by Charles Loft
Controlling the order in which decisions were announced offered a less problematic way of defusing opposition than manipulating the order in which proposals were published, but even this was not trouble-free. Closures were generally announced in batches so that consents were accompanied by refusals. The first such group was announced on 14 January 1964, when five Welsh consents were balanced by the refusal of Cardiff–Coryton. By February Noble was insisting that the next batch must contain a Scottish refusal. Marples was able to offer Kilmarnock–Ayr and announced around twenty decisions at a press conference in March including this and a second refusal, Shrewsbury–Llanelli.
Every letter written to the minister about rail closures received a reply written by officials. Although standard texts were used for all letters about a given line, unique paragraphs were usually provided in response to specific points. A good example is the reply offered to a twelve-year-old schoolboy who wrote to the ministry in 1967 with a lengthy account of his reasons for hoping that the Hull–Scarborough line would not close, during the course of which he asked whether two unrelated stations had been closed and whether the ministry could send him some maps of railways. The ministry’s reply updated him on the progress of the Hull case, informed him that he could send an objection to the Yorkshire TUCC, answered his questions on the two stations and suggested he ask the BRB for maps, enclosing their address. His letter may even have come as a welcome relief from the angry rants and, more often, heart-rending appeals – ‘we do not own cars and if the trains were stopped my children and I would not be able to meet and they are all the family I have being a war widow’ – all to be answered in the same calm, rational language.226 It must have been a depressing task to draft these letters; all those years of education and experience devoted to the crafting of a perfectly logical explanation and defence of policy that the author must have known would be in no sense satisfactory to its recipient. The provision of even partially tailored replies made letter-writing an effective form of protest in as much as it delayed the whole process. The preparation of – and correspondence resulting from – the March press conference slowed the pace at which the ministry could process cases and by May the press was claiming that this was deliberate; by July the Board was complaining. In fact, Marples was being pressed by colleagues to speed up his decisions as early as April, in the belief that delays increased controversy.
In the early summer, concern about the electoral consequences of closures was mounting and ministers sought to persuade Beeching not to publish new proposals in the run-up to the election. Although he appears to have agreed not to publish controversial proposals, he refused to stop publication entirely. Marples’s rash of decisions in September, consenting to a further thirty-eight closures, was prompted partly by his colleagues’ desire to end uncertainty, but he was admonished for overdoing it by Lord Blakenham in the middle of the month. Over 200 Reshaping proposals had yet to be dealt with (of which about half had been published). Some thirty decisions were implemented between the start of September and the general election, the Wells branch among them. Had the ministry required passenger services to be retained until freight was withdrawn, rather than trying to conceal the railways’ error in providing the wrong figures by reaching a private understanding with the BRB, Wells (or Fakenham at least) might still have a railway today. In August the BRB told the ministry freight would continue as far as Fakenham into 1965; in fact it did so until 1980. In June 1964, Lord Stonham had claimed that Labour would keep the line open if it won the general election. However, the BRB had already told the ministry that it would close the line to passengers on 5 October, a month before it intended to withdraw freight. A scrawled note on a scrap of paper in the file attributes this to ‘political reasons’ but does not reveal what these were.227 The obvious inference is that the Board brought closure forward to get it out of the way before the election. However, 5 October was a common date for several closures and the BRB wrote to the ministry in May, before the precise date of the election was known and before Stonham’s speech had raised the prospect of a new Labour government intervening to prevent the closure. In any case if the BRB was acting to thwart such a move, it need not have worried, as we shall see.
Fulminations against Beeching on the part of candidates of all parties were common during the 1964 election, but are not generally considered to have affected the result. At Buckingham, where closure of the line to Bletchley in September was followed by Robert Maxwell’s victory for Labour in October, the local paper reported that only forty people turned up for the last train, none of whom were local, while the reprieve granted to the Newcastle riverside loop in September was not enough to save the Conservatives’ majority of ninety-eight at Newcastle East. However, Maxwell certainly felt there were votes in the issue – in September 1964 he led a deputation from Castlethorpe to Marples’s doorstep to petition against closure of the station. Voters in some constituencies were given greater cause to believe they should vote Labour if they wanted to save their railway. Marples’s consent to the closure of the lines from Malton and Scarborough to Whitby in September had been greeted with outrage in Whitby and the local Conservative MP had quickly found himself obliged to disown the decision. In a fine display of campaigning local journalism the Whitby Gazette gave front-page prominence to the case on an almost weekly basis for the rest of the year. Wilson’s letter to the local Labour Party in September assuring them that ‘an obviously major decision such as the Scarborough–Malton–Whitby rail closure would be covered by the statement in the Labour Party manifesto “major rail closures will be halted”’, was interpreted by the paper as meaning that if Labour won the election the closure would not go ahead.228 At Silloth the party went further, organising the demonstration described at the start of this book, reports of which gave much prominence to the promise that trains would run again if Labour got in.
