by Charles Loft
The Beeching press conference was the culmination of a significant presentational effort, discussed at two Cabinet meetings and overseen by a committee of ministers. It was considered vital to present the report as an exercise in modernisation and to ‘avoid giving the impression that the government were concerned primarily with making the railways pay’. Instead, the message must be that ‘losses arose from the fact that the system was not related to present needs and the principal objective should be to reshape it’.186 The press conference was part of a plan that included a statement in the House from Marples, the recruitment of the comedian Tony Hancock to be the acceptable face of Beeching and a specially made film explaining the plan broadcast by Granada Television. The ‘surgical’ nature of the operation was emphasised. All this came on top of months of statements which made it pretty clear what to expect, at least in terms of rationalisation, stretching back to the publication of two maps showing the density of passenger and freight traffic the previous summer; back, in fact, to Macmillan’s statement in March 1960. On the evening after the press conference to launch Reshaping, Beeching and Marples dined with their wives at the Café Royal in Piccadilly and posed for pictures to scotch rumours of a rift between them.
Beeching himself was vital to the effort. Writing to The Times from Castle Leod in Rothshire, Lord Cromartie compared Beeching to ‘a very efficient, very expensive computer, brilliant but completely soulless’ (before suggesting that closing the railway north of Inverness would lead to ‘the extermination of a people and their way of life’).187 Such criticisms merely served to reinforce Beeching’s image of cool, ruthless detachment and the idea that, however unpalatable the harsh facts he presented might be, they appeared equally unarguable. Although endowed with an aura of calm, the antithesis of Marples’s tense dynamism, Beeching was, like the minister, of ‘New England’. He was a grammar school boy with a first in physics, whose managerial abilities had allowed him to rise ‘with apparent effortlessness’ through the ranks of ICI. Sampson described him as having a reputation for efficiency, generating confidence, being ‘visibly astonished’ at the railways’ lack of information about their activities and giving the impression ‘above all of a striking intellectual honesty’. His doctorate replaced his Christian name and preceded his surname like the man with a red flag who walked in front of early motor cars, proclaiming his modernity and inviting images of ‘the dispassionate expertise of a surgeon’. He was ‘the antithesis of the old English ideal of the amateur’, a point reinforced by the storm over his salary.188
The perfect combination of Reshaping’s logical progression from problem to solution and Beeching’s expert status undoubtedly succeeded in conveying the size of the problem and the reasons for railway closures to the public, as well as establishing the government’s modernising credentials. A generally (although by no means universally) positive reception included praise from Labour MP and Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association General Secretary Ray Gunter and the ASLEF General Secretary; Reshaping’s presentation was seen as a template for the handling of the Buchanan Report later that year. Yet, the effect of this presentational success was undermined by the fact that even when lines had been listed for closure in the report, specific closure proposals still had to be published, considered and reported on by the relevant TUCC and that report and other factors had to be considered by the ministry. The preparation of closure proposals by the BRB took longer than anticipated – as did every aspect of their consideration. As a result, the positive reception the report received had worn off to an extent by the time individual decisions began to be announced in significant numbers from January 1964 – and its reputation has subsequently tarnished further. The case against Reshaping is that it ignored the social consequences of closures, examined the railways in isolation from transport as a whole and got the figures wrong. Some have suggested that these were deliberate shortcomings, cooked up as part of the secret agenda developed by the Special Advisory Group (SAG) which led to Beeching’s appointment. How valid are these criticisms?
The SAG has achieved a mythical status among the critics of Beeching and Marples, primarily because the recommendations it made to the government remained secret until the publication of the official history of British Railways in 1986 and because Beeching was one of its members. Given these two facts, it does not take a great deal of imagination to conjure up a picture of a secret version of the Beeching Report’s closure programme emerging from conspiratorial meetings in some Whitehall bunker. Ironically it was Alf Robens, the Labour MP who was shortly to become chairman of the National Coal Board (NCB), who claimed that the SAG members were appointed to be ‘the handmaidens of government policy’, but the suspicion that it was a ‘Marples Gestapo’ set up by the minister ‘for the sole purpose of facilitating railway closures’ was common and has endured.189
Whitehall would probably have kept the recommendations of the SAG secret out of instinct, but the overriding reason for doing so was that the group quickly divided and these divisions quickly became personal. The government did not need outside experts to convince it of the need for a railway closure programme in 1960. What it did need was advice on how best to reorganise the Commission along more effective lines. The SAG was given secret terms of reference designed to steer it towards proposals which would fulfil ministers’ desire for greater decentralisation. This was a steer Stedeford and Kearton were happy to take; however, Beeching and Benson felt a strong central board was a necessary step in getting a grip on the railways’ finances and cutting the system down. This disagreement was paralleled by a fundamental division over how best to approach the group’s task. Beeching and Benson wanted, through a series of studies, to begin by establishing what the railways should be doing. Stedeford, aware that ministers wanted organisational proposals sooner than Beeching’s approach would allow, resisted. Robertson and his colleagues learned of these divisions through sympathetic officials at the ministry and saw advantages in good relations with Stedeford. They pursued this objective with such success that Stedeford appeared willing to allow the BTC to review the modernisation programme itself, to the dismay of Beeching, Benson and the two officials. Following a particularly fractious meeting on 13 June 1960, Stedeford threatened to resign. Enlisting Benson’s help, Serpell spent most of the following two days persuading him to stay.
The conflict over methodology was solved by creating a new group to examine the future size and shape of the railway system, the Ministerial Group on Modernisation (MGM), but while the SAG made recommendations on finances and commercialisation which influenced the 1962 Transport Act, it was unable to agree on organisation. To the surprise of Serpell and Stevenson, who agreed with Beeching and Benson, ministers proved willing to abandon decentralisation in order to achieve a pragmatic solution to the railway problem. The Regional Railway Boards created under the 1962 Act were subordinate to the BRB, which was directly responsible to Marples. The advantage of this approach (from the government’s point of view) was exemplified by Beeching’s ability to compel the Scottish Region to put forward major closure cases such as Inverness–Wick–Thurso and Edinburgh–Hawick–Carlisle, which it would not have done on its own initiative (and which it privately invited the Scottish Secretary to direct it to retain in 1963). As far as direct advice on closures was concerned, however, the group offered no surprises. It recommended only that a dated programme of further proposals should be drawn up, repeating what it had been told by some TUCC chairmen ‘that the majority of the cases now coming before them for the withdrawal of uneconomic railway services could have been put forward several years earlier … and that, from their experience there must be a considerable number of similar cases not yet prepared’. It concluded that ‘action may have been retarded by a sense of public obligation’.190
The SAG’s internal divisions have contributed to an impression of Beeching and Benson as hawks to Stedeford and Kearton’s doves. In fact, the group quickly and unanimously concluded that the modernisa
tion programme should be fundamentally reviewed and, particularly unimpressed by Sir Reginald Wilson, wanted a senior official appointed to the Commission to take responsibility for finance. Stedeford expressed this view to the Treasury in strong terms:
Sir Ivan … felt that if in a private firm shareholders’ money had been committed with the recklessness which characterised the inception of some of the projects making up the modernisation scheme those responsible would have been indictable… [I]t almost seemed … as if the judgement whether or not to start a scheme had depended on the degree of support which it received from the particular technicians or other people in authority in, say, a particular region rather than on any economic justification.191
In June the group recommended that modernisation projects that were at an early stage should be halted and no new works begun until a review of the whole programme had been undertaken. The merits of the flagship project of the modernisation programme, electrification of the Euston–Manchester/Liverpool main line, were unclear and it was only restarted in January 1961 to avoid damaging railway morale and the export efforts of the electrical industry and wasting the sums already spent. The financial benefits the Commission expected never materialised. There had been no disagreement over the need for such a review, only the form it should take. The SAG’s verdict on the BTC’s investment programme was as damning as Whitehall’s the year before and the cutting back of modernisation by Marples needs to be seen in this context.
Beeching’s desire to begin with a study of transport was in tune with Whitehall’s thinking on the need to set clear objectives and to base investment on a picture of transport trends, but it was easier to wish for than accomplish. The position was not helped by the poor relations between the Road Research Laboratory of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) – generally seen at the time as the centre of official research on transport economics – and the ministry and Treasury. In 1960, when the RRL’s economics committee wanted to begin its own study of transport requirements for the next twenty to thirty years, the ministry and Treasury successfully lobbied to keep it off the territory they now wished to occupy. This was unfortunate as the RRL had better links with academics and local authorities than the ministry. Dunnett was well aware of the need for expert advice and of the inadequacy of the ministry’s economic, statistical and scientific resources, but recruiting staff to rectify this was not easy and these problems continued to frustrate official attempts to get to grips with issues such as the costs of the growth in road traffic. In the circumstances, Stedeford’s reluctance to wait for Beeching’s studies was understandable, for these were every bit as methodical as one might expect – and proved completely impossible to conduct.
Beeching had argued that the Transport Acts of 1947 and 1953 had set the railways potentially conflicting objectives, which could only be reconciled through precisely the kind of detailed study of transport as a whole which he was later castigated for failing to conduct as a basis for the Beeching Report. He proposed a study of total traffic flows and the railways’ share over recent years. This data would then be sub-divided into types of passenger journey (commuting, inter-urban business, inter-urban pleasure, local business, local private, holiday, excursion) and freight classes that took account of distance, size and loadability. In each category of traffic Beeching proposed a study of the merits of rail relative to other forms of transport, previous trends, the likely effect of changes in charges or quality of service, handling costs and the effect of various improvements on costs or quality. These figures would then be applied to estimates of future traffic flows in the country to assess the railways’ probable share, given various possible improvements and taking account of likely developments in other forms of transport, to arrive at an indication of what investments would be most likely to bring worthwhile results. In addition, he drew up a list of nineteen points to be answered in relation to each specific project. The MGM attempted to boil all this down to two studies: one of current costs (to show which rail traffics were currently profitable); and one of likely future traffic trends for rail and other transport modes. This was expected to take a year to complete. However, as the preparations began for the detailed work, attention increasingly focused on rail. In particular, the estimates of future traffic were to be based upon a study of existing levels of rail traffic in various categories and estimates of future demand derived from a study of the past relationship between the development of the industries concerned and the levels of the rail traffic they generated. A market research study would then estimate how much of this potential traffic would go by rail given various assumptions on fares and charges.
This approach was almost entirely dictated by the absence of information on non-rail transport, in particular on road costs and future traffic estimates; but it was hampered by the Commission’s inability to produce the requisite figures and the impossibility of finding anyone who could undertake a market research study on the factors influencing industry’s choice of transport mode (officials ruled out asking the DSIR). There seems also to have been a degree of misunderstanding between Beeching, who was interested in establishing what traffic the railways could and should carry in the future given the right kind of investment, and the ministry, which was still trying to ascertain where the railways were currently losing money and whose officials had reservations about Beeching’s cost-based approach, as cost was not necessarily the chief determinant in industry’s choice between transport modes. Beeching hoped to proceed using estimates and research but this would have involved an even longer and more complex exercise. The MGM petered out, overtaken by what Sir David Serpell described later as ‘the nitty gritty of actually doing things’ and Beeching’s appointment to the BTC.192 Beeching introduced a new emphasis on the utilisation of the network, traffic flows and the possibility of winning new profitable traffic at the Commission; but the studies he pursued there, dependent on the data provided by existing work within the BTC and reflecting current conditions rather than predicted trends, were a pale shadow of his original intentions.
In October 1962, the BTC produced a map showing freight flows not travelling by rail that were considered suitable for rail. However, in December, ministry officials were disconcerted to learn that the total of some 90 million tons of such freight was based on ‘subjective estimates made by district commercial officers on the basis of their personal experience of the economics of handling traffic by rail and the known characteristics of each group of traffic’ and that ‘the plans for attracting freight traffic at present passing by other means of transport were a longer-term and more hazardous task than that of cutting down the system to a realistic size and reducing operating costs’.193 It appeared that no assessment had been made of the capital investment necessary to win this traffic or how charges should be altered to attract it. There were also fundamental problems with some of the new technology upon which the plan relied. Several months after Reshaping’s publication the BRB’s studies of new handling methods and other factors were still incomplete and the Board could not relate the total savings and earnings under the various headings in Reshaping to any specific timescale. The case for closures seemed sound in principle; the case for investment more speculative. Reshaping’s estimate of a £20–27 million financial improvement from winning back freight and introducing freightliners were its least convincing aspects.
In the summer of 1961, with Beeching now ensconced at the Commission, Dunnett tried to address the shortcomings that had derailed the MGM by recruiting Sir Robert Hall, the former Chief Economic Adviser to the government, to chair a group supervising the ministry’s own study of transport requirements over the next twenty years. Hall was asked ‘to consider the questions which this study should be designed to answer, the assumptions on which it should be based and the methods by which the necessary data should be sought’. If this indicates that the ministry was merely at the starting gate, Hall’s report a year later represented very limited progress.194 It i
dentified the problem of allocating investment among rail, urban roads and inter-urban roads as one of two fundamental problems facing the ministry but was unable to find a common yardstick for assessing road and rail investment, which the ministry concluded would have to continue to be assessed separately. As the extent to which rail could attract freight from road would have only a marginal effect on the road programme, rail investment would continue to be judged on its likely rate of return.
The second key issue Hall identified was urban traffic. Although it was the publication of Buchanan’s report on Traffic in Towns, in November 1963, that highlighted this problem publicly, the Transport and Housing ministries had begun laying the foundations of a joint group on traffic and urban planning in the spring of 1961. Hall’s report warned that ‘rail transport in the cities which have it is an asset which should not be lightly eroded’.195 The ministry had already taken this issue up with Beeching and suggested that it might wish to have advance consultation before urban services were proposed for closure. Traffic surveys were being conducted in a number of towns by the time Reshaping was published and Beeching was persuaded to omit urban services losing some £25 million a year from the report, over half as much again as the total direct saving from closures. This was a significant acceptance that rail services had a social benefit (although not necessarily a permanent one, as the report indicated further study would take place here). The report acknowledged that suburban services were important in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, Leeds and Birmingham, and were vital in London, and that social benefit studies and a coordinated approach to urban transport would have a role to play in deciding their future. The Hall and Beeching reports stimulated Treasury officials to begin considering the idea of creating conurbation transport authorities. Nevertheless, Beeching was not prepared to hold back urban proposals indefinitely. He had included a surprisingly large number of services affecting the cities listed above in his closure programme on the grounds that social benefit studies would not show them to be worth keeping, a claim which officials found unconvincing. Beeching also underestimated the railways’ potential role in reducing urban congestion in smaller cities, such as Nottingham, where lines have since reopened, Bristol, Exeter and Hull. As far as urban transport was concerned, Beeching’s terms of reference had been overtaken by the development of Whitehall thinking by March 1963 and urban closures were to prove one of the major issues of contention between Beeching and the government in 1963–4.