Hear the story of how the men and Great Western Railway helped to win the Second World War in my talk at the Swindon Literary Festival on May 14. Here’s an extract from my interview with the amazing Kathleen Halls – the Great Western’s first woman porter as she recalled her life for my book ‘Steaming to Victory’:
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‘I DON’T think they’d ever seen anything like me before, when I went along to apply for a wartime job at my local station. They hadn’t a clue what to make of me. ‘We’ve got a problem,’ they said, and went away for a bit – coming back smiling. ‘We don’t know what to call you because you’re the first lady that’s ever been employed here. Even though you’re a girl, we’re going to have to call you a lad porter! It’ll be 25 shillings a week.’
Kathleen Hall is one of those rare people in Britain today, living just a mile or so from where she was born – deep in rural Warwickshire, 88 years ago. The station at Great Alne, the village where she now lives, is long closed, with the last train having departed at the outbreak of war in 1939. But the quaintly named Wootten Wawen Platform, where she waved to the trains as a young girl, is thriving on the commuter line from Stratford-upon-Avon to Birmingham. Her passion for the railway – in the days when trains were just for boys – turned her into a pioneer of railway history. ‘I believe I was the first woman porter to take on the job in wartime on the entire Great Western Railway,’ she tells me.
