Female drivers

[Wheatley]

Ok, I know Anne Winter and the late Karen Harrison were the first female drivers on BR in 1977/78 but does anybody know why there were none before this ?

Women worked in all other parts of the railway (including, I think, the PWay and certainly including signalling) during the war and after, but not on the footplate. Was it a proscribed occupation (like coal mining - banned under the 1842 Mines & Collieries Act), was it official policy or was it purely down to the closed shop, tradition and social attitude ?

It's a genuine question, an inquisitive trainee who keeps telling me how pleased she is to be 'a millenial' and thinks I'm winding her up about how we used to do it, wants to know.

Ta.

Edited to add Anne Winter.

[russ p]

How pleased she is to be millennial? What is that? Was she in a really bad mood when she said this and does it happen often?

Getting back to the question, well I don't really know. Were there women guards before drivers.

One reason why there may not have been drivers is that there would have been few women that had the stamina to be firemen in the days of steam, I know there are a few in preservation but in steam days I would have thought the average shift entailed shovelling a bit more coal than your average preservation line.

Also the atmosphere on the railway with filthy mess rooms and foul language would put most girls off. Remember until 88 the oldest you could start on the footplate was 24

[PaulRhB]

Ok, I know the late Karen Harrison was the first female driver on BR in 1977/78

Even that is disputed by Annie at Salisbury who insists she passed out first even though Karen was technically employed first

As to why none before a mixture of the perception it wasn't a job for women and being edited out at the sifting stage before PC quotas?

Certainly opened the doors though and there's an ever increasing number now and some damn good drivers too. At Salisbury there's been at least three husband & wife drivers, Mum & daughter and one family there's the mum, dad, daughter and son in law too all drivers!

One of my co Signallers has overtaken us all and she's now the boss too. What's more it's nice to have a boss who recognises the importance of cake

[Wheatley]

How pleased she is to be millennial? What is that?

Well the conversation started off as a couple of the bright young things wondering aloud why anyone would still buy CDs instead of downloading and ended up with casual racism and sexism in the workplace via being able buy SS Stormtrooper outfits for ones Action Man, Roberstons Golly, the B&W Minstrel Show, girlie calendars in messrooms and no-one (including the Head) batting an eyelid at a couple of my teachers working their way through the sixth form. They concluded quite quickly that they've never had it so good.

 

Remember until 88 the oldest you could start on the footplate was 24

Now that I had forgotten, that would have been quite limiting. I can understand why the job would not appeal in steam days but I'm fairly sure I read that it was not permitted, not just discouraged. That was on an interpretation board at the NRM in an exhibition about women on railways years ago but I can't remember now whether it meant 'banned', 'not BR policy' or simply exempted under the 1976 Act.

 

And apologies to Annie, I'd remembered about her but not that there was a dispute.

[russ p]

It may have been that they were banned as there were no facilities for them such as toilets and showers at most locations.

To be honest there are still few facilities in a lot of yards today

[Ray H]

My Mum was a guard on the GE section during the war - that's how she met my Dad.

 

I also remember a female signaller on the North Woolwich line when I started work there in 1964. There were certainly plenty of female station staff and booking office staff at the same time but the number of female divisional/line manager's staff seemed much less in proportion as I recall. I think most were consigned to the typing pool and to being secretaries - and bl**dy good jobs many of them did in both roles.

 

That said, when I moved to LTE just three years later there were a considerable number of women in clerical positions in the Broadway offices. I'm pretty sure though that at that time there weren't any female LTE train staff or signallers but there were plenty of female station staff including (still) a few LWAs - Ladies Waiting Room Attendants! I can't recall any female supervisors at that time though.

 

Even the London buses were not immune. Plenty of clippies but I don't recall any female bus drivers. Mind you, I'm not sure that there were any/many female lorry drivers either (once the war finished).

