A Bitter Equation

Women in Mathematics

Today is International Women in Mathematics day and Dora is being commemorated at the Women’s History Scotland blog. I’m so pleased to see her remarkable story getting some airtime, this time focusing on her Scottish connections and the mystery of why she chose to retire to a remote house at Loch Morar.

It’s beautiful in the West Highlands and Dora and her husband John loved fishing, but a house on the loch with no electricity or road access seems quite a challenge for a woman of 70. After a lifetime of building an international business, developing budgetary control, management planning and scientific analysis using machine calculation, perhaps she longed for peace. But the house had been used by the Special Operations Executive for training the Norwegian resistance. Did her secret work in WW2 connect her with someone who knew the house? Did John’s Norwegian colleague, Larsen, tell them about it?

Next week I am speaking about Dora at the Women’s History Association of Ireland’s conference. I’m focusing on her response to loss. She lost her father when she was 8 years old, and both her parents lost their fathers as young children too. These losses prompted her mother to ensure that Dora and her siblings had the best education she could afford, to cushion them from destitution.

Then when Dora lost her fiancé, Hugh Cass, at Gallipoli in 1915, it proved to be the formative crisis in her life. Her future as wife and mother evaporated and instead she used her mathematical skills and entrepreneurial spirit to build a career for herself. But her story is largely lost to history and I am also talking about this at the WHAI conference. Sadly, it is extremely common for women’s achievements to be overlooked or ignored, so I am sure I will have a sympathetic audience!

Writing Success

I’ve been researching and writing Dora’s story for several years now. Trying to find a publisher for my novel about her is a depressing and, so far, unsuccessful marathon. However, I entered a biography competition with the Society of Women Writers and Journalists (SWWJ), in spite of it all, and found some writing success at last!

They only wanted 1500 words but I have written so many synopses and blog posts that I found it quite easy to tell her story in these few words. I didn’t win the competition but my entry was Highly Commended, which pleased me.

The judges said: ‘This piece is an unearthing and airing of what is – regrettably – a barely-known history. Portraying Dora’s personal and professional development in the face of adversity, it also evokes an era of advancement and relative liberation for women in Britain and Ireland. The strong, affecting opening (the loss of Dora’s fiancé at Gallipoli) suggests that the story will go in one direction, but in fact it expands to become something quite different, just as Dora’s life did.’

Just as well I didn’t win, as the prize is being presented at the House of Lords on May 1st, when I will be away. Phew! It was good to have the importance of Dora’s story acknowledged and I was pleased that the key themes came across clearly.

I look forward to reading the winning entry, about a pioneering, Bauhaus trained woman called Lotte Stam-Beese, who was Chief Architect for the rebuilding of Rotterdam after the Second World War.

UN: Invest In Women

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 that 340 million women around the world live in extreme poverty.

This IWD I am thinking particularly about women in Gaza, grieving, trying to care for loved ones and orphaned children, and coping with pregnancy and birth without healthcare, clean water or food. The UN estimate that 700,000 women in Gaza are having their periods without access to sanitary products. Those in power must end the suffering now.

Dora Metcalf invested in women throughout her career. From the early days of mechanical accounting in the 1910s through to the dawn of the electronic computing era in the 1950s, she employed a mainly female staff. It was the norm for women to operate the machines – in fact the women were known as computers – and Dora was renowned for employing anyone, regardless of race or religion. She also employed women mathematicians and, in the 1950s, women programmers. Her membership of the Women’s Provisional Club gave her connection to many other pioneering and campaigning women, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

The forerunner of the United Nations was the League of Nations. I knew that Dora had attended a conference in Geneva in 1930, hosted by the League of Nations, but I have only just found out the details. It was a conference convened by the International Management Institute on the new science of Budgetary Control in business. One of the pioneers in the field was James McKinsey, who founded McKinsey Consulting in 1926, and he was due to lead a discussion on “the budget as an aid to determination of policy,” but did not attend at the last moment. It seems incredible to us now that budgeting had only just become a thing!

Budgeting was defined as “not merely control; it is not merely forecasting; it is an exact and rigourous analysis of the past, and the probable and desired future experience with a view to substituting considered intention for opportunism in management.”

Budgetary Control Conference, Geneva, July 1930, showing delegates including Dora Greene and Everard Greene — Budgetary Control Conference, Geneva, July 1930

Dora’s cousin, Everard Greene, (known in the family as Kitten, he is seated under the white square in the pic) presented a paper on “The relationship of tabulating machines to budgetary control.” These were two innovations coming together. He argues that prior to the First World War there was a long period when demand and supply were in balance and so budgetary control was unnecessary. The war disrupted the system and afterwards some industries faced an excess of supply over demand, while others faced the opposite.