Silloth and Whitby both lay in safe Tory seats, but on the penultimate day of the campaign the Hull Daily Mail reported an election meeting at Hornsea, which along with the neighbouring Withernsea branch was due to lose its service the following week, at which a Labour councillor claimed that if Labour won ‘the closures which had not already taken place would be stopped until every line had been examined, not purely on the basis of whether they paid or not, but whether they provided a service to the community’.229 Many of the voters in marginal Hull North (where Labour overturned a Conservative majority of 702 to win by 1,181 votes) used the lines for summer day-trips and would have read reports of the campaign to save them if Labour won on the front page of the local paper on polling day. The closure of the Northampton–Peterborough line through Wellingborough in May 1964 probably came too early to influence the election result, but even a minuscule protest vote could have cost the Conservatives dearly as Labour won by forty-seven votes. In both the Scottish Highlands and Cornwall it is possible that the extent of Beeching’s proposals fuelled a sense of regional disaffection reflected in the Liberals’ capture of Inverness, Ross & Cromarty, Caithness & Sutherland and Bodmin.
Darlington, Doncaster and Bury were among the seats Labour took at the election. At Darlington the threat to the railway workshops and to the industry in general in a town put on the map by its association with the Stephensons was a key factor in the campaign, as the Central Office agent for the north had predicted it would be the previous autumn. The local Labour Party went to the trouble of tracing railwaymen who had moved to other works and ensured that they had postal ballots. The swing to Labour here was a strong 6.4 per cent. Similar concerns may have helped Labour in the railway town of Doncaster, which also changed hands, but where the pro-Labour swing was only 4.8 per cent. At Bury, which had featured on the list of sensitive closures the previous year, David Ensor turned a Conservative majority of nearly 4,000 into a Labour one of over 1,000, helped by the first Liberal candidate since 1950. The electric service to Manchester, used by 7,000 people a day including 4,000 commuters, had been proposed for closure in February
. In an election speech reported locally a week before polling, Ensor pointed out that under the proposals listed in the Beeching Report the town would lose all its rail links and implied that Bury would benefit from Labour’s manifesto pledge. Although the local Conservative MP was a prominent opponent of closure, both Liberal and Labour candidates pointed out that he had voted in support of Reshaping itself and a Times feature on the constituency identified rail closures as one of two significant local issues. Ironically, the other was the unpopular plan to use Bury as an overspill town for Manchester, the very measure which had ensured two other Bury–Manchester services were among those postponed in February.
Finally there was North Norfolk. This is an odd case to cite, in that Labour held it against a Conservative swing. Yet the majority of just fifty-three, reduced from 658, is so small that the closure of the Wells and Mundesley lines ten days before polling and the fear that Sheringham–Cromer would follow may well have done enough to prevent the Conservatives repeating their success at Norfolk South West. The possibility that seats in Norfolk would swing towards the Conservatives and the significance of local issues was appreciated during the campaign (although the Conservatives themselves focused resources on seats they were trying to hold). As the Conservative vote in the area tended to come from the towns (with Labour’s support based on agricultural workers) it is surely possible that a handful of Conservative voters were persuaded either to stay at home or vote Labour in the hope of saving or restoring their local rail link, or simply in protest. The local Labour candidate failed to utilise the campaigning opportunities provided by the two closures in the way that his counterpart at Silloth did, but closures did feature in the campaign and fears for the Sheringham line’s future were expressed in the local press in the weeks leading up to the vote.
It is impossible to make a watertight case for closures costing the Conservatives a single seat in 1964, and even where closures were an issue they did not dominate campaigns to the exclusion of all else. Transport did not even feature in a Sunday Telegraph poll of election issues. The Carlisle Journal’s supplement on transport on 9 October concentrated entirely on the possible impact of a Labour government on the local road haulage industry and Ensor’s final speech of the Bury campaign ignored the railway issue altogether while criticising the Conservatives for not building enough roads. Given that implementation of the closure programme coincided with a Conservative recovery in the polls, it seems likely that the strategy of backing Beeching in order to present the party as a modernising force, rather than risking the appearance of weakness by not doing so, was right. Marples’s belief in being frank about the need for closures seems to be supported by his personal ratings; in December 1963, 55 per cent of those surveyed by Gallup thought he was doing a good job, with only 24 per cent disagreeing. Nevertheless, the scale of the potential impact of closure on Bury, the tiny Labour majority in North Norfolk, and the centrality of the industry to Darlington raise the possibility that Labour owed its victories in these three seats – and with them Wilson’s outright majority – to the government’s inability to manage the programme with a combination of absolute cynicism and perfect foresight.
There was more to the work of the various Cabinet committees and the ministry-led meetings of officials than simply trying to manage the electoral consequences of the Beeching Report. In their consideration of urban closures and the effect on the holiday industry civil servants conducted detailed analyses and gave serious thought to the wider implications of the closure programme, as did ministers. The consideration of hardship also contradicts the idea that the suffering caused by railway closures was simply ignored, although it is obvious that all concerned were determined not to allow concerns over hardship to undermine the basic policy of a significant contraction of the network. This is particularly evident in a case such as Wells. It is probably true that closing the line to passengers saved the railways money but it is pretty obvious that the saving cannot have been great, that the consequences for users were harsh and that there was significant usage of the line.
