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