Adelaide Knight

Knight served as a Poor Law Guardian for West Ham.^[3] She developed a friendship with Dora Montefiore with whom she travelled to France in 1908 to address meetings there.^[1] In March 1909, Knight resigned as branch secretary of the Adult Suffrage Society due to illness through pregnancy and received letters of thanks. She moved from Plaistow to Abbey Wood later that year with her family.

In 1920 she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as a founding member with Dora Montefiore ^[10] but declined an invitation to join a delegation to the Soviet Union due to poor health.^[1] In Abbey Wood she joined the Women's Cooperative Guild and, together with her husband, the Independent Labour Party and the Workers Educational Association.^[1]

Knight married Donald Adolphus Brown (1874–1949), the son of a Guyanese naval officer and an English mother, in 1894.^[11] Donald took his wife's surname and became known as Donald Knight.^[12] The couple had four children between 1895 and 1901, three of whom died in a smallpox outbreak in 1902.^[13] Adelaide gave birth to another son in 1904 and a daughter in 1909.^[14] Her husband worked as a foreman at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, where he received a medal for bravery for tackling a fire there.^[14]

Knight died in 1950; her husband had died a year earlier. Their daughter, Winifred Langton, wrote a memoir of her parents edited by Addy's granddaughter, Fay Jacobsen, entitled Courage.^[15] She wrote that her father "vigorously supported his wife in every possible direction"^[12] and reflected that she learned to fight from her mother and to care from her father.^[16]