Dora Metcalf

The forging of Dora’s character began before she was born. Her maternal grandfather died when her mother was three, and her paternal grandfather died when her father, one of 14 children, was six. Dora was Irish but born in India and her father died of cholera when she was eight, forcing a return to England for her mother, Dora, her brother Howard (6) and deaf sister Hilary (5). She was learning that men are unreliable!
Dora was educated at progressive Bedford High School and won a scholarship to take an external degree with London University, gaining her BA in Mathematics in 1911 when she was 19. She was one of only 25 women in Britain to gain a mathematics degree that year. A career in teaching was cut short by the outbreak of WW1. She met and became engaged to Lt Hugh Cass, who was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. This was a pivotal moment, a man’s death again forcing a change in her trajectory. Dora overcame heartbreak and became the chief breadwinner for her mother and Hilary, as Howard’s army pay was minimal. Working in munitions factories with calculating machines called Comptometers, her mathematical mind soon saw their world-changing potential.
Fleeing Zeppelin raids, she moved from London to Ireland, where an unexpected sales role developed her business skills. She met revolutionary Irishwomen who gave her courage, inspiration and support. She tested the possibility of a new industry, supplying information services to commerce and government using modern technology, but the Irish war of independence threatened her life and sabotaged her success.
She retreated to London, where her vision and sales skills led to the British Government making the largest order for Comptometers that the company had ever had. She was not credited with this achievement.
In 1924, Dora returned to Ireland to found her own company, the Calculating and Statistical Service (CASS), in partnership with her cousin, Everard Greene, of British Tabulating Machines (BTM), and Sam Haughton, a local businessman. I believe she chose the acronym CASS to maintain her connection to Hugh. She would never be Mrs Dora Cass, but she would always be Dora, CASS. The company was also known as the Commercial Calculating Service and was advertising its services in 1924. CASS won the contract to analyse the Northern Irish census in 1926 but there is no record of the company, and it is not named in the census report.
Dora’s success faltered due to entrenched business attitudes, misogyny and a weak economy. The Irish Hospitals Trust sweepstake offered a high risk, high reward lifeline for her struggling business in 1930, and it would become her most profitable contract, lasting decades. The role of CASS in the success of the Irish Sweep is not recorded.
From about 1930 onwards, Dora suffered a chronic abdominal illness. In 1932 she moved to London, founding a pioneering Service Bureaux division at BTM in 1934 to exploit the larger British market for services. She was frustrated when she was not made divisional director. She never received any recognition for her role at BTM in either their in-house or customer newsletters. Dora received sisterly support from the Women’s Provisional Club (a haven for women pioneers across industry, government and the professions) and continued working after marrying naval officer, John Metcalf, in 1935.
The Second World War brought Dora’s greatest challenge: managing BTM’s top-secret contract to supply Bletchley Park (BP) cryptanalysts with over 200 ‘bombe’ machines, to help crack the daily-renewed Enigma codes and win the war. About 70% of BTM’s production was diverted to meet BP’s needs and it was a huge logistical challenge. There is no record of Dora’s role, but she was head of the Service Bureaux division and BP was known as Bureau B. She had the government connections, business contacts, organisational skills and dedicated, secure office to manage the project.
She was also running CASS in Ireland, John was in danger in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Blitz destroyed her home and office, and her illness flared up. At the end of 1942 she eventually collapsed, had an operation on her stomach and suffered a humiliating demotion at BTM. Hilary died in October 1943, John was wounded in 1944, Howard was in danger in Italy and Dora reached her lowest ebb.
Post-war, restorative fishing trips to Norway and Scotland reignited Dora’s determination to salvage her reputation. She won a prestigious contract for BTM in Ireland, analysing Dorothy Stopford-Price’s BCG vaccination campaign, but is not credited in the BTM article about the work. She formally left the staff of BTM in 1954 but continued to run CASS, selling services and BTM equipment. She sold the first electronic computer in Ireland to Irish Sugar in 1957. The HEC1201 machine had 20 bytes of memory and cost £33,000 (nearly £700,000 in today’s money). Dora is not credited with the sale. Between 1953 and 1962 the gross Irish revenue of CASS rose from £107,000 to over £500,000” (£10million) in today’s prices.
By this time the tide was turning and men were flooding into the computing world, exploiting opportunities that Dora had created focusing on the range of functions that computers could serve, rather than just mass data processing. The narrative we hear today is that computing has always been a man’s occupation, but this is actually a relatively recent development, as Dora, early women programmers and, of course, Ada Lovelace can show us.
In 1962, Dora and John retired to a remote house in the Scottish Highlands that had
been used as a special forces training centre in WW2. I can’t find out what led them there, but I think it was a sanctuary for Dora and a safe haven for long-held secrets. The house had no electricity, water from a pipe in the stream and was only accessible by boat or a 7 mile-long footpath. She lived there from the age of 70 – 80, before moving down to Yorkshire, where she died in 1982.