Duchess of Atholl, Outspoken Critic of Chamberlain, Self-Proclaimed Crusader Against International Cruelty
In May 1940, thanks to a group of anti-appeasement British members of Parliament, Neville Chamberlain was ousted as prime minister and Winston Churchill was summoned to power just as Hitler invaded Western Europe. One of the MPs who rebelled against Chamberlain was a woman, who, as the wife of the Duke of Atholl, also happened to be a high-ranking member of Britain’s aristocracy.
The boldest of the rebels, Kitty Atholl was an especially outspoken critic of Chamberlain, and the prime minister and his supporters set out to destroy her politically. In 1938, they kicked her out of the Conservative Party and nominated another candidate for her seat in a special election. Shockingly, because of her gender, none of her fellow insurgents stood up for her. Most of them had been adamantly opposed to the idea of women serving in the House of Commons. Defeated by a very small margin, the Duchess of Atholl retired from politics and spent the war working to help refugees throughout Europe. But as I write in my book Troublesome Young Men, she had the satisfaction of knowing that, if it hadn’t been for her and her anti-appeasement colleagues, Churchill would never have had a chance to become prime minister and Britain might well have negotiated for peace with Hitler or gone down to defeat.
