Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  The suggestion that Marples had acted unconstitutionally in rejecting the consultative committees’ recommendation, although technically wrong, both typified and fuelled perceptions of Marples as a man who had the ability ‘to locate a single objective and to get there, never mind how’, a doer rather than a talker or a thinker.161 To Sampson, Marples, with his air-conditioned home full of ‘gadgets’, was:

  an unusual British minister, much more typical of North America or Germany, and almost unique in the upper reaches of Conservatives … a self-made tycoon with no political connections and a passionate interest in business which distinguishes him from the rest of the Cabinet. He sees himself less as a politician than a technician, devoted to efficiency … first and last a businessman … he doesn’t even pretend to be an amateur.162

  This was a vision of himself that Marples appears to have thoroughly bought into; he liked to tell Macmillan that ‘a time of crisis is a time of opportunity’ or ‘the crucial point is that on all fronts we must retain the initiative and keep moving all the time’.163 The son of a socialist foreman, since leaving school at fifteen, Marples had risen through accountancy and property development to run his own company. During the war, he went from private to captain; after it, he began climbing the political ladder. Conservative MP by 1945 and parliamentary secretary to Macmillan at the Ministry of Housing by 1951, he played an essential role in the mission that was the making of the future Prime Minister’s career: fulfilling the party’s ambitious pledge on house building. Ernie wasn’t Eden’s type, but in 1957 Macmillan made him Postmaster General – Marples launched premium bonds, reorganised telephone exchanges and introduced the postcode. It was no coincidence that when the cartoonist Vicky caricatured Macmillan’s Cabinet as a football team, Marples was the centre-forward.164 He was the very model of a modern Tory minister, except… Except that what appeared to some as refreshingly modern and dynamic struck others as cheap and corrupt, a problem Harold Wilson would also encounter.

  Marples gave the impression of running the MoT with little concern for Parliament. He offended Brian Robertson with a dinner party performance the General found disgusting, was unable to conceal their subsequent antipathy and upset the rail industry by the tone of an anecdote he told at the 1960 Conservative conference about a crane he had once had moved by train, some part of which the railways had lost. His relationship with the road lobby was hardly perfect either, provoking a split in the Roads Campaign Council in 1963. He demonstrated a consistent carelessness towards rules that impinged on his personal convenience, which appears to have stemmed from a reckless enjoyment of flirting with political danger almost for the hell of it. Rumours of an exotic private life abounded among his colleagues and nearly brought him down when, in the summer of 1963, Lord Denning was asked to report into any possible security implications arising out of the Profumo affair, which had seen the Secretary of State for War resign after sharing a girlfriend with a Russian diplomat. Denning warned Macmillan that his investigations had identified an important minister whose liaison with a prostitute involved practices that put him at risk of blackmail. Thanks to Richard Lamb’s The Macmillan Years, we can be certain he was referring to Marples; but a combination of Denning’s old-England discretion and Marples’s new-English cunning kept his name out of the report. Marples later claimed that he arrived at a meeting with Denning to find a prostitute he knew present. Aware that Denning was not allowed to delve too far into the past, he greeted her warmly, saying ‘it must be nearly ten years since we last met’. Pointedly, Denning’s report stated that he would ‘normally regard … perverted practices with a prostitute as creating a security risk, at any rate if it was of recent date’. After Macmillan’s departure, Marples fell foul of the Cabinet Secretary over an attempt to import wine from his French vineyard, to which he fled suddenly in 1974 to avoid a crippling tax bill and a couple of lawsuits, one of which related to his thoroughly unedifying activities as a landlord. When tracked down by the Daily Mirror’s Richard Stott he was driving while disqualified and waving a resident’s permit which he pretended was a Monaco licence. Questioned about his departure from Britain, he told Stott that the man from the Inland Revenue ‘was a socialist … there was nothing I could do, so I said “Fuck ’em, if that’s their attitude, I’m off ”’.165

