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 …
Continue reading “Irish Actress Brings Dora’s Story to Life”
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 …
Continue reading “Unraveling Dora’s Legacy: Connecting Key Family Figures”
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), …
Continue reading “A Journey to Portencross: History and Heritage”
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 …
Continue reading “Dora and John’s Engagement at Loch Awe Hotel”
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 …
Celebrating Dora and #IWD2023 #womeninSTEM
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 …
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 …
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. …
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, …
A Bitter Equation 