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This newsreel item gives an extremely brief portrait of Katharine Marjory
Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, the first woman to be given a post in a
Conservative government. She was the Scottish Unionist Party MP for Kinross and
West Perthshire from 1923 to 1938, and served as parliamentary secretary to the
Board of Education from 1924 to 1929.
The involvement of women in parliamentary politics was still something of a
novelty for the newsreels six years after women finally won the rights to vote
and to stand for election. Topical Budget seems to have missed an earlier
breakthrough, when Labour MP Margaret Bondfield became the very first woman to
serve in a British government following her appointment by Ramsay MacDonald as
parliamentary secretary to the minister of Labour in January 1924.
The film shows the Duchess just after her appointment to the Board of
Education, and she is seen in a splendid hat talking outside a building for a
very few seconds.
During her time as an MP, the Duchess of Atholl (so titled after her husband
succeeded his father to become the 8th Duke of Atholl in 1917) campaigned for
human rights in the Soviet Union and against female genital mutilation in
Africa, before resigning her seat in parliament in protest at Neville
Chamberlain's appeasement policy toward Hitler. She later spent time in Spain
observing the effects of the Civil War and gave support to the republicans. She
died in Edinburgh, where she was born, in 1960.
Lucy Smee
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Complete item (0:12)
