Marking both Women’s History Month and St David’s Day, today’s blog post focuses on one place we’re going to find Welsh railwaywomen in the Railway Work, Life & Death project’s coming data release. The next release will be added to our database of railway staff accidents in the summer, and will focus on accident records produced by English and Welsh railway companies.
These records are held at The National Archives of the UK, where a brilliant team of volunteers have been transcribing them for the last six years or so. A strong concentration of those records focuses on south Wales railways, from around 1897 to 1923. We’re delighted that these are of particular interest to Transport for Wales, as part of its cultural heritage work. We’re therefore very pleased to be working with them, and the Welsh Railways Research Circle, to explore what these records contain.
Amongst others company records, the new dataset includes records produced by the Cardiff Railway Company. Thinking about Women’s History Month, and with a view to Railway 200’s ‘celebrating railway people’ theme, we wanted to see if and where women featured in the Cardiff Railway’s records.
The Cardiff Railway Company & women’s employment
The Cardiff Railway was a relatively small company, in terms of numbers of employees and route mileage. The main focus was on the Bute Docks area in Cardiff, and the export of coal. The Company attempted to build a line to access collieries around Pontypridd, but legal challenges effectively rendered the route an expensive white elephant.
The Cardiff Railway’s accident records cover 1914-21, and the docks feature strongly. It would have been useful to have records that predated 1914, to see if women featured. As we shall explore, the First World War has a particular impact on the shape of railway employment. Nevertheless, we can still draw some conclusions from the surviving records.
The first woman to appear in the accident records was shorthand typist Bessie Camble. On 22 February 1916, she fell down stairs in the Company’s general offices, at Pier Head, bruising her arm and side. She remained at work, but was then off until 25 February. Given the opportunities for women at the time, Bessie’s role is one which probably isn’t hugely surprising. However, the First World War was to bring about some changes – albeit temporary.
First World War opportunities
We’ve written before about the ways in which the First World War changed women’s opportunities. A result of the nature of our records, we’ve been able to focus on Wales, too. In this post, we’ve looked at some of the women working on the Barry Railway. And in this post, we’ve looked at signalwomen Elizabeth Trevelyan, in Tondu.
We see more women being employed on the Cardiff Railway from 1917 onwards. This means they feature more in the accident records, too. So, in 1917, five women appear across six incidents – conductor Rose Millett features twice. This was very much a role that was open to women as a result of the war. If the Cardiff Railway had had a greater passenger route mileage, perhaps there would have been more such roles for women. Instead, there was a greater concentration on more manual roles. The remaining four women who had accidents in 1917 were all labourers.
Of the ten women who had 15 accidents in 1918, only two were not labourers. One was a conductor again, and the other was a messroom cook – more in line with expectations of women’s roles at the time. By 1919 though, the flash in the pan of women’s employment on the Cardiff Railway was coming to an end. Only four women employed by the Cardiff Railway had accidents, and they were all labourers.
Female dock labour
Labour covers a multitude of sins, however. Where were these women working? To a woman, it was the dock foreshore. I’m not totally certain what this term covers, but from the contextual information in the accident records, it looks like it was dockside. I’m also not sure how common it was to employ women as dock labourers. Newhaven port was certainly doing so in 1918. However, Guy Collender’s research into the Port of London Authority hasn’t found any women dock labourers there – though women did take on clerical roles, to the tune of over 300 temporary women clerks by 31 March 1917.
Courtesy Britain from Above.
For whatever reason, things seemed to have been different in Cardiff. (When we have data for other docks and railway companies, it would be fascinating to compare them, to see if this was unique to the Cardiff Railway.) The women were employed around Queen Alexandra or Bute docks. Those women employed as labourers were doing physically demanding work. Most accidents seem to have resulted from discharging ballast from wagons, or getting up and down from wagons. The injuries sustained were relatively minor – bruises or small cuts, though of course in the pre-penicillin age, a cut could be lethal.
Post-war ‘normal service’
In addition to the women who feature in the Cardiff Railway’s accident records, a surface look at the National Union of Railwaymen’s membership registers shows at least 27 Cardiff Railway women joining the union between July and November 1917. However, each of them leaves the Union – and likely the railway industry – in either June 1918 or 1919.
So, in the accident register for 1920, only two women appear: another conductor, and an office cleaner, Mrs BM Taylor. Taylor went on to have another accident in 1921, the only one recorded involving a woman for the whole of 1921. Presumably with the return of service personnel from the war, men resumed their old jobs, squeezing women out again.
Eline Arnold
One wartime railwaywoman with the Cardiff Railway was Eline Arnold. Unusually, she had three accidents, all at Bute Docks in 1918. As well as being able to see these accidents as things which happened to individuals, she offers us a helpful look at multiple accidents.
Eline was born in Bristol, in 1888. She married Percy in the years before the 1911 Census, when they were living at 17 Edward Street in Merthyr Tydfil. Both were in paid employment, in the laundry business – he a laundry engineer’s assistant, she a laundry forewoman. Might this have been how they met? Their daughter, Phyllis, was born in Dowlais in 1913.
We know from Eline’s National Union of Railwaymen membership record that she joined Cardiff No. 5 branch on 21 July 1917. This must have been quite a challenge, with a four-year old to care for between two working parents. Who looked after Phyllis whilst both parents were at work?
Eline’s accidents
Eline’s first recorded accident was on 4 April 1918, when she fell out of a wagon whilst discharging ballast, and injured her back. She was off work for six days – too short a period to qualify for compensation under the Workmen’s Compensation Act. On 10 July 1918, she was pulling a lever – perhaps a brake lever? – when she strained her arm and side. She doesn’t appear to have left work though. And finally, on 11 September 1918, she fell whilst walking to some wagons she was going to discharge. She struck her head on a solid object, but again, doesn’t seem to go off work. So – three relatively minor incidents, but which capture a little of the challenges faced by dock workers and railway women and men.
According to Eline’s membership record, she remained in the Union until June 1919, when she probably left railway service. By 1921 she and her family were living at 20 Madras Street in Cardiff. Eline was listed as occupied in ‘home duties’, whilst Percy was still in the laundry business. It seems that Eline’s time on the railway was brief – but full of incident. How typical this was of Welsh wartime railwaywomen’s experiences is hard to say – but we might be able to assess this by building up life and service histories for the women appearing in our next dataset.
Whilst the First World War was an exceptional period, it’s useful in the ways it makes railwaywomen more easily visible to us – including through their accidents. As we seek to uncover railway workers of the past during the Railway 200 year it’s a valuable reminder of how much we can uncover through unconventional sources.