This prompted the development by the Americans of the concept of budgetary control. Tabulating machines had been invented in the USA in the 1880s, principally to mechanise the census. As with all innovations, there was considerable resistance to these “new fangled business ideas” and this was inhibiting growth for both Everard at BTM and Dora’s CASS. Everard concludes:

“It seems obvious that those who are interested in budgetary control should investigate the possibilities of tabulating machines as a means of putting their ideas into effect, and in turn, those who are marketing tabulating machines should impress on their market the value of budgetary control.”

Dora was one of 200 delegates at the conference, but the only one representing Ireland and one of a handful of women present.

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 an ardent feminist and suffragist and many of her images betray her thoughts on the lot of women in the interwar years. I love that Nefertiti, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, is still obliged to do the ironing. The naked girl at a sewing machine combines eroticism and woman’s decorative qualities with the domestic and working dimensions of life. A bird sings in the background, perched at the open door of her cage. And woman’s best friend is her dog!

Yevonde was a member of the Women’s Provisional Club and a good friend of my great aunt Dora. Dora commissioned portraits of my parents as a wedding present to them in 1950. Yevonde tinted the original black and white photos, giving Mum red lipstick and a red sweater – Yevonde’s favourite colour. She must have framed the prints too, giving a red tint to the inner section.

For Dad she used softer tones. I think he looks rather handsome!

The Yevonde exhibition is wonderful, highly recommended, but it ends soon, 15 October 2023, so hurry or you will miss it!

Women in STEM Pioneer

March is the month of Dora’s birth, International Women’s Day and Women’s History month. The UN theme for IWD 2023 is “DigitALL – innovation and technology for gender equality.”

It seems appropriate to celebrate Dora, a tech pioneer who employed an almost exclusively female staff in her information services business, CASS. From the start of the 20th century, it was women who used the new technology – typewriters, telephones and calculating machines. In 1916, Dora’s Comptometer operators were all women. In the 1920s, when Dora added electro-mechanical tabulators to her business, the operators were all women. She brought in female statisticians, mathematicians and eventually programmers. Men were happy to be engineers, but their focus was on developing hardware and servicing the machines. Women used the machines and analysed the data, and it was Dora, a trained mathematician, who was the innovator, finding new applications for how the machines could be used in businesses and government departments.

In was only at the very end of her career, in the 1960s, that men started to encroach into the field of computing. The machines were no longer clerk substitutes with their operators suffering low status, low pay and no career progression. The electronic era and the introduction of programming gradually transformed computing into a career of importance. Apparently too skilled for the women who had been working in the field for years, a shift that follows the ‘boys and their (mechanical) toys’ trope. Sadly, the shift has never reversed, with men still dominating the computing industry. According to the UN, “women’s exclusion from the digital world has shaved $1 trillion from the gross domestic product of low- and middle-income countries in the last decade—a loss that will grow to $1.5 trillion by 2025 without action.”

I was fortunate to be awarded a place at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. It’s an artists’ retreat, with studios for artists, printmakers, photographers, dancers, composers and songwriters, and lovely rooms for writers. It is a big old country house, surrounded by woodland and with a lake at the foot of the lawn.

It was heaven to have a whole week to write, uninterrupted by the necessities of daily life. Perfect timing too, as a publisher to whom I had submitted my manuscript asked me to tweak the story, saying they liked it and would look at it again if I redrafted it. So I delved deep into Dora’s life and worked hard to make her story more immediate, rich in texture and immersive.

I especially enjoyed being in Ireland to do this work. Dora spent her life between Belfast and Dublin and TGC is close to the border, in County Monaghan. I was in the excellent company of some fun and creative Irish people, being treated to generous Irish hospitality. There is an augmentation effect when a group of people are all engaged in similar work, a sort of entrainment of the energies. It made it a very productive time.

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 Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape; Elizabeth Andrews, political activist for women’s rights; Cranogwen, master mariner and poet; and Betty Campbell, the first black headmistress in Wales.

Lady Rhondda was one of the founders of the Women’s Provisional Club and would have been well known to Dora. In fact, it may be that it was in Geneva in 1930 that they first met, before Dora joined the WPC. Dora was there with Everard Greene for a statistical conference at the International Labour Organisation and met Ethel Wood, co-founder of the WPC, who was probably there on Six Point Group business with Lady Rhondda and Helen Archdale. They were campaigning for the League of Nations to sign an Equal Rights Treaty for women.

My cousin in Ireland has just sent me a picture of a wreath that she has put on the Greene family grave in Mount Jerome cemetery, resting place of Henry William (Dora’s grandfather), Henry R, Charles and Gertrude, all uncles and aunts. I’m so pleased that their lives are being remembered at Christmas. Thankyou Sandra and Merry Christmas to everyone!

