Katharine Chorley, Baroness Chorley

Katharine Chorley, Lady Chorley (née Hopkinson) (1897–1986) was a British writer and mountaineer.

Biography Katharine Campbell Chorley (née Hopkinson) was born on 15 November 1897, the youngest of Edward Hopkinson's two children. She married Robert Chorley (Theo) on 15 April 1925, he was raised to the peerage in 1945, as Baron Chorley of Kendal in the County of Westmorland, and Katharine Chorley thereby became Lady Chorley. They had two sons and a daughter, the eldest son became Roger Chorley, 2nd Baron Chorley on the death of his father in January 1978. Lady Chorley died in London on 2 October 1986.

Katharine Chorley was born in Timperley but, apart from the period 1911-1914 when she attended school in Folkestone, she spent most of her childhood at the family home in Alderley Edge.

Mountaineering There was a long tradition of mountaineering in her family. Her father and his brothers Alfred and Charles were members of the Alpine Club, as was another brother, the physicist John Hopkinson FRS (1849–1898) But, after her uncle's fatal accident, neither her father or his remaining brothers ever climbed seriously again. At the age of 14, when she visited Switzerland on a family holiday which took in Mürren and from Zermatt, (It was through the FRCC that she met her future husband, in the Lake District, She joined the Ladies' Alpine Club in 1935 and was later elected as its president (1953–1955).) She also became a member of the Alpine Club.

Writings Chorley's book Armies and the Art of Revolution was written before World War II, but was not published until 1943. (In the 1970s, it was included in the main text compiled specifically for US Army training courses.) The text was still used at least until the late 1980s.

Chorley contributed to C. E. M. Joad's 1948 work The English Counties Illustrated by writing the chapters on Westmorland and Cumberland.

Other work included a biography and appraisal of the works of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough and several articles in The Month about Wordsworth.

She also wrote numerous articles in mountaineering journals, particularly those of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club and the Ladies' Alpine Club. In the 1950s, she regularly contributed to The Tablet. With Nea Morin, she translated Marc Azema's book The Conquest of Fitzroy (1957).