by Charles Loft
To Elaine, Billy, Sid and Ron
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1 Introduction: a wound that has not healed
2 Colonel Stephens’s lost causes: the railway problem 1914–51
3 A terrible tangle: the Isle of Wight and the end of integration
4 Chromium dreams: the 1955 Modernisation Plan
5 The Bluebell and Primrose Line: the 1956 closure plan
6 White elephants: the M&GN and the collapse of faith in the railways
7 Westerham, Marples and the M25
8 The nitty gritty: shaping Reshaping
9 Wells-next-the-Sea and the general election
10 Unmitigated England: Tom Fraser and the Great Central
11 A tiger in the tank? Barbara Castle and the stable network
12 Aftermath: the management of decline
13 Conclusion: ultra-modern horror
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Select bibliography
Notes
Index
Plates
Copyright
Chapter 1
Introduction: a wound that has not healed
On a September evening in 1964, a branch line terminus in the north of England waited for the Beeching Axe to fall. As the last train from Carlisle pulled into the tiny terminus at Silloth, the usual diesel replaced by a steam locomotive for the occasion, passengers in the packed coaches gasped to see a crowd of between 5,000 and 9,000 people spilling across the tracks and a group of folk singers performing ‘The Beeching Blues’. The police had already ejected the local Labour Party candidate from the platform. With the train preparing to return to Carlisle, officers repeatedly removed a placard which read, ‘If you don’t catch this you’ll never get another one – unless you vote Labour’, from the front of the locomotive, which was also adorned by a wreath. The final departure was delayed, first while the police removed detonators from the rails and then as they removed ‘dozens of “teenagers”’ sitting on the line to shouts of, ‘Remember it’s your train they’re stopping as well as ours’ from the crowd. As the locomotive inched forward, the driver released hot steam and then hot water to clear the last of the demonstrators sitting on the tracks before the train pulled away to the sound of Brian Poole and the Tremeloes’ ‘Do you love me?’ playing on the crowd’s transistor radios. As it pulled into Abbeytown, police cars raced to the station in response to a bomb hoax. Such desperate acts may stop a train, but they cannot make it run; the line had closed, the crowd departed, some in tears. The following Friday, the Carlisle Journal reported this ‘great train robbery’ in uncompromising terms. ‘With one swift cut of your scalpel,’ it warned Beeching, he had deterred holidaymakers and new industry from coming to ‘once booming’ Silloth, and ‘severed a vital lifeline … that can mean the difference between prosperity and poverty’.1
A few weeks earlier the local MP, Willie Whitelaw, had been accosted by a constituent whose farm bordered the line. The farmer complained that if he was no longer able to see the branch train passing in the afternoon he would not know when it was time to go home for his tea. He was advised to get a watch. This was not just the loss of a local amenity, it was a fundamental alteration to a pattern of life; the old certainties steamed away to the soundtrack of the new Britain. This convenient symbolism was less significant, however, than the fact that the ‘teenagers’ (the account in the Railway Magazine, founded in 1897, felt the word still required inverted commas) were as unhappy at the loss of their railway as the watchless farmer.2
The atmosphere in which the last train left Silloth was unusually politicised and rowdy (the 1964 general election was only a month away), but similar scenes took place all over Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, as the passenger railway network contracted from around 17,000 miles in 1948 to under 9,000 in 1973. The fall in the number of stations open to passengers was even more dramatic, from over 6,500 to 2,355. Sometimes there were protests but more often the last train was mourned like the passing of an old friend, albeit one the mourners had lost touch with lately. It was not unheard of for someone who had travelled on a line’s first ever train to travel on its last; people would wave from level crossing gates and enthusiasts would descend from far afield. It was not uncommon either for the last train to be barely marked, perhaps an epitaph chalked on the locomotive by its crew and a dreary sense of resignation among the few remaining passengers. The name of Dr Richard Beeching has become so indelibly associated with this process that over thirty years after he left the British Railways Board (BRB) the BBC could use it in the title of a sitcom set on a rural branch line in the early 1960s, Oh Dr Beeching!, and be confident the public would recognise it.
