TSSA Journal November/December 2005

The first named railway woman I traced was Mrs Argyle, clerk-in-charge of Merry Lees, Leicestershire, where she carried out clerical and manual duties, at the single-staffed station from 1832 until it closed in 1871.

But what about booking offices? The Times in 1858 described ticket sellers and telegraphists at Edinburgh. Women began to staff the administrative offices from the 1870s and, for the next century, were confined to routine, low-status work. Some companies insisted that women clerks live with their parents or relatives until they were 21. They were segregated from men and watched over by matronly supervisors.

As was the norm until the 1950s for most women workers, female clerks had to resign once they got married, although many companies provided a wedding dowry. Clerical work was open to women because they provided cheap labour, and were considered to be more docile and compliant than men.

During WWI, there was a huge influx of women to replace railwaymen who had enlisted. In 1912 there were 30 women in the Railway Clerks’ Association (which later became TSSA) but within six years it had expanded to more than 13,000. The RCA held its first women’s conference in 1916 with 93 delegates. The union’s president remarked that women were ‘exploited by employers in a manner which is entirely reprehensible’.

This is evident in the gender pay gap. During the war, one office that employed 148 male clerks for total annual pay of £11,000 replaced its staff with 196 women workers whose combined pay was just £6,000.

As well as ticket and administrative clerks, telegraphists and telephonists, women worked as tracers, drawing locomotives and signaling diagrams. Working conditions were primitive as the following quote from Muriel Mose suggests: “The office was drab, with a large black fireplace and brown lino. On a wet day the smoke blew straight back down the chimney and we sat coughing in a sooty blue haze. My first shock was being confronted with an old typewriter with a double keyboard - one for capitals and one for small letters. There were two solid wood fixed benches, where four typists sat each side, and a large desk raised up on a dais where a lady supervisor sat overlooking us.”

By the 1930s many women were exasperated at being confined to the lowest grade. One said: “A girl is merely expected to type - perhaps for 20 or 30 years. Then, at the age of 50, a young fellow dictates letters to her!”

Some became zealous union activists, starting a 25-year campaign for equal opportunities and equal pay. These included Elsie Orman of King’s Cross (the first woman on the RCA executive) and Mary Keenan, a clerk at Manchester whose graduation in economics and political science went unrecognised because Oxford University refused to award degrees to women.

During WWII, hundreds of thousands of women replaced railwaymen. There were many heroines among the wages grades, but female clerks were brave and also resourceful. Some received OBEs and BEMs for their war service. Ida Luff, a booking clerk at Carshalton, was on duty when a boy fell onto the electrified line. She grabbed some special rubber insulation gloves, ran 100 yards to where the boy lay on the live rail and dragged him off by his legs. And Mrs Wright, a booking clerk at Elephant and Castle, London, bravely fended off armed robbers.

After the war, clerical grade railwaywomen continued their long campaign for equality and eventually equal pay was granted by 1961. One TSSA member remarked: “Those at present in the service who will derive full benefit from the settlements will, we know, acknowledge the debt they owe to their predecessors.”

Equal opportunities were even harder to obtain; in particular, the management and the unions were united in their strong opposition to women becoming station masters. Eventually the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 forced the issue and the first was employed in 1979.

Helena Wojtczak