Background
She was born in Chateau d"Oex, Switzerland, where her parents, the former Rosalind Potter (Beatrice Webb"s sister) and George Dobbs, were then living.
She was born in Chateau d"Oex, Switzerland, where her parents, the former Rosalind Potter (Beatrice Webb"s sister) and George Dobbs, were then living.
The family returned to England when hostilities in the Great War began and she attended Bedales School, and briefly, in her early 20s, the London School of Economics.
Stafford Cripps was a cousin. Then admirers of the Bolsheviks, the couple described this as "a wondrous development", but quickly became completely disillusioned when they saw what was happening in the country. With Ruth Adam, she wrote Beatrice Webb: A Life 1858-1943 (1967), which although more a memoir than a scholarly book, was positively reviewed at the time.
Her opinion of broadcaster David Frost dating from 1967, "he rose without a trace", has been much quoted over the years.
Kitty"s aunt, Beatrice Webb, who with her husband Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield had recently defended the Soviet Union in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, called Muggeridge"s Manchester Guardian articles "an hysterical tirade", but was more restrained in her private communications with the couple.