Monica Maurice

Helen Monica Maurice (30 June 1908 – 20 September 1995) was an industrialist and Managing Director and Chairman of the Wolf Safety Lamp Company, Sheffield, and the first, and for 40 years the only, woman member of the Association of Mining Electrical Engineers. She was known as “the Lady of the Lamp” in the coal fields of Yorkshire.

Early life and education Monica Maurice was born in Hucknall Torkard, near Nottingham, and brought up in the industrial north Midlands, the eldest of three daughters. Her father was William Maurice (1872–1951), founder of the Wolf Safety Lamp Company, a manufacturer of safety lamps for mining and quarrying; he had purchased the business rights from Friemann and Wolf of Zwickau, Saxony, Germany, in 1910.

She and her sisters were all educated at a pioneering co-educational preparatory school at Grindleford, Derbyshire, and at the independent school Bedales in Hampshire, where she studied from 1922 to 1927; she was head girl there in 1926. As her son William wrote in her obituary, she had a talent for languages and design and continued her studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and at Hamburg University; 'even as a young girl there was a steely determination to be successful.' In 1930 she gave a paper on 'Mines and Miners in Art and Letters' (in French) at the Congres International des Mines, de la Metallurgie et de la Geologie Appliquee, at Liege, France, which was printed in the congress's Proceedings. In 1931 she attended the International Conference of Illuminating Engineers during their first visit to England. In July 1935 she deputised for her father at another meeting of the same organisation, held in Berlin and Karlsruhe, Germany, and played an active role in promoting arrangements for the establishment of an international standard of lighting for mines. She joined the Women's Engineering Society (WES) as a member in 1935 and organised the fourteenth annual conference for WES in 1936 in Sheffield. She was the second woman (after Caroline Haslett) to be elected a Companion of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, In 1947, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, she took part in a British intelligence overseas survey mission to Germany to determine the extent and subsequent recovery in certain specialised industries. According to her obituary, during this visit her group were reporting their arrival at a town near Cologne 'when an arrogant young British captain dismissed their request for accommodation and supplies. She came forward and quietly suggested that she might be forced to pull rank and suddenly rooms were available in the local hotel, as well as fuel and rations for the onward journey.' artist Janet Patterson in the 1980s after she visited her at Wolf Lamp Company offices on Saxone Road, Sheffield. It shows her sitting in her office at the company works. The watercolour hung in Miss Maurice's office for some time and was later exhibited in the Morley Gallery in London and in the former Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield in 1986.