Mrs. Margaret Ashton Stimson Lindsley (1889-1956), better known as Lorna Lindsley, was a globetrotting journalist and activist whose causes including aiding Jewish refugees in occupied France.

A cousin to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Lindsley covered the Spanish Civil War for several publications and then became involved with the Loyalists, nursing wounded soldiers and writing letters home for them. In 1937, amidst Palestinian Arab rioting, Lorna visited the Holy Land and wrote a series of pro-Zionist articles for American publications. She was particularly sympathetic to the nationalist Revisionist Zionists.

Lindsley spent five months in Nazi-conquered Paris in 1940, helping to smuggle Jewish and political refugees out of the city. Her reports from within the German zone became an important source of eyewitness information for the American and British press. After returning to the United States in 1941, she wrote her first and only book, War Is People, which described the impact of war on the lives of ordinary citizens.

In 1946, Lindsley returned to Palestine to write articles sympathetically portraying the Irgun Zvai Leumi’s underground guerrilla war against the British. At one point, she even smuggled herself into the Acre Fortress prison to interview jailed Irgun fighters.

Sources: Medoff, Pessah in Acre Prison p.27.