Female railway clerk
across in the collections at The National Archives (TNA) are Margaret Savage, a telegraphist at the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway’s Three Bridges Station in August 1855, and her sister Harriet, who was a booking clerk in 1857.
‘ Bonnie lasses’
According to a Sheffield Daily Telegraph article, the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway employed three “bonnie lasses” as clerks, at Edinburgh Station as early as 1858, one a telegraphist, while the North British Railway had female telegraphists in its Telegraph Office at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, in 1872. However, the employment of women was not given serious consideration by railway companies until the Long Depression of the late 1870s, when financial constraints forced railway companies to find new ways to reduce their costs; and again in the 1890s, when a scarcity of male clerks of any ages increased the dilemma.
In January 1877 the Railway Sheet and Official Gazette debated the problems of hiring women, arguing, “There is no doubt that the gentler sex can only be employed in the performance of the lightest duties requiring neither the highest intelligence nor a large amount of endurance.” Company needs grew, however, and gradually young, unmarried women were employed, often in station offices where they had a male relative working who would act as the guardian of their virtue.
The telegraph, the ‘doll’s-eye’ telephonic switchboard and later the typewriter proved golden opportunities, opening the office doors for young women. Originally a way for young men to carve a technical clerical career, it was soon found that the skills these machines demanded – dexterity and speed, a delicate touch, and sustained alertness and application – better suited women’s smaller, nimbler fingers and their ability to sit still for hours. As a result the telegraph, the telephone offices and the typing pool were eventually ‘feminised’. Men were more concentrated in the management and the drawing office, and in departments handling accounts, wages and correspondence.
A railway clerk’s work required copious and laborious note- keeping in large, heavy ledgers. These were still in use in the 1930s, when Violet Lane, who I interviewed during my PhD, applied for a vacancy with the Great Western Railway (GWR) at its Swindon Works. She was told that “she could not possibly be a clerk, as she would never be able to lift and move the ledgers, let alone climb up onto the high stools”. (For more about Violet’s experiences, see the Case Study.)
Railway offices became more mechanised, however, and new machines brought work within the scope of female clerks. These included the ‘Hollerith’, an electromechanical system that applied the ‘punched hole’ principle to cards enabling them to be sorted mechanically (and was used to process data for the US census from 1890), and the Powers-Samas Accounting Machine, described to me by Barbara Carter, who used it in the 1940s, as “a great monster” that could only be tamed by “brute force and strength”.
The First World War saw an army of women invade the offices of railway companies, not only to replace the men who had gone to the Front, but also to deal with the paperwork created by the Government using the rail networks as a vital part of the war machine. The influx of
females was not always welcome, especially at GWR. Male clerks did not want women ‘stealing’ the job title of clerk, and battle was waged via the in-house magazine the Great Western Journal. In the end the company decided that the women would get their own job title: ‘female clerk’.
At the end of the Great War, the trade union the Railway Clerks’ Association (RCA) records that there were a staggering 25,000 female clerks on the railways, of whom 13,655 were members. The RCA, later known as the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, was established in 1897 and had initially resisted the employment of women, but accepted its first female member in 1910. Mamie Thompson from Oldham, aged 21, was the first woman delegate to attend its annual conference.
Level up
Like everything else in the railways, ‘clerkdom’ had a hierarchy. You joined at the bottom and, if lucky, worked your way up through the grades. At the tender age of 14 males started as ‘lad clerks’, later called ‘office boys’, while females were ‘messenger girls’. They ran around the offices and workshops delivering messages, collecting money, making tea and washing up. These duties had changed very little by the time Lorna Dawes joined the GWR as a messenger girl in the early 1940s. She told me that she also carried out ‘unofficial’ duties, such as buying lardy cakes in town for the office.
While there were many grades for men within railway companies, the majority remained on the lowest grades all of their working lives. Few made it up the ladder to be head of department, or the exalted chief clerk. For women there were generally even fewer grades. At the GWR in 1920 there were just three: girl clerk, 16–17 years; woman clerk (from age 18) Grade 2; and woman clerk Grade 1. Pay was linked to grades, and each determined a maximum salary that, if reached, would be your salary until you left or retired. Salaries were paid weekly, and at this time girl clerks started on 17s 6d, Grade 2 clerks on 30s 0d, and Grade 1 on 65s 0d. From the 1930s there were only two grades: girl clerks and women clerks.
Women again flooded the offices in the Second World War, but this time they were more quickly accepted because the necessity was obvious and they had already proved their worth. The end of the conflict brought women an unexpected benefit in the relaxation of the by then illegal but still applied ‘Marriage Bar’, which prevented women from pursuing white-collar professions when they married. They were now able to stay on or return after their wedding.
Dr Rosa Matheson is a railway historian whose books include The Fair Sex: Women and the Great Western Railway (History Press, 2007)
When a woman left to get married, she was ‘banged out’ of the office by colleagues banging their rulers on their desks.