A Brief History of Ladies Only Carriages

A Ladies Only sign from the National Railway Museum collection

There has been a remarkable flurry of interest in women, safety, and the railway this summer. Recent revelations from the British Transport Police that sexual offenses were up 21% for the 2013-2014 period was dredged back up to provide the underpinning for discussions and opinion pieces on sexual harassment and safety on the Underground, the railways, and public transport in general. The debate reached a peak with Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that he would consider introducing Ladies Only carriages if elected, possibly responding to a demand created by the coverage of Ladies Only compartments on Indian railways in the BBC’s recent World’s Busiest Railway.

Given the public interest surrounding the subject, it seems apt to consider why Ladies Only carriages and compartments vanished from Britain’s railways. Simon Abernathy has already offered up an excellent study of the problems of reintroduction. This blog is covers why they vanished from the lines in the first place.

A feature of British railways right from the start, by the 1850s South Eastern already had a rule stating that ‘A carriage is always reserved for ladies if required’. By 1900 most companies pre-grouping were reserving a compartment on a three or four coach train for Ladies Only, and longer trains could feature an entire carriage for Ladies Only, situated next to the Guard Van for security. All companies, it seems, also offered a service on request, where female passengers could ask a guard to designate a compartment Ladies Only. South Railways Magazine featured a charming story from 1929 where a male passenger took a woman’s seat by dumping her bag out of it whilst she left to buy a newspaper. When challenged, by both passenger and guard to relinquish the seat he refused with ‘Unwritten law be hanged. I am here and here I stay’. The guard, looking around and seeing the other three passengers were ladies, left and then returned with a paper sign that he hung on the window reading “For Ladies Only”. The male passenger, to a ‘murmur of approval’ from the crowd on the platform, was forced to vacate. Ladies Only was not the only by-request service offered by the companies. London, Chatham and Dover, for instance, kept a supply of cushions and blankets that could be reserved by female passengers.

From the start, however, Ladies Only was beset by problems. The chief among these was that women seemed reluctant to use them. A Board of Trade inquiry found that, in 1887, the vast majority of the services were underused. Great Western informed the inquiry that it had set aside 1060 seats for women but only 248 had been taken up, whereas over 5000 women had made use of the smoking carriages instead. ‘The average women does not greatly care for these reserved compartments’ mused the Railway Gazette in 1917. Popular with some women travelling alone and mothers or nurses with children, Ladies Only compartments and carriages meant a separation for those women travelling with menfolk or those who wanted to smoke en-route.

The closed compartment - the source of so much railway anxiety

They also did not prevent the problems of sexual harassment and violence. Ladies Only carriages reached centre-stage during periods of moral panic, as David Turner has pointed out, usually focused on famous outrages on the railways. The murder of the 55 year old war-time nurse Florence Nightingale Shore in 1920, on a trip to the south coast, was particularly shocking. Discovered in third-class compartment unconscious and bloodied, Ms Shore’s attacker was never caught, having slipped off the train at Bexhill without being seen. A decorated nurse, the press was up in arms and questions were asked in Parliament. There had been, though, the Minister of Transport revealed, a Ladies Only carriage. Ms Shore had simply not availed herself of it. Even using the Ladies Only was not a sure-fire way of avoiding harassment. The general excitement surrounding the introduction of the mini-skirt saw many drivers on the Great Eastern develop a scheme where they pulled the train into the station so as the Ladies Only carriage was raised up from the platform. This allowed the “helpful” guards to alight and lift the young ladies into the carriage. ‘Once the skirt became established fashion attire, the novelty soon wore off and the ladies were left alone’ recalled one driver ‘but it was a bit of innocent fun while it lasted. Like all good pranks, it lost its humour if you didn’t know when to stop’.

