[2] The family lived in a middle-class area not far from the slums of Liverpool, where the young Thorp would hear the sounds of "noise, shrieks, and drunken brawls" at night.
At Woodbroke, Thorp came into contact with several radical figures associated with the Young Friends Movement, including Barratt Brown, a member of the Independent Labour Party active in campaigning against conscription.
Originally arriving in Adelaide, they journeyed onto Hobart where Dr Thorp had been invited to temporarily fill in as the headmaster of the Friends' School there, to advise Quakers in Tasmania about the consequences of the Australian government's conscription policy.
She was a delegate to the first AFL national conference (in Adelaide) in 1913, and spoke often about the perceived moral deterioration that camp life and the drill hall caused in young men and boys.
[3] The Women's Peace Army (WPA) was an organisation that had been set up by noted suffragist Vida Goldstein in Melbourne, with branches established in Brisbane and Sydney.
In one incident in 1917, Thorp was involved in a series of violent confrontations at the Brisbane School of Arts, where she led a group of WPA members trying to disrupt a meeting of the Women's Compulsory Service Petition League.
[6] Following this incident, a badly shaken Thorp relinquished her leadership role in the WPA, handing over to fellow activist Kathleen Hotson, and returned to Toowoomba to care for her ailing father.
In 1923, she returned to Australia once more, settling in Sydney, where on 1 October 1925 she married Arthur Watts,[8][9] a fellow Quaker whom she had first met during her days in the AFL, and who had also been active in war relief in Europe until he had contracted typhoid in Russia.
Arthur left Australia for Russia permanently in 1931; Thorp did not share her husband's enthusiasm for all things Russian and disapproved of the direction that the communist government was taking the country, and they were divorced in 1936.