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Abstract
During the Great War public transport in London was put under extreme pressure. Services suffered from staff and material shortages, fuel rationing, and requisitioning. Despite this, over 300 million more passengers travelled in 1918 than in 1913. The Metropolitan Police was forced to relax rules governing passenger safety on trams and buses, ‘straphanging’ became endemic, and trains were crowded ‘almost to danger point’. This article examines how the impact of the First World War on London's public transport represented both an ‘interlude’ and a permanent discontinuity. While the female transport worker was the personification of wartime exceptionalism, the rise of the female commuter and the entrenching of the ‘rush hour’ as part of the commute remain even today as a more permanent legacy of the Great War.
Notes on Contributor
Simon T. Abernethy completed his PhD in 2016 on the subject of ‘Class, gender, and commuting, 1880 – 1940’ at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and has published several pieces on the social and cultural history of public transport.
Notes
1 E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1921), 62.
2 B. Supple, ‘War Economies’, in J. Winter, The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2, The State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 304, 308.
3 The National Archives, Report of a Meeting in Room 461, Hotel Metropole, on 16 May 1918, Ministry of Munitions, MUN4/4385, 4.
4 A. Rotondaro, Women at Work on London's Public Transport, 1905–1978 (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 38.
5 Great Eastern Railway Magazine, 1914, 299.
6 A. Gregory, ‘Railway Stations: Gateways and Termini’ in Capital Cities at War: London, Paris, Berlin, vol. 2, A Cultural History, ed. by J. Winter and J. Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 51.
7 J. White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), 133, 134, 181.
8 I. Castle, London 1914–17: The Zeppelin Menace (Oxford: Osprey, 2008), 9.
9 White, Zeppelin Nights, 133, 217.
10 E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, 481; Parliamentary Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area) together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence, and appendices (London: HMSO, 1919), 420.
11 I. Castle, London 1917–18: The Bomber Blitz (Oxford: Osprey, 2008), 49.
12 A. Gregory, ‘To the Jerusalem Express: Wartime Commuters and Anti-semitism’ in The Railways and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble, ed. by M. Beaumont and M. Freeman (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 184.
13 T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century to 1970 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 192.
14 S. T. Abernethy, ‘Opening Up the Suburbs: Workmen's Trains in London 1860–1914’, Urban History, 42 (2015), 70–89.
15 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 419.
16 Women in industry. Report of the War Cabinet Committee on women in industry: appendices, summaries of evidence, &C (London: HMSO, 1919) [Cmd.167], 139.
17 The LCC believed 63 stations had closed. Only fourteen reopened in 1919, the war providing a reason to permanently close stations that suffered badly from road competition, though some later reopened under public pressure. C. F. Dendy Marshall, A History of the Southern Railway (London: Ian Allan, 1968), 395; Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 391.
18 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 419.
19 Women were already employed in such roles in Glasgow, Sheffield, and Birmingham, where they were considered ‘satisfactory’ but where the trams carried fewer passengers. The Times, 21 October 1915, 7.
20 Rotondaro, Women at Work, 30.
21 Exclusive of the small number of women employed before the war. Women in industry. Appendices, 139.
22 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 419.
23 The Times, 1 January 1919, 11.
24 The Times, 3 January 1919, 9.
25 The Times, 14 September 1917, 9; Rotondaro, Women at Work, 31.
26 The Times, 21 September 1917, 12.
27 Women in Industry. Appendices, 132.
28 Ibid., 139, 141.
29 Ibid., 139.
30 H.C. Women in Industry. Report of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry (London, HMSO, 1919) [Cmd.135], 90.
31 Women in Industry. Appendices, 139.
32 Gregory, ‘Railway Stations: Gateways and Termini’, 36.
33 Women in Industry. Appendices, 139.
34 Rotondaro, Women at Work, 30.
35 Women in Industry. Appendices, 141.
36 A. Prost, ‘Workers’ in The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. 2, The State, ed. by J. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 331, 335, 339, 355; The Times, 28 August 1918, 9.
