Sub-First Class on First Great Western

I start writing this Blog entry on the 16.30 train from Gloucester to London Paddington, two minutes after leaving Gloucester. The train is 21 minutes late, however I do have the joy of being in First Class, something that I was more than looking forward to. It is, in my life, a new travelling experience. I have only travelled First Class once before. Through a fluke of ticketing four years ago I had the joy of going to York via GNER's First Class service. My, what a service that was. While in GNER's First Class carriages I actually felt like I was a special traveller, like I was a cut above those in the standard class carriages.

When booking tickets to see my friends Jack and Katie in Cheltenham another quirk on the National Rail Enquiries ticketing website was that First Class would cost me only £5 extra each way. So, as I was on holiday, I thought I would pay the extra and enjoy those luxuries that my memory reminded me were part of the First Class experience. The only downside was that I would on the way back have to get a rail replacement bus service from Cheltenham to Gloucester because of engineering works. This was thankfully avoided by Jack driving me in a car. So here I sit (currently at Stroud – a beautiful building) in First Class on the return service. I have to be honest that First Great Western's version of First Class is so far below GNER's of four years ago (and which I hope has continued under the current operators of the franchise, East Coast), that I am thinking about writing a letter in aid of the common good. .

Firstly, and this is just happening as I write, the Buffet car is not open because of staff shortages. So, evidently I won't be getting my complimentary cup of tea and/or coffee. Now I don't know whether I have any rights in this regard, but I was under the impression that if you sell a service at higher cost based on a range of perks and then fail to deliver, then this would constitute a breech of the trade's descriptions act. I mean the complementary drinks are there, plain to see, on FGW's website. They hope (although the member of the train crew who made the announcement seemed unsure) that some staff will join them at Swindon to open the buffet and operate a trolley. In all honestly I doubt this'll happen (it didn't by the way). That's no great loss though, the tea service wasn't up to much on the way in

On the GNER service there were cups and saucers on the table, a staff member with tea and coffee pots to pour on demand, and real milk in a small jug on every table. I think I replenished my tea three or four times...I consumed to the maximum and it was bliss.

This is a lot for FGW to live up to. All I can say is “Oh dear.” In no world, in no parallel universe, in no moment of time, is a card cup, lukewarm water and UHT milk 'first class.' This was bad tea. Now I know I may be being picky as the tea was free, but in a way that is not the point. Running a First Class service isn't just about giving away free items that I'd have to pay for as a standard class traveller. First Class travel is about being provided with a service that is better than that I'd get in standard class. I have paid extra money to avoid those slightly rough-and-ready aspects of standard class. But what about the other services that I have supposed to have paid for? How did they manifest themselves on my journey?

Well, on my inward journey I got the impression that one newspaper was divvied out amongst six people and now, on the way out, where is it? Is this a mythical newspaper? As far as I can see, throughout the carriage, there are no newspapers on tables. In fact come to think of it I haven't seen any staff yet. At least on GNER the newspapers were there waiting for you and there was one per customer. Indeed if, as I witnessed at one point, the paper was missing, you could go to the buffet bar and get one. This strikes me again miss-selling a service. Again it is only a small point in the grand scheme of things, but my complaint is that I have paid extra money for a degree of service that I simply haven't been receiving. Is this because FGW staff simply forgot? Is this because FGW are being cheap? I can't tell you, but I am a disgruntled consumer and at this point I don't care.

I suppose I can't slate every aspect of FGW's First Class service. I have a big, comfortable seat that reclines. However my slight complaint with it is that the arm-rests are a bit tacky, simply being made out of very hard plastic. But let me try and be positive, I have a lovely table. I can't really say much about it, except that, and this won't surprise you at this point, the plug socket doesn't work. I have just mentioned this to the ticket inspector. It seems he can't do anything about it and mumbled something about the fuse coming out. It's lucky on this occasion that I have a long-lasting battery on my computer. However, again this a case having been sold an advertised service (on the website is says there is a plug socket on every table) that I am not receiving.

