This week I was contacted via the website by an Irish actress, who said she was performing in a play about the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake. The Sweepstake was Dora’s biggest client in the 1930s and rescued her struggling business during the depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Anyway, the actress said she was playing the part of Dora and could she ask me some questions to help her prepare for the role! I couldn’t believe it!
I am thrilled that Dora is being brought to life on stage. The play is called The Good Luck Club, written and directed by Louise Lowe of the highly regarded ANU Productions, as the first in a series on “framing the nation,” looking at the early years of the Irish republic. I have spent so long researching Dora’s story, trying to get her the recognition she deserves, that I am a bit overwhelmed to suddenly have her featuring in a play as a key actor in Irish history.
I knew that the sweepstake was a huge money spinner for the Irish economy, but I hadn’t realised that, in the 1930s, 4,000 (out of a population of 90,000) Dubliners worked on processing sweepstake tickets.
However, the sweepstake was somewhat morally questionable, with the organisers, Joe McGrath and his friends, making their fortunes at a time when lotteries were illegal in the UK and USA (where most tickets were sold) and creating a substantial and embarrassing balance of trade deficit for Great Britain.
The Good Luck Club is being performed at the National Archives of Ireland in Dublin, as part of their celebration of the release of the 1926 census. It will be an immersive experience, with the play happening around the audience as they wander through the archives, rather than being on a stage. I understand that tickets sold out within minutes of going on sale, but the production company have very kindly offered me a ticket. I cannot wait to see/experience it! Watch this space for more details after my visit to Dublin at the end of May.
Over the years that I have been researching Dora’s story, I have always tried to make connection with key characters in her life. I tracked down Hugh Cass‘s family and returned to them his love letters to Dora from 1915. John Metcalf, Dora’s husband, has no descendants but I have visited the village in Yorkshire where his sister was a district nurse and met people who remembered her. I also found a descendant of Dora’s friend and business partner, Sam Haughton, and was able to return his letters. But I couldn’t find anyone descended from Everard Greene, Dora’s cousin, business partner and lifelong mentor. Until last week.
Ancestry.co.uk has a new feature whereby it gives you a score for your family tree based on how accurate they believe it to be. Then it prompts you with names of people in your tree that may be incomplete or duplicated. Everard’s 2x great aunt, Mary Letitia Greene (1787-1859), came up as someone whose details I needed to corroborate. Everard, Dora and I are all descendants of her brother William. When I looked at the ‘hints’ for MLG, one of them was a blog post written about her by Lord Henry Lytton Cobbold of Knebworth House, explaining her connection to his family. On further investigation I found that he had written a book about his ancestor Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1828-48), based on MLG’s writings and crediting her as co-author.
Emily was the daughter of Edward Bulwer Lytton, the most renowned novelist of his day. He gave us phrases such as ‘it was a dark and stormy night,’ and ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ He had a tempestuous relationship with his Irish wife, Rosina Wheeler, and neither of them wanted to parent their daughter – she was sent to a wet nurse at a farm 20 miles from their home, within days of her birth on 27 June 1828. We share a birthday, what a coincidence! MLG had been a friend of Rosina since she was 17, and the Greene and Wheeler families lived close to each other near Dublin.
It seems that MLG became a sort of second mother, known as Aunt Mary, to Emily and her little brother Teddy (who later became Viceroy of India) and to two children in her own family – Grace (known as Bonnie, later to become Everard’s grandmother) and Rose Greene. She seemed to be nurse, parent, governess and friend, a constant loving presence in the children’s lives. MLG recorded her experiences of looking after the Bulwer Lytton children until Emily’s tragic death, aged 19, in 1848. Her reminiscences made their way back to Knebworth House in the 1880s, where they lay unread until the 21st century.
Lord Henry Lytton Cobbold became interested in Emily’s story but needed the help of an expert to read MLG’s illegible handwriting. Much of it was “cross-written,” a paper saving device whereby you write across the page first and then overwrite vertically down the page (you can see a sample of it on the cover of Lord Cobbold’s book, above). Eventually, after many readings of the transcribed text, visits to various relevant locations in the UK and Europe, hunting down living connections and visiting graveyards and archives, he was able to write his book, In The Bosom Of Her Father. A key connection was with Jean Greene (1929-2024), who held many relevant Greene family items. She was the wife of Everard’s son, Alfred Greene (1921-2006). At last, an Everard descendant!
I have learned much of this tale through correspondence with Lord Lytton Cobbold, as well as by reading his fascinating and beautifully illustrated book at the National Library of Scotland. He has very kindly helped me to connect with Jean’s daughter, Jenny.
I was amazed to learn that Jenny remembered Dora, having met her many times at Everard’s home, when they all lived in Kensington in the 1950s. Jenny had also spent a family holiday visiting Dora and John at Loch Morar in the 1960s. She solved the mystery of why Everard (whose full name was Christian Augustine Everard Greene) was nicknamed Kitten – apparently, when he was a child, his younger brother couldn’t pronounce the word ‘Christian,’ instead saying Kitten. It was wonderful to bring the close relationship between Everard and Dora to life with these intimate details! Jenny also mentioned that one of her sons is a professor of statistics and was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute, connecting him back to BTM’s role in the Second World War. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!
Another interesting snippet from Lord Cobbold’s research is that a relative of ours called Elizabeth Greene was mother to James Patten, Captain Cook’s surgeon. Patten accompanied Cook on his second voyage, aboard HMS Resolution, and saved his life after Cook fell ill near Antarctica. It seems that the Greene family has a long and intriguing history!
Dora Metcalf would be 134 on 11 March 2026 and, for her birthday, I’m pleased to announce that I have secured a publisher for my novel based on her life!
