An engrossing read

"That's all they really think about you. Not 'can she do the job?' And if you are 'shaggable,' then they think that you are probably not much good at the job" stated platform worker Debbie Hanson bluntly when interviewed by Helena Wojtczak in 2003.

Women had a hard time trying to establish themselves as workers within the rail industry.

It has been a long track since the early days when, "in 1717, Lady Jane Clavering took over a wooden waggonway in in North East England on which chaldrons of coal were pulled by horses," to the present day, when "women drive Eurostar trains under the Channel."

From facing "appalling exploitation by the railway companies, paying women abysmally low rates of pay," to anti-women agitation and tragic and avoidable loss of life.

Some obstacles, as the early 1900s debates of semantics within the NUR, were just farcical.

A seemingly impossible conundrum developed as to whether women, not being, in the strictest sense of the word, railwaymen, could be recruited on the basis that the rulebook stated, "any person employed on any railway shall be eligible for membership."

In another instance, not even a century ago, "a woman crossing keeper was not even trusted to operate her gates when the royal train was due to pass through and had to be replaced temporarily by a man."

When, in 1979, Anne Winter rang Wimbledon BR office asking "if it was possible for a woman to be a train driver," all she heard was "hysterical laughter."

Six months later, however, she "passed out as a driver's assistant, or 'secondman'." Only such tenacity could win the day.

Wojtczak has a rare talent which combines rigorous academic research with an immense gift for storytelling.

"Pig stealing, murder, a shipwreck, examples of cross-dressing and some gruesome fatalities" are neatly interwoven with press reports, statistics, testimony and, crucially, a meticulous analysis of policies, individual attitudes and public opinion.

Unique photographs, cartoons, newspaper cut-outs and comprehensive statistics elegantly support the text.

The volume can be randomly opened on any page where an engrossing read invariably awaits.

MICHAL BONCZA