Perhaps surprisingly, the question of literacy doesn’t seem to come up in the worker accident reports too frequently. It appears as though in most cases railway staff had at least a functional level of reading. Presumably their level was more than just functional, too, given the key document employees were reading, so far as the […]
Archive | March, 2019
Benjamin Emery – a family mystery solved!
We’re really pleased to be able to feature this guest post from Yvonne Kerry. In the course of researching her family history she came across our project – with a useful conclusion for her search! What makes this doubly-pleasing is that Yvonne works in the railway industry today – a family line, perhaps. We’re always […]
Getting more than your fingers burnt
We’ve featured a burns case in the past – in that instance, it was electrical burns. But often lumped together with burns are scalds, something we’ve not discussed until now. As you might expect, working around steam locos exposed some staff to hot steam. There are relatively few of these cases in our database, though […]
Accidents and the ordinary (railway)women of the past
March is Women’s History Month – and so an ideal opportunity for us to return to the women who have so far appeared in our project. This is something we’ve blogged about before, most recently here, including noting a relative absence of women in the cases formally investigated by the state – only 3 cases […]
