On International Women’s Day Gillian Lawrence reveals some local life-stories to remember

Through my own desk-top primary research I’ve been able to dig deep into the lives of women in what was Essex and closer to home, Forest Gate.

Using their birth names I’ve been able to trace them and discovered the humanity and special qualities that marked them out in the neighbourhood.

Ada Margaret Dinn, for example, married a vicar. I found on EBay a St Marks Church cook book which years ago was used to help raise funds to repair the church roof.

I am pretty sure Dinn, in her role as vicar’s wife, would have gathered the women for such projects. She died before her son was killed at The Battle of the Somme in 1916. She was not defined by her husband’s role, but would have been influential in motivating the church congregation and has her own identity. Her husband remarried a year after her early death.

Durning Hall in wide Earlham Grove, once glorious and now decorated by overflowing bins, was bequeathed to the poor by the powerful and wealthy family dynasty Smith, Durning and Lawrence.

Bottom right: Theodora Durning- Lawrence, image via www.e7-nowandthen.org

But the heiress, Theodore, lived without the trappings of a millionaire life-style. Instead, she made sure that hall worked for the community after opening it in1959.

Hannah Kohn was her birth name, but she was Dr Strieson in her professional life as a doctor. What a woman. What a GP. She advocated for safer home- births and was the first woman NHS doctor in Forest Gate.

Someone connected with Royalty was Mary Orchard who is buried in Manor Park Cemetery. She was nanny to some of the children of Princess Alice, the mother of Prince Phillip who died last year.

Another notable was Jane Rebecca Yorke, am woman I discovered while working on a women’s project based in Yorkshire which explores how women were ostracised and criminalised as ‘witches’. She was a pensioner and widow who lived in Romford Road and made history by being the last women to be prosecuted under Britain’s ancient witchcraft laws.

She was arrested in 1944 at the age of 72 and the last woman to be prosecuted under the 18^th century Witchcraft Act over seances she held in her front room. What marks her out is that she was a poor widow supplementing her pension by relieving other widows of their money and grief. She was notorious in Forest Gate and criminalised by an ancient hardly used law which historically hurt more women than men.

I salute all these women and stand them next to all the suffragettes, every lioness and every wife-mother who claimed their own places on earth.

More herstories are at Facebook: Join The Throng. Women’s Heritage Project 2021.

Instagram: @ragworksart for textile depictions of my researched women.

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