A powerful woman

20 Mar 2026

As part of Women's History Month, we took a look at our archives to explore some of SSE's influential women throughout our history.

The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board was far from the centre of the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1965. For more than 20 years, it had been an organisation run exclusively by men. The members of the Board itself, its chief officers and its managers were all men. Decisions about the Highland Grid were made by men and its operations were carried out by men.

But it wasn’t entirely immune to the change sweeping Britain. For in 1965 Agnes Holway became the first woman member of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board and was responsible, along with its other members, for ensuring the duties of the Board were carried out and its powers exercised effectively.

Holway was first elected to Dundee Town Council in 1945. She was renowned for her work with the city’s older people, and in due course became a Bailie (a position like that of an alderman or magistrate). In 1957, she was appointed to the Electricity Consultative Council for North Scotland.

Agnes Holway continued to serve as a councillor after taking up her position on the Board. In 1966, for example, she hosted a meeting of the Scottish Division of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Great Britain, at which equal pay for women, which was still years away from becoming law, was one of the topics discussed. In 1968, Holway marked the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage by meeting Lila Clunas, the former Dundee town councillor who was very active in the suffragette movement, to the extent of being imprisoned in London Holloway Prison in 1909.

Holway served on the Board for six years. Her appointment was a signal of the change sweeping the country; and there were other signals, too. In the summer of 1969, for the first time, the Board included two female electrical engineering students in its university vacation technical training programme. It said that ‘female engineering students are a comparative rarity: to have two in the same place at the same time is unique’. But the reality is that the electricity industry continued to be dominated by men. So much so, that 50 years after Holway first joined the Board, the ‘POWERful Women’ organisation was established ‘in response to a startling lack of women in senior roles’ in the UK energy sector.

In the 1960s, therefore, when it came to the Hydro Board, Holway’s was a lone female voice, albeit an influential one. But it was an influential voice during a particularly significant period in the development of the Highland Grid.