Just as Simon has observed that the ‘travel in a ladies-only carriage or you deserve what you get’ attitude lingers around such carriages, so too did the stigma of the Ladies Only carriage stick to the women who used it. Kim Stevenson, in her work on women’s safety on the Victorian railways, discusses an 1879 magazine article that argued that at least one fifth of indecent assault cases (which for the Victorians covered everything from sexual harassment to rape) were fictitious or overblown, and were attempts to entrap men for blackmail purposes. Travel outside of the Ladies Own, it essentially argued, and the women you encountered were morally suspect. Yet travelling in the carriages brought its own set of labels. Railway Gazette, a publication we should remember written by and aimed at a largely male readership, depicted those who used them as ‘nervous women of all ages and mothers of innumerable babies’. Travel inside the Ladies Own, in contrast, and you were a frail and nervous woman.

'The First "Ladies Only" Compartment'

 William Heath Robinson 1935

Railway Gazette, however, also raised a serious point – writing in 1917 they observed that there was, simply, no point in Ladies Own. The demands of war work, and the influx of women into the transport system during working hours, meant labelling only one carriage in three or four Ladies Only was a futile effort. Demand was outstripping supply. By the 1970s, when Ladies Only carriages were being pulled out of service, they were already seen as an anachronism. A relic of the past. In 1979 Felicity Green, the Managing Director of Vidal Sassoon, wrote into The Times and complained about sexual discrimination on-board British Airways. There had been about one hundred male passengers, Green wrote, but only two female. Her issue was not the disparity, however, but that BA had segregated her and the other women in one part of the plane. ‘Why was I denied the stimulus of talking my way across the Atlantic with any member of the opposite sex, many of whom, in this case, I happen to know personally?’ she asked. In 1917 the Railway Gazette had argued that barring women from the smoking carriages would upset men ‘torn between the desire for tobacco and female society’. By 1979 women’s voices appeared more stridently in favour of not being excluded from general society in public transport. ‘I’m not a sex maniac, merely an integrated member of the travelling public who wishes to remain so. More so’ Green concluded. Ladies Only floundered as sexual discrimination legislation came in in the 1970s, many commentators in newspapers and magazines arguing (erroneously) that the acts would require companies to establish Men Only carriages as well. By 1977 British Railways were stripping their signs from carriages across the country.

By the 1980s Ladies Only carriages were being decried as relics of the forgotten past already. ‘Maud Cook can remember when there were carriages for women only on British trains’ ran a Times article in 1982. Susan Marling’s piece, actually a supportive one about Cook’s efforts to establish Ladies Only buses in London, still couldn’t resist a dig at Ladies Only waiting rooms with their ‘slight smell of musty cats’. The cat, long associated with the socially-awkward spinster in comedy culture, harked back to the nervous women of the 1917 piece.

This piece has eschewed a discussion of economic reasons for social and cultural ones. This is not a sin of omission– ongoing changes in British society did away with the Ladies Only carriages much more effectively than the beleaguered accountants at British Railways could have done. The move from close compartment (think Hogwarts Express for the uninitiated) to the open carriage we know today was thought by many men and women at the time to have eliminated the need for protection. Men wouldn't harass women in public, the argument went, and this idea helped govern BR policy. Changing attitudes towards women, and the changing place of women in society, helped reshape rail travel. Yet this is not a simple Whiggish story of liberal progress writ-large. From a historical perspective such an attitude solidifies the image of women as passengers - passive and removed from the work of the railways they did so much to enhance. Socially, it excludes questions of class and social background. Changes were opposed, and some women benefitted more than others from the abandonment of Ladies Own. Green herself admitted that in her opinion ‘the exclusive band of females lucky enough to travel Concorde are really not the same species as those who object to the demise of “ladies own”’, suggestive, in 1979, of attitudes in the decade to come. Some women clearly benefitted from Ladies Only, whilst others did not use the service at all, yet across the board social attitudes were changing. Not necessarily all together, nor by any means in the same direction, but by the 1970s and 1980s Ladies Only was, clearly, a musty piece of the past for many British women. The problems faced by female commuters and travellers today demand answers. But they are not, as this piece has tried to show, that different from those faced by women in the past. Problems that, between the 1840s and 1970s, Ladies Only failed to solve.If any further proof is needed, see the reverse image of the Ladies Only sign that started this blog below:

Just for the Ladies: 

Inside the carriage and on the back of the Ladies Only sign? 

