Factory Girl in photo tracked down 60 years on

The image of Mrs McCourt was found in a scrapbook in Derry's Tower Museum

A jewellery maker who appealed for help finding a woman from an old photograph who inspired her latest work is delighted to have tracked her down.

Una Carlin found the photograph in an old scrapbook in Londonderry's Tower Museum while carrying out research for a collection honouring the city's factory workers.

After appealing for help on social media and speaking to some of Derry's former factory workers, Mrs Carlin found that the woman pictured in the early 1960s is Margaret McCourt, now aged 86.

Mrs McCourt's daughter Yvonne Lecky told BBC News NI her mum "can't believe all this going on around her and the photograph."

Mrs McCourt's daughter said her mum was 'amazed' the photograph has resurfaced

"She is a bit amazed about it all. Mum said the photo has been knocking about a good while 'and now all of this'."

The photograph, taken by Londonderry Sentinel newspaper shows Mrs McCourt, then Ms Olphert, working a sewing machine with a number of colleagues behind her.

It served as inspiration to Mrs Carlin, the designer goldsmith at a city centre jewellers in Derry, for her collection honouring the city's factory workers.

For much of the 20th Century Derry was a world leader in shirt production and the city's factory girls were the driving force.

Right up to the early 2000s there were still hundreds of people employed in clothing manufacturing.

Una Carlin says she was taken by the photo's modern feel

Earlier this week Mrs Carlin had told BBC Radio Foyle the photo of Mrs McCourt had "stayed with her" as she looked through the museum's "brilliant scrapbooks" of factory life.

"I wanted a kind of modern picture. There's lots of really old ones, but I wanted one that the women who worked in the factories could relate to," she said.

Speaking to BBC News NI, Mrs Carlin said she was "delighted" to have been helped identify the woman who inspired her work.

"From speaking to people we learned she was very much idolised by the other girls in the factory. She was very glamourous always and dressed impeccably. The watch and the pearls were standard wear for her."

Mrs McCourt, she added, is "well remembered…as a lovely gracious lady and admired by her co-workers for her elegance and style."

Now the two ladies plan to meet in the weeks ahead. Mrs McCourt will be presented with a brooch featuring the design she inspired.

"It is going to be lovely to meet up," she said.

Mrs McCourt's photo also features on a city centre storyboard telling the factory workers story

As well as inspiring Mrs Carlin's collection, the photo now features prominently on a Factory Girls storyboard in Derry's city centre.

"She has become our poster girl," her former colleague and friend Clare Moore, one of the admins of the Friends of the Factories community online, said.

Over the years, she had also tried to track down Mr McCourt with the help of the now much talked-about photograph.

"I had always wanted to catch up, to get back in touch and had put the photo up (on social media) a number of times," she said.

"Margaret, at the time of the photo was six years older than me, she was like a big sister, she really stood out, Margaret was classy, all the ladies were."

They had briefly reconnected in 2013 by chance, but had lost contact again.

Now the friends are back in touch again and have met up again recently, at an event on International Women's Day.

"Poster girl.... what an honour. It is definitely a good title for Margaret, she had disappeared for so many years," Mrs Moore said.

A public artwork was unveiled in Derry remembering the city's factory girls in March

What was the significance of Derry's factory girls?

A female workforce powered much of the industrial development of Derry

Derry was a globally-renowned centre for shirt-making, with the industry developing from the late 19th Century.

By the 1920s, there were more than 40 shirt factories employing thousands of workers, with thousands more servicing the industry from their homes.

The Tillie and Henderson factory, near Craigavon Bridge, was even mentioned in Karl Marx's famous book, Capital.

The vast majority of those who did the job were women.

They were immortalised by the songwriter Phil Coulter in The Town I Loved So Well.

The industry has now been all but wiped out in the face of global competition, with one of the last traditional handmade shirt makers in Britain and Ireland closing in May 2019.