TRACER IN RAILWAY DRAWING OFFICE
Maud Mary Bassington was born in Kensington in 1895 on what is now Hillgate Place, Notting Hill Gate. Her father William was a basket maker, who sadly died in 1902. Maud was just seven years old. Her mother Frances remarried in 1905, but her new husband Alfred Hawkings soon died. By 1911 Maud and her mother were living in Willesden where Maud was working as an artist, a floral painter.
In 1921, after the First World War, and possibly during the war we don’t know, Maud was putting her drawing skills to technical use as a tracer at the SE&C Railway Loco Drawing Office at Ashford works, aged 25.
Chris Valkoinen, Curator of Railways and Communications at the National Railway Museum, said: “The role of a tracer was highly skilled, but perceived to be less technical than the draughtsmen’s work. Just as secretarial work became a female dominated profession due to misogynistic attitudes, women also began to be employed as tracers, a process that was accelerated by the First World War. However, since it was the tracers that produced the master-copies that were retained by the drawing offices, it is worth remembering that the majority of the drawings that now survive in the museum’s collections were penned by women and not men.”
It is at the Ashford Works that she likely met 53-year-old widower Christopher Kybert, an accountant in the locomotive department there, 27 years her senior. They married in 1921 and had a daughter Christine in 1931. Christopher died in 1938, aged 70. Maud died in 1968.
Notes/links:
https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/drawing-office-romance-an-engineering-love-story/
Research and design by:
Danny Coope / Street of Blue Plaques
https://streetofblueplaques.co.uk/