Beeching joined the British Transport Commission (BTC), the publicly owned body with responsibility for the railways, in March 1961 and became chairman on 1 June. When the BTC was replaced by the BRB on 1 January 1963, Beeching became its chairman, remaining in the post until 1 June 1965. The context for Beeching’s appointment was the railways’ burgeoning deficit. Operating profits had declined steadily since 1952, becoming losses in 1956. In 1962 that loss was more than £100 million and interest on the railways’ debts added some £50 million to that figure (even though interest payments on much of their debt had been temporarily suspended). Under Beeching’s chairmanship, the BTC and BRB closed 2,479 route miles to passengers (less than a third of the total contraction). In March 1963 the BRB published The Reshaping of British Railways, or the Beeching Report as it soon became known. At great length the report expounded what was in essence a very simple message: the railways had to concentrate on carrying the traffic for which they were best suited with increasing efficiency, while cutting out that which did not pay. This meant investing in the transport of large loads over long distances, while withdrawing many stopping-train passenger and pick-up freight services (in other words local services stopping at every station), and closing lines on which no other traffic was carried. In short, the railways should behave like a business. Beeching made a number of positive recommendations, most notably investment in freightliner trains, which he hoped would allow rail to retain some general merchandise traffic by offering a long-distance service combined with collection and delivery by road. Nevertheless, the parts of the report which attracted the most attention were the list of 2,363 stations to be closed, 266 services to be withdrawn and seventy-one to be modified, and the accompanying map which showed that roughly a third of the passenger network’s route miles would go. By 1973, 31 per cent of the route mileage open to passengers in 1962 had closed; slightly more than half of this was achieved by the end of 1965. By this time, studies set in motion by Beeching had identified a network of 7–8,000 miles, less than 5,000 miles of it open to passengers. This implied nearly twice as many closures again as Beeching had presided over. These proposals were never implemented.
As a literary text, the Beeching Report’s pages of alphabetically ordered stations to be closed have the mournful look of names on a war memorial. This sombre list immediately inspired a Guardian editorial, entitled ‘Lament’, which utilised some of the more interesting station names and ended ‘Yorton, Wressle, and Gospel Oak, the richness of your heritage is ended. We shall not stop at you again; for Dr Beeching stops at nothing.’3 In a similar vein, later the same year Flanders and Swann produced their valedictory song for the passing of the ‘Slow Train’, which to a large extent involved setting to music the list of stations to close. It wasn’t only professionals who put pen to paper. The Ministry of Transport’s files on railway closures are stuffed with letters of protest, ranging from the bizarre and misguided to the eloquent anger of Mrs Joan Price of Cavendish, Suffolk, who attacked ‘this inhuman plan’ as a ‘monstrous
embodiment of ruthless disregard’ for those affected by closures: ‘it is like cutting off the nation’s feet in order to save the cost of shoe leather’.4
The contraction of Britain’s railway network was well underway before the Beeching Report. Between 1950 and 1962 the passenger rail network shrank by over 3,300 miles, the rate of contraction accelerating from 1958. But the concentration of so many closures in one slim volume associated Beeching with the entire process. No other nationalised industry chairman is so well remembered: at the Lord Beeching’s pub in Aberystwyth; at Beeching’s Folly, the former Southern Railway station in Tavistock; at, among others, Beeching Close and The Beechings, housing developments on the site of the former stations at Halwill Junction, Devon and Henfield, Sussex, respectively.