37 Women in Industry. Report, 144.
38 The Times, 28 August 1918, 9.
39 The Times, 16 August 1918, 3.
40 The Times, 19 August 1918, 3.
41 The Times, 20 August 1918, 7.
42 The Times, 21 August 1918, 7.
43 The Times, 22 August 1918, 6.
44 The Times, 23 August 1918, 6; The Times, 24 August 1918, 3.
45 The Times, 24 August 1918, 3.
46 The Times, 26 August 1918, 3.
47 The Times, 27 August 1918, 6.
48 The Times, 30 August 1918, 8.
49 H. Wojtczak, Railway Women: Exploitation, Betrayal and Triumph in the Workplace (Hastings: The Hastings Press, 2005), 90.
50 Women in Industry. Appendices, 141.
51 Rotondaro, Women at Work, 41.
52 The Times, 2 December 1920, 11.
53 Rotondaro, Women at Work, 51.
54 S. Taylor, The Moving Metropolis: A History of London's Transport since 1800 (London: Laurence King, 2001), 158–174.
55 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), vii.
56 Based on figures for local railways, the suburban traffic of the trunk railways, tramways, and omnibuses. Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 287.
57 Gregory, ‘To the Jerusalem Express’, 178.
58 London, Midland & Scottish Railway, Handbook of Statistics 1929–1930 (London: London, Midland & Scottish Railway, 1930), 18.
59 Parliamentary Papers, 1922, House of Commons debates, vol. 155, column 2326.
60 See also Anna Maguire, ‘Looking for Home: New Zealand Soldiers Visiting London during the First World War’, The London Journal 41: 3 (2016), doi:10.1080/03058034.2016.1209343; Gregory, ‘To the Jerusalem Express’, 183, 184.
61 Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, 135.
62 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 288.
63 TNA, Minutes of Meeting Held in Colonel Wedgwood's Office 22 June 1916–Transit Facilities for Munitions Workers, Woolwich, MUN 4/4385, 1.
64 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), The traffic problem of the Underground. 15th January 1918, ACC/1297/UER/04/073, 9.
65 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 123, 167, 390, 405, 408, 419.
66 Ibid., 26, 28, 29.
67 See J. Lawrence, ‘Material pressures on the middle classes’ in Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914 – 1919, vol. 1 ed. by J. Winter and J. Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
68 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), vii.
69 The first British use of the term ‘rush hour’ (originally an Americanism) is listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as in the Westminster Gazette of 1898 which refers to the ‘rush hours’. The term was used only occasionally before the Great War, becoming a common term thereafter. Oxford English Dictionary, <accessed at http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/169041?redirectedFrom=rush+hour&on07/04/15>.
70 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 29.
71 The Times, 1 September 1921, 7.
72 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), xiv.
73 LMA, The Traffic Problem of the Underground, 8.
74 The Times, 14 August 1920, p.7.
75 The London & North Eastern Railway retained second class on certain services until 1938 as it did not issue third-class season tickets in these areas, while the Southern Railway offered second-class on its boat train services.
76 C. E. Lee, Passenger Class Distinctions (London: The Railway Gazette, 1946), 70. This excluded services which began or ended their journeys outside the London Passenger Transport Board area.
77 B. Schmucki, ‘“If I Walked on my Own at Night I Stuck to Well Lit Areas.” Gendered spaces and urban transport in 20th century Britain’, Research in Transportation Economics, 34 (2012), 76.
78 Select Committee on Transport (Metropolitan Area), 289.
79 Schmucki, ‘If I Walked on my Own at Night’, 75; S. T. Abernethy, Class, gender, and commuting in Greater London 1880–1940 (Cambridge: unpublished PhD thesis, 2015), 108.
80 M. Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–2000: Perfect Pleasures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 146.
81 The Times, 17 November 1926, 11.
82 The Times, 16 February 1926, 9.