An advert for disinfectant

See what a jolly map I have - Ripper Street, the Metropolitan Police, and sensing Victorian London

I have a strange relationship with BBC Victorian grime-fest Ripper Street. 

On some levels it is decidedly odd. Given the vast array of Victorian crimes readily available through digitised newspapers and online resources such as the Old Bailey material, its insistence on working in criminal activities that appeal more to 21st century sensitivities can set my teeth on edge and my wife's (my reluctant viewing partner) eyes rolling. Sinister property-owning conspiracies and child-abductions did take place in the nineteenth century, of course, but are better pitched towards some sort of woolen-jumpered Scandinavian noir I feel sometimes.

Yet I cannot deny the research that, overall, is packed into Ripper Street. It has that most important characteristic of the successful period drama - the "feel" of the past. Streets are lovingly recreated, replete with grime and grim-faced Victorian paupers, and the insides of houses range from the sumptuous to the cobwebbed. I love the attempt at a Victorian patois from Matthew Macfadyen. I love the attention to the rattling soundscape of carriage on cobble. I love the (sadly underplayed in this current series) bible thumping evangelism of the bearded duty sergeant.

Despite Ripper Street treading the same East End streets as I have in my research, so far, over two and a half series, I've managed to keep the series at an academic arms-length. Enjoy it without it intruding into my critical thoughts. Until this latest episode.

Featuring an extensive prowl through the streets connected to the original Whitechapel Murders, a revelation of the episode (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here) hinged around the production of a map of the area.

So far I had managed to avoid the map hanging in the Station office, sliding my eyes away from it. But this one was, quite literally, thrust under my nose as a viewer and, I think, demands attention.

Edmund Reid's creepy scrap map. Not for kids.

Online Ripper nutcases (the professional term I'm sure, having met some) were quick to point out that some of the pictures of victims/suspects are pinned in the wrong places. This post is not about that. Nor is it a criticism of Ripper Street. This is about the idea of Victorian police officers and the mapping out of space in London.

I've only come across one "Police map" in my time in the archives. Charles Booth, my erudite guide to late Victorian London, came across one during his surveys. Inspector Wyborn of Southwark (M) Division had a copy of the Booth map, colour coded for poverty, hanging on his wall. Booth, chuffed, made a special note of it before the interview commenced. There is no other mention of a map in any of the other police interviews in the Life and Labour notebook collection. I've already, at Urban History just gone, mused on why Wyborn might have one, especially as he informed Booth that 'there has been very little change [in the district] in the last ten years'. Southwark was one of the rougher postings for a Metropolitan officer, but no worse than parts of the East End or the notorious Clapham and Lambeth areas. It may have been a strategic document, used for pointing out large patterns of policing as the wall map in Ripper Street's H Division office is used, or may simply have been a statement of admiration for Booth and his work. 

On the street, however, a more sensory mapping would have taken place. There are repeated sections in the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels where the grizzled Police Captain Vimes can, by working his paper-thin soles, tell where he is in the city by the feel of the cobbles beneath. Fanciful, maybe, but I think the sensory history of working in the Victorian city demands more attention. 

Sight:

With recent studies of vision in the city, both during the day and the night, much of the broad strokes of visual policing has been covered. Fixed-point policing, so established that in his Dictionary of London Charles Dickens's son could list the places a police officer could be found on duty throughout the day, fixed lines of vision throughout the metropolis. Focused on key points, such as Lambeth's notorious New Cut or Bethnal Green Road, the presence of a police officer served a dual purpose - he was there to see and to be seen. A physical imposition on the landscape of the Victorian city.

Sound: 

Perhaps the most ubiquitous, and maybe the most spine-tingling, of sensory landscapes would have been the police whistle. The high pitched rasping of the tin whistle would, most likely, have signaled an officer in trouble. It was a precaution that tied in with fixed-point policing. Men were able to summon help as quickly as possible, officers running in from various points. The records of assaults on Police Officers in the Old Bailey records show that it was an imperfect system. PC Young, attacked in Bethnal Green in 1871, was only able to summon help when he handed his rattle (precursor to whistles) to a bystander.

