How a market town shaped Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie Shirley died on 9 August, her family said on Instagram

Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, who died on 9 August, is remembered by thousands for her pioneering work in the field of technology and for women's rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

She founded the software company Freelance Programmers, which shook up the tech industry by almost exclusively hiring women.

As a child, she was separated from her parents to flee the Nazis in World War Two, settling with a foster family in the Sutton Coldfield in 1939, before later moving to Oswestry.

It was at school in the Shropshire town it was discovered she had an aptitude for mathematics, which ultimately let her to becoming a tech pioneer.

She was born Vera Buchthal in the German city of Dortmund in 1933, and came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport - a British rescue effort in the months preceding World War Two that brought 10,000 children to the UK.

"I was a very traumatised child, I was five years old when I was put on a train in Vienna and sent off, without my parents, with my older sister to foster parents in the Midlands," she told BBC Radio Shropshire in 2024.

Dame Stephanie was at the forefront of UK computing advances

She then moved to Oswestry, which Dame Stephanie said was very welcoming to immigrants.

"I think its quite significant that Oswestry as a market town, and as a border town - its geographically in Wales, politically in Shropshire - but it should be welcoming of immigrants. It was... certainly in my day when we were living there," she said.

"I describe it as a town of sanctuary.

"My childhood was in the Midlands... I had six wonderful years of peace in Oswestry and I feel very affectionate about Oswestry."

But it was not just the atmosphere that shaped her childhood.

'Maths lessons made my career'

She attended what was then Oswestry Girls' High School, a boarding school in the town, but maths was limited there - in fact, it was not taught to girls at all.

But her talent for the subject was recognised and she was offered maths lessons at the boys school in the same town.

"I was the first girl to attend boys school to learn mathematics, and it was a rather unpleasant experience, really, with all the boys cat-calling and whistling as I turned up for my lessons," she told the BBC last year.

"But I did get the tuition I wanted, and I bless the people that had the sufficient foresight to say: 'Well, this child is gifted in mathematics... and we need to provide her with tuition'."

Dame Stephanie said that decision "made her career".

A plaque was put up in the town in 2021

When she grew up, she adopted the name "Steve" to help her in a male-dominated tech world.

This was the name Jools Payne, who met her at Oswestry Literature Festival in 2015 when Stephanie was there to promote her memoir, knew her as.

Ms Payne established the group Oswestry Welcomes Refugees.

"She was fantastically successful but she was such a kind person," she said.

"She had such humanity and I think I will probably remember her most for the kindness that I saw her show on the three or four occasions that I spent time with her."

Her connection to Oswestry was immortalised with the installation of a blue plaque, facilitated by the town council, on The Broadwalk next to St Oswald's Church in August 2021.