These are not fond memorials but infamy. The name Beeching still arouses passion, at least in men of a certain age. When I tell people I study transport policy their eyes glaze over; when I tell them I study Beeching I am often treated to a brief lecture on my subject. By the end of the twentieth century, Beeching was typically seen as having callously ignored the social consequences of closures, falsified figures, studied the railways in isolation from transport as a whole, and was variously accused of cooperating with an anti-rail conspiracy or simply being wrong. One historian calls Beeching’s appointment ‘a tragedy for the nation’ and refers to his ‘dismantling of the railways … as one of the major aberrations of the Macmillan government’.5 The late Robert Adley, MP and railway enthusiast, saw Beeching’s legacy as the ‘mass decimation’ of the railway network.6 Ian Marchant describes Beeching’s ‘brutally simple task’ as being to make the railways pay ‘[n]o matter what it cost in social terms’.7 Most recently Richard Faulkner and Chris Austin, echoing David Henshaw’s 1991 The Great Railway Conspiracy, claim that there was ‘clearly a conspiracy between ministers, senior civil servants and the road lobby’ to cut investment in rail and that Beeching’s report was part of ‘a determined attempt … to diminish the role played by rail in meeting the nation’s transport needs’.8 In the introduction to Henshaw’s work, Stan Abbott of the Railway Development Association wrote that praising Beeching for his achievements in improving railway management ‘is rather like praising Hitler for helping create the VW Beetle while conveniently forgetting his other more notorious deeds’.9
It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that Richard Beeching never killed anyone; indeed, he did not close a single railway line. Individual closures had to be approved by the Minister of Transport; all Beeching did was to put forward for closure those lines which were, in his view, irretrievably unremunerative. The prioritisation of financial criteria evident in the Beeching Report was founded upon the BRB’s terms of reference set out in the 1962 Transport Act. Beeching’s critics have generally recognised that their barbs must equally be aimed at Ernest Marples, Conservative Minister of Transport from October 1959 until October 1964, who appointed Beeching, implemented many of the closures he proposed and presided over both the 1962 Act and a shift in investment resources from rail to road which preceded it. Both contemporary and more recent commentators have tended to see the apparent shift in emphasis from rail to road as a direct reflection of Marples’s influence, and – for some – the result of an unjustified anti-rail prejudice on his part. But whether it is Beeching, Marples or the ‘road lobby’ that gets the blame, Bruce Grocott’s reference in a House of Commons debate in February 1996 to the ‘vandalism of the Beeching era’ typifies the lasting resentment over railway closures. They are, as Stewart Francis, then chairman of the Rail Passengers Council, wrote in 2002, ‘a wound that hasn’t healed’.10
Why should this still be so, decades later? Some obvious explanations are available; the most obvious of all being the bitter memories of those directly affected. In 1976, British Rail (BR) commissioned a study which concluded that rail closures had a significant adverse effect on the quality of life of many former passengers. Only a third of people who had travelled beyond their line’s junction with the main line on a reasonably regular basis continued to do so and those without cars tended to abandon non-essential travel altogether. Even when the loss on a service clearly outweighed its social value, those who depended on the railway suffered when it was removed. Take, for example, Melton Constable, a tiny Norfolk village distinguished from its neighbours until 1959 by the fact that it was the hub of the former Midland and Great Northern Railway, the point at which a duplicate route from the Midlands divided into lines to Norwich, Yarmouth and Cromer. It was once the site of a locomotive works and a railway-owned concrete works, producing everything from fence posts to prefabricated offices. By 1963 only a sheet-metal works and the line to Cromer via Sheringham remained. A total of 189 people used the ten daily trains on the Sheringham–Melton section in the summer, 166 in the winter. Closure was expected to save £26,700 net and only thirty-one objections were made. The fact that the taxpayer appears to have been paying over four times as much to operate the service as its passengers and that such expenditure could not be justified when so few benefited was undoubtedly no consolation to those marooned in a village that had lost its purpose: the two schoolteachers and a pupil who would have to wait until 6.45pm for a bus back to Sheringham; those reliant on the train to reach doctors, dentists and chemists in Holt; and those seeking new jobs when the railway’s last remnant, the sheet-metal works, closed the following July. A local councillor, Miss M. Gray, suggested that Beeching and Marples should ‘come out here for a month, leave their cars at home, and see how they would like it. That is the way to prove what hardship means… With no station and no trains we might as well be dead.’ It is significant that her letter implied she used the line not to get to work, but for ‘little outings by train’ which gave her ‘something to look forward to’; even for those who did not depend on the railway in absolute terms, its loss had an appreciable effect on the quality of life.11 Miss Gray’s rhetoric may have spilled into hyperbole, but for those with no cars rural life would be significantly bleaker without the railway and they were unlikely to meekly accept the argument that, from a national perspective, there were too few of them to be worth subsidising.
