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Catherine Arnott: doctor, suffragette and ‘Pied Piper’ of Eastby

There are some extraordinary and very interesting women in Embsay-with-Eastby’s history, such as Margaret Sidgwick, who became the wife of the parish’s first vicar, Rev. Henry Cooper (her fascinating family and social connections were explored in our book “Historical Notes, Vol. 2”, published 2023); and the mother-and-daughter team, Elizabeth and Annie Greenwood, landladies at the ‘Mason’s Arms’ pub, in Eastby (whose diary extracts contribute so much to our knowledge of Late Victorian Embsay and Eastby). 

Also on our list of extraordinary women is Catherine Arnott (1858-1942), who dedicated her life to the medical profession, becoming the Chief Medical Officer of the sanatorium at Eastby, at a time few women were permitted to take on such roles, and they could not even vote in general elections. 

She came from a family deeply involved with the military and medical fields; Most famously, two of her great-uncles were physicians to Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on St. Helena. Dr. Thomas Shortt (1788-1843) [1] and Dr. Archibald Arnott (1771-1821) [2]. Indeed many of her male cousins, uncles, and nephews served as army officers or physicians, many of them with the East Indies Company in India. 

Catherine and her four younger siblings were all born between 1858 and 1863, at Mhow, India, where her father, Dr. Francis Shortt Arnott, served as an army surgeon, rising to the post of Inspector-General, and Honorary Surgeon to the Queen. 

But the Arnott family estate was based at Kirkconnel Hall, near Lockerbie, in Scotland. [3] In 1821 Catherine’s father had inherited the house, which was the Arnott family estate for several generations, from his unmarried uncle, Dr. Archibald.

Catherine was just under five years old when her mother, Ann (née Gabourel) died in childbirth in 1863 (their infant son died soon after). 

Six years later, in 1869, Francis brought his family back from India to live at Kirkconnel. He became Inspector-General of Prisons, but by 1871 was retired, to oversee his farm of 250 acres. [4] The four children were looked after by their 91-year-old paternal grandmother, Catherine (née Shortt) Arnott, and their 50-year-old maternal aunt, Elise (sometimes recorded as Elsie) Gabourel, from Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Also living with them was George Arnott (Francis’s brother), who was another doctor, and now retired from his practice in Cheltenham; a governess from Jersey (36-year-old Elizabeth Falle); and no less than 11 servants (including two farm servants, a dairymaid, a nurse, and a coachman). 

This privileged background continued as Catherine grew up, and by 1881 at the age of 22, she was still at Kirkconnel House, with her sisters, Harriet and Annie. Their father had died two years previously, and the head of household was now aunt Elise Gabourel. The number of servants was reduced to six (including a nurse, coachman and dairymaid). Uncle George, and his wife, Jane, were also still in the house (George died at Kirkconnel Hall two years later, and Jane in 1885). 

But Catherine was not content to be a lady of leisure, living on her annuity. She determined to follow her male relatives into the medical profession, and applied to study at the London University’s School of Medicine for Women, which provided practical work placements at the Royal Free Hospital. [5] Nevertheless, the University of London did not at this time award medical degrees to women, so the female students sat exams set by the Royal University of Ireland. Catherine passed these exams in 1887 and 1889. She began her very varied medical career at the Dublin Lying-in Hospital where she obtained her licence in midwifery. Returning to the London School of Medicine for Women, she obtained honours in Medicine, Midwifery and Gynaecology, and further work experience at the Royal Free Hospital and Hospital for Sick Children. [6] She was by now living in Sandford House, Edmonton, Middlesex, where she was joined by her sister, Harriet, and their three elderly aunts, Harriet, Elizabeth and Louisa Gabourel. They were still living comfortably, employing a nurse, and two live-in servants. [7] 

Catherine finally received her degree from the Royal University of Ireland in 1893, and was admitted onto the Medical Register. [8] Her first official post was as assistant medical officer in the County Lunatic Asylum, in Lancaster.[9] 

Within three years she was applying for other posts, but failing to find work in Britain, she eventually returned to the land of her birth, India, arriving in November 1896. She became assistant medical officer in Mure Memorial Hospital, a mission hospital newly established by Dr. Agnes Henderson. [10] There she would have provided care for the poor during a time of severe famine. [11] A year later, Catherine was appointed as the first full-time medical officer in charge of The Lady Dufferin Hospital, in Karachi, which was devoted to the care of native women. [12] She worked there through three epidemics, before moving on to be Lady Superintendent of the Jaswant Hospital for Women, at Jodhpur, Karachi (from September 1901 to 1904). [13] 