I am now at Swindon, the home of the Great Western Railway. I have to be honest that if the company's managers of 100 years ago could see how their successors run their First Class service, they would be horrified. My conclusion is this; don't buy First Class tickets from First Great Western. I feel that it is a waste of money. Maybe I am being old-fashioned. Maybe my GNER experience set my expectations abnormally high. Now as I only paid £5 extra for the pleasure of sitting in First Class on each journey I can't really complain. I have received some services, mainly on the way out, that were approximately equatable to that value. Yet if I was someone who hadn't been fortunate in getting a good deal when booking, if I had paid an extra £20 or even £30 pounds as a treat perhaps, I would be very disappointed with a service which in my opinion was simply standard class with a few add-ons. Having a First Class service is not just about hand-outs, better seats and a bit more space, it is about a superior travelling experience. If it isn't, then it should just be named 'Standard Class+.' Sorry First Great Western it's simply not good enough and you will be receiving a letter soon...

NOTE: This was posted when I got home

The Female L&SWR Clerk - Part 2

It was in 1880 that the L&SWR began to give female clerical workers greater responsibilities in the positions of Booking Clerks and Weekly Paid Clerks. The appointment of two female booking clerks have been found in the records. These were Miss Augusta Alice Long, who was appointed at Daggons Road Station on the 1^st June 1880, as her father was the agent there. The second was Miss F.A. Dalby, who, in addition to performing telegraphic functions, also became a Booking Clerk at Torrington Station in October 1881, again because her father was agent at the station. However these women were only allowed to handle limited extra responsibilities as booking clerks, and the work did not have any greater status than the position of telegraphist.

It was in late 1881 that there was one, albeit small, movement forward in what the working remit of new female clerks was. In November that year, Newcombe, Agent at Haliwell Junction, requested that his niece be made a Telegraphist there. Instead the Traffic Committee appointed her as a Weekly Paid Clerk. In February 1883 the daughter of Mr Wright, late agent at Fulwell station, was also made a Weekly Paid Clerk. While the precise responsibilities of Weekly Paid Clerks is uncertain, what is known is that while Newcombe and Wright would have still have undertaken both telegraphic and booking duties, it is very likely that they would have supported the male clerical staff in administrative tasks.

These women, despite having slightly more responsibilities than previous female clerks, were still highly disadvantaged in comparison to their male colleagues. Firstly they were of course only 'weekly paid' and could be dismissed without notice. They were also paid only £19 5/- per year, as opposed to male Junior Clerks, who started on £30 per year. Further, it seems this wasn't a shift in company policy and in the years after 1883 the company still appointed women simply as telegraphists. In September 1890 Kate Deal received such a position at Southampton. What this suggests is that the women who were appointed to the posts of Weekly Paid Clerk recieved their positions in response the local requirements of the company, rather than a policy instituted by the company of increasing the opportunities to women.

The is especially true given female employment elsewhere on the L&SWR. Evidence suggests that the L&SWR did not employ female staff in clerical capacities except at country stations. In the period after 1898 the daughters of London based Traffic Department employees who wished to work on the railway received appointments at the Vauxhall ticket sorting office. I have found the names of fourteen of these women. Further, most of the widows of deceased Traffic Department staff were given positions as waiting room attendants, office cleaners or gatekeepers in the London area. In addition women had been working in the Nine Elms (Battersea) Carriage and Wagon works since 1871, however the majority of individuals working in this capacity had started employment in the 1880s. All were based in the sewing room, sewing carriage linings. At the same time the widows of ex-locomotive department men were given posts as office cleaners, lodging house keepers and mess room attendants.

Firstly, the evidence presented here suggests that by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century the types of work women were doing within the L&SWR was expanding. However, appointments were still always defined by the women's marital status and their husbands department. Importantly for the analysis of the development of female clerical employment on the L&SWR, the positions given to the daughters of railway workers in the city were always in non-clerical capacities, which held much less status than their colleagues acting as telegraphists elsewhere. Therefore, this suggests that those women appointed to clerical work by the company were given the posts because where they lived it was the only railway work available to them. This is highlighted by the locations at which they were employed, such as Torrington, Daggons Road, Halliwell and Fullwell. These places in the 1880s and 90s were simply villages, where the opportunities for women to gain employment would have been smaller than in the city. Therefore, on the L&SWR, the pre-1914 female clerical workers were an anomaly in the system, and presumably the company would have given the women much lower status work had it been available to provide it.

