangers to Britain, warning—accurately as events proved— of the threat to British shipping from German U-boats.
Her fears over Nazi Germany increased after 1938 visits to Austria, just before the Anschluss, and to Czechoslovakia. Her criticism of the Munich agreement and support for Spanish Republicans led to her expulsion from the Conservative Party. In December she resigned her seat forcing a by-election, in which she stood as an independent. The Labour and Liberal parties withdrew their candidates, but she lost narrowly. This ended her political career, but not her support for the Spanish Republic and human rights. After the Republican defeat in 1939 she visited their refugee camps in southern France, where hundreds of thousands were confined.
After the Second World War the Duchess of Atholl established and chaired the British League for European Freedom. The League campaigned to expose human rights violations in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Her memoirs, Working Partnership, were published in 1958, two years before her death.
Atholl and Churchill
Aside from being born only two weeks apart, Kitty Atholl and Winston Churchill shared the same independence and courage to stand up for unpopular causes. Both advocated fair play for defeated Boers in South Africa and those left behind in British society. Both inveighed against an undemocratic House of Lords and warned of Hitler in the 1930s. Predictably, each ran into trouble with their constituency associations. Atholl lost her seat; Churchill held on, despite determined efforts to deselect him as MP for Epping.
Colin Thornton-Kemsley, honorary treasurer of the Essex and Middlesex Provincial Area, led the anti-Churchill effort between November 1938 and March 1939. Phone taps and committee takeovers were used to pile up evidence. “It was made clear to me that the growing revolt in the Epping Division was welcomed in high places,” Thornton-Kemsley later stated.2 Churchill soon became aware of all this, and snorted in derision, quoting Burke:
Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.3
“Cancelling” Winston, 1939
In 1939 a politician could be “cancelled” for saying things deemed unfashionable by the prevailing orthodoxy. Back then the orthodoxy was Munich, deemed to have saved the peace.
Thornton-Kemsley wrote the press demanding that Churchill resign the Conservative whip and stand as an independent. Epping had 103,000 electors in 26 branches. Suddenly small towns and villages became key battlegrounds. The parish of Matching, for example, had only 384 electors, but it sent five anti-Churchill representatives to the Council.
In his memoirs, Thornton-Kemsley regretted his attempt to cancel Churchill. It was, he wrote, “very childish and impertinent… a futile insurrection.” Yet he believed at the time that “a strong Conservative candidate backed by the party machine might have let the Liberal in on a split vote.”4 Undoubtedly he had hoped to deprive Chamberlain’s most persistent critic of a voice in Parliament.
At the time Thornton-Kemsley recalled, “it looked as if the Council meeting might…prove to be ‘ a damned close-run thing.’”5 Important local branches, Waltham Abbey, Theydon Bois, and Epping itself, were “against the Member.” In Nazeing on 4 March, a Captain Jones voiced the old complaint: “I admire [Churchill’s] brains and mental capacity but I decry his judgement.” A Major Bury had “come to the end of my patience.” Chamberlain, said another speaker, “is one of the greatest premiers England has ever had.” Munich was “one of the greatest acts in history.”
Might Nazeing succeed where the Nazis had failed? No one spoke against expelling Churchill. Chigwell’s vote to deselect was 14-4, Loughton’s 31-14. These are tiny numbers in the context of world events that would have ensued had Churchill not been available to become prime minister when Hitler attacked in the West in 1940.
Sinking prospects
A general election was then expected within the next 12 months. Almost any other politician, faced with a revolt on such a scale. would have toned down their criticism. Churchill would have none of it. Of his speech after Munich he said: “I do not withdraw a single word. I read it again only this afternoon, and was astonished to find how terribly true it had all come.”6
If deselected, he would resign to fight the seat as an independent, like the Duchess of Atholl. No other winnable constituency would have taken Churchill after Munich. Like Atholl, he would be unlikely to win in that pro-Chamberlain environment.
Nevertheless, he hammered on: “Many people at the time of the September crisis thought they were only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia,” he said on March 14th. “But with every month that passes you will see that they were also giving away the interests of Britain, and the interests of peace and justice.”7 Defying attempts to remove him, he asked:
What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the constituencies return tame, docile, subservient members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgement.8
Turn of the tide
At dawn the very next morning, Wednesday, March 15th, the entire geopolitical landscape changed. Germany invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia. Hitler proclaimed “the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” from Prague Castle the next day. His years of protestations about how he merely wished only to repatriate ethnic Germans were ended. His claim that he had no more territorial claims in Europe was revealed to be a lie, and those who had believed him to be dupes. Well-meaning, perhaps, but dupes all the same. Those who had understood all along were Churchill and a handful of others: Anthony Eden, Leo Amery, Alfred Duff Cooper, Lord Loyd—and Katharine, Duchess of Atholl.