  While these stories emerged after his career as a minister, it was well known at the time that Marples owned some 80 per cent of a company, Marples Ridgway, which built roads, among other things. He had resigned as managing director in November 1951, shortly after he became a junior minister, and claimed to have received no payment from the firm since then other than expenses; by 1960, however, his share of the firm had come to be worth something in the region of £350–£400,000. Matters came to a head in January 1960 when the Evening Standard reported that Marples Ridgway had won the contract for the Hammersmith Flyover. The potential embarrassment was increased by the fact that a lower tender from another firm had been rejected (for the entirely proper reason that it had not matched the specifications for the job). The tender was in fact handled by the London County Council, not the ministry, although MoT engineers endorsed the council’s decision. Marples had begun arranging to sell his share of the firm in October 1959, but he initially arranged to do so in a way that left him open to the charge that Ridgway was acting as an agent to ensure Marples could buy back the shares when he left office (giving Marples an incentive to see the firm do well). This was prevented by the Attorney General and, having sold his shares, Marples was careful to ensure that any contracts awarded by the ministry to his old firm were approved by other ministers. Given that Marples had no inherited wealth to fall back on if he lost office, it was perhaps an understandable error of judgement. It was a significant one, however. Once he became Minister of Transport, the firm’s involvement in road building was clearly in breach of the rule that ministers must not allow a conflict of interest to arise or appear to arise between their official and private work, and whether or not he actually got away with this (he allegedly sold his shares to a company owned by his wife) he certainly tried to.

  Marples combined a flair for publicity, a desire to be seen – and to see himself – as a dynamic man of action and an apparent desire to flirt with political disaster so effectively that it was all too easy to believe not only that he was the driving force behind an anti-rail policy, but that his motive might be personal enrichment, either via the benefit to Marples Ridgway of a pro-road transport policy, or as the road lobby’s man on the inside. Quite apart from the fact that this involves a massive overestimation of the power of ministers of transport, the problem in attributing changes in policy to Marples’s personal influence is that policy did not change but developed along lines that had already been set in train under Watkinson. In contrast to Sampson’s description of him as a doer rather than a thinker, Dunnett recalled Marples as being ‘a great publicist, and he was interested in new ideas, but he had not much effect as far as the railways were concerned … he wasn’t awfully good at following through … it’s difficult to put your finger on what he actually achieved’.166

  It is difficult to attribute a decisive influence on policy in the Marples era to the road lobby because the arguments for motorway-building tended to be backed up by the available evidence. There is no question that Marples was an enthusiastic road-builder, but so were his two predecessors. Late in 1954 the ministry had sought approval for an annual road programme of £60 million per annum but had been left with one of £40 million. Throughout 1957, Watkinson, whose ‘first priority was obviously that of getting a national road programme moving at any cost’, pressed for more road spending.167 A long-term road-planning group was established that year and by the time Marples arrived its studies had provided considerable support for expanding the programme, which now stood at £60 million a year; the ministry was pressing for £90 million. Preparing a list of topics for consideration by the new government prior to the 1959 general election, Treasury officials expe
cted an expansion of the road programme to be ‘the first priority of the next Minister of Transport’, whoever it was.168 When, in December 1959, Marples began pressing the Prime Minister for more roads spending, he was acting on the basis of the ministry’s work rather than his own whim. In March 1960 his request for a five-year road programme was referred to a committee of officials under Padmore, which reported in July 1960 that the five-year motorway programme, while desirable in principle, should not be settled until a clearer picture of railway investment had emerged. However, the Cabinet’s economic policy committee concluded that expanding the road programme would bring quick economic benefits through reducing congestion and accidents, so the Cabinet gave Marples most of the funds he wanted for 1961–2 and 1962–3. Although the economic case for providing better roads for motorists was weak, the congestion those motorists caused was damaging the economically significant road freight industry, which carried more than half the nation’s goods. Even a 10 per cent increase in railway passenger and freight traffic (which seemed unlikely) would reduce road traffic by only 5 per cent on 1959 levels. The case for road building was a combination of the political (responding to motorists’ complaints about congestion) and economic (speeding up road freight); the alternative appeared to be watching the roads grind to an unpopular halt. Further support for this policy was provided by the pioneering cost–benefit study of the first section of the M1 published in 1960 and the positive public reaction to this first long stretch of British motorway. It was only when the Greater London Council attempted to carve a swathe through urban London in the late 1960s that opposition to motorways took off.

