Katherine Laird Cox

Katherine Laird "Ka" Cox (7 January 1887 – 23 May 1938) was a Fabian and graduate of Cambridge University. There, she met Rupert Brooke, becoming his lover, and was a member of his Neo-Pagans. She was also a friend of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. During World War I she worked with the Serbian Relief Fund, assisting refugees in Corsica. After the war, she married the Labour politician Will Arnold-Forster, and became the first woman magistrate in Cornwall. She and her husband were instrumental in founding Gordonstoun School in Scotland in 1934. Her sudden death at the age of 51 fuelled speculation of involvement in the occult.

Early life

Katherine Laird Cox, known as "Ka", was the daughter of Henry Fisher Cox and his wife, Jane Thompson Laird. Cox was a wealthy stockbroker and Fabian. Ka was raised in "Hook Hill", a house designed by Horace Field and commissioned by her father at Hook Heath, near Woking, Surrey in 1893. Ka was the second of three daughters, her sisters being Hester Laird Cox and Margaret Anna Laird Cox. Ka's mother, who had been in poor health, died in 1900 when Ka was only 13. Her father later remarried and had two further daughters, Winifred and Sydney, by his second wife Edith. Ka attended St. Felix School, Southwold in Suffolk, "a school where girls are treated like sensible creatures", then considered a feeder school for Newnham College, Cambridge. Ka's father died suddenly on 19 January 1905, when she was 18, with an estate of £22,000, leaving her and her sisters financially independent. Ka was left in the slightly unusual position for a young woman of her class and time of now being free to live, travel, and love as she pleased. Her stepmother continued to live at "Hook Hill" for a further five years before moving to a smaller house, also designed by Horace Field, further down the hill, called "Hook Hill Cottage" (1910), for a further ten years.

Cambridge, Neo-Pagans and Bloomsbury

In 1906, Ka first encountered the Bloomsbury Group, attending some of Vanessa Bell's Friday Club fine arts discussions at Gordon Square. She frequently posed for Duncan Grant, and one of his portraits of her was submitted to Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912.

Ka was described as having a sweet nature and while not conventionally pretty, having a fresh clear-skinned appearance that was appealing. She was said to be an aesthete, wearing diaphanous clothing with Peter Pan collars, "a miracle of poise, maturity and charm", who appealed equally to women and men. She made her own clothes, and Gwen Darwin describes her "standing on the very edge of the cliff, her crimson skirt whirling in the wind, her head tied up in a blue handkerchief, and the gulls screaming below". Other accounts describe her as the "lumpy, lovable Ka Cox, who was motherly and very sexy...a heroine who goes through reversals of fortune".

Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagans

Later in 1906, Ka went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read history, graduating in 1910.

During the First World War, a Women's International Congress was held in April 1915 at The Hague, in the Netherlands, which was a neutral state. Ka was one of the 156 British delegates (the British General Committee), but all but three were prevented from crossing the North Sea by Winston Churchill. In January 1916, Ka answered a call for volunteers from the Serbian Relief Fund to work with refugees in Corsica.