By the early 1900s police phone boxes were beginning to be sited around the capital. These could be used to call the station for help but also, with their flashing light on top, could be used to summon officers if the station needed to speak to them. Again, they reinforced the patrolling culture of the Metropolitan Police, further tying them to moving between fixed points.

Taste:

One of the elements that united all police testimony in Booth's Life and Labour was an insistence that they did not take tipple from publicans. Throughout the Victorian period police forces struggled with drunkenness among their officers, with many fired for inability to stay sober on duty. Increasingly, forces such as the Metropolitan cracked down on instances of officers taking brides or payments from publicans. Inspector Barker, in Bethnal Green, would not be pushed on the issue. Even when Booth told him that he had encountered police in other divisions that took money from publicans in exchange for looking the other way, 'he still persisted in saying he knew nothing of it'.

Officers would have been more than aware of public houses, nexus points for trouble and places of social gathering. The attackers of PC Young, for example, were quickly swept up from a nearby public house where, in their blood-spattered clothing, they were drinking and joking about the 'bloody lark' they had had with a police officer. With not just public houses but coffee stalls, street sellers, and other food and drink vendors throughout the streets of London, it is worth considering the extent to which a landscape was created for Police officers by the smells and tastes of these ephemeral markets.

Fear: 

Ripper Street has traded off the terror of Whitechapel, the roughest of the rough, in casting its premise. Yet the area was, particularly before the events of 1888, no more violent or dangerous than others. Lambeth, south of the river, was for much of the 1900s and 1910s seen as a rough posting for junior officers. Likewise the constellation of railway labourers and slum housing around Clapham Junction was a notoriously tough beat. Clive Emsley, in his work on the British Bobby, has argued that many an urban beat before 1914 needed a 'tough man to walk it'. This suggests that, in addition to the sensory mapping out of their subdivisions and beats, Police Officers may have been engaged in mapping their emotions and experiences onto the streets.

What jumps out from even the most casual perusal of the Booth notebooks is a sense of foreboding regarding some streets. Several times officers informed him that their men did not venture into certain courts or streets. The majority of these, such as the Nichol Slum eventually replaced by the LCC and well-studied by Sarah Wise, were areas where the sensory strategies of the Metropolitan Police did not work. Lines of sight were obscured, sounds blocked by high walls or narrow passages. This was further exacerbated when officers ventured into homes. From the painstaking description of  what he found to be a clearly alien immigrant lodging house he gave at the trial of Israel Lipski in 1887 Sergeant Bitten may as well have been on the moon.

Too rarely are the histories of senses and emotions combined, especially with regards to the Police who are too often studied as automaton from an institutional perspective. Yet these men, urban wanderers, were daily engaged in mapping out the city around them. They just didn't rely on pen and paper to do it.

Teaching and the Teaching Excellence Framework

Its a humid low to mid twenties at the moment and my infant son is struggling to feed from the breast. He is hungry, pursing his little lips and reaching up to his mother, but something stops him. He sucks once or twice and then draws back. And tries again. And again. He gets frustrated, little arms waving and skin turning redder and redder as he shakes with emotion. His mother, needless to say, finds it hard. The midwives and breast-feeding experts fret. She's doing everything right. Position, flow, comfort - all are carefully and correctly positioned. He is healthy, alert, and not in any pain. But he won't take up the milk. He has to have the bottle. He struggles with the new sensation required in breastfeeding.

Watching him, watching them both, I worry too.

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This last week, in between these feeding issues, I've been thinking about the Government's proposed Teaching Excellence Framework. How it would work. How it might come together. I don't hate the idea, per se, but I do have some issues that I'd like to give an airing.

