This week I finally completed my new book and sent it off to Pen & Sword publishers: Female Railway Workers in World War II. It’s always such a relief to draw a line under a project and say no more. Now I have to hold my breath and see how it fares on its journey.
Goods workers at Bristol
This book draws upon a vast collection of oral history interviews with railway workers, carried out around fifteen years ago by the Friends of the National Railway Museum. A small number of these interviews featured women workers talking about their wartime experiences on the railways. I felt that the collection was a valuable resource, little used, and was determined to shine a light on it.
During the Second World War many thousands of the men working on the railways in Britain were called up for military service, and many thousands of women were recruited to replace them, to keep this vital service running. There had of course been women already working in some areas of the railway, such as in clerical, cleaning and catering jobs, although before the war even most of those jobs were carried out by men. But in wartime many women were employed in the kind of work which was completely new to females, working as porters and guards, on the permanent way and in maintenance and workshop operations.
Many were working in ‘men’s jobs’, or working with men for the first time, and these interviews offer tantalising glimpses of conditions, sometimes under great danger. What was it about railway work that attracted them? It’s fascinating to contrast their voices with the way they were portrayed in official publicity campaigns and in the light of attitudes to women working in the 1940s, when the press insisted on referring to them as decorative objects. These women talk about their difficulties in a workplace not designed for women – no toilets for example, the attitudes of their families, what they thought about American GIs and Italian POWs, how they coped with swearing and troublesome colleagues, rules about stockings, about devastating air raids and being thrust into tough responsibilities and prove themselves for the first time. Sadly however none of them were allowed jobs on the footplate, a step too far.
I hope that the book will serve as a tribute to their hard work and their contribution in keeping the railways going in wartime.
Susan Major 