by Charles Loft
It was virtually impossible to know what the decision would be in any particular case or how long it would take to emerge. There were practical difficulties in altering the plans of the BRB and the TUCCs and political dangers in being seen to do so. Marples and his officials were generally reluctant to interfere with Beeching’s timetable and were enthusiastically backed by the Treasury, which took the view that ‘our job is to facilitate the closure of the lines: there will be no shortage of advocates for the defence’.217 Beeching was not generally prepared to delay proposals simply because they might prove unpopular. However, the chief flaw in this attempt to manage the programme was that it was based on the false assumption that the more money a closure saved the less controversial it would prove. Generally, the opposite was true. Lines which cost more to operate tended to have more trains (and passengers) on them than lightly used branches. To take an example from the cases set out in detail in Reshaping, the York–Hull service earned £90,400 a year in fares, while Banff–Tillynaught earned a mere £600, indicating that far fewer people would be affected by its closure. Yet the former offered savings of £81,110, the latter £10,900. More obviously, long lines offered greater savings than short ones, but tended to leave communities more isolated and harder to serve by bus when they closed. While the twenty-one closures Marples approved in March 1964 saved an average of less than £40,000 a year each, the two he vetoed at the same time (Shrewsbury–Llanelli and Ayr–Kilmarnock) would have saved a total of £215,000.
As the ministry had anticipated in 1956, Scotland was the focus of opposition to closures. A visit by Beeching in the autumn of 1962 had inflamed opposition and by May 1963 the Scottish Secretary Michael Noble was pressing for the government to announce that five major proposals in Scotland would be deferred for three to five years.† He was unhappy at Beeching’s reluctance to supply him with information on them (it did not arrive until November, despite significant pressure from Macmillan). Over the summer of 1963 Macleod compiled a list of controversial cases in England based on the huge number of replies he received to a request for information from the party. Although he limited it to those in which the relevant MP had complained, it still affected thirty-three. By October the list had expanded to include the five Scottish cases and six in Wales. No sooner had this list been compiled, however, than the whole question of timing was thrown into confusion when Macmillan fell ill and resigned unexpectedly in October 1963, putting the anticipated election date back from the spring of 1964 to the autumn. This left ministers uncertain whether to accelerate unpopular proposals to get the decisions on them out of the way before the election or to postpone them. No decision had been taken by December, when it became clear that the whole process was taking longer than anticipated and so accelerating publication of any further proposals would be of little use (it was too late to reach decisions on them before polling day). On 2 December Marples was instructed to halt publication of proposals on the list until a decision on how to proceed was taken (in fact this made no difference as none of them was due for publication before the next meeting of the Cabinet committee on closures). Sufficient areas of potential delay had now emerged to threaten the credibility of the whole programme: Lord Stonham had called for 131 urban closures in Reshaping to be postponed (rather optimistically, as one proposal had attracted no objections); Marples was being pressed to defer the publication of some thirty proposals relating to holiday resorts until the autumn; and on top of the ‘sensitive’ list, there was now a second list of proposals officials wanted deferred on the grounds they might conflict with another plank of modernisation, regional planning.
The closure of lines to holiday resorts was at the heart of the transformation of the railways in the 1950s and 1960s. The railways had created many holiday towns; however, holiday traffic was concentrated over a very short period. In the West Country some resorts saw a third of their holiday trade in a single peak fortnight, a far from lucrative arrangement for both the railways and the trade. In 1959, out of 18,500 coaches allocated to fast and semi-fast services, 6,000 were used on no more than eighteen occasions, and a third of these on no more than ten. Beeching estimated these coaches cost £3.4 million, but earned only £500,000. Reshaping proposed the closure of lines to 127 holiday resorts, including inland destinations such as Richmond (Yorkshire) and Ballater, and promised the complete elimination of high peak stock by 1965 (a proposal with implications for plans to mobilise the army and disperse the urban population in the event of war).
The issue came to the attention of the Cabinet committee on rail closures when it considered proposals to keep the short line to Porthcawl open on a summer-only basis in December 1963. It called for a report on holiday lines. Marples attempted to overcome the obvious problems of conveying luggage on buses by suggesting they be permitted to haul luggage trailers. Officials estimated that closures would only affect 2 or 3 per cent of non day-trip holidaymakers, who could always transfer their custom to other resorts and were already shifting to road. Similar closures had not had a serious impact in the past (the Isle of Wight and Coniston were cited as examples) and this kind of traffic, although still large, was in decline. In 1955 roughly a third of holidaymakers travelled to their destination by rail, a third by car and a third by coach or bus. By 1962 rail was carrying only 26 per cent, while a further 18 per cent travelled by bus or coach, leaving over half travelling by car. In the same period the number of cars on the road had almost doubled from 3.6 million to 6.6. million. The trend was clear. Although closures might mean hardship for resorts that lost business, it was argued that they should be adapting themselves ‘more vigorously’ to car-borne visitors and ‘modernising their promotion to this end’.218 The committee was persuaded that holiday lines should be judged on their individual merits, which was curtains for Porthcawl. The one concession the Cabinet committee made to worried boarding-house landladies, hoteliers and deckchair attendants throughout the country was the announcement on 12 February 1964 that if any closure proposals affecting holiday resorts were published from then on, the line would not close until 1 October. Two of the ten busiest resort stations listed for closure in Reshaping came to the ministry before the 1964 election. Whitby was reprieved, but lost two of its three routes; hardship was an additional factor in the decision to reprieve the third. Withernsea, only slightly less busy, was closed.