Although the Anglo-Boer War has only been over for two years, Catherine’s career then took her to South Africa, and a Sanatorium at Modderfontein, in the Transvaal. [14] She rented this private hospital in Johannesburg from the local authorities, and was in charge of it during a difficult period for the region. A series of epidemics of several infectious diseases in the area, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, had overwhelmed the hospitals, especially those for labourers (mostly miners), migrant workers, and paupers. Temporary camps or ‘lazarotte’ (quarantine stations) were quickly set up. One of these was at Rietfontein, several miles to the east of the city. But Rietfontein was actually established as a “Chronic Sick Home” for incurable illnesses, and the presence of a lazarotte in the grounds was entirely unsuitable. Catherine negotiated to receive funding to take in “Government cases” of the terminally ill from the “Sick Home” to relieve the pressure on Rietfontein, while it was being re-built and expanded during the spring of 1905. [15] After these patients were returned to the new hospital at Rietfontein, the mine owners put relentless pressure on the authorities to build a new, improved, hospital for their white workers. Catherine’s private sanatorium was identified as the ideal location, and she must have experienced a testing time as her future at Modderfontein was threatened. By 1911 her sanatorium had been completely re-built, re-named as Springkell, and placed under the control of a corporate board. [16] 

Unsurprisingly, she returned to England. But she had gained extensive experience in several fields of medicine, and in hospital management. By August 1912 she obtained a position as a doctor in Coventry, and also became an active member of the suffragette movement. [17] 

Her new address was ‘Beech Brae’, 71, Berry Street, Coventry. The house has since been demolished, replaced with flats and student housing, but at the time it was in a respectable, middle-class neighbourhood, home to an active women’s suffrage campaign movement. Catherine was now living just a few minutes walk away from her sister, Harriet (living at Primrose Hill House, Coronation Road), who was married to her first cousin, Dr. Francis Arnott Collington, and had four children. 

Both sisters were fervent supporters of women’s suffrage, but disagreed on how this should be achieved. Harriet was a suffragist, an active member of the Coventry Women’s Suffrage Society (a branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, NUWSS, which believed in peaceful protest). Harriet was a regular speaker at their meetings, and became chairman of the committee. She publicly criticized the militant suffragettes for alienating popular support for the cause, which would be widely regarded as led by fanatics. Instead, she argued, the ‘quiet women’ must continue with their peaceful campaigning, proving they were worthy of the franchise by demonstrating they could work within constitutional means, such as the leafleting, street marches, mass rallies and meetings that Harriet attended in London and Coventry, as well as deputations to local M.P.s. 

The sisters were on good terms, and remained close, despite Catherine’s very different approach to the issue. She joined Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant suffragette organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). By 1913 Catherine was Press and Honorary Secretary of the Coventry branch, and chaired several public meetings in the Market Square, no doubt having to battle against constant jeering and heckling. The ‘Coventry Herald’ newspaper reported (October 10th, 1913) that she argued: “Women did not want the vote for the pleasure and excitement of going to the polling booth once every five years; they wanted it to ameliorate the conditions of men, women and children.”  

But within two years of her return to England, Catherine moved from Coventry to Eastby. In May 1914, she was appointed as Resident Medical Officer at the Sanatorium, on a salary of £130 p.a., plus rations, living quarters and laundry expenses. This hospital, with 33 beds, had been opened in 1903 by the City of Bradford Board of Poor Law Guardians, specifically to provide their tuberculosis (TB) patients with the ‘open-air’ system – taking patients out of urban areas into the country, where they could recuperate in the fresh air. But it was proving too expensive for them to maintain, its future uncertain even during the two years before Catherine’s arrival. Catherine successfully ran the hospital for many years, and the pattern of frequent staff turnovers over the previous decade, appears to have ceased under her management. 

In September 1915, she bought a three-year lease on the sanatorium for an annual rent which rose from £100 in the first year, to £150 for the second year, and £200 for the third. This arrangement allowed her to run it as a private enterprise for male patients, on the condition that she reserved at least ten beds for TB sufferers sent to her by the Bradford Guardians, for which she received £2 per head per week. She was still liable to half-yearly inspections by the Board, and had to submit regular reports and accounts. In 1918 she took out another three-year lease on similar terms. She instituted a policy to only take in boys aged between four and 16, although she did take in a limited number of adult males if sent by the Board of Guardians. She increased the number of beds to accommodate up to 50 patients, and set up a school with two resident teachers. 