[The Johnster]

It sort of doesn't matter if there was ever a formal official ban on female footplate staff, on the 'traditional' railway, very much alive and kicking in my time on it in the 1970s, they simply wouldn't have been employed, and that was the end of it.  IIRC, which I don't always, the advert for guards that I responded to specified men.  Not everything was better in the 'good old days'!  There was certainly a perception that women were physically incapable of heavy labour of the sort involved in firing steam engines, and I remember some messroom discussion about their potential future role as secondmenwomen or driver's assistants/assistant drivers, but it was held to be at some indeterminate point far, far, into the future when we all had rocket boots as promised on Tomorrow's World.  

 

When you stripped away the spurious arguments of the old school attitude that women could not work as engine drivers because they 'suffered' from menstruation and couldn't concentrate and would require a week off every 28 days, or that the railway would never pay for female staff toilets, or that they would not have their minds properly on the job because of domestic worries of the sort women were in those days held to be prone to, not to mention the messroom culture of foul language and page 3 girls on the wall, or any other nonsense including the idea that they couldn't climb up the steps to a loco cab in case you looked up their skirts, what it came down to in those days was whether or not you could accept that women could physically and mentally take on the task of driving a train.  It was fairly clear to me that I could not see any reason that they couldn't, and that by pursuing a policy of only recruiting male footplate or traincrew staff the railway was needlessly denying itself access to the skills, abilities, and enthusiasm of half the potential labour force.  Oh, yes, another objection was that, as secondmen/driver's assistants, they would be a distraction to male drivers vulnerable to their feminine wiles...

 

The problem was obviously with the men, and not with women!

 

Our carriage cleaners at Canton were women, and a tough bunch they were at that; some of them were twice the man I'll ever be!  I reckoned the night shift of Canton cleaners were the hardest working bunch of people I had ever encountered, and I had, and still have, enormous respect for them!

[The Johnster]

My Mum was a guard on the GE section during the war - that's how she met my Dad.

 

I also remember a female signaller on the North Woolwich line when I started work there in 1964. There were certainly plenty of female station staff and booking office staff at the same time but the number of female divisional/line manager's staff seemed much less in proportion as I recall. I think most were consigned to the typing pool and to being secretaries - and bl**dy good jobs many of them did in both roles.

 

That said, when I moved to LTE just three years later there were a considerable number of women in clerical positions in the Broadway offices. I'm pretty sure though that at that time there weren't any female LTE train staff or signallers but there were plenty of female station staff including (still) a few LWAs - Ladies Waiting Room Attendants! I can't recall any female supervisors at that time though.

 

Even the London buses were not immune. Plenty of clippies but I don't recall any female bus drivers. Mind you, I'm not sure that there were any/many female lorry drivers either (once the war finished).

 

 

IIRC the first female bus drivers were in Bristol, about 1967?

[Wheatley]

That's just it, women were employed in every other branch of railway work, albeit only in penny numbers in some cases, but not the footplate.

 

Knew I'd seen female gangers somewhere - http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?image=10660171&cs=lFwoM4ZJNhztRZ4&pb=Women&themex=26

 

I fully appreciate that some jobs were not considered suitable for women but in most cases there was at least one exception, sometimes only one exception, who blazed a trail and did it anyway. I doubt PW gaffers were any more enlightened than the Motive Power department but there's four grannies shovelling ballast in 1957 and still no women at all on the footplate until after the Sex Discrimination Act.

[roythebus]

From memory Ann Winter (later Ross) was the first woman to pass out as driver. She was appointed driver at Waterloo in 1882, just before the ASLEF strike. She could have been popular but shall we say, worked more days than the other drivers and took an enforced journey to a Midlands town. Her husband was a driver at Leatherhead London Country, and reportedly when the drivers there found out, he made a similar trip to the midlands town metaphorically speaking.

 

I understand from the FB Lost Boys group that the drivers at Salisbury don't have such long memories as she became ASLEF branch secretary!! From the same source there was some detail about the late Karen Harrison, much respected and an active trade union rep.