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 a wall at Glendalough and died of his injuries, leaving a wife and 13 children. The 14th child was born three weeks later.

Vartry Lower Reservoir with draw off tower

Henry W was buried at Mount Jerome and was joined by three of his children – Charles (d 1890), Gertrude (d 1940) and Henry R (d 1940, father of Norah). I went and met them all and left some flowers.

It turns out that Robert Barton (Bartons had owned the Glendalough estate since the 1830s) was a great friend of Dr Dorothy Stopford Price of St Ultan’s Hospital, with whom Dora would work on the BCG vaccination programme. Both were republicans seeking to free Ireland of British rule. Barton wrote to Dr Price in December 1921, after signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty creating the Free State, an ugly compromise that led to civil war.

“It’s a sad story because success was in our grasp at one time, at any rate I believe it was, provided all leaders and people had been prepared to take the gamble and risk all for the ideal. Well the opportunity has gone now and will not return in our lifetimes, but that the provisional government under the leadership of the pro-ratification party, will be either successfully happy or long lived, I doubt. For myself I retire to home and oblivion.” (27 Dec 1921, accessed at National Library of Ireland).

Correct on all counts, except that Ireland became a republic in 1949, during Barton’s lifetime. 1949 was also the year that Dorothy Stopford Price’s BCG vaccination programme went national, increasing from a few local patients to a programme to vaccinate all infants, children, young adults and frontline staff – about 18,000 people in the first eighteen months. I didn’t find specific reference to Dora, but the National BCG Commmittee report for 1950 mentions her manager at the Dublin office, Mr Patterson, who earns praise for his ingenuity and advice in setting up the data for recording on punch cards. I suspect Dora was the top level contact and saleswoman and left the details to her staff.

Deansgrange cemetery (best café in town by the way) has the grave of Matilda Knowles, the renowned botanist with whom Dora stayed in Dublin in 1917-19. Her great work was on the lichens of Ireland and it seemed apt that her grave is now covered in mosses and lichens! Her apartment was a gathering place for Dublin’s intelligentsia, where Dora made many friends and useful contacts, including her business partner Sam Haughton, who was from the same village as Matilda. Matilda is honoured at the Botanic Garden, with a plaque and a brief history of her work, at the herbarium.

Another friend that Dora met at Matilda’s apartment was stained glass artist Evie Hone and her friend, cubist painter Mainie Jellett. When I wasn’t grave hunting I was looking for works by these avant garde artists.

It’s been a busy fortnight but very rewarding! I’ve enjoyed spending time in both Northern Ireland and the Republic and there is plenty more to see. It really doesn’t take long to get here so I’ll be back for more next year.

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. Some have the information on a website, some you email, some you phone and some you just turn up and hope for the best. Anyway, in this particular case I was just plain lucky that the office was open and Brian, the very nice man in the office, was able to help me. I gave him a reference number for the grave and he spent some time studying an aerial view of the cemetery on his computer and then brought out the original books in which burials were registered.

Eventually he took me to the grave himself as he thought it might not be obvious. The grave was a low rectangular wall, with an inscription on the stone at the head end. It was in a poor state, with most of the text obscured by decades worth of soil and leaves.

I was upset and when Brian left I burst into tears and kept saying sorry to this much loved woman, now sorely neglected. I determined to restore her grave to its proper state. The next day I returned, armed with a new trowel and fork, a scrubbing brush, a bottle of water and a pack of wildflower seeds. I am pleased with the result and hope it will bloom successfully next summer.

In Loving Memory of Eleanor Emily Greene, widow of the late GP Greene, Madras Survey. Died 13th October 1929

My next target was EEG’s grandfather, Dr John Boyd MP, DL (1789-1868), of Coleraine. First I went to the town cemetery but there were acres of graves and no way of finding my ancestor. I rang the local cemeteries department and learned that he wasn’t buried there anyway. ‘Try St Patricks in town,’ they suggested. The church dominates the town centre and, as I walked towards it, I could see an elderly man wrestling with the padlock on the gate. I explained my quest and asked to be let in. ‘I only open the church on Wednesdays at noon – we have a communion service at 1pm,’ he said, ushering me in. I started to search the graveyard and then he called me into the church office. There was a map of the graveyard on the wall, with all the names of the people buried there.

Boyd is quite a common name in Northern Ireland but there was only one Dr Boyd. It must be him, surely? And the grave was more or less outside the office door. It soon became obvious why I hadn’t seen any reference to his grave on Ancestry. The whole face of the headstone was erased. Defaced? Broken off? Hard to say. I would never have found it without the map.