  Pressure from the roads lobby undoubtedly encouraged these developments. Mick Hamer has shown that organisations such as the British Roads Federation made great efforts during the 1950s to encourage motorway building and the BRF’s individual components certainly carried weight with officials. The Road Haulage Association had a good relationship with the road transport division of the ministry, which ensured that when Marples established a Special Advisory Group to investigate the BTC in 1960 the RHA had an opportunity to give evidence to it. The RHA feared that the group would recommend restrictions on road transport to benefit the railways, which it felt enjoyed widespread public sympathy. It complained that taxes paid by hauliers were being used to subsidise their chief competitor, which was also cross-subsidising freight services to undercut them by carrying traffic at less than cost price, an allegation it was able to support with examples. At a meeting with Marples in March 1960, RHA representatives called for a study of ‘true comparative costs as between road and rail’ in the clear belief that such a study would support the case for allowing road haulage to grow and reducing rail investment.169 Rather than conspiring to undermine the railways through some clandestine deal, the RHA was confident of its members’ ability to win traffic from them through fair competition.

  Similarly, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and representatives of motor industry unions successfully lobbied the Treasury to set up a study on the potential growth of the motor car industry and its economic implications in 1959, which the SMMT hoped would lead to a greater appreciation of the motor industry’s importance and consequently to more account being taken in Whitehall and Westminster of its needs. The committee fulfilled the SMMT’s hopes in as much as it recognised that:

  the progress of the motor industry is clearly a matter of very great interest to the government both because of its economic importance and its physical and social effects. Through the investment which it has recently agreed to undertake in areas of local unemployment it has now become an important instrument of the government’s employment policy. It forms a valuable source of revenue.170

  Should we take this conclusion as indicative of the pernicious influence of the road lobby on transport policy? Clearly the SMMT had its own agenda, but so too did the Treasury, which had hoped to use the study to consider whether or not the industry’s growth should be slowed in response to the social costs of increasing car traffic. That this was not the outcome was partly a result of the ministry’s inability to calculate what the social costs were. The overwhelming factor, however, was the political impossibility of restricting road traffic in the early 1960s. Any party committed to such a policy risked losing the votes of the 750,000 working in the industry, existing motorists and those affluent workers saving for their first car, the purchase of which fuelled ‘a feeling of modernity and adventure that would never be won so easily again’ in Booker’s view.171

  While the railway industry’s decline seemed fairly obvious in 1960, the systemic difficulties the UK motor-car industry was in fact suffering did not become apparent until the 1970s. Hamer makes a reasonable case for the view that the lobby influenced the pattern of motorways and the order of priorities within the roads programme, but he does not show that it achieved an unwarranted diversion of funds away from rail towards road building and his suggestion that ‘there is scant evidence of any public concern’ over the inadequacies of Britain’s roads is unconvincing.172 By 1959 there was a cross-party consensus on the need for new roads and the ‘pathetic inadequacy’ of the road system was clear enough for Michael Robbins to comment on it in his 1962 history of The Railway Age.173 Even the left-of-centre think tank, Political and Economic Planning, while critical of aspects of government transport policy, accepted that investment in road transport was long overdue and should include motorways at some point. Less thoughtful critics attacked Marples’s perceived failure to improve road conditions with a campaign of car stickers that read ‘Marples Must Go’, while official attempts to tackle urban congestion by introducing parking meters led one motorist to saw a meter off its stand in north London and hurl it through the front window of the minister’s west London home. While it is true that the road lobby called for increased road building – and road building did increase – one has to ask whether, had people not wanted cars, wanted to use them and then complained about the state of the road network, the lobby would have got anywhere? Indeed, given that the Attlee government had announced a ten-year plan to build 800 miles of motorway in 1946, that Britain’s first motorway did not open until December 1958, that by the time Reshaping was published only 194 miles were open and that before 1960 the ministry consistently underestimated future traffic levels, the lobby’s efforts do not seem to have been an unqualified success.