I'm a great teacher. That might sound arrogant to say, but it has been, over the four years of PhD and one year in Post-Doctoral Limbo, the one thing that I have been sure of. I struggle with writing, with research, with networking, with, really, pretty much every aspect of academic life. But teaching is where I feel comfortable. I wasn't always like that, of course, and at the start I was a quivering wreck of nerves. I put it down to experience. A rough calculation puts me, by my reckoning, at over 500 contact hours of seminar teaching. Students enjoy my classes. I coax quieter students to talk, louder students to calm down, and somehow we always manage to muddle through to an end point where students have a better mark, and a better understanding of how they got there, than they did before. On the way, I sincerely hope, we have some fun, and I gain experience and confidence in my abilities. It is this experience that makes me worry about the TEF.

My concern here is that in reaching out to student worries about teaching in Universities, both the Government and the external assessment body it sees assessing TEF will miss the point. One of the most widely acknowledged problems within the Humanities teaching - that a large proportion of teaching is undertaken by doctoral and post-doctoral students with little or no official connection to the University, at least in any sense that could be covered by TEF's spiritual inspiration REF.

There are, in my experience, three key problems that exist under the current system that would complicate any meaningful attempt to gauge student satisfaction and value for money through TEF.

1. Students are unreliable reviewers of modules.

I'll fight for students until my dying breath but, lets face it, we with teaching experience in Higher Education know that they are not always the most reliable sources of information when it comes to reflective criticism of courses and modules. At York students are asked to grade different aspects of each module Over the years at York I have taught a number of first and second year historiography and skills modules. There are, common I think across many Departments, problems with such modules. Skills are often taught in abstract, devoid of historical content or appreciation of a field, and under such circumstances one can sympathise with students asked to sit through a two hour seminar on footnoting.

Over the years I've got better at teaching these, able to navigate the quagmires of glazed expressions and keep the balance of skills and primary sources alive. But it remains difficult, and would continue to feed into any TEF assessment in a profoundly negative way. Over the past two years there have been a number of studies revealing that students still cling to an image of the middle-aged, white, male, Professor, and that female academics tend to come off worse in feedback regardless of content or performance in the actual lectures.At York this year we had to take disciplinary action over abuse posted online, on Twitter and other social media outlets, over the "boring" content of some medieval lectures.  PhD students have little direct disciplinary support in this regard. They are in a similar position - often semi-invisible in institutions from a teaching perspective. They are liked by students but, often, not necessarily respected in the way senior colleagues are. This disparity of review feeds into my second concern:

2. Some topics will suffer more than others.

At Sheffield I shared my office hour with Liz Goodwin this year. She's finishing off her PhD and is definitely someone to watch. She works on the early modern period but, that semester, was teaching early medieval history. I enjoyed having my lunch and hearing about the Arab Conquests and the collapse of Visigothic Spain. Some of her students? Not so much. I always say in interviews that modern British history is, from a teaching perspective, a battle against "been there, done that" syndrome. You're constantly battling against half-remembered A-Level or GCSE boredom. For my medieval and early modern colleagues, the opposite is true. PhD students tend to be roped into the large first year survey courses. Pre-1700 usually starts strong. After being largely sidelined by the history curriculum at schools before A-Level options, students are eager to dip their toes in unfamiliar waters. The problem is, they don't always like the temperature.

"Too many Constantines and Goths and Monks" my students grumbled one morning when I asked them about the other module they were taking. My wife, the only person to have taught on both pre and post 1650 survey courses at York, had students who agreed. Sources were too obtuse, the reading too hard, the focus too broad. By assessment time at the end of term, they have clustered around the warm familiarity of the twentieth-century dictators and, in contrast, dread the cold realms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. Some of this is the challenge of teaching at a University level, exciting and surprising as well as teeth-gnashingly frustrating, but this would be chaos in an externally assessed system. PhD and Post-Doc tutors rarely have much control over what they teach but would, I fear, be tarred with the reviewing brush for concerns beyond their control.

