Educated at Edinburgh University, Kate Keen became a teacher. She went as a missionary to Tingchow (Changting), 200 miles west of Amoy, China, with the London Missionary Society in 1913, and apart from the five years when China was 'closed', remained there until 1950. When home on leave she stayed, as did many missionaries, in the home of Rachel Hutley and her husband Walter.
Rachel Hutley was writing a letter to Kate in China when she suffered a heart attack. After her death Walter Hutley finished the letter and sent it to Kate, and her reply was the beginning of a correspondence with the man she was later to marry. At the time of the Communist rising in 1929 she had to leave China, and she came to Adelaide, where she married Hutley in 1931. He was 71 when they married, and lived only another eighteen months after their marriage.
Kate had enrolled at the Parkin Theological College in Adelaide and was training for the ordained ministry. When China was 'opened' again, she was one of the first to go back. She went on a battleship to Amoy, and gradually made her way back to Tingchow. Many of the Christians had kept their Bibles, and the work continued as before until 1950, when Mao Tse-tung's army made the situation very difficult and she had to escape with only the clothes she stood up in. She found her way to Chungking, and followed the Burma Road into India. From there she returned to England, where she taught for a while before coming back to Adelaide. She died at the age of 89 at Alexandra Lodge, Adelaide.
In addition to the play which she wrote with Leonard Robjohns, she wrote a report of her work in China, The Ordeal of Tingchow (published by Livingstone Press in the 1930s).
