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This is a Letterbox Hybrid geocache, placed on 8th March 2023, International Women's Day. It is not at the published co-ordinates - you will need to visit these coordinates to work out the final location.
These Letterbox caches simply highlight significant individuals, from a variety of fields, who once lived behind a letterbox at this location. My thanks to tundra70 for allowing me to add to this interesting new series.
Dr Dorothea Sinton (1899–1987)
The published coordinates will take you to a blue plaque at 18, North Avenue, Gosforth, where Dorothea Sinton lived. The plaque celebrates the life and pioneering work of Dr. Sinton in providing medical and well-being services to the poorest women of the North East.
During the late 1920s there was extensive public debate about the rights and wrongs of birth control. In 1929, Dr. Sinton was a brave pioneer who was instrumental in starting women’s advisory clinics in Scotswood; later she opened clinics in Ashington and Sunderland. She passionately believed that poorer women who already had large families to raise, needed more support when they took on all the family responsibilities. The loss of so many men in both Wars, together with high unemployment, was keenly felt in the poorer parts of the City. She asked her medical colleagues to “look at past and prevailing social and economic conditions in order to discover the causes of the declining birth rate. The reasons for the existence of contraception services were to enable motherhood, not to degrade it. There is nothing dignified in a diseased woman bringing a sickly child into a poverty-stricken household.”
The Scotswood clinic was established at 670 Scotswood Road and started in January 1929 with gifts of £100 each from Lady Denman, and the Durham Miners' Welfare Committee. It was a hugely difficult task in establishing the Centre. Doctors and the clergy had to think hard before linking their names to birth control. Those who did help the clinic “felt brave and somewhat wicked and immoral”. Dr. Sinton struggled to form a Committee of local and influential women to run and raise funds for the "Women’s Welfare Clinics", and most of her supporters appeared not to tell their husbands what they were really engaged in. Dr. Sinton was fortunate in finding Mrs. Murray Brooks who worked with her for over 20 years as her Nursing Superintendent. Mrs. Brooks was also a founder member of Newcastle Soroptimists, a voluntary women’s organisation dedicated to educating and empowering women to have an equal voice in our communities. The services that women in our communities can use today are in large part to pioneering medics such as Dr. Dorothea Sinton.
The cache is a short walk away from the published coordinates and is a magnetic tube.
To calculate the final co-ordinates:
At the plaque, note down the following numbers :
A = the number of seahorses.
B = the number of words on the line of text which starts with "L" and ends with "e"
C = the sum of the two digits preceding North.
At the nearby lamppost on the same side of the street, note down from the 4 character lamppost code , 3 of which are digits:
D = A + B + the first lamppost digit
E = the third lamppost digit
F = the second lamppost digit minus D
The final container can be found at:
N55 00.ABC W1 37.DEF
The cache is small, but does contain a stamp. Please leave this in the cache.