Regional planning concerns proved harder to dismiss. Before his resignation through ill-health, Macmillan had incorporated into his modernisation theme measures designed to address the perceived decline of the industrial areas of Scotland and the north-east of England and the contrasting growth of the southeast. The difficulty the government faced was that resisting this economic trend might damage national economic growth, a story which has become familiar in the ensuing half a century. Macmillan wanted government to stimulate growth in the areas threatened by unemployment, leading the Conservatives to a new emphasis on regional planning, which was maintained under Douglas-Home. Macmillan had given Lord Hailsham special responsibility for drawing up a development plan for the northeast in January 1963 and by mid-1963 a series of Regional Study Groups (RSGs) covering the south-east, north-east, north-west, West Midlands and central Scotland had been established as part of the government’s attempt to get to grips with the future distribution of population and employment. Reshaping contained potential conflicts with attempts to assist declining areas and with regional policy in general, most obviously because government had no say over the withdrawal of freight facilities. In August 1963 the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) drew up a list of fifteen cases it wanted postponed so that regional studies could be carried out first. By December, the Board of Trade and the Scottish Development Department had between them added another twenty-three cases.
Together, the ‘planning’ and ‘sensitive’ lists accounted for about 20 per cent of the programme. Marples resisted any deferment through three meetings of the Cabinet committee and one of the Cabinet, before agreeing to
a compromise in January 1964. This consisted of the announcement about holiday lines referred to above and a request to Beeching to defer publication of nine cases: the Waverley line, St Pancras–Barking and seven in the north-west. Beeching agreed to eight, although the Barrow–Whitehaven and Broad Street–Richmond proposals appear to have been abandoned as well. Although there seems to have been genuine concern in the Cabinet over the implications of closures for development and urban traffic, the Cabinet Secretary’s notes suggest that the discussion was as much about finding a ‘respectable’ reason to delay controversial cases.219 Nevertheless, faced with the obvious truth of Marples’s warnings that too many exceptions would undermine the whole policy, his colleagues were persuaded not to court political disaster.
Between the publication of Reshaping and the general election in October 1964, Marples consented to the closure of 127 services affecting 701 stations and closing 1,341 route miles in all; he refused consent in eleven cases affecting seventy-six stations.† The ministry certainly attempted a thorough investigation of individual cases. Treasury officials complained of the detail the ‘marathon’ meetings of the interdepartmental working party went into.220 The Hon. Henrietta Brewer was not entirely correct when she told the Catholic Herald on behalf of Walsingham’s pilgrims that no consideration was being given to the cost to the taxpayer of widening roads and getting children to school, or the wider economic effects. In the Wells case, for example, concerns about the effect on the holiday trade and on the shellfish and lugworm traffic carried by passenger trains were considered, but not felt to be particularly significant. Nevertheless, the effort did not amount to the ‘full investigation … into the effects on the area as a whole’ that Wells council, among thousands of other objectors to closures across the country, wanted.221
When ministers were wondering how best to handle Reshaping in February, Marples had assured Macmillan that ‘our procedures are designed to ensure there is no real hardship’, by which he meant that where the ‘essential needs’ of rail users could not be met more cheaply by a bus service, the rail service would continue, although the intention was to postpone closures until roads could be made adequate, rather than retain lines permanently.222 Defining the ‘essential needs’ of users was an inexact process and it is difficult retrospectively to extract hardship as an issue from other concerns that influenced refusals. However, the definition that emerged over the following eighteen months can be summed up as being able to get to work or school without an absurdly long journey and not being completely cut off otherwise. In considering the provision of alternative bus services, officials would take account of journeys made for reasons other than to get to work, but disruption to these journeys was not generally considered hardship. A key point in the evolution of this definition was ministers’ consideration of the Romsey–Andover line in the early summer of 1964, the first to come before them in which it was clear that hardship could not be satisfactorily relieved by a bus service. In recommending closure they argued that a balance had to be struck between the degree of hardship, the numbers involved and the cost to the public. In this case an increase in journey times of up to of thirty-seven minutes and a ninety-minute maximum journey was considered acceptable to remove a subsidy per regular passenger of £100–200 a year.