 

The first woman bus driver in London Transport was the late Jill Viner, passed out in about 1973following a lot of press publicity and hoo-haa-ing from London Transport. She worked for my bus company from about 1992 until her early passing at the age of 45, about 20 years ago to the day!  She managed to drive RTs and RFs with no problem and loved the job. there's a bit about her in the LT museum at Covent Garden.

[pH]

Even the London buses were not immune. Plenty of clippies but I don't recall any female bus drivers. Mind you, I'm not sure that there were any/many female lorry drivers either (once the war finished).

I worked as a bus conductor with Western SMT in 1966. There were two female inspectors in our garage, though they had been conductresses, not drivers. However, I was told that some of the cleaners (all women) had been drivers during WW2. They weren't supposed to, but I saw several of them competently shunting buses round the garage, rather than asking for a driver to do it for them, as they were supposed to.

 

Incidentally, hourly rates were 6s/1d for drivers, 5s/10d for conductors, ... and 5s/7d for conductresses!

[Rivercider]

When I was working at WR HQ at Swindon in 1988 I saw some correspondence about the percentage of women across all the different grades of BR, including drivers.

It was a positive discrimination project to increase the number of women on BR  though I can not remember the driving force, but as well as showing the actual figure for each grade there was a target figure that grade.

 

Off topic but among other memories I remember there was an all female track gang operating in the Bristol area in the 1980s,

and on one of my photographic trips in the early 1980s was surprised to see a female guard on my DMU service from Sheffield to Worksop.

 

As regards female tram drivers Beatrice Page was one of the first, she joined Weston-super-Mare Tramways in 1916,

http://somersetremembers.com/content/storys/the-home-front/beatrice-page-1889-1972.ashx

 

cheers

[stewartingram]

1978 was when Hannah Dadds became the first female train operator on the Underground.

 

http://london-underground.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/tubes-first-female-driver.html

 

Stewart

['CHARD]

From memory Ann Winter (later Ross) was the first woman to pass out as driver. She was appointed driver at Waterloo in 1882, just before the ASLEF strike. 

 

That start date is going to be hard to beat.  

[Ray H]

We shouldn't of course forget the female "fluffers" - the tube tunnel cleaning females. Night work only and not the cleanest job in the world.

[Rugd1022]

I don't know whn Karen passed out for driving but she was still a Driver's Assistant in 1983 while I was working alongside her at Old Oak, coincidentally the day I arrived at the depot Fiona Johns also arrived there, and we our boiler training together at Stratford Works in November '83.

[Guy Rixon]

The Metropolitan Railway had female guards during WW1. It would be interesting to know if any stayed in the job after the war, and, if so, if they applied to become motorwomen (motorpersons?).

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

Given the well attested accounts of women who managed to 'pass' for years serving in the infantry in C18th and 19th - a life with much the same challenges as footplate crews faced, but with the occasional presence of genuine hostiles - whatever the official record may show, I wouldn't bet against some woman having got in under the radar, somewhere.

 

Having known a girl a year ahead of me at school who was physically well within the normal range for men, and had a very adventurous disposition, it doesn't seem that improbable to me. (She graduated as an engineer and went into the construction industry.)

[The Stationmaster]

Karen definitely wasn't the first female Driver on BR - I think she was probably about the third or fourth.  There were two 'somewhere up north' at the time she started as a Drivers Asst although one of those might possibly not count as she'd started her footplate career in the male gender.  However Karen was definitely the first to join the WR in the Footplate line of Promotion and was duly feted by the WR publicity machine as a consequence.

 

She probably became better known because of that plus her union and political involvement hence perhaps the story growing up that she was the first female Driver.