3. PhD and Post-Doc Tutors get nothing.

I enjoyed, this week, reading Rachel Moss' piece on trigger warnings in History Today. Particularly the part about the box of tissues in the office. This year, one office hour, Liz and I were confronted by one of our shared students. She had not been doing as well as she could have been, we had both prior to that day, discussed her work and our concerns. However that lunchtime she came in, sat down in the swivel chair, and burst into tears. And suddenly everything came out. Her problems with her housemates. Her homesickness. Her confusion over her consistently stuck grades. Her housemate's suicide attempt the night before the essay deadline. Liz and I ended up shuttling other students who turned up with more banal concerns out of the office and tag-teaming her until we could finally sit down, the three of us, and properly talk through her issues. She ate up the whole office hour for both of us. But it was worth it. In the following weeks she was a whole new person. Feeling more supported she became more vocal in seminars, more confident in her written work, and generally more upbeat about the whole University experience. In the last week of semester she stopped by the office to thank us both. When she left Liz turned to me and said that she thought we'd helped her turn a corner. I was inclined to agree, and it is one of the teaching moments that, whilst not in the seminar room, will stay with me forever.

How this would fit into an assessment I'm not sure. Is it a contact hour? Skills support?

Jo Johnson, Universities and Science Minister behind the proposed TEF, has said:

Students are telling us in surveys that they know they would do better by investing more time in their studies.

 True, but how can such interactions be judged? For better or worse PhD and Post-Doc tutors are the workhorses of Humanities teaching, concentrated in that critical first year when students are prone to homesickness, course fatigue, or culture shock amongst others. I cannot even begin to imagine the complexity that a fair assessment criteria would need to judge their contribution to teaching in Departments across the county. And neither, sadly, can I imagine the Government coming to grips with such a criteria. In the end, PhD and Post-Doc tutors will always be the poor relations in such a system.

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My little boy is doing alright. He's healthy. Just struggling with something new. My wife, I think like all new mothers, is worried about being labelled a "bad mother" for her failure to breast-feed. But, looking at him try again and again to settle with her, I can't believe that. Of course, I'm a partial observer. I have skin in the game, quite literally. But the situation is so complex, so charged with human emotion, and necessitating such careful arrangements and rearrangements of skills, that I fail to see how any outside assessor would be able to get a clearer picture.

London, Chatham and Dover, Travellers and Letters to the Editor c.1900

The Graphic, 1893

 

To say that the London, Chatham and Dover Railway had a poor reputation would be a little of an understatement. Despite having an enviable record for passenger safety, although not a perfect one as some railway historians have claimed, due to its adoption of Westinghouse Brakes and new signalling techniques, it was not a commuter favourite.

 

The London, Chatham and Dover Railway (henceforth LCDR) ran a series of lines, perhaps unsuprisingly given their name, down from London to the Kent coast. They also branched out across the eastern and central parts of South London, around Crystal Palace and Nunhead, and by the late 1860s had reached the Thames at Blackfriars and crossed to build Ludgate Hill station.

 

This positioned the LCDR as a primary provider for the growing commuter population south of the river but also put them in a prime position for capturing the continental traffic both to and from the port of Dover.

 

Given that this post is an early working piece the historigraphy of travelling is not complete here. Looking to my right reveals an enormous pile of books to climb. Instead, I want to address one significant voice on the topic - that of Wolfgang Schievelbusch.

 

I've long admired Schivelbusch's work, which takes a socio-cultural angle on various aspects of modern life. He's been most influential in the past when his work on night-time, the 1983 Disenchanted Light, is placed alongside Joachim Schlor's 1998 Nights in the Big City. But recently I've been dipping back into his The Railway Journey. Its a fantastic exploration of how the coming of the railways reshaped modern society, yet I do have some reflections on his discussion of the railway carriage and its effects that I want to discuss.

 

Much of my early research on this topic came from one of my favourite, and to my mind criminally underused sources, letters to the Editor of The Times. Now digitised and fully searchable, late nineteenth-century newspapers offer more and more titbits for the historian willing to comb them. I've used these multiple times (they are a great teaching resource too) but I was shocked by the extent of letters touching on the LCDR. Between 1870 and 1899 (when the line shifted to a joint working relationship with South Eastern Railway) no fewer than 79 entries in "letters to the Editor" touched on the subject. As a historian you are lucky if you get a dozen on any topic that isn't either enormously broad or a major national issue.

 

Almost all of these 79 entires, some of which contain multiple letters grouped due to similar content, were negative. 

