Doris Brabham Hatt was born in 1890 into a well known and affluent Bath family that ran a successful wig-making, hairdressing and perfumery business.

They bought a plot of land at the northern fringe of the town and arranged for an ex-army wooden building to be moved there and converted to a bungalow with a veranda front.

Her political awakenings came while she was in London during the First World War, where she witnessed degrees of poverty she had not seen in Bath and also the plight of returning soldiers, including deaths of two cousins killed in France.

[8] She was also aware of the Women's Suffrage and New Woman movements and the combination of these influences, with her developing opposition to the war and conscription in 1916, caused her to commit to socialism and she joined the Independent Labour Party in 1917.

Nonetheless, Hatt and Smith continued to host Sunday afternoon discussion meetings that were attended by left-wing progressives from the arts, academia, politics, the theatre and journalism.

[9] In 1915, while at Goldsmiths College, London, Hatt designed a First World War recruiting poster, featuring St George and the Dragon.

Her work was initially influenced by the way the French modernist movement was being interpreted in Britain by artists such as Paul Nash, John Nash, Iain Macnab and Ethelbert White, but as she began to travel, for example, to Paris, and was able to see pictures by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at first hand, the influence of Modernism deepened.

Her lifelong partner was Margery Mack Smith (1890-1975), a weaver, and primary school teacher, and it is thanks to her that a number of Hatt's sketchbooks and folios of working drawings have been preserved.

[citation needed] A small exhibition of watercolours, prints and drawings was staged in June 2021 as part of the Clevedon Literary Festival.