Her parents, William Oram and Jane Lawrence, were the owners of Lawrence's Hotel in Sintra, reputedly the oldest still-functioning hotel on the Iberian Peninsula, which became famous as a place where, in 1809, Lord Byron wrote part of his work Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

[1][2] Oram became a correspondent for a wide variety of foreign news agencies and papers, such as the Associated Press, Reuters and the British Daily Mail, often using the pseudonym of Célia Roma, with which she signed short stories and poems that appeared in several newspapers and magazines.

For the Daily Mail she prepared a report on the 5 October 1910 Republican revolution in Portugal, which was the first news of the event to be released abroad.

The period after the overthrow of the monarchy was one of great political and social instability, marked by daily riots, attacks and explosions.

[4][5] In May 1916, Oram accompanied Virgínia Quaresma, the first Portuguese woman to be a professional journalist and a noted feminist and lesbian, on a trip on a submarine, which included a dive.