A few weeks later officials recommended that Hull–Hornsea should close on the grounds that the times and subsidies were roughly the same as the Andover–Romsey case. In doing so they refined the definition of hardship by calculating the subsidy using only the 3,400 commuters on the grounds that extended journey times for 2–3,000 day-trippers from Hull on fine summer days, 200 shoppers and various other users was inconvenience, not hardship (for good measure, officials argued that refusing consent to Hornsea would cause bitterness and jealousy in Withernsea, which was due to lose its service to Hull at the same time, therefore both should close). These were very rough calculations and the Hornsea decision led members of the TUCC to consider resigning en masse or appearing before the traffic commissioners to oppose the granting of licences to replacement buses. A certain amount of cynicism about claims of hardship was understandable; even in Wick a local claimed that ‘most of the people who are making all the fuss have not used the railways for years’.223 Marples was more cynical about it than most and in one case (Cambridge–March) he had to be restrained by his colleagues from withdrawing a service in advance of complex arrangements for a replacement bus service being completed (the service eventually closed when these arrangements were established in the 1970s). Hardship was not ignored, but it was defined in a manner that maximised the number of consents, and in the cases Marples rejected it tended to be combined with concerns about urban congestion, regional development or the holiday trade.
In the Wells case, the TUCC had found that unless the proposed bus service was improved, hardship would be caused to a number of commuters, shoppers and day-trippers (schoolchildren were the education authority’s problem). However, officials felt they could not insist that the BRB subsidise better bus services if their cost wiped out the savings. When the ministry wrote to the Board, pointing out that the line would cost more closed than open, it got a stark reply. Even if the service were able to break even, the Board argued, ‘it would not be the sort of service which we ought to be engaged in. It is against the whole conception of the Reshaping Report that we should’, because, as Reshaping put it, the ‘proposals in the plan are interdependent … realisation of many of the savings depends upon the adoption of the plan as a whole’.224 This argument reflected the extent to which costs were shared between services – which was not covered by the figures that went to the ministry. It was what the government had signed up for and the only good news for officials was that the Board had now decided it would be closing the line to freight after all, at which point the savings would increase by £34,400 and justify the necessary improvements to the bus service. The easiest course was to withhold consent to passenger closure until this took place; the working party recommended this course. But attaching such a condition to a formal consent would mean admitting that the board had got the figures wrong and had misled the TUCC over the provision for pilgrims. However innocently made, these errors would have provoked calls for the case to go back to the TUCC and would have undermined both Carrington’s assurances and the credibility – already weak – of the consultative process.
Marples’s parliamentary secretary, Tom Galbraith, rejected officials’ advice and recommended refusing consent to the Wells closure and requiring the BRB to make a new proposal if freight was subsequently withdrawn. He did so in part to balance consenting to closure of the Brightlingsea branch, in which the bus subsidy also outweighed the saving, but chiefly to avoid the political difficulties of closure. However, there had clearly been some tension in the office and Scott-Malden intercepted Galbraith’s minute before it reached Marples, to suggest an alternative. Wells was not Cromer or Hunstanton, let alone Skegness. Objectors had raised the issue of day-trip traffic on the line but this was one of a range of issues rather than a life-or-death matter for the town. Nevertheless, Scott-Malden pointed out to Marples that Wells was a holiday resort, however minor. While any announcement that the line would be kept open until October in order to maintain facilities for summer visitors would raise awkward questions about why others had not been treated similarly (it had been published too early to fall into the group of holiday lines the government had just promised would not close until then), if the Board was persuaded informally to keep it open until freight was withdrawn, the mess it had made of the case could be kept quiet and the ‘holiday case’ explanation would serve as a fall-back if the delay was questioned. On 2 March Marples formally consented to closure, while in a separate letter the ministry privately agreed with the BRB that this would not take place until freight was withdrawn, at which point the balance of costs would make the case clear-cut. All very neat, except that this pushed the closure date closer to the general election.
Bee
ching’s agreement in February 1964 to postpone publication of the Waverley proposal reflected the continuing intensity of opposition in Scotland. An organisation known as MacPuff had been formed to oppose closures north of Inverness and was attracting Conservative support. In December 1963 the Conservatives’ majority at Dumfries was cut from over 7,000 to 971, its lowest for thirty years, in a by-election at which the proposed closure of the line to Stranraer had encouraged opposition hopes. The following month the chairman of the party in Scotland, Sir John George, warned the Prime Minister that
feelings are red hot among the executive committees and Divisional Councils throughout Scotland on the … subject. No one believes that the [Inverness–Wick and Dumfries–Stranraer] lines in fact will be closed but all are distressed and dismayed that we are giving our opponents such a long run to flay us mercilessly.225
Pressure from Number Ten succeeded in squeezing a refusal of consent to the closures north of Inverness out of Marples as soon as was decent after the TUCC reports arrived, despite his hopes that the Inverness–Kyle line could be closed once major road improvements were carried out. The Stranraer lines proved more problematic and it was not until July that Marples was able to announce his refusal to Ayr–Stranraer and the reopening of a short connecting line that would allow trains from the south to reach the port once the line from Dumfries closed (opposition to these two proposals being as much about connections to Northern Ireland as rail services in south-west Scotland). Meanwhile, Douglas-Home had to be persuaded that it would not look good if the Gleneagles–Crieff section of the Comrie branch (which lay in his constituency) was reprieved when other more deserving cases had not been. In September 1964 Noble successfully lobbied for a decision on Aviemore–Forres to be deferred on purely political grounds.