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Courtney [née Potter], Catherine [Kate], Lady Courtney of Penwith (1847–1929), social worker and internationalist, was born on 4 April 1847 at Gayton Hall, Herefordshire, the second of nine daughters of Richard Potter (1817–1892), railway entrepreneur and speculator, and his wife, Lawrencina, née Heyworth (1821–1882), whose father, Lawrence Heyworth, was also a railway entrepreneur. Among her four talented sisters was (Martha) Beatrice Webb. She was educated by tutors at home and, briefly during the 1860s, at a London boarding-school for young ladies. Between ‘coming out’ at eighteen in 1865 and finally insisting on leaving home at twenty-eight in 1875, Kate Potter acted as the unwilling but competent organizer of the family household, both during the London season and for their months in the country at Standish, Gloucestershire. She longed to stop being a social parasite, on offer each year in the fashionable marriage market, and begged her parents to allow her to make a life of independent thought and action for herself instead. ‘After a particularly difficult year … I made up my mind to leave home and go to Miss Octavia Hill to be trained for her work in London’ (K. Courtney, journal, first entry, 1875). Kate Potter began as a trainee worker for the Charity Organization Society in Whitechapel and as an organizer of East End boys' clubs. She then joined Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, founders of Toynbee Hall and promoters of London settlement work. So warm and obviously genuine was her personality, and so anxious was she not to offend, that she actually managed to humanize her unlovable role of rent collector. In 1880 she met the Liberal cabinet minister Leonard Henry Courtney (1832–1918), who was attracted by her hearty laugh. On 15 March 1883, when she was thirty-six and he fifty-one, they married, cheered on lustily by her well-wishers from Whitechapel. Their marriage, which was childless, was to prove a partnership of true minds for nearly forty years. Kate Courtney followed her husband's lead in becoming a Liberal Unionist and a suffragist—indeed she became a leader of the Women's Liberal Unionist Association in the 1890s, until she became disillusioned by its social conservatism and imperialism. She resigned from the association's committee on 24 October 1900.
Both the Courtneys were deeply committed to international peace and their first testing time had come in October 1899 with the outbreak of the South African War. They both became notorious as alleged ‘pro-Boers’, receiving scores of anonymous threatening letters. Leonard Courtney was dropped as Liberal candidate for Penwith, and Kate Courtney joined Emily Hobhouse in April 1900 in founding a women's committee of the South Africa conciliation movement that urged a negotiated settlement of the war: ‘We have substituted uncivilized for civilized methods of warfare’, she argued (K. Courtney, letter to the Westminster Review). In December she supported Emily Hobhouse's fact-finding mission to the British concentration camps at Bloemfontein, and throughout 1901 she helped both to organize relief in South Africa and to inform the British public about the atrocities being perpetrated by Britain on Afrikaner and African women and children.
When the First World War broke out Kate Courtney (who, on her husband's elevation to the peerage in 1906, had become Lady Courtney of Penwith) persisted in her humane pacifism; she consistently refused to wage war in spirit, insisting instead on championing ‘innocent enemies’ (K. Courtney, Extracts from a Diary during the War, 30 March 1915). Thus she helped to found an emergency committee to relieve destitute German civilians who had been stranded in Britain at the outbreak of the war; she visited German prisoners of war in prison ships; she publicized the work of her German counterparts in Berlin who were overseeing the welfare of British civilians and prisoners; she tried to intercede with the Home Office on behalf of German civilians threatened with deportation; she supported the American progressive Jane Addams's frustrated attempts in 1915 to organize a negotiated end to the war brokered by neutral nations; and finally, in 1918, she sought a way for British Quakers to go over to defeated Germany and take relief supplies to the starving over there. The first meeting of the Fight the Famine Committee was held at Kate Courtney's Chelsea home, 15 Cheyne Walk, in January 1919, when she was seventy-one, and out of that committee developed the Save the Children Fund.
Both Kate Courtney's Extracts from a Diary (1927) and her reflective, impassioned letters to the press in 1919–20 testify to her prophetic insight into the fatal consequences of righteous hatred and militarism. The popular press, for example the Daily Sketch, July 1919, pilloried her as ‘pro-Hun’. Kate Courtney's alternative principles were those of E. D. Morel and his Union of Democratic Control, and she was also a founding spirit behind the British sections of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the League of Nations Union. ‘Somebody must begin to be good if the better world we were promised is ever to come’ she wrote to the Daily News in January 1920. She died at 15 Cheyne Walk on 26 February 1929, and was buried at Chelsea Old Church. Catherine Courtney (1847-1929)Kate Courtney's brilliant and much more famous sister, Beatrice Webb, condescended to her all her life: ‘Dear Kate is an incurable sentimentalist’ (B. Webb, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 1982). But after Kate Courtney died, she wrote: ‘Kate was the most beneficent of my sisters. … She was in a sense faultless—she had no malice, no envy, little egotism’ (ibid., 6 March 1929). Other tributes to Kate Courtney's radiant personality are found in G. P. Gooch's Life of Lord Courtney (1920), Stephen Hobhouse's Margaret Hobhouse (1934), and Elizabeth Fox Howard's Our Lady of Chelsea, but it is her own words and deeds that deserve to survive her.
Ref. 'Women Against the Iron Fist' by Sybil Oldfield