This page is one of a series introducing railway staff who worked on the Isle of Wight’s railways before 1939. It’s a collaboration between the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and the Railway Work, Life & Death project. We’ve tried to share more about the social history of the Island’s railways in the past, via the people who kept them moving. Where we can we’ve looked at the individual and their wider working and family lives.
The workers featured were selected from staff who appear in the Railway Work, Life & Death project database of accidents to pre-1939 British and Irish railway employees. This worker is one of those featured in the leaflet produced collaboratively between the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and the Railway Work, Life & Death project, available at the Railway or as a PDF here. You can find the other staff in this series here.
We might perhaps be familiar with the idea that during the First and Second World Wars, Britain’s railways saw an influx of women workers. That was certainly the case – but it obscures the fact that plenty of women worked on the railways outside the war years. Elsie Knapp might have been a First World War recruit – but she remained with the railways long after war was over.
Elsie’s early life
Elsie Louisa James was born in Newport on 26 June 1889. Her father, Harry, was a mariner; he died between 1891 and 1898. This left Elsie’s mother, Amelia, with six children aged between 14 and a matter of months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she remarried, in 1898, to Harry Odell.
Elsie married Henry Knapp in Newport, towards the end of 1909. They are elusive in the 1911 Census – one possibility is Edward and Elsie Knapp, living in Westminster Place, Newport. It hasn’t proven possible to connect the pieces definitively here, unfortunately.
It appears Elsie and Henry didn’t have any children. Sadly Henry died in September 1917 at 5 East Street, Newport. That address was to prove helpful later.
Railway work
Elsie had joined the railway by 1916 – possibly earlier. We don’t have an employment record for her – the survival of railway staff records is fairly patchy at best. However, we do have her trade union membership record. Elsie joined the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) on 28 October 1916, as a member of its Ryde branch. She was working for the Isle of Wight Central Railway as a carriage cleaner.
Courtesy National Railway Museum.
As Julia Winterson has shown in her article in the Journal of Transport History, until the First World War, carriage cleaning was a largely male role. It was seen as hard, physical work, including the need to get on top of carriage roofs, and to work in sidings, potentially amongst moving trains. This had its dangers – as was evident in the 1913 accident at Saughton, near Edinburgh, which killed Williamina Gardiner and Robert Watt.
Necessity meant that more opportunities for women arose on the railways during the First World War. Some railway roles, deemed critical to keeping things moving, became reserved occupations – including drivers and firemen. But that still left plenty of roles from which men might be released to frontline service. Women sometimes filled those gaps – including as carriage cleaners. Presumably this offered Elsie her way into railway work.
Elsie in the Union
Elsie’s Union membership record shows that she transferred her branch affiliation on 7 July 1918 – alongside at least three other colleagues. We know from another Union record that by 1919 Elsie belonged to the Newport branch of the NUR, so it’s likely that this July 1918 date marks the transfer. It’s probably the point at which the Newport branch was formed.
The only other information we have from the Union membership record is that Elsie remained a member until December 1921. That was perhaps a little longer than many other women who joined railway service during the First World War – typically the vast majority who joined the NUR seem to have left by the end of 1919. No doubt this reflects the return of men to their pre-war roles.
Women’s work on the railways
Where does Elsie fit in terms of women’s employment on railways? Women had long been employed on Britain’s railways – likely from the outset. Typically this was in roles society and railway management deemed ‘appropriate’ for women: kitchen staff, hotel maids, cleaning roles, seamstresses in railway workshops, laundry work and the like. There were some other roles filled by women, too, which took them into more visible, more physically-demanding and even more dangerous roles.
As noted, there were some female carriage cleaners before the First World War. Often wives of track workers might work – sometimes formally, sometimes informally – as level crossing gatekeepers. There’s more here on how some women’s work as gatekeepers was and wasn’t acknowledged by the railway companies. Working as gatekeepers put them in amongst moving trains – sometimes with tragic results, as was the case with Ada Davies in 1922 (discussed here).
Courtesy Isle of Wight Steam Railway Photographic Archive.
There’s also no doubt that the First World War – and again at the Second World War – expanded opportunities for women’s employment on the railways. Some of the ways we’ve seen this in the Railway Work, Life & Death project has been via dock labour in south Wales, and the first British women track workers (the earliest of whom, Susan Longman, was based in Southampton). We’ve also recently uncovered more about some of Portsmouth’s First World War women carriage cleaners.
Women’s work on the Isle of Wight’s railways
For whatever reason, the Isle of Wight both fitted and bucked the trend of women’s railway employment. Men still dominated the paid work, but it seems there were opportunities for women that were more difficult to come by on the mainland. The most famous example would be station mistress Emily Merwood. She was in charge of Whippingham station from 1888 until around 1914 – best known for being the station serving Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s residence on the Island.
Emily wasn’t the only woman station master on the Island. Research by Isle of Wight Steam Railway volutneers Derek, Tony and Steve has identified station mistresses, as they were called, at Watchingwell (Mary Prouten, 1921 Census), Blackwater (Elizabeth Young, 1881 Census), Brading (Fanny Young, 1901 Census), and Alverstone (Fanny Young again, 1911 Census). In all cases, their husbands worked for the respective railway companies, so there was an ‘in’ of sorts. And it might be that – particularly distinct on the Island – most of the lines and stations were relatively lightly served by traffic, and serving relatively small places. In the thinking of the time, this might have made it easier for the companies and the travelling public to countenance a woman being in charge.
