Katherine Harley (suffragist)

Katherine Harley was born in Kent on 3 May 1855, the daughter of the daughter of Margaret French, née Eccles, and her husband John French, a Royal Navy commander from Ireland. Katherine's siblings included an elder sister, Charlotte (later Charlotte Despard, born in 1844)[1] and John (later John French, 1st Earl of Ypres, born in 1852).[2] Katherine's father died before she was born,[1] and her mother was confined to an asylum by 1867; she was raised by relatives.[3] She married Colonel George Harley; he was killed in the Second Boer War.[3][4]

In 1910 Harley joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),[4] and became the honorary treasurer of the Midland Region. She was made president of the Shropshire branch of the NUWSS in 1913.[5] She was also a member of the Church League for Women's Suffrage.[6] In 1913 she proposed, and organised, the Great Pilgrimage.[7] The pilgrimage was a march along six routes to converge on Hyde Park, London, where there would be a rally. The march took place between 18 June and 26 July 1913.[8]

In 1914 Harley volunteered to assist the war effort by serving as a nurse in France with the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, where she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.[9][10] She became director of the hospital located in the Abbaye de Royaumont, 40 kilometers north of Paris, from January to April 1915 and then directed the hospital installed under tents in the domaine de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine, near Troyes, from June to October 1915.

In late 1915 she transferred to Greece to nurse on the Balkan Front. She established a motorised ambulance unit which operated near the front line, often at night, despite district orders to the contrary. She rented a house in Monastir, Serbia (now in the Republic of North Macedonia) after its capture, and it was there, on 7 March 1917, that she was killed by shellfire. She has buried at the 10 of March the city of Thessaloniki, her funeral attended by General Milne—the commander of the British forces in the Balkans—and George, Crown Prince of Serbia.[9]