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GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton
Hockley Station: gwrhd711b
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Close up of image 'gwrhd711' showing Top shed's cartage area
with rows of horse-drawn vehicles and a young female porter at rest. The Second
World War saw significant numbers of women take over extremely onerous and
physical jobs from men of which being a porter was one. This wasn't new as
during the First World War when almost one-third of male railway workers joined
the Forces, leaving the industry in a terrible crisis, jobs that had always
been rigidly closed to women were suddenly opened to them and there was a
stampede for jobs. Railwaymen did not disguise their opposition to women. Their
union leaders grudgingly accepted that women were needed to keep the railways
running but insisted they be ousted when war ended. The proportion of female
staff increased from 2% to 16% in four years. By 1918 there were almost 66,000
female railway employees, of which about half were in uniformed, manual work
never before performed by women. 10,000 became ticket collectors, luggage
porters, parcels porters and goods porters, handling heavy goods such as sacks
of coal or flour, animals and milk churns. They worked on stations, sometimes
being the only woman amongst a group of men. At other locations the
stationmaster was the only man among a staff of twelve.
At the outbreak of the Second World War over half a million
men and 25,000 women worked on the railways. Of the women, about 11,000 were in
offices, 7,000 in hotels and catering and 7,000 in female manual work (i.e.
cleaning). Thousands of railwaymen joined the Forces in 1939 and women
wereonce again (and rather miraculously)deemed to be capable of
men's work. In addition to filling all the posts women had filled in the First
World War, their range of tasks broadened. This time they were employed on
track work, as electricians and engineers assistants, jointing
cables, and repairing and oiling semaphore signals and associated wiring,
oiling points, packing ballast and tightening the bolts which hold the rails
onto the sleepers. They became fog signallers, standing alone at an isolated
signal-post for hours on end in freezing fog, laying detonators on the line.
They were pilotwomen, travelling on engines along single lines; they became
porter-shunters, who climbed down on the track between engines and carriages
and uncoupled and coupled them.
Despite bitter opposition from men, many more were employed
as guards; for the first time, they were put in charge of trains along the
South Coast, the Midlands and London which, while all railways were a prime
military target, suffered from particularly heavy bombing. Many more became
signalwomen, and they were permitted to move up a rank or two and control the
more complicated signalboxes, previously thought beyond their mental and
physical capabilities. Women's tasks in the workshops were also greatly
expanded. They operated power lathes and drop-stamp hammers, and were trained
as electricians. They climbed inside the workings of escalators to repair and
maintain them. From 1941 women were conscripted and could be made to perform
railway work. After the war, most women were forced to leave any uniformed job
to make way for a man. A handful managed to keep their jobs, most usually on a
rural station or isolated signalbox that no man applied to work at. Some
managers were apt to take a laissez-faire attitude to an individual woman,
perhaps a war widow with dependents, who was obviously competent at her job,
but union officials sometimes complained until the woman was dismissed and
replaced by a man (even one with no railway experience).
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