  The decision to apply the brake to the Commission’s investment programme just as it got going also owed little to Marples or the road lobby. The decision was prompted by the ‘Railway Problem’ memorandum Dunnett sent Marples at the start of 1960. Dunnett’s paper reflected five developments: the impending report of the Guillebaud inquiry into railway wages and its effect on the deficit; the collapse of official confidence in the Commission’s ability to spend wisely; the implications of the Treasury’s investigation into the likely future demand for transport; the need to find a legal way of subsidising the BTC; and the Padmore committee’s recommendations on the nationalised industries. When Macmillan returned from his ‘wind of change’ tour of Africa to ‘a great log-jam of problems’, he saw the solution to this one in terms of a reorganisation of the BTC, bringing in new men to oversee a new plan and persuading the unions to accept these measures, and a smaller railway industry, in return for the government’s acceptance in principle of the Guillebaud Report.174 In a statement to Parliament on 10 March 1960 he stressed the need for the unions and the public to accept the remodelling of the industry and of the modernisation programme to ‘a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects’.175 This statement is the fulcrum of the public face of railway policy, the point at which the dream of the Modernisation Plan began to become the nightmare, or at least the reality, embodied in the Beeching Report, but it owed little if anything to Marples. The following month the appointment was announced of a Special Advisory Group (SAG) to examine the Commission and advise how to put Macmillan’s statement into practice.† The idea
of getting outside experts to advise on how to apply the new policy on nationalised industries to the railways had been raised by the Padmore committee in June 1959 and Watkinson had considered asking an industrialist, a chartered accountant and the head of Canadian Pacific Railways to consider the reappraisal. The SAG’s chairman, Sir Ivan Stedeford, also the chairman of Tube Investments, suggested Frank Kearton of Courtaulds and Sir Frank Ewart Smith of ICI as other members. The Treasury recruited Henry Benson, an accountant from Cooper Brothers who Dunnett believed was interested in replacing Robertson. Two civil servants, Sir David Serpell and Matthew Stevenson of the Treasury, were also appointed to the group. The introduction to the railway industry of its most controversial figure was an afterthought – Ewart Smith was unavailable, but recommended ICI’s Technical Director, Dr Richard Beeching. A physicist by training, Beeching had worked for Ewart Smith at the wartime Ministry of Supply. Impressed by Beeching’s analytical mind, his former boss recruited him to ICI where he gained hands-on experience in how to manage and improve business efficiency. He was successful, but had not yet risen to prominence. Unlike most of the upper echelons of the BTC since nationalisation, he was just coming into his prime. Between June and October 1960, the SAG produced a series of recommendations which formed the basis of a White Paper entitled Reorganisation of the Nationalised Transport Undertakings, published in December 1960 (these are discussed in more detail in the following chapter). This was followed by the Transport Act 1962 which wrote off much of the railways’ debt and created a strong central British Railways Board (BRB) to run the industry, hiving off the other parts of the BTC to separate boards. The contributions of Beeching and Benson had convinced officials that solving the railways’ problems required ‘someone of the stature and width of mind of Dr Beeching relying on the accountancy expertise possessed by Mr Benson’.176 They had to do without Benson, but Beeching joined the BTC in March 1961, becoming chairman in June with a salary of £24,000 (Robertson had received £10,000). This figure caused a storm Marples and Macmillan were willing to weather, but it fuelled suspicions that Beeching had been paid to implement Marples’s anti-rail agenda.