Partner Katharine Furse
Queer Places:
Sheppards, Outwood, Surrey
Brompton Cemetery
West Brompton, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Greater London, England
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Dame
Rachel Eleanor Crowdy, DBE (3
March 1884, Paddington –
10 October 1964, Outwood, Surrey)
was an English nurse and social reformer.[1] A
series of letters from Katharine
Furse to Rachel Crowdy dating from 1917 until Furse’s death in 1952
indicates that they shared a woman-loving friendship. The letters to Rachel
continue until Katharine’s death in 1953 at the age of 77.
Alison Roberta Noble Neilans died at the young age of
58,
after twenty-nine years as Secretary of the Association for Social and Moral
Hygiene. Among the numerous mourners at her funeral were her feminist friends and colleagues
Rachel Crowdy,
Nina Boyle,
Nancy Astor,
Grace Abbott (chairman of AMSH), Miss F. Barry of St. Joan’s
International Alliance, Miss K. Courtney of the League of Nations Union,
Daisy
Solomon of the British Commonwealth League, Miss
Anna Munro, Miss Marian Reeves
of the Women’s Freedom League and many more from the international arms of
organisations such as the Open Door Council and the International Council of
Women, Bessie Rischbieth of
the Australian Federation of Women Voters represented Australian women.
Crowdy was Principal Commandant of Voluntary Aid Detachments in France and
Belgium from 1914 to 1919 and Chief of the Department of Opium Traffic and
Social Issues Section of the League of Nations from 1919 to 1931.[2] She
was also an active member of the British National Committee for the
Suppression of the White Slave Trade.[3]
The daughter of James Crowdy, Rachel Crowdy was educated at Hyde Park New
College before training as a nurse at Guy's Hospital. She met Katharine
Furse in 1911, volunteering to serve as a Red Cross nurse in case of invasion.
At the outset of World War I Furse and Crowdy travelled abroad to discover
what was being done for the wounded, their investigation resulting in the
establishment of rest stations. Crowdy was appointed Principal Commandant
of V.A.D.s in 1914. She was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British
Empire in 1919.[2]
One of her sisters, Edith was the Deputy Director of the Women's Royal Naval
Service from 1917 to 1919, while another sister, Isabel was the Assistant
Director Inspector of Training for the same organisation.[4]
From 1919 to 1931 Crowdy was Head of the Social Questions and Opium Traffic
Section of the League of Nations, making her the only woman to be head of an
administrative section of the League.[2] In
1920-21 she accompanied the International Typhus Commission to Poland at the
height of the post-war epidemic there. On her retirement from the League, she
was guest of honour at a dinner for six hundred women at the Café Royal.[2]
Crowdy was made an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1927.[5] In
1931 she was a member of the British delegation to the Institute of Pacific
Relations conference at Shanghai.[1] Also
in 1931, it was noted in the press that she had criticised the USA for
allowing eleven states to retain the legal age of marriage for girls at 12
years.[5] She
sat on the 1935-36 Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of Armaments,[6] visited
Valencia and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War with the Parliamentary
Commission in 1937[7],
and sat on the 1938-39 Royal Commission on the West Indies.[2]
In 1939 Rachel Crowdy married Colonel Cudbert John Massy Thornhill, CMG,
DSO (4 October 1883 – 1952),[8] a
British Officer of the Indian Army and of The Secret Intelligence
Service (MI-6).[9] In
World War II she acted as Regions Advisor to the Ministry of Information,
reporting on bomb damage in British cities.
Dame Rachel Crowdy died at her home in Outwood, Surrey on 10 October 1964.
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