'Why am I, and scores of others, to be constantly subjected to the annoyance and loss of time occasioned by the wretched unpunctuality, irregularity, and not infrequently, as was the case this morning, the failure of the train to put in an appearence at all?'

complained one letter, whose author chose to identify himself only as A Victim. (The Times,

4^th October 1871) 

 

Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey, has some interesting points to make about the experience of the railway carriage. His main observation is that they disjointed older forms of familiarity whilst traveling, spelling the death of conversation in transit, and also representing 'the total optical and acoustical isolation' of the passenger from the form of transport in comparison to older horse-drawn carriages or riding (Shivelbusch, 1986, 75-79). To some extent these are present in the complaints. Delayed at Rainham a Mr Abraham sent his son out of the carriage to investigate the cause of the delay - it was only by breaching the isolation of the carriage that they were able to discover the nature of the stoppage ahead. (The Times, 7th September 1878).

 

Yet other passengers seemed to expect a connection to the outside world. Schivelbusch speaks of the fear, particularly with the emergence of railway murders in the middle of the century, that isolation provoked. The comments of travellers on the LCDR speak of anxiety only when the established lines of connection failed and isolation became an unwelcome, and unexpected, reality. One Indignant Traveller had a distressing journey when his wife was taken ill in the carriage in 1898.

'Between Chatham and Hearne Hill her condition grew so alarming that, as we lived at a town which has a station on the main line, I decided to stop the train there by means of the communicator fixed up in the carriage. This I pulled according to the printed instructions...but the train did not even slacken'

Upon confronting the driver and guard at the terminus the angry passenger was shocked to discover that the cable had simply not alerted the apologetic operators at all.

 

Scattered throughout the letters pages across this thirty year period are complaints about inabilities to contact guards, about poorly enforced ticket distinctions, about the lack of warmer foot covers and blankets at LCDR stations for ongoing passengers, about the intrusion of rowdy Bank-Holidayers into carriages where quiet conversations were happening, and, chiefly, about the rattling discomfort provoked by the unwillingness of the LCDR to invest in bogies to provide proper suspension for their carriages.

 

It is, I think, important to given credence to these sources but also to read them against the grain. Schivelbusch sees the move towards carriages with compartments offset from a corridor that ran the length of the vehicle as inevitable. A consequence of the 'quiet and isolation, experienced as both pleasurable and frightening'. (Schivelbusch, 1986, 88). Yet whilst these letters support a mixed view of isolation, that could be both enjoyed and feared, they also point to an appreciation amongst passengers that they were never truly isolated from the outside world. The regular rhythm of station stops, the coming and going of fellow passengers, and the interactions with staff that could (or at least should in LCDR's case) have taken place at stations and en route, suggest a much more subtle experience than Schivelbusch suggests, one which only provoked reactions when it was punctuated by error or failure. As the only positive commenter in the selection of letters pointed out, it was not that bad most of the time. Even if the condition of carriages left a little to be desired, he wrote,

 

'I must bear testimony to the uniform civility and courtesy which is meted out to travellers on the London and Chatham line...while the line is deficient in many things, on no other system is more civility extended to the passengers than on this'. (The Times, 24th September 1895)

 

Experiences on the LCDR, it seems, were for passengers a balancing of missed connections and personal ones.

 







Fresh Beginnings

Hello and welcome!

This blog is going to stand as a record of my time as Research Fellow at the National Railway Museum, York, which should run 2015-2018.

Here I'll be discussing the wider interplay between transport history and social, cultural, and other forms of history, reflecting on how these impact my own work and on how these play out in wider academic and public history events.

My main research project, whilst here, is a history of South London 1870-1940. This project, which I have no doubt will bore readers to the core in the course of this blogging adventure, uses the railways as a way of understanding the changing landscape of the southern half of the world's biggest (at the time) city.

Other blogs about historical research, being an academic in a museum, and wider issues will undoubtedly follow.

My final plea is that this is an open space - if people have suggestions, research ideas, or just comments please feel free to contribute and comment below!

Oli Betts