 

As for Canton's female Carriage Cleaners they were a very tough bunch of girls who could at times be a rather frightening bunch but watching them at work on nights was an education as they got through DMUs at an incredible rate doing a  really good job - about one of the only things I didn't criticise in my rather large, and somewhat critical,, report about DMU servicing on the night shift at Canton which led to some considerable changes in working methods in the early '70s.  And to be honest I began to think the Canton ladies were quite a tame bunch when I took over a force of female Carriage Cleaners elsewhere on the Western some years later - their skills ranged from exquisite lace making to brothel keeping and very nasty fighting methods among some of them although there were some extremely good cleaners in their number.

[The Johnster]

Karen definitely wasn't the first female Driver on BR - I think she was probably about the third or fourth.  There were two 'somewhere up north' at the time she started as a Drivers Asst although one of those might possibly not count as she'd started her footplate career in the male gender.  However Karen was definitely the first to join the WR in the Footplate line of Promotion and was duly feted by the WR publicity machine as a consequence.

 

She probably became better known because of that plus her union and political involvement hence perhaps the story growing up that she was the first female Driver.

 

As for Canton's female Carriage Cleaners they were a very tough bunch of girls who could at times be a rather frightening bunch but watching them at work on nights was an education as they got through DMUs at an incredible rate doing a  really good job - about one of the only things I didn't criticise in my rather large, and somewhat critical,, report about DMU servicing on the night shift at Canton which led to some considerable changes in working methods in the early '70s.  And to be honest I began to think the Canton ladies were quite a tame bunch when I took over a force of female Carriage Cleaners elsewhere on the Western some years later - their skills ranged from exquisite lace making to brothel keeping and very nasty fighting methods among some of them although there were some extremely good cleaners in their number.

 

If there are a bunch of girls, or any sort of human being, tougher than Canton Carriage Cleaners, I need to know so as to step respectfully out of their way should I ever encounter them...  My respect for the Canton girls was for their prodigious work rate; on any other level I was just plain terrified of 'em!

[The Johnster]

If there are a bunch of girls, or any sort of human being, tougher than Canton Carriage Cleaners, I need to know so as to step respectfully out of their way should I ever encounter them...  My respect for the Canton girls was for their prodigious work rate; on any other level I was just plain terrified of 'em!  

 

DMU certainly needed sorting out a bit on nights, but my first year of regular dmu work was 1976, with the hot summer, and the valley sets were dropping like flies with coolant problems; I doubt any re-organising or anything else short of a fleet of new trains could have helped the situation, and for some reason it was decided to concentrate the very worst sets on the Rhymney service, not known for easy gradients.  The absolute no-hopers with only one engine working were relegated to Coryton and Bute Road, but basically if a set could turn a wheel a complete revolution on the shed it had to be used for traffic;  desperate times!!!

[PaulRhB]

When women demanded equality with men they did not have in mind standing up to their eyeballs in sh*t or eating eggs off of a shovel. Can you imagine a woman going back on the tender for a crap in the coal? Womensworld is starting halfway up a ladder and heading up it via her gender.

 

Having said that, a young woman in footplate attire was standing beside the Mucky Duck at Llangollen yesterday.

Plenty of ladies doing those mucky footplate duties on several railways I know and some for a long time.

As to the question about the tender, yes I don't think you'll find the right girls would have an issue with it as many in the forces don't when necessary. A lady friend of mine takes great delight in bringing such women won't conversations to a standstill with a graphic description of only having one piece of toilet paper in the Army, and that was trained too.

Plenty of blokes who shiver with horror at dirty work too.

[steve1]

There was definitely a female driver called Madeleine Schulkind (can't remember her name after she married) on the Southern in the late 1980s. She was a member of Marlow, Maidenhead MRC for a while and was a good modeller of SR electrics.

[Rugd1022]

And one more for the pot.. .we have a female driver at our depot who started out as a male!

 

About fifteen years ago I bumped into another transgender driver at D.I.R.F.T., I think she was based at Ipswich.

[steve1]

Er, I can assure you Madeleine was all female...

 

steve