The theme for the UN International Women’s Day 2024 is Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress. Women do three times as much unpaid care work as men and, if they were paid for it, it would account for 40% of GDP! And that’s before we even get started on the gender pay gap or the fact …
Author Archives: Mary276
Yevonde
The National Portrait Gallery reopened this summer after a long period of closure. Among their opening exhibitions is Yevonde: Life and Colour. Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975) was a pioneering photographer, bringing colour to portrait photography in the 1930s and producing allegorical and surreal images. Her sitters including royalty, the rich, famous and my parents! Yevonde was …
Women in STEM Pioneer
Celebrating Dora and #IWD2023 #womeninSTEM
Lady Rhondda statue
I was delighted to see a report in The Guardian that a statue to Lady Rhondda is to be unveiled in Newport, South Wales. I was intrigued to find out who had commissioned it, a group called Monumental Welsh Women. This inspiring group of activists are working on five statues commemorating Welsh Women, including Elaine …
Treasures
Dublin held many treasures for me on my quest to dig deeper into Dora’s story. In terms of family members, I found out more about Henry William Greene (d. 1868, Dora’s grandfather). He was an engineer working on the Vartry Reservoir scheme, County Wicklow, to bring fresh water to Dublin’s growing population. He fell off …
Grave hunting
I spent a few days in Northern Ireland researching family history and Dora’s connections. I knew that Dora’s mother (my great grandmother) was buried in Belfast city cemetery so I went there to find her. I do wish I had checked, with all the cemeteries I planned to visit, how to go about grave hunting. …
Notable Person
Dora Metcalf is now officially a ‘notable person’ with her own Wikipedia page. I don’t know exactly how the process works but the search engines look for reference to the person on several reputable websites. Over the last couple of years I have written guest blog posts for various organisations, including the Women Engineers’ History, …
Latest Research
The 1921 census was released at the beginning of 2022 and I was keen to see where Dora was living at that time. I knew she’d returned from Ireland in 1919 and had been selling Comptometers for Herbert E Robbins Ltd. After the First World War the British Government decided it wanted to redeploy its …
Pioneers of the WPC
I had a wonderful 4 hours at the Women’s Library studying the Women’s Provisional Club (WPC) archive. There was a lot to look at so I just photographed any pages that seemed relevant so that I could get through all four boxes of documents. I learned that Dora joined the WPC in 1932, was its …
Connections
The National Museum of Computing has published the Youtube presentation that I gave about Dora back in June. My talk covered her whole life but TNMOC were particularly interested in the Second World War and the Bletchley Park connection. It’s about an hour long including questions. I have made some interesting connections by going through …