Such complaints might not have resonated for so long had Reshaping’s claim that ‘if the whole plan is implemented with vigour, much (though not necessarily all) of the railways’ deficit should be eliminated by 1970’ had been achieved.12 Professor Terry Gourvish’s thorough business history of British Railways concludes that the amount saved through closures was ‘anybody’s guess’, but that it was less than expected during the late 1960s.13 In the early 1970s BR concluded that there was no size to which the railway network could be reduced that would render it profitable. If this suggests that Beeching was fundamentally on the wrong track, there is little doubt that, in some cases at least, the figures offered in support of individual proposals were vague calculations in support of a general principle that rural railways did not pay. Certainly, closures were not subject to detailed social cost–benefit analyses. Nor can there be any doubt that the 1962 Transport Act prioritised financial criteria and changed the procedure for considering closures to speed up the process. The reopening of some 180 route miles by 1991 supports Henshaw’s claim that they should not have closed in the first place; and further reopenings have followed. One can make a case, therefore, for seeing this as a policy that failed, based on data that was at best flawed and at worst faked, bludgeoned through in the face of popular opposition, ignoring the need to consider transport as a whole and with scant regard for the wider picture of social costs and benefits or the suffering endured as a result, possibly as a deliberate attempt to benefit the road lobby at the expense of rail users.
These views, however, are open to dispute. Most people did not suffer like Miss Gray suffered and most places did not lose like Melton lost. If the sweeping away of almost all rail services has done lasting damage to the economies of the Scottish borders or east Lincolnshire, it did not prevent quality of life improving signifi
cantly for most people in the ensuing half-century. For many, the 1960s were the time they bought their first car or took their first foreign holiday and the overwhelming majority of them did not do so because their station had closed or because they could not get to Bude by train. They chose to. When I told a student of mine from Cirencester, who had been born in the late 1970s, that Ernest Marples had been burnt in effigy outside her station when it closed in 1964, her response was one of amazement: ‘But it’s only five minutes to Kemble [the town’s railhead] in the car.’ Even Beeching’s harshest critics accept that many of the lines closed before 1966 had to go; any assumption that full-scale cost–benefit analysis would have prevented many of the more controversial closures needs to be treated with caution, given the results of those studies which were carried out, as we shall see in Chapter 8. As for reopenings, with fifty years’ hindsight is it really surprising that the contraction of the rail network went further than we think it should have done, when the construction of it so obviously did? It is one thing to believe Beeching got things wrong or that this or that line should still be open, but the passion with which many people continue to revile Beeching cannot simply be explained by the difference between what the railway was and what it is; we need to look also at what it means.
In his survey of the place of the railway in English culture, Ian Carter shows how having once been the ‘epitome of modernity’, the ‘railways’ historic role as modernity’s spear tip is [now] blunted to the point of fatuity’ and that the association of the railway with main line speed has given way to the prominence of the rural branch line ‘at home in the English landscape’ as a cultural reference point, a process he traces back to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Cuckoo Valley Railway of 1893, which ‘invented a new way of writing about railways in Britain … nostalgic memory, a conservative and yearning regret for lost days’.14 Could anything illustrate the place of the railways in the landscape more clearly than the name ascribed to the line that was the subject of the most controversial closure of the 1950s and the first standard gauge passenger preservation project, the Bluebell Railway in Sussex? Carter stresses the place of the quaint and whimsical in the nostalgic memory he describes; it was precisely the loss of the quaint and the whimsical, of Trouble House Halt and Midsomer Norton, which lay at the heart of Flanders and Swann’s lament.