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Mrs Katherine Harley
Katherine Mary Harley was the daughter of Royal Naval Captain John Tracey French and Margaret (née Eccles). She was born at the family home in Ripple in 1855. After both her parents died, she was brought up by relatives, and in 1877 she married Colonel George Ernest Harley of The Buffs, who died while serving in the Second Boer War in 1907.
Her sister, Mrs Charlotte Despard, was the founder of the Women’s Freedom League, and their brother was Captain of Deal Castle, Field Marshal John Denton Pinkstone French, 1st Earl of Ypres.
Katherine was an early member of the NUWSS, and it was she who in 1913 proposed and helped organise the ‘Monster Demonstration’. Known as the Pilgrimage, an estimated 50,000 suffragists from right across the country walked to London, culminating in a mass meeting in Hyde Park.
At the outbreak of war, Katherine became a founding member of the Women’s Emergency Corps, whose purpose was to help organise women to become doctors, nurses, and motorcycle messengers. When Dr. Elsie Inglis founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service, Katherine volunteered.
At its formation, Dr. Inglis offered the service to the British War Office, whose reply was “My good lady, go home and sit still.” The service was then immediately offered to the Allies. So it was that Katherine found herself serving in French hospitals in France and then in Ghevgeli, fifty miles from Salonika, where hospital tents were erected in the compound of a factory. When it became too dangerous, the unit was forced to retreat to Salonika, where they re-established the hospital knee-deep in mud, with the wounded arriving before they were ready. For her dedication and services to France, Katherine was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
In 1916, she left the Scottish Women’s Hospitals service to join an independent ambulance unit serving the civilian population of Monastir (now Bitola, in modern-day North Macedonia), an Allied-occupied town in Serbia. As a frontline town, it was subjected to daily bombing and shell fire. Katherine, though, was determined to help the women, children, and elderly. Perhaps influenced by her sister’s efforts at home, she rented a house in the town, funding the establishment of an orphanage.
The Women’s Suffrage National Service Corps was organised by the Women’s Freedom League, the suffrage organisation founded and headed by her sister, Mrs. Charlotte Despard. One of this Corps’ efforts was to provide a hospital for the women and children who, before the war, would have been taken into the London hospitals. Katherine lent “Brackenhill,” her large Bromley home, for this purpose; its spacious rooms were soon converted into sick wards accommodating 40 patients, and there were also surgical, maternity, and children’s wards.
Sadly, Katherine was not to return to her home. On 7 March 1917, Monastir was subjected to a barrage and, apparently while taking tea, she was killed by shellfire.
Katherine was buried with full military honours; her gravestone, in Salonika (Lembet Road) Military Cemetery in Greece, has the inscription ~
“On your tomb instead of flowers, the gratitude of the Serbs shall blossom there.
For your wonderful acts, your name shall be known from generation to generation”
She fittingly has several other memorials ~
In the parish church of Condover, Shropshire, is a plaque in memory of her husband and herself.
On Condover’s WW1 memorial plaque, she is named incorrectly as “Katherine Ellen Harley.”
She also appears on the Trinity Chapel of St Mary’s Church, Shrewsbury war memorial.
A memorial fund was raised by the Women’s Citizens Association to buy a cot in the Royal Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury; the remaining funds were invested to provide for gold and silver medals awarded annually to the two highest-achieving student nurses. It was named the ‘Sister Harley Memorial’ and was awarded until the hospital closed in 1977.