It is at this point that I must jump ahead to 1914. Bar career histories and personal details, I have no information as to whether any further female clerical staff were appointed between 1890 and March 1914. It is in March 1914 that the company decided that there should be a codified policy instituted with regard to the appointment of female staff. I am not certain as to what the initiating factor of this policy was, however, it may have been the result of an industry-wide acceptance of women as railway workers, as well as the number of women rising in the British workforce.
According to Wojtcak, by 1911 British Railway companies employed 1,120 female clerks (1.32%), compared with 84,802 men (Wojtczak, 2005, 29), and increasing numbers of companies were investigating whether more women should be appointed as clerks. The Great Western Railway (GWR), the L&SWR's northern neighbour and long-time rival, had started employing female clerks by 1908, whereas by 1906 the North Eastern Railway (NER) was already employing 94 and the London and North Western Railway (L&NWR) were employing 250. (Matheson, 2002, 137) However the L&SWR was quite behind the national trend and according to the records it is known that in the same year the L&SWR only employed two female clerks.

Another factor that my have played a role in the L&SWR's introduction the formal policy for female staff in March 1914, was the appointment of a new General Manager, Herbert Ashcombe Walker, in 1912. Walker had been a London goods manager on the L&NWR. It may be a coincidence, however all 250 of the L&NWR's female clerks had been based in the abstracting and ledger posting part of its London goods department. It is quite possible that Walker saw the virtue, and the financial benefit (in that women were cheap labour) of employing female clerical staff, and introduced the policy as part of his many wide-ranging changes to the company.

The L&SWR's terms of employment for female staff are shown above, however the company only appointed three new female clerical staff members between March and the 3^rd August 1914 when war was declared by Britain. They were Mabel Cole, Florence Emily Elliott and Ada Muriel Coombes, who all became a telephone operators at Waterloo on the 24^th July. These cases show that even after the institution of a formal policy for the employment of women, their appointments on the L&SWR were still restricted to communications work, possibly reflecting management's perceptions of the capabilities of women. Only with the coming of the First World War would women receive the opportunities to become full clerks, with the same roles and responsibilities as their male co-workers.

These two Blog entries are not a comprehensive history of the female clerical workers of the L&SWR, and much more needs to be said and more analysis undertaken. However, what they have shown is that before World War One women were never really afforded greater opportunities than becoming communication clerks. However, even then their appointment to clerical positions was dependent on their location and their contacts. This is in contrast with other railway companies where by the early 20^th century women were acting in full clerical roles at their administrative centres. Therefore, the L&SWR was generally a railway company with a poor record on female clerical employment, and it was only the war that widened women's opportunities within the company. However, that is another story for another time.

The Female L&SWR Clerk - Part 1

The history of the female railway worker has been shrouded by the fact that railway employment has always been dominated by men. Therefore, this has been reflected in the scholarship on labour relations. A look at the index of David Howell's book on railway trade unionism, Respectable Radicals, has little mention of railwaywomen. Indeed this problem is exacerbated when studying female labour on the railways before 1914, as the proportion of women employees in the industry was small. On 31^st December 1913 British railway companies employed 643,135 persons, however in July 1914 there were only 13,046 (2.02%) female railway workers (Wojtczak, 2005, 38).

Therefore, this puts historians who are researching railwaywomen before 1914 at an obvious disadvantage. Invariably research into male railway labour, especially before 1914, is much easier than that for women. Male labour can be analysed easily, for example by occupation type, wages, length of service, grade of employment and geographical location, and therefore conclusions can be reached as to employment experiences and labour relations without significant trouble. However the male domination of the industry before 1914, combined with the short-term, temporary and uncodified nature of the early female railway employment, means that the historian must look for the 'women' before looking for the 'worker,' because of the 'needle in a haystack' nature of the task. For this reason Helena Wojtczak's excellent book Railwaywomen, Rosa Matheson's thesis, Women and The Great Western Railway: With Special Reference to the Swindon Works, as well as her book, The Fair Sex: Women and the Great Western Railway, only document the experiences of railwaywomen before 1914 in minimal detail because of the limited available information. Therefore, it is the challenge for those researching railwaywomen in this period to build up the fullest picture possible, so that in the long run more detailed analysis can take place once that picture has been formed.