The Guardians complained several times about the deteriorating state of the buildings and facilities, but refused to provide her with the funding she required to carry out repairs. Nevertheless, she had another pavilion built to increase the number of beds to 85 by May 1921. As her second lease expired later that year, the Guardians decided to offer to sell the hospital to Dr. Arnott, otherwise they would close it, as it was too expensive to maintain. Catherine bought the hospital outright from Bradford Corporation for £4,000 (half the original cost of the construction of the building), and increased the accommodation to 84 beds. 

The Arnotts were a close-knit family, with Kirkconnel Hall still very much their home base. In 1927, Catherine was visiting her brother, the laird of Ecclefechan, Colonel Archibald Arnott, while a dispute was raging between him and his tenants. The Scottish newspapers reported that an angry crowd of between 500 and 600 local people, armed with wire-cutters and spades, protested against a seven-foot-high wire fence he had erected on Ecclefechan Common. The fence had been pulled down, but Colonel Arnott’s men had put it back up. So back the people came to tear it down a second time. Archibald, and his sister Catherine, arrived, and walked among the crowd, trying to persuade them to stop, which took the intractable Archibald into some heated arguments. When 200 yards of fencing had been destroyed, the parish councillors congratulated the crowd and were loudly cheered. The council chairman was even carried back shoulder-high in triumph back to the village. [18] 

Three years later, when Archibald died, Catherine’s sister, Harriet and her husband, retired to Kirkconnel Hall, so no doubt Catherine continued to visit. 

In the meantime, she focused on her work at Eastby Sanatorium. Catherine was still working at the age of 81, as Superintendent and Chief Medical officer. The 1939 National Register shows that her 20 staff (including five servants) were all female, caring for over 70 patients. (Men were employed as gardeners and for maintenance work, but they did not live at the Sanatorium.) Former patients Eastby Sanatorium in the 1920s and 1930s, recalled an eccentric, little lady, and that Dr. Arnott’s brother, who lived in Gargrave, often visited. Tommy Stephenson, for example, said that: “They had no concern over clothes. Both Dr. Arnott and her brother were very clever”. Derek Raw remembered Dr. Arnott’s brother looking like a ‘Russian spy’ with his black beard, and their driving round the area in an open car. [19] 

Catherine’s only known surviving brother was Archibald, the laird of Kirkconnel. There is no documentary evidence that he ever resided in Yorkshire. On the other hand, the ‘brother’ is described in one person’s memory as an engineer – this could therefore be Catherine’s nephew, Frank Pierce Arnott, a maintenance fitter, who is known to have lived briefly in Skipton with his sister, Emily, at Brougham Street. 

Catherine retired in 1940, to live with Emily in Brougham Street, Skipton. Sadly, this extraordinary woman fell victim to senility, and was looked after in her final days by her nephew and niece, Frank and Emily Arnott (a chiropodist). She died in October 1942, not at the grand ancestral home of her ancestors, but in Emily’s modest mid-terraced workers’ cottage. The cause of death – ‘accelerated by a fall’ – was recorded as myocardial degeneration (heart failure), arteriosclerosis, and senility. She was buried at Ecclefechan, near Kirkconnel Hall. 

Despite a career that, in the late Victorian period would have been considered quite astonishing and trailblazing for a woman, newspaper obituaries tended to hone into the fact that she was the grand-niece of the doctor who attended at the death-bed of Napoleon Bonaparte, and was also the daughter of a surgeon to Queen Victoria. Sometimes they briefly acknowledged that she was an authority on the treatment of tuberculosis. Her resilience and endurance during a long career, often under very difficult circumstances in Britain, India and South Africa, when female doctors were rare, and often met with resistance and suspicion, is inspirational. But perhaps the best tribute to her is in the reminiscences of former patients at Eastby Sanatorium, such as that of Kenneth Evans: 

“The mysterious visitor. On not more than three or four occasions during the two years at Eastby San. we would be warned the “Doctor” would be coming. The whole place would be tidied up especially ‘Doctor’s Garden’ which was an enclosed area of shrubbery in front of the new block and contained a small pond. .. ‘Doctor’ (no other name) … would arrive and was treated with great respect, if not reverence, by all the staff and boys, who would crowd around this old lady, dressed in black Edwardian clothes. 

