MacLellan, Miss Mona

Also given as ‘McLellan’. See under her real name, Dorothy Cochrane Logan, for the 1927 hoax swim

Born Dublin 1888 to Quentin Logan, an army officer born in Jamaica to a military family. Soon after, the family moved to Kent and in the 1890s Quentin took on the Seabrook Hotel in Hythe when he retired from the army.

Moved 1905 to Cardiff and then 1906 to London to study medicine. Qualified 1912 and began practising in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Had set up in Harley Street by 1920. Wasa also a medical officer for King’s College Hospital

Served in French Red Cross in WWI in 1918 as a doctor at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Royaumont, France but was dismissed in June 1918 after just 3 months.

She began training to swim the Channel in 1925, making 3 attempts in 1926 and 1927 under the pseudonym of Mona MacLellan (in 1929 to be the middle names of her daughter). Her 4th, hoax, attempt was under her real name (presumably because she  intended to claim the £1000 prize)

In 1929 she married in Wandsworth to her trainer and Channel swimmer Horace Carey, 8 years her junior and a driver for East Kent Buses, and they lived at Hythe. Dorothy was a gynacologist specialist in London and only spent the weekends in Hythe. She had met Carey in 1925 when both were training to swim the Channel

The couple had a daughter but separated in 1930 and finally divorced in 1939. Her daughter, born London in 1929, was baptised Joan Mona MacLellan Cochrane Carey at Saltwood, Hythe. The couple were in constant dispute over custody of the child

During the war, from 1939, she was a surgeon at the Swandean Isolation Hospital in Worthing, Sussex

She emigrated with her daughter Joan to New Zealand after the war and died at Whitianga on 19 July 1961.