MY ANCESTOR WAS A... FEMALE RAILWAY CLERK
In the 19th and 20th centuries women overcame social barriers to work in male-dominated railway offices, as Dr Rosa Matheson explains
Meet the women who overcame social barriers to work in maledominated railway offices
Clerks of all callings were the Cinderellas of the 19th-century business world – overlooked, overworked and underpaid. Not for nothing were they so often identified as ‘a lowly clerk’, toiling away in dreadful, often healthaffecting conditions, doomed to struggle to make ends meet while desperately trying to keep up a respectable appearance.
With the coming of the railway companies from the early 1800s, the rise of the railway clerk was as spectacular as it was unexpected. In the industry’s infant days the numbers were small, and clerks of a certain social class were sought.
The directors of the newly created London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) liked to appoint clerks of all ages from personal recommendations. All that was required was a ‘bright intelligence’ and the ability to ‘write a good hand’. Later the increased demand for clerks meant that this patronage eventually gave way in February 1860 to the L&SWR’s entry examination, in order to weed out applicants who could read, write and do arithmetic from the generally uneducated masses. This novel idea was quickly taken up by other railway companies, although senior posts were still decided by personal connections – much to the chagrin of the clerks.
In the Victorian era, however, the place for any respectable woman was in the home, and definitely not in the masculine world of the railways. The earliest recorded female clerks I have come
The rise of the railway clerk was as spectacular as it was unexpected