We would all escort her to her garden and boast how well we had looked after it in her absence. She was something out of this world and we all loved her for the aura of genteel kindness about her which the children instinctively sensed, the perfect surrogate mother we all craved and would have followed to the end of the earth, in fact a real life ‘Pied Piper’ of children.” [20] 

ARTICLE NOTES

 1 Arnold Chaplin – “Thomas Shortt (Principal Medical Officer in St. Helena), with biographies of some other medical men associated with the case of Napoleon from 1815-1821” (1914) 

2 James Arnott – “The House of Arnott and some of its branches; a family history” (1918; available online at: https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/)  

3 This is now a country hotel, with a caravan park in the grounds. Not to be confused with Kirkconnel House, another large estate house which lies nearby.  

4 1871 Census for Scotland 

5 The School had only recently been established, in 1874. It was another two years before a controversial Act of Parliament actually allowed women to enter the medical profession as licensed doctors. Scotland did not provide a university medical degree for women until 1894. Although a few women, such as Elizabeth Blackwell (the first to be registered with the British General Medical Council, in 1858), had practiced as doctors in England, they had been forced to find loopholes in the law in order to do so – to go abroad to obtain their degrees, or practice without a licence (until prevented by the Medical Act of 1858). In 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson only qualified by obtaining her licence through the Society of Apothecaries (they closed this loophole the following year), although no hospital was willing to appoint her. In 1877, the first four fully qualified women doctors in the UK to graduate with medical degrees were all Scottish, but had graduated from the Irish College of Physicians. By 1914 there were 1,000 women doctors in the UK, although it took the shortage of male doctors to persuade many British hospitals to accept female doctors on their staff. 

6 (a) Christopher Dickson – “Catherine Arnott” (WikiTree FREE Family Tree (www.wikitree.com/wiki/Arnott-1046) (b) “Medical News.” (The British Medical Journal, vol.2, no. 1399 (1887): pages 918–20) (c) “Medical News.” (The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1480 (1889): pages 1096–98) 

7 1881 Census 

8 (a) Belfast News-Letter (29th July, 1893); (b) General Medical Council, “UK Medical Registers 1859-1959” (General Medical Council,1899) (c) It was not until 1892 that the British Medical Council formally accepted women onto the Medical Register. 

9 Lancaster Guardian newspaper (16th June, 1894) 

10 General Medical Council – “The Medical Register” (1903) 

11 Opened in June 1896, by Scottish medical missionary, Dr. Agnes Henderson, with the financial aid of two sisters, also from Scotland, Mary & Helen Mure, and almost immediately had to cope with a famine. The hospital continues to serve the poor of Nagpur, in central India, to this day. For many years it was the only hospital in the region which offered care for poor people during epidemics of infectious diseases. 

12 When she learnt many Indian women died because of their refusal to go into hospitals alongside male patients, Queen Victoria requested Lady Dufferin, the wife of the Vice-Roy of India, find a solution. She founded several hospitals exclusively for women and children, including the one in Karachi (now in Pakistan), which opened in in 1894. 

13 National Archives of India – “Appointment of Miss C. Arnott as Lady Superintendent of the Jaswant Hospital for Women at Jodhpur.”

14 (a) South African Heritage Resources Agency [Linksfield EIA Report 2015_Part 8.pdf (sahra.org.za) ] – “Memories of Dr. Max Mehliss, son of Dr. John Max Mehliss, and his second wife Edith Theodora Williams” (n.d.) (b) General Medical Council – “The Medical Register” (1911 to 1913 editions)  

15 (a) The South African Medical Record (Volumes 3–4, 1906; p.125) (b) “The Transvaal: Minutes of Evidence: Transvaal Indigency Commission, 1906-8” (1908), p.388) 

16 (a) The Heritage Portal (South Africa, 2015; see media file, dated 2013; www.theheritageportal.co.za/thread/springkell-sanatorium-modderfontein) (b) Elaine N Katz – “The Doctors’ Dilemma: The Health Care of Workers on the Witwatersrand Gold Mines, 1892-1910” (University of the Witwatersrand Institute or Advanced Social Research, Seminar, 1994 ; p23-26) 

17 Tara Morton and Professor Sarah Morton, Project co-ordinators – “Mapping Women’s Suffrage : A snapshot in time” (University of Warwick, 2011-22; website: www.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk)  

18 ‘Sunday Post’ newspaper (1st May, 1927) 

19 Ann Anderton – “Eastby Sanatorium” in Embsay-with-Eastby Women’s Institute Millennium Local History project – “Embsay and Eastby since 1900” (unpublished manuscript, 1999) 

20 Ibid. [copies of which are available for consultation in Skipton Public Library as well as Embsay branch library.]  

Arnott Family Tree

 Jane Lunnon, Embsay-with-Eastby Historical Research Group, October 2023