Derek, Tony and Steve’s research has also found women employed on the Isle of Wight’s railways before the First World War in a number of other roles – as level crossing keepers, a charwoman, a refreshment room manageress, a needlewoman and a waiting room attendant. After the First World War the number of women employed and the range of roles increased. Some worked in refreshment rooms (serving and as managers), some in clerical roles, some as gatekeepers and carriage cleaners, an office cleaner, a halt attendant and the station mistress at Watchingwell.
What’s missing in that is the First World War years. Some light is shed on that via the NUR membership records. They give us an additional 11 women previously not known to have worked on the Island’s railways, including another three station mistresses. Other roles included gatekeepers, ticket collectors, clerks and carriage cleaners.
Elsie’s 1919 accident
To return to Elsie Knapp, we first spotted her because she appeared in the Railway Work, Life & Death project data. When someone appears there, it generally means that something bad has happened to them, and they’ve had an accident. That was the case for Elsie – though fortunately it was a relatively minor incident and didn’t prevent her from continuing with the Isle of Wight Central Railway.
She appeared in the NUR’s details of support provided to members who’d had a non-fatal accident. On 29 January 1919, she sprained her ankle at work. She returned to duty on 10 March 1919. Whilst she was off, she received compensation of 19 shillings and two pence per week – around £220 in 2026.
Courtesy National Library of Scotland Maps.
And that’s all the detail! Sometimes it really is fragmentary, and poses more questions than it answers, but it’s valuable nonetheless. Without that record we wouldn’t have known about Elsie, or uncovered her story.
A 1921 puzzle
Particularly where we have these wartime references to railwaywomen, it’s instructive to see if we can trace them after the war. The 1921 Census is usually the first stopping point, and it can tell us how long railwaywomen’s engagement with paid railway employment lasted. More often than not, women were no longer working for the railway by 1921.
Elsie, however, threw up a rather different surprise! Initially we discovered Elsie L Knapp at a property in Wroxall. She was born in 1885 – not a perfect match with the information we had, but within the bounds of possibility. She was shown as widowed, and a carriage cleaner for the Isle of Wight Central Railway. So far, so good. She was listed at the property alongside the Russell family – husband and wife and three sons.
We didn’t have a connection between Elsie and the Russell family, but there might have been one. Or she might simply have been boarding with them. Admittedly, Wroxall wasn’t terribly convenient for work in Newport. It was on a railway line, but at that point operated by a different company. It would have been a rather circuitous route to work. The real spanner in the works came when we found the other entry for Elsie Knapp!
Which Elsie Knapp?
The second entry on the 1921 Census gave us Elsie Louisa Knapp, born in 1889, a carriage cleaner for the Isle of Wight Central Railway – all of the details tallied with our knowledge from other sources. Not only so, but she was living at 5 East Street, Newport. Rather more convenient for work in Newport, and the address at which her late husband had died.
Cementing the view that this was the correct Elsie Knapp, living with her were three people with the surname Odell. Her mother, Amelia, had remarried one Harry Odell in 1898. The Odells listed on the Census were Henry William, Emilia and their son Ernest. With a little understanding of naming conventions (Harry/ Henry; Amelia/ Emilia) It was all stacking up.
However! The transcription on FindMyPast reported Henry William as Elsie’s son-in-law, Emilia as her daughter and Ernest as her grandson. This is where it became important to see the original record. On it, Elsie (who made the return) had correctly recorded Henry as ‘father’ (actually step-father, in strict terms, but how lovely that she regarded him in this way), ‘Emilia’ as ‘wife’, and Ernest as ‘son’. The census enumerator had presumably disagreed, as they had ruled through these entries and converted them to son-in-law, daughter and grandson.
The clincher was the dating. Henry the ‘son-in-law’ was 78 years old, and Emilia the ‘daughter’ was 58. We knew enough about biology and chronology to appreciate that 31 year-old Elsie couldn’t possibly be the mother of Emilia (or Henry). The enumerator had introduced mistakes into the official record, subsequently transcribed and accepted as ‘true’ without considering if they were actually possible.
All of this begs other questions. It seems unlikely that there were two Elsie Knapps, of similar age, both working for the same company in the same role in 1921. Presuming both entries to be the same person, how had she come to feature twice? Had Elsie visited the Russell family on the census day and they’d recorded her there – whilst she’d made the return at her own home? All very strange.
Later life
Whichever 1921 Census entry we accept was ‘our’ Elsie, it shows that she was still working as a carriage cleaner. She was sticking with paid employment on the railway. And it lasted. On the 1939 Register, she was listed as ‘Railway carriage cleaner (heavy worker)’. She was living at 72 South Street with Amelia Odell – her mother.
Unfortunately we don’t know how long Elsie remained working on the railway. Presuming she was continuously employed from 1921 until 1939, the turned what might have been a temporary wartime exception into a long-term job. Elsie died in early 1983, a few years short of her 100th birthday.
If you know more about any of the railway workers featured we’d be keen to hear from you – do please let us know.