In this and the next Blog entry, I therefore hope to add to the existing literature on railwaywomen by presenting the history of the female clerical staff of the London and South Western Railway (L&SWR) between the 1870s and 1914. The L&SWR had employed women since 1850 when platelayer's wives were employed as gatekeepers on the new Dorchester line. However, in the 21 years after female employment had been restricted to the wives and widows of existing company employees, the latter employed benevolently by the company to support the deceased worker's family.

By the 1870s the L&SWR railway clerk was special kind of employee. This was reflected in the nature of the application process, which, while including nepotism, was tougher than for most railway employees, such as porters or engine drivers. The initial stage of the process was that the applicant, who had to be between the ages of 15 and 19, had to be nominated by a family member or family friend who had connections with the company, either through a board member or member of senior management. Their name would then be placed in a book, from which the directors would choose in turn applicants to go forward to the testing phase of the process. This test would be in 'literacy, arithmetic up to vulgar and decimal fractions' to see if the individual met the educational and intellectual standards for the work. Lastly, they had to be observed for three months by a senior manager, to see if they were suitable to be a clerk. Once a boy was confirmed in post, clerical employment did, however, have its rewards. Clerical staff had the greatest job security of any L&SWR employees, they had respectability within the company, and lastly they were the only ones who realistically had any opportunity to be promoted into senior management. Therefore, when assessing early female clerks within the L&SWR, the highly established nature of male clerical employment is important, as any attempt by women to access clerical positions would invariably be within, and reflect, this established framework and its development.

Between the years 1870 and 1914, I have discovered only nineteen female clerks employed by the L&SWR. The first known case was that of Miss Fifield. Her father was agent (Station Master) at Oakley station, and in November 1871 he applied for his daughter to be employed as a telegraphist there. The Traffic Committee, to whom he applied, passed the issue to board of directors. Unfortunately the board minute is missing to see how they reacted. There is however a good chance that the board employed Miss Fifield and at the same time instituted a new policy. In July of 1872, Mr Vermer, agent at Dean Station, requested that a telegraph instrument be placed there. The Traffic Committee, without passing it to the board, recommended that his daughter be taught how to operate it. This suggests that when the Fifield case was brought up at the board meeting they agreed that she could be employed a telegraphist and, at the same time, laid down some form of rule for the future regarding the employment of female telegraph clerks.

However, it seems that despite breaking into the ranks of the clerical staff in a very small way, the L&SWR still barred women from becoming full administrative clerks, which was still the preserve of men. In March 1874 Mr McLees, Agent at Honiton, successfully requested that his daughter, Bertha, become a Telegraphist at the Station. However a year later when he applied for his eldest daughter to be appointed as a Booking Clerk there, this request was declined. Her younger sister, Flora, was however appointed as a Telegraphist. In fact until 1881 the L&SWR only employed women as telegraphists, and other cases of this type of employment have been found in 1877, 1879 and 1881. All of these appointments were to the weekly paid staff and not the salaried staff, to which most clerks belonged, and were the result of a father applying directly to the Traffic Committee for the appointment.

What the evidence suggests is that the L&SWR's policy, that is suspected to have been instituted in 1871, restricted the employment of women to the post of telegraph clerk. In the context of L&SWR clerical history it is important to note that the L&SWR had merged the posts of Junior and Telegraph Clerks in 1868, essentially abolishing the latter, and placing all junior clerks on one promotional tree. This meant that while junior clerks were now also obliged to also cover telegraph work at stations and depots, the clerical work must have taken precedence after the merger of the position. This was because the duties of the telegraph clerks were not skills that juniors clerks would have to carried over when they were promoted to senior clerkships. Therefore it is quite possible that the company was using cheap female labour to fill the gaps in staffing that had been caused by the removal of dedicated telegraph clerks.