Stuffed in the same fifty-year-old file as letters pleading for the line’s retention, the BRB’s declaration that, loss or no loss, this was not ‘the sort of service which we ought to be engaged in’ makes unpleasant reading. When the line closed, the timetable on the remaining section through Dereham was recast, leaving the new buses with no connection to the surviving rail services to Norwich and King’s Lynn. Officials discovered this purely by chance some three months later. As the bus journey time was double that of the railway, it would be surprising if Stanley Jenkins’s history of the line is wrong to say that most people heading to Norwich went straight there by road after closure. In any case, when the other line through East Dereham closed in 1968 (to King’s Lynn, completely) and 1969 (to Wymondham to passengers) the assumptions on which the TUCC had assessed hardship were undermined. Given that so much of the route survived as a freight line for so long, given the fulfilment of local suspicions that the line onwards from Dereham would be next to go and given the difficulty in accommodating the 100,000 pilgrims to Walsingham each year on the local roads today, it is difficult not to feel that if the line had been given a chance, the benefits would have outweighed the loss. It is difficult not to see the closure as slapdash and unreasonable and to ask why anyone’s journey to work should be doubled to over an hour, for the sake of a drop in the ocean. But the Board’s letter needs to be read in the context of every previous chapter in this book. For a decade or more lines that had long since served their purpose had proceeded through the interminable closure process at a snail’s pace while taxpayers’ money leaked out of the system. So dynamic action was taken – debate was restricted, procedure was simplified, progress was made. And this is what that looks like. It would hardly be surprising if the closure of the Wells-next-the-Sea branch inspired a handful of local Conservative voters to stay at home or register a protest. But whether or not Beeching actually made any difference to the election, the significant effort Conservative ministers devoted to managing the programme offered a warning to future governments. The potential impact of the closure programme on the election was clearly appreciated by Wilson; although if Labour won any votes through its pledge to halt major closures until a plan for transport was worked out, it did so on a false prospectus, as we shall see in the following chapter.
† Files on the decision to reprieve the riverside loop in Tyneside immediately before the 1964 general election in which the Conservatives defended a majority of ninety-eight at Newcastle East have not survived, although this decision did affect the sort of urban line which stood a good chance of being reprieved in any event.
† Inverness–Wick/Thurso, Dingwall–Kyle of Lochalsh, Ayr–Stranraer, Dumfries–Stranraer, and Edinburgh–Carlisle via Hawick, known as the Waverley Route.
† These figures exclude cases published before Reshaping even where decisions emerged after October 1963.
Chapter 10
Unmitigated England: Tom Fraser and the Great Central
Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of the South Eastern, Metropolitan and Great Central railways in the late nineteenth century, shared Ernest Marples’s dynamism and ability to generate ideas, although his dreams of a high-speed railway from Paris to Manchester got a lot further than Marples’s plans to prefabricate the cities of the future. Like Marples, Watkin was not everyone’s cup of tea; his intense rivalry with James Forbes, chairman of the London, Chatham and Dover and Metropolitan District railways brought misery to passengers and penury to shareholders, although it did help to ensure that anywhere that is anywhere in Kent has at least two railways to London. ‘The Feud’, as relations between the South Eastern and the Chatham became known, brought forth one of the most absurd railway lines in England, the South Eastern’s branch from Strood to Chatham Central, expensively built across the Medway right alongside its rival’s line, to a station so far from the centre of Chatham that it was actually in Rochester High Street. The exten
sion from just north of Nottingham to Marylebone station in London, with which Watkin turned the Manchester Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway into the Great Central, turned out to be an even more expensive folly; but while Chatham Central was clearly the work of a lunatic, the Great Central was a beautiful dream that has continued to capture imaginations from the day Watkin persuaded the first unlucky investor to back it.
The sheer scale of Watkin’s ambition, its foresight and the fact he got so much closer to fulfilling it than most of us do is surely part of the attraction. In addition the Great Central was marvellously executed: relatively flat and straight, with elegant bridges and viaducts and neatly arranged stations, it demonstrated all the lessons of three quarters of a century of railway-building. The romance attached to this fabulous railway is elevated to national angst when the English compare all those high-speed lines on the other side of the Channel Tunnel to the ruin of the nearest thing they had to one before HS1. The Great Central’s downfall was that, like one of Colonel Stephens’s lines, it connected places with little potential for traffic via countryside with none. Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester and Rugby had already been well served by the Midland (and in Rugby’s case the London and North Western) for decades by the time the London Extension opened in 1899 and, although the country between Rugby and Nottingham did yield a little local traffic, between Rugby and Aylesbury there were already more railways than the sparse population would prove able to support. And therein lies the final element in the appeal of this railway romance: the Great Central ran through what even today is as close to unspoiled countryside as England has got. A highlight was the viaduct over Swithland Reservoir with its wooded backdrop of silver birch and bracken, ‘especially very early on a cold morning when mist hung above the placid water and the trail of smoke from a speeding express drifted idly away through the winter trees’.230 ‘Unmitigated England’, Betjeman called it in his Great Central Railway – Sheffield Victoria to Banbury; hunting country, with ‘ridge and furrow shadows’ and church steeples shining silver ‘above the barren boughs’.231