Likely to be the grave of Dr John Boyd MP DL

I feel exceptionally lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to find these graves. I was also lucky when I visited Cullybackey, meeting someone in the village community hub who gave me details for the organiser of the Cullybackey Historical Society. We’ve had a long chat and promised to exchange news. I found Sam Haughton‘s grave in the local graveyard but Matilda Knowles is buried in Dublin. More of that anon as I travelled on to Dublin after my tour of the North.

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, Women in Tech and Science Ireland, Women Who Meant Business and the Women’s History Network. There is also the webinar I gave for The National Museum of Computing and, of course, there is this website that I created. I guess that must add up to enough reputable websites. I am thrilled that this has happened, not least because apparently only 19% of ‘notable people’ are women, according to Wiki Women in Red, a group of editors trying to correct the gender bias.

Dora’s page includes a reference to an article about the Davis Archive, which details all the female mathematicians from the 1870s through to 1940. I spoke to the creator of the archive about three years ago, AE Davis, and as a result spoke at the British Society for the History of Mathematics conference in 2021. I was sad to read in the article that Ms Davis had died at the end of 2020, but it was a phenomenal piece of work that she did and I salute her.

This week there was a report that plesiosaur fossils had been found in river systems in Morocco, implying their adaptation to a freshwater habitat. Previously it was believed they were marine animals only. The find gives greater credibility to the Loch Ness monster story and, by implication, to the Loch Morar monster, Morag. Dora and John claimed to have seen Morag on numerous occasions and I think they would be thrilled to hear this news!

Back in April I received feedback from a publisher that my novel about Dora is good, but not quite good enough for them to publish. I decided to employ a professional editor to help me improve it and since receiving his report I have been editing and redrafting. Writing a novel is a craft like any other and it needs training and practise to improve. I am gradually learning and I am pleased with the latest draft. It is slightly less true to life than before, mainly to give it a more dramatic ending, but I hope it will now attract some interest from the publishing industry.

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 existing Comptometers rather than buy any new ones. Dora was tasked with surveying all the various government departments about their calculating requirements and I imagine she also contributed some fresh ideas on the potential for mechanical accounting. The result was an order for 200 new Comptometers, the largest order the company had ever received! Her entry in the 1921 census describes her as ‘in charge of Comptometer service to Governments Depts.’

entry from 1921 census: Comptometer adding and calculating m/c, in charge of Comptometer Service to Government Depts.

Dora was living with her mother at Durham Terrace, Bayswater, London, at the time. There is no mention of her sister Hilary and, when I looked her up, she didn’t feature anywhere in Britain. I wonder if she was in Ireland, but I cannot be certain. Her brother Howard was in Iraq with the Royal Artillery in 1921. The transcription of the census entry for Dora was gobbledygook but, if you pay to see it, you are allowed to make corrections, so I have.

I recently looked through an old photograph album belonging to Howard (my grandfather) which gave some fresh details on Dora’s activities in 1930. This is the period when she worked on the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme at Ardnacrusha. The scheme had begun in 1925 and was one of the largest civil engineering projects in the world. From 1929 it would bring power and economic development to Ireland, by 1935 producing 80% of Ireland’s electricity. Dora’s role was to do the costings for extending the transmission lines, which included substantial payments to landowners for putting pylons in their fields. What I hadn’t realised was that there was a family visit to see the scheme in 1930.

June 1930 family photograph of Greenes and friends — L to R: Hilary, Howard, his wife Phyllis, Kathleen Dobbs, Peggy & Owerson Flynn, Dora (in suit and hat behind laughing unnamed woman), Ali, Joy.

Ardnacrusha Electricity power house, June 1930

In my grandfather’s album there was also a photo of Dora (second to last row, below) attending a “statistical conference” in Geneva in 193o. Her cousin Everard Greene is present too (seated back row, under white square), captioned as ‘Kitten Greene’. He does look like a pussycat but that’s the first time I’ve seen him referred to by this name! His full name was Christian Augustine Everard Greene and I know Christian is sometimes shortened to Kit, but still. Dora says she met Ethel Wood in Geneva in 1930 and I wonder if this statistical conference was part of a League of Nations or International Labour Organisation assembly?

The League of Nations Assembly met in September every year and, from the late 1920s through the 1930s, there was much campaigning for equal rights for women, petitioning the League of Nations Assembly (all members) and Council (executive body consisting of 9 member states at this time). Viscountess Rhondda spearheaded the campaign via her Six Point Group, founded in 1921. In 1930 a subgroup was formed, called Equal Rights International (ERI), led by Helen Archdale, to lobby the League of Nations to agree a treaty on equal rights for women. I suspect that Ethel Wood was in Geneva as part of the lobby group that year – these three women were the founders of the Women’s Provisional Club that Dora would join in 1932.