There are no figures available with regard to the health of women clerks generally.  The common ailments are neuritis, anaemia, and nervous breakdown.  Typing is also a strain on the eyesight and hearing.  Miss Charlesworth says that in her experience it is the girls who are not suited for the work who suffer most from ill-health.

One typing office and school, of high repute for excellence of work, had rooms so dark that electric light was always used in one or other of them during part of the day.  No sun ever entered the work-rooms.  The salaries were good, but overtime was paid at only 6d. an hour.  There was a sort of compulsion, too, to work overtime; some of the best typists, occasionally even stayed all night during excessive rushes of work.  No holidays were paid for, and it was regarded as disloyalty on the part of a clerk to stay away for sickness.  There was an instance of a girl being dismissed because she stayed away a fortnight owing to influenza.  This particular firm recently moved into bigger, brighter rooms, not out of humanity to its staff, but because the lease had run out.

Where competition is as keen as in the typing business, it is often the case that the comfort of employees is considered as little as is compatible with running the place at a profit.  There seems to be no inspection, and there is no law to say how many typists may be worked together, or what limit of noise shall be endured by them.  Everything is ruled by the individual standard of decency of the employer.  Many well-educated girls enter typing offices for the excellent practical training to be had, and for the short time they remain they are willing to put up with severe discipline and some personal discomfort.  There are, of course, typing offices with as high a level of comfort and decency as the most exacting law would prescribe.  Many of the big engineering firms and City houses have most comfortable and even luxurious quarters for their women clerks.

In old days in the above-mentioned northern school, it was possible to get complete teaching as a clerk—­excellent teaching, too—­for a guinea a term.  There were some shorthand typists whose training cost them only that initial guinea and the fees of the supplementary course of evening classes, 5s. and 10s. according to the number of subjects.  In London at that time a year’s course in the same subjects cost as much as 60 guineas at some of the chief typing schools.  The fee nowadays, at one of the foremost London schools for a secretarial course for six months only, is 60 guineas; a year’s course is L100.[2] This includes book-keeping and shorthand correspondence in one foreign language, besides shorthand and typing, etc.

The best testimony shows that a year is altogether too long for an intelligent well-educated girl of eighteen or more to spend on technical training.[3] Mr James Oliphant, writing in The School World for July 1913 on the subject of secretarial training for girls, says: