Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  Chapter 9

  Wells-next-the-Sea and the general election

  It is a funny place, North Norfolk. I once travelled by road from London to Cromer through the blistering heat, blue skies and green verges of a proper English summer’s day to find the town completely enveloped in freezing sea fog, every sound muffled, the people huddled in tea rooms, and the end of the pier hidden or possibly not even there. Cromer, like Hunstanton at the other end of the coast, is a typical English resort; love them or not, you can never quite escape the feeling that they are not what they were and they won’t be again; perhaps Cromer was always a little grander or perhaps Hunstanton has fallen a little further, having lost its railway. With the exception of Sheringham, a bustling seaside town where the Bittern Line (the Norwich–Cromer–Sheringham service) meets the Poppy Line (the preserved North Norfolk Railway), the small brick and flint villages between Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have forgotten they are by the sea, probably because of the marshes or dunes that lie between them and the largely undeveloped coast. ‘Unspoiled’ and ‘delightful’ are the sort of words you find yourself forced to say, unless you consider the influx of second home owners and rat race refugees has spoilt it all. Burnham Market, a ‘bijou village’ with a stream through its middle, is lovely; lovely like the set of a film about England that hopes to do well in the US, a 21st-century Titfield.201 Obviously all the cars will have to be moved before shooting actually starts, the boutiques will have to be disguised as a chandler’s, a post office and a bank and the inevitable shot of a steam train arriving at the station will have to be filmed up the road at the Poppy Line. The station at Burnham is now an inn offering ‘trendy yet stylish’ accommodation (it has ‘statement wallpaper’), including the chance to sleep in a refurbished Victorian carriage; a step up, one imagines, from the camping coaches available at many seaside stations into the 1960s. Its goods shed is now a five-bedroom house, on the market in the summer of 2012 for £1.6 million.202

  Wells-next–the-Sea, where the line from Burnham terminated, has a less polished feel. Although the granary that dominates its small harbour is no longer used as a granary, the quay looks as though people might actually use it for landing fish. It has proper old-fashioned seaside holiday shops and there’s a campsite. On the outskirts of town is a ramshackle bookshop where you will not be disturbed by unwanted offers of help; the sort of shop in which, just when you feel you have looked at every book in the place, you spot a doorway you had not noticed before and another room full of books just beyond it. You may suddenly be disturbed by a very loud banging you will have to investigate, cautiously. Seeking an explanation (it is a kiln, as the place is also a pottery) you wander out through the back door and it may be only now that you realise you are in an old railway station. Wells-next-the-Sea is my favourite old railway station, the perfect antidote when it seems England has become a sanitised, stylised production of itself; it may well be the perfect bookshop. Wells is also my favourite old station because its closure exemplifies how a policy that is rational, sensible and probably necessary at a general level can be harsh, unreasonable and dishonest in its specifics. Wells also raises the possibility that Dr Beeching helped put Harold Wilson in Downing Street as the first Labour Prime Minister since 1951. It is only a very small possibility, but it is significant because a great deal of effort went into ensuring that railway closures did not put Harold there and the inability of that effort to guarantee success helps to explain why we do not have a very much smaller railway today than we do.

  At the time of Reshaping’s publication in March 1963, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan hoped to make ‘Modernising Britain’ or ‘Britain in top gear’ the main theme of the general election which would probably take place in the spring of 1964 (and which had to be held no later than October).203 The Beeching Report offered an opportunity to show the public that modernisation was not simply a slogan, while modernisation provided a positive context for the report’s controversial programme of railway closures. Macmillan’s modernisation theme caught the mood of the times, but it was a contrary mood, as the contemporary journalist Samuel Brittan recognised:

  [T]he fashionable belief among Left and Right alike is that if a country is to get moving, it needs not a new financial policy but more fundamental changes in its industrial and business structure… Yet whenever any such structural change is proposed all hell is immediately let loose.204

  Backing Beeching was central to Macmillan’s attempts to present the government as ‘full of life and vigour with some new plans’; but it was also a gamble that doing so would win enough electoral support to outweigh the damage the Labour Party – led by the young, dynamic Harold Wilson – could inflict by playing on opposition to closures.205

  The chances of this gamble paying off were not enhanced when, in October 1963, Macmillan fell ill and resigned the premiership. He was replaced by his Foreign Secretary, the sixty-year-old fourteenth Earl of Home, who immediately renounced his various titles and was elected MP for the vacant (and safe Conservative) seat of Kinross and Western Perthshire as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. If Macmillan had struggled to present himself as a moderniser when compared to Wilson, Douglas-Home did not even struggle. It was ‘dull Alec versus smart-alec’, as the then young, dynamic satirist David Frost put it on the groundbreaking television show That Was The Week That Was. In his survey of post-war British Prime Ministers, Peter Hennessy describes Douglas-Home as virtually ‘the final flowering of an admirable breed… Like the last of the steam locomotives which were on their twilight journeys at exactly this time… He was Mallard, pulling one last express from King’s Cross.’206 In contrast, Wilson inspired supporters with his promise, in October 1963, to harness the white heat of the technological revolution and, following his subsequent victory, to deliver a hundred days of dynamic action. In opposition, Wilson argued that Beeching’s terms of reference should have covered the whole of inland transport, not just the railways, and that ‘transport is not a single problem capable of being looked at in isolation. It is part of the wider planning problem – economic planning, social planning, town planning.’207 Labour’s manifesto stressed the new thinking that would make a new Britain, attacked the Victorian nostalgia of Conservative economic policy, offered virility in place of sterility, planning (both national and regional) in place of chaos and, in a section the Treasury described as ‘more of an incantation than a set of proposals’, it promised a plan for transport and that while regional plans were being worked out major rail closures would be halted.208 With the Conservatives predicted to lose office at the forthcoming election throughout 1963 and 1964, it was not for nothing that a series of Cabinet committees oversaw the Beeching Report’s publication and Marples’s handling of closures; nor was it coincidence that once the initial presentation of the report was out of the way, these committees were led by successive party chairmen (Iain Macleod until October 1963, then Lord Blakenham). When ministers first laid eyes on Reshaping in February 1963, some, deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler in particular, were tempted to ‘reduce the size of the bang by removing some of the explosive’, cutting out those proposals which were bound to be rejected on social grounds before the whole plan was made public.209 A significant factor in the decision not to do so was the fear of being caught and looking weak.

  The first and most obvious hurdle to clear was union opposition. This proved much easier than might have been expected. Macmillan had already identified the need to use redundancy payments to mitigate the effects of industrial change and here the railways set an example followed in both public and private sectors and which met the main aim of the National Union of Railwaymen. The NUR’s opposition was hampered by the unwillingness of the wider union movement to support action which might jeopardise the election of a Labour government, to which the unions looked for a change of policy. Its general secretary, Sid Greene, was not well suited to leading the type of campaign effective opposition to Reshaping would have required. Both sides were helped by the fac
t that the plan for rationalising railway workshops, launched in 1962, offered a dry run for the closure programme and produced agreements on redundancy that provided a basis for those relating to Reshaping. Union anger at the way the workshop proposals had been published without prior consultation brought home to the government the dangers of treating closures in the same way and, dissatisfied with Marples’s handling of the issue, Macmillan told him:

  We must not hesitate from the slogan ‘Growth means change – innovation and change are all the time necessary’, yet we must not let it be thought that so far as men and women are concerned that they are to be treated in the Victorian happy-go-lucky way when they thought of humans almost less than they thought of machines.210

  Marples and Beeching managed to follow this advice well enough to allow the government to use the contraction of the railway industry as a positive example of modernisation: freeing the resources tied up in decaying industries for redeployment in growing ones without abandoning full employment.

  Some of the backbench ‘opposition’ was even easier to deal with. When Nicholas Ridley saw Marples over the closure of lines to Cirencester and Tetbury in his constituency, he expressed support for the policy but concern at his constituents’ reaction (in the event, they burnt Marples in effigy). He left with a promise that the minister’s office would draft a letter of complaint for him to send to the minister and provide a draft reply from the minister with it. Nevertheless, the government’s majority was cut by about twenty in a debate on Reshaping in April, with Scottish and West Country MPs prominent among the rebels. By May 1963 backbench unrest had reached a level which prompted the Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, to convey his concern to Macmillan ‘as to whether the Minister of Transport is going to handle the political implications of the Beeching proposals in a way which will necessarily be acceptable to ministers generally and to the party’.211 It was Redmayne’s idea to have Marples’s decisions in individual cases overseen by a Cabinet committee, a suggestion the minister does not appear to have welcomed.

  Criticism of the consultative procedure, in particular the limited nature of the financial information given to the TUCCs, built up as the committees began to hear cases in the wake of Reshaping. In 1962 the ministry had given in to pressure from the committees and abandoned its argument that there was no need for them to receive financial information now their role was restricted to the consideration of hardship. Instead, they could have figures showing the direct earnings (exclusive of contributory revenue) and direct expenses of the service in question, plus a figure representing expenditure on maintenance and renewals over five years. A year later, amid allegations of excessive secrecy, the government announced that MPs, councils and other ‘responsible bodies’ could get the same information direct from the railways.212 However, this concession merely encouraged complaints of inaccuracy, forcing Marples to ask Sir William Carrington, a former president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, to consider what financial information should be supplied to the TUCCs. Carrington’s hurried endorsement of the figures was condemned a few years later by experts in the ministry’s economic section; however, they had no doubt that the lines affected would have been losing money.

  Carrington’s report, completed in October, did little to defuse concerns about the process. In a furious private letter to Marples in October, in which he called the BRB’s figures ‘a damned lie’, Lord Stonham of the National Council on Inland Transport warned the minister that he was receiving 200–300 letters of support a week and enclosed one from a female correspondent typifying, he claimed, the rural Conservative Party.213 Stonham’s campaigning was receiving favourable attention in the press and worrying the ministry. However, Marples told his colleagues that fuller calculations would be open to criticism because they inevitably involved a certain amount of estimation. In December he called the waverers’ bluff by offering to set up an independent body to assess the economic case for closure, while warning his colleagues that this would probably mean spreading implementation of the proposals over ‘ten years instead of two or three’.214 The matter was dropped. In the wake of all this, what the Railways B division of the ministry probably wanted least for Christmas 1963 was a case which rolled all the criticisms of the Board’s figures and the consultative procedure into one handy file and justified them, but that is what it got. The file was marked ‘Wells-next-the-Sea’.

  The line from Heacham, on the King’s Lynn–Hunstanton branch, through Burnham Market to Wells had closed to passengers back in 1952, when Burnham was just a village and even Carnaby Street did not have boutiques. On the night of 31 January 1953 devastating floods killed over 300 people on the east coast of England, nearly 2,000 in the Netherlands and a few hundred more at sea. Wells station was flooded and a train on the Hunstanton branch collided with a floating bungalow. Between Burnham and Wells the line was so badly breached the Commission decided to close it to freight and abandon it (a decision which stood, unlike the attempt to close the Brightlingsea line after similar damage in the same storm). This left Wells with just one rail connection, which ran south through Walsingham and Fakenham, where it crossed the Midland and Great Northern and the river Wensum to run along its southerly bank for a mile with the M&GN opposite, through County School (junction with the ‘round the world’ line to Wroxham) to Dereham, where it joined the line between King’s Lynn and Norwich via Wymondham. The railway reached Wells in 1857, but it brought prosperity neither to the port nor to investors in the Wells and Fakenham Railway and, unlike the lines to Cromer and Hunstanton, was not linked to the development of holiday trade. Wells was too far from London and a marshy mile away from the sea. In 1950 the train from Wells still took about two hours just to get to Norwich.

  In 1956 a new diesel service was introduced on both routes through Dereham, offering a quicker and more frequent service from Wells: Dereham in forty minutes and Norwich in ninety. This improvement undoubtedly made the proposed closure of the line to Dereham, published in September 1963, and its replacement with buses that would take twice as long, all the harder to accept. In winter, 500 people a day used the line, nearly 700 a day in summer, well below Beeching’s much-criticised estimate that 10,000 passengers a week was the minimum requirement, but about three times as many as the Westerham line (and Wells would be a lot further from anywhere without its trains than Westerham was from Sevenoaks). Mr A. R. Bull of Church Farm, Cranworth, probably spoke for many when he wrote to Marples in November claiming the TUCC process was a pre-judged waste of time and dismissing the idea that buses were an adequate replacement. ‘Five hundred people per day do not pay good money for the fun of travelling by train,’ he added, ‘not Norfolk people anyway.’215 Petitions were signed by 2,400 local residents and 570 pilgrims (who used the line to reach Walsingham). The TUCC hearing in November heard the usual disputes about numbers. The summer census had missed the extra traffic in the school holidays; but the Board pointed out that a census in the holidays would have missed schoolchildren. The figures also ignored a regular football special and, much more significantly, pilgrim trains to Walsingham. The discrepancy between the council’s claim that as many as 3,000 arrived on some days by train (a figure the roads would struggle to cope with) and the region’s less daunting figure of 750 was never resolved, because the TUCC was told that special trains would continue to run for pilgrims as the line would stay open for freight. In any case the saving, even with freight maintained, was a pretty clear-cut £27,000 a year. The TUCC drew attention to the shortcomings of the proposed replacement bus service and suggested some improvements, but there was nothing in its report to suggest that this would be a particularly complicated case. What the TUCC did not know was that the figures showing costs of £54,000 against earnings of £27,000 were out of date. The Eastern Region regularly made a mess of its figures at this time and the saving was a tenth of the size it had claimed; small enough, in fact, to be outweighed by the cost of providing replacement buses. On the face of it closure would
cost more than retention.

  By the time the TUCC sent its report to the ministry in late November 1963, the rate of closures had slowed to a trickle as the new machinery took time to get underway and the threat of the whole process grinding to a halt was growing. Such was the fraught atmosphere and pressure to clear the backlog that ministry under secretary Peter Scott-Malden actually collared the chairman of the South-Eastern TUCC alongside a ship he was about to board with two friends in December 1963 in order to get his agreement to the committee meeting in his absence. The chairman agreed but was suspicious of this ‘unhealthy interference’ with the committee’s independence, which he blamed on ‘some other quarter’ than the ministry or BRB. He warned his committee to be on its guard.216

  Whatever the precise source of Scott-Malden’s mission, there was a significant risk that the whole policy would collapse by the end of 1963. There is no evidence that government concern at the effect of closures on its popularity affected the outcome of any individual case and the Cabinet committee only dealt with a small percentage of cases; but it devoted much effort to managing the programme as a whole in order to minimise the electoral damage.† Bearing in mind that the BRB was required by law to publish individual proposals covering each of the closures proposed in the Reshaping report and that the overwhelming majority of these had not been published in the summer of 1963, ministers sought to influence the order in which these proposals appeared. Their initial aim was to complete work on two types of proposal before the general election: relatively uncontroversial closures offering large savings; and controversial proposals that would be refused. This, they hoped, would postpone the most unpopular decisions, while demonstrating a balance between support for the Board and due concern for hardship. This strategy was fraught with problems. Macleod, charged with overcoming them, pursued what he saw as an impossible task, mainly to prevent accusations of ineptitude if he was not seen to try.