In addition it is obvious that these vacancies were filled by nepotism, but of a unique kind. As stated, the normal route for boys wishing to obtain a situation was for the directors to choose nominated applicants from a book, after which they would go forward to the testing phase of the recruitment procedure. However, the appointment of the female telegraphists was through their fathers directly approaching the Traffic Committee. In the Victorian society, where there were clearly defined spheres of what women and men's work were, this direct approach to the Traffic Committee was meant to bypass the established clerical recruitment process, which the women almost certainly would not have been allowed to enter into. Further, the applications of fathers for women to take up positions were sporadic and not seemingly at a set time or over a period. Thus, there seems to be no systematic effort by the company to recruit women into the company's clerical ranks before 1914. Overall these pieces of evidence suggest that it was the impetus and determination of these women that forced, or persuaded, their fathers to make the applications, through an alternative, more direct, application process. Therefore, the early female telegraphists on the L&SWR were women fighting against an employment system that told them they could not be anything more than housewife and mother.

In the second part I will look at how women's clerical roles did extend to administrative clerical work and how the L&SWR eventually introduced, just prior to the war, full female clerks.

Ruling the workplace

Some of my favourite London and South Western Railway items that I own are my rule books. I have five of them, three general rulebooks that were issued to all staff in 1904, 1912 and 1921, two Appendix to the rule books dated 1911 and 1921, as well as a smaller book just for Engineering staff from 1902. I also have images of rule books dating back to 1845. OK so they don't sound that interesting, in fact they are, for the non-railway fan, a bit of a bore. But if you'll bare with me here I'll explain why I find them them fascinating.

Firstly they were issued to railway workers, who had to keep them about their person constantly and become fully acquainted with their contents. For this reason my 1921 Appendix belonged to a Mr N Smith who was based at Itchen Abbas station, and my instructions to engineering staff came from the signal box at New Kew Junction. For this reason it, for me at least, makes the history of the railway more 'real.' Yes I know that that is a vague statement, but when you are dealing with faceless names of managers, formalised processes and company hierarchy, to get an item that was used on the front line of railway work, and was the end product of all these things, humanises the work that I am doing.

Secondly the rule books show how the company developed and what changed for railway workers through the ages. By default it also shows what stayed the same. The first rule book that I have images of, was issued to all staff in 1853. Boy were they obsessed with signalling! The first 10 pages are all related to the topic. Firstly the signals that they used back then weren't the ones that you have seen in Films and TV (or still, if you are lucky, on our railway network). They didn't have hands and were not controlled by a signal box. In addition the signals weren't tied in with the point changes, a mechanism that reduced the risk of crash. No, in 1853 the traveller was at the mercy of a guy standing next to a pole, at the top of which was a disk that had a light behind. To me that seems a little scary. Given that these individuals were essentially turning the pole to change the signal when the trains came past, based on their own judgement, it is not surprising that the rule book devoted a considerable amount of time to it...or so it seems.

In reality 10 pages is nothing. Technological advances, the increased complexity of operations and the emphasis on safety, meant that the 1912 rule book has a full 134 pages devoted to signalling and safe running. There are no discs here, everything on the L&SWR was pneumatic and subject to standard UK operating regulations that had been worked out through the Railway Clearing House. The changes in the rulebook tell me about the changes in the railway network and the stark changes in operational complexity. Therefore I think a survey of the rule books from start to finish would tell me a lot about the development of train control. This said there are those things that stay the same. I won't say much about the similarities, they're quite boring, however they cover the usual things like smartness, punctuality, drinking on the job etc. and reflect that some things stayed the same.

The last point is that rulebooks provide valuable sources of information about the nature of railway work, the management structure and the operational procedures. As an example I was uncertain about the early district management structure of the L&SWR, however the rule book from that year told me what I needed to know. Of course the later rule books, that were a standard nation-wide set of procedures worked out by the Railway Clearing House, have less information of an organisation nature than the earlier ones which are more company specific, but they still give good ideas about the rules under which railway workers operated. Therefore the rulebook has tremendous capacity to inform my work.

Therefore I think that the rulebook is a valuable resource for railway historians, that tell us about the life of railway workers, the organisation of the companies they worked in and complexities of company operations.