By Elliott West
“I did all the press and the television, and anyone else from radio. There were loads of them! And I drove a train out of Acton, drove it from there to Ealing Broadway. And then I had a lot of them [pictures] taken there, and then I had to fetch it back in again. And then we went to the pub”.
Hannah Dadd
Introduction
Influential people in history have always fascinated and having worked for the London Underground for the last 22 years I have come across a few past and present. However, for this piece, I want to concentrate on a truly iconic figure. A woman who broke down the barriers of sexual inequality and opened up the floodgates for future generations of women to have the opportunity to drive a tube train. The lady in question is, of course, Hannah Dadds. Staggeringly, it took until 1978 for this monumental event to happen. Not to say that this was a popular choice amongst a male workforce who believed an outdated and sexist view that a woman’s place was in the home. A sex that was considered to be ordinary. A company that at the time, had inadequate facilities for women in train depots with few female toilets or showers. Women had to wait until the male toilets became free.
Fond Memories
“When she first started, there were no ladies toilets in the drivers’ mess – she used to have to wait for the toilet to be empty. She didn’t expect the male drivers to make any exceptions for her and made a point of saying they did not need to watch their language or take down their images of women off the walls. She made the effort to fit into what was a man’s world rather than make demands – she wanted to show she did not need any allowances made for her because she was a woman. She made sure she was accepted as a driver – not a token female driver and there was no special treatment”.
Vivian Parsons, Hannah Dadd’s niece.
The tube was a very different place to work when Hannah joined in the late 1970s. Every train on every tube line had a guard. Smoking was still permitted on the system and you could still buy a platform ticket with some stations like Baker Street and Sloane Square having a pub on the platform. The smart black three-piece uniform of the underground staff and the rocking carriages with plush seating covers from the 1930s now lie dormant in the Transport Museum in Covent Garden or the large storage unit at Acton Town.
Dadds worked on a number of lines during her long career, driving tube trains on the District, Bakerloo and Jubilee lines until her retirement in 1993. Her sister Edna joined at the same time as a driver but what is lesser known is that they could drive a train long before they were trained how to. Hannah had first joined London Transport as it was called then as a Railman in 1969, earning £13 per week at Upton Park station, then as a ticket collector, totalling 8 years before becoming a tube guard.
In the Cab
“The problem is getting accepted in the first place; you need skin like crocodile hide.”
Diane Udall, former NUR Branch Secretary.
Thanks to the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975 introduced by the Harold Wilson-led Labour government, Hannah and her sister were no longer barred from becoming drivers. Their training as an emergency driver as a guard could now be put to use. Hannah was the first to pass after completing a seven-week course and her sister Edna worked on her train as a guard before she qualified 18 months later. These pioneers of their time tried to be accepted into this daunting male environment where the language could turn the air blue and etiquette was off the table. This a stark contrast to 1915 when Maida Vale had an all-female complement of staff, only to be replaced by men when the First World War ended.
Hannah’s Legacy
Hannah Dadd died, aged 70 in 2011 after a long illness and despite her becoming the first female tube driver, the statistics for women drivers are still far too low. A plaque at Upton Park station was unveiled in 2019 to mark her achievements. The sad fact is that 7% of the female population in the UK are train drivers and 16.3% of tube drivers are women. A figure that sinks into obscurity when 51% of the UK population are women. This is despite the London Underground running a glossy recruitment campaign aimed at recruiting more women tube drivers in magazines such as Cosmopolitan. However, we should not let this taint Dadd’s iconic status. Hannah showed how despite all the odds, a woman can achieve their career goals in life. That is despite working in a hostile environment that was positioned by the times. A true inspiration and a woman that rightly deserves to be remembered and celebrated.