Apologies
Colin Thornton-Kemsley was found a Scottish seat by Conservative Central Office, and no more was heard of his attempted coup in Epping. War was declared on 3 September 1939. Nine days later he wrote Churchill from his Army camp:
For 14 years I worked as hard as most in your support, and from September until the time of my By-Election in March (since when I have scrupulously refrained from taking any part at all in the affairs of your Division) I have opposed you as hard as I knew how for reasons, and in ways, which you know all about. I want to say only this. You warned us repeatedly about the German danger and you were right: a grasshopper under a fern is not proud now that he made the field ring with his importunate chink. Please don’t think of replying—you are in all conscience busy enough in an office which we are all glad that you hold in this time of Britain’s danger.9
Churchill did reply, with grace and magnanimity: “I certainly think that Englishmen ought to start fair with each other from the outset in so grievous a struggle and so far as I am concerned the past is dead.”10
Retrospect
Colin Thornton-Kemsley concluded his memoirs:
In war Mr. Churchill’s single aim was to encompass the defeat of Germany. When by the Grace of God this was accomplished, his one consuming purpose was to devote what remained to him to building a durable peace. When the final judgment comes to be made, I believe it will be seen that Winston Churchill’s whole life—his patrician and part-American ancestry, his mastery of the English language, his fearless advocacy of unpopular causes and his readiness in great matters to accept the right priorities—was but a preparation for his finest hour.
He was a man of heroic proportions. His leadership in the dark days when Britain, alone among the Great Powers, preserved the cause of Freedom, saved the Commonwealth from defeat and Christendom from the darkness of eclipse. That, I believe, will be the ultimate verdict. Beside that all else will pale into insignificance.11
It was clear that Thornton-Kemsley drew the right conclusions.
The author
Richard Cohen is a lawyer in Loughton, Essex, part of Churchill’s old constituency of Epping, later subdivided as Woodford—which WSC represented for 40 years. Thus, he has a particular interest in local efforts to deselect Churchill as MP in 1938-39. He is writing a play on the subject to be presented in 2024 during Churchill’s sesquicentennial. Mr. Cohen founded the Winston Churchill Facebook page which in two years soared past 21,500 subscribers. As head of the Essex Branch of the Jewish Historical Society, he sponsored a podcast with historian Sarah Reguer on Churchill and the Middle East.
Endnotes
1 Louis Fischer, Men and Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), 440..
2 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. V, The Prophet of Truth 1922-1939 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 1042.
3 Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 514.
4 Colin Thornton-Kemsley, Through Winds and Tides (Montrose, Angus: Standard Press, 1974), 96.
5 Ibid. Thornton-Kemsley was using the Duke of Wellington’s misquoted remark about the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. The Duke’s actual words were “a damned nice thing.”
6 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), at Chigwell, Essex, 10 March 1939, Gilbert, 1044.
7 WSC, Waltham Abbey, Essex, 14 March 1939, in 259.
8 Ibid., 493.
9 Colin Thornton-Kemsley to WSC, 12 September 1939, in Gilbert, 1115.
10 Ibid.
11 Thornton-Kemsley, Winds and Tides, 280.
Bibliography
Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Penguin Random House, 2018
David Thomas Churchill: The Member for Woodford, Frank Cass, 1995, Routledge, 2014
“What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavour to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear?”
This reflects the situation today in most Western nations in which politicians and citizenry meekly accept what we are told of a looming existential crisis caused by climate change, turning a blind eye, or supporting, attempts to cancel those scientists who have the temerity to question such UN/WEF-driven groupthink, e.g., Curry, Koonin, Lindzen, Lomborg, Moore, Pielke Jr, Plimer, Shellenberg, et al. Audi alteram partem.
May I be permitted the following question of the author? As she was a Duchess, if only by marriage, why was she allowed to become an elected Member of Parliament sitting in the House of Commons?
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She married a peer but was not one herself, so was entitled to sit in the Commons, like Nancy Astor. -Eds.