The Book Guild is a hybrid publisher who will provide editing, typesetting, cover design, printing and all the necessary behind-the-scenes services to enable the book to appear online (Amazon etc), as a paperback in UK bookshops and via print on demand internationally. Most importantly, they will promote the book in the trade and to the public. Probably the whole process will take 9-12 months, but I’ll know more when I have spoken to their production controller.
If you want to be kept informed as to the book’s progress, be the first to see the cover design and learn the launch date, please sign up by clicking the subscribe button at the foot of the page. If you can’t see it here, go to the home page or the contact page and you’ll see it.
It has taken a long time to reach this stage. Ongoing research into Dora’s story, learning novel craft, getting feedback from various writing professionals and working full time have made for slow progress. Added to that, finding a suitable publisher has taken some time. Dora’s story is unique and thrilling but it doesn’t fit into popular categories such as fantasy, romance or crime, so it has proven to be a harder sell than I anticipated. With 3,500 books published in the UK each week it is an extremely crowded marketplace, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. At last, though, a publisher has seen its potential and will bring it to market. Hurrah!
My great, great grandfather and Dora’s grandfather was Dr John Boyd, MP for Coleraine in Northern Ireland in the mid 19th century. My post about searching for his grave led to contact from a historian of the Boyd family. He recently shared with me a family tree going back to Sir Robert Boyd (died 1333), who was a knight of Robert the Bruce. King Robert gifted land near West Kilbride in Ayrshire to his faithful knight after victory at Bannockburn and the Boyds built a castle there. Portencross castle still stands today!
Yesterday we went over to the west coast and walked to the castle. It stands on a rocky promontory looking across the Firth of Clyde to the isles of Arran and Bute. Supposedly Portencross was where the ancient kings of Scotland lay in state before being taken to Iona for burial. Certainly it has a commanding view and a well fortified sense of peace. Over the last 20 years the castle has been renovated by the Friends of Portencross Castle and it is now open to visitors in the summer months. I knew I had Scottish ancestry on my father’s side but I hadn’t realised that it goes back centuries on both sides!
Portencross Castle, Ayrshire
There is a deep (but not always happy) connection between Southwest Scotland and Northern Ireland, separated by a short stretch of sea. The first member of our branch of the Boyd family to leave Scotland was Archibald Boyd (1576-1650), who became mayor of Coleraine. More recently, Dora spent her life between Belfast, Dublin and London, before retiring to the Scottish Highlands. Since moving to Scotland in 2020, I have always felt at ease here. There’s something that seems to call us home.
In my novel about Dora, she and John get engaged at the Loch Awe Hotel in the Scottish Highlands in March 1935. Loch Awe is the longest freshwater loch in Scotland, at 41km, but is only 1km wide. It is renowned for its trout and so was an obvious destination for the couple, fishing being their favourite pastime. The hotel is easily reached by train from Glasgow, simplifying the long journey from their London home. Steps from the station lead directly up to the hotel’s main entrance and a terrace overlooking the loch.
Last week we passed by the hotel on our way home from a short break to Oban. It was a clear, crisp December day, with a hoar frost giving the whole scene a magical look.
The receptionist very kindly showed me the dining room and bar, where I imagined that John and Dora spent their evenings after a cold day’s fishing on the loch. It was in a private corner of the dining room that John bends his knee and asks Dora to marry him, after a long courtship. He could never replace Hugh, the love of her life who was lost at Gallipoli in 1915, but John had earned her love and respect since they’d met in 1931.
The hotel retains much of its Victorian character and I was amused to see that there was mistletoe hanging from the chandelier in the bar – a romantic resonance with my story!
Rereading Dora’s handwritten notes, I have discovered another hotel that features in the story. In August 1939, John summons Dora to meet him in Copenhagen, where he is piloting a cruise to the Northern Capitals for the Orient Line. War is about to begin and he needs to tell her about his newly received orders to return to the Royal Naval Reserve. They stay at the Hotel Phoenix, in the centre of the city, not far from the harbour. This grand, 19th century hotel would be confiscated by the Nazis during the war and later became home to the Danish Communist Party. It was turned back into a hotel in 1990 and was restored to its former elegance and luxury. Might have to go and have a look at it, as a trip to Copenhagen is on the cards this spring!
There is a group of editors called the Wiki Women in Red (WWR) who aim to address the gender bias in Wikipedia’s profiles of ‘notable people.’ Since 2014, when only 15.5% of profiles in English language Wikipedia were about women, they have steadily added more, including Dora, so that now over 20% of profiles are about women. Quite an achievement but still a way to go!
Social media is a mixed blessing but it recently connected me to one of these WWR editors. I was pleased to be able to thank somebody for adding Dora and she also told me that Dora’s Wikipedia page has been viewed 6,276 times since it went live three years ago. I’m thrilled! Gone but not forgotten, and probably a better commemoration of her life than a headstone on her grave.
This year I spoke about Dora at the Women’s History Association of Ireland conference in May, which also allowed me to meet up with my Irish cousin, Sandra. She added to my knowledge of my Irish family history, which was really helpful. And we had great fun visiting Hook Head! On the way back to Dublin I stopped at Kilkenny to admire the round tower at St Canice’s cathedral. Round towers are a recurring detail of Dora’s life – there’s one at Glendalough and another at Loch Morar.
I have been rewriting my novel about Dora, taking advantage of a week at the Moniack Mhor writers’ retreat centre near Inverness. It was great to be among writers and they helped me find a new and better title for the book. It’s now called A Bitter Equation and I am trying to find a publisher for it.
In the autumn I was interviewed about Dora for the Infinite Women podcast. The episode is due to air in Spring 2026 – I will keep you posted! It’s great that there are so many individuals, groups and organisations now celebrating women in history and raising awareness of their achievements.
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
A Bitter Equation 