by Charles Loft
Nationalisation completed the Great Central’s transition, initiated when it was absorbed into the LNER, from challenging competitor to spare part – one main line more than was really needed between London, the East Midlands and south Yorkshire. By the 1950s the line’s chief value was as a useful north-east to south-west link via a spur from Woodford Halse, a junction in the middle of nowhere, to Banbury on the GWR. By 1959 a plan had been drawn up to concentrate freight and parcels traffic on the Great Central in order to free capacity on the former Midland main line from St Pancras to the East Midlands. This would allow passenger services on the Midland line to be accelerated, while the Great Central’s expresses would be replaced by three semi-fast trains a day between London and Nottingham and three between Sheffield and Manchester. The first stage, announced in 1959, saw the end of express services from Marylebone to Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield, saving an estimated £140,000. Although they offered a slower journey from the East Midlands to London by the late 1950s, the Great Central’s expresses were more comfortable and reliable than those on the Midland route (which was particularly unreliable at the time of their withdrawal) and as they left Marylebone with an average seventy-two passengers, you could always get a seat in first class. Their withdrawal provoked strong opposition and led to the formation of the Great Central Association, an organisation distinguished from other anti-closure groups by its focus on restoring long-distance services, but similar to them in its aim of ‘protecting the public against the whims of the large and ponderous organisations which run the public services of the country … for their own administrative convenience’.232
Anticipating a similar reaction to stage two of the plan to rationalise the Great Central, which involved withdrawing the stopping trains, closing twenty-five stations and withdrawing the Sunday service, the East Midlands division produced a pamphlet explaining the plan. This sought to associate opposition with a privileged minority of ‘influential people in Nottingham and Leicester particularly, [who] have grown up to hold the GC line in almost sentimental regard as their own particular way of getting to and from London in comfort and reasonable speed’ and others who were motivated by an outdated loyalty to their favoured line (an interesting reversal of the criticism aimed by objectors at ex-LMS managers supposedly taking revenge on the rival LNER-owned Great Central). Whatever truth this may have contained, the argument that local opinion in Nottingham had been coloured in favour of the Great Central because its Victoria station ‘happens’ to be better sited than its Midland rival and then enjoyed ‘advantages …[that] are simply the embodiment of several decades’ additional experience of what a station should be and the facilities it should provide’, was an odd way to promote its closure.233
When the East Midlands TUCC met to hear objections to the stage two proposals at Leicester in February 1962, the Divisional Traffic Manager, a Mr Gray, set out his case with regret:
No railway officer worth his salt likes to see even the smallest facility reduced, but he is under statutory obligation to make ends meet and it is therefore my unenviable task to have to put before the committee proposals which I believe are eminently sound, but which must make a few people think that railway officers are hard hearted.234
His task did not become any more enviable as the area committee criticised the apparent carelessness of the traffic survey and found the Commission’s proposals would cause unacceptable hardship between Leicester and Rugby. An attempt by the region to recast the semi-fast timetable to meet these concerns merely earned a rebuke from the chair of the central committee, who expressed a lack of confidence in BTC figures. The former Midland route between Leicester and Rugby had closed since the census had been taken and objectors argued that this had improved use of the Great Central. As the region had promoted the merits of the GC line as an alternative when it closed the Midland route, this was a difficult point to dispute. At the TUCC’s recommendation, the Rugby–Nottingham local service and two of its stations (Ashby Magna and East Leake) were retained in addition to those served by the semi-fast trains. The rest of the local services were withdrawn in 1963.
By the time stage two was considered by the East Midlands TUCC in early 1962 the plan to concentrate parcels traffic on the line had been abandoned and there was already talk of withdrawing the semi-fast trains. At the end of the year the Commission decided to examine north-east/south-west routes with the aim of closing the Great Central completely. By the end of 1963 this study had identified potential savings of £3.3 million (£1.24 million more than could be saved by simply switching to diesel operation) and work began on a proposal to close all of the Great Central, except the Rugby–Nottingham local trains recently reprieved, which was anticipated to be complete by June 1965. However, by the time the report was ready for publication a Labour government had been elected, pledged to halt major rail closures while regional transport plans were prepared by new regional bodies.
There was no sophisticated planning system ready and waiting for Wilson’s arrival, from which the Conservatives had averted their eyes when implementing Beeching. Indeed, if the Conservatives could have conjured one up in 1962 they almost certainly would have done so. If Labour’s plans were to be based on a serious analysis, it would take a long time to close the Great Central. Yet almost immediately the new government was under great pressure to save money and the Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, was very much taken with the promise of £20 million just waiting to be saved by pushing ahead with the closures programme. The Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), implacably opposed to any assistance to rail that could not be justified on economic grounds, had its own ears and voice within the Cabinet in the shape of Frank Cousins, Labour’s new Minister of Technology, TGWU General Secretary, former head of its road haulage section and rail-sceptic. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the Labour Party, the rail unions in particular, was chiefly attracted to planning, coordination and integration in transport as shorthand for a quick change of policy that would reduce the number of railway closures, protect jobs in the railway workshops and recreate the BTC, which had become ‘the ark of Labour’s transport covenant’.235 If Tom Fraser, the pleasant fifty-something Scottish ex-miner Wilson appointed as Minister of Transport, was unlucky to be caught between these competing desires, he was foolish in thinking that devising a transport policy based on the principles of sound economic planning offered a way out.
Wilson’s promises of change meant that Fraser was in difficulty from the off. Aside from those affected by closure decisions, his problem was not public opinion – he told Wilson that the favourable reception Trunk Routes received indicated public support for modernisation – but Labour Party opinion. One of the first things Commander Harry Pursey did following his October 1964 re-election to one of the safest Labour seats in the country, Hull East, was to tell the Hull Daily Mail that he would immediately urge the new Labour government to reopen the branch lines from Hull to Hornsea and Withernsea which were due to close that weekend. Pursey was by no means the only Labour MP who would be calling for a halt to rail closures in the ensuing weeks. The new government’s tiny majority meant an early general election was inevitable and the embarrassment of Wilson’s abandoned pledge to stop Beeching was a sensitive issue.
The possibility that Labour would at least halt and possibly reverse closures had caused officials at the ministry and Treasury a great deal of anxiety. In the fortnight before the election, the ministry prepared for a change of government by obtaining advice from the Treasury Solicitor on a Minister of Transport’s powers to undo the work of his predecessor. The advice officials passed on to Fraser in the early weeks of the government’s life was that while he could issue directions of a general nature to the BRB, a direction to halt closures approved by Marples but not yet implemented would not be of a general nature as it would only affect about twenty-five lines. Therefore, no power existed to direct Beeching to reopen lines. Nobody wants to go back over their past two years’ work and undo some of it. Quite
apart from tension between what civil servants are supposed to do and what human beings are actually like, however, Treasury officials were concerned that the closure programme was the only way in which they could exercise a direct influence in reducing the railway deficit. They were eager to know what was happening at the ministry in the election’s aftermath and to impress upon the new regime the belief that there were £20 million of savings to be made through closures (although the BRB had confirmed this figure, it was merely a rough estimate – a caveat that was not passed on to ministers).
The pressure on Fraser intensified when, a week after the election, British Railways announced its plans for the Great Central, provoking demands from all three rail unions for ministerial action to protect the 1,700 staff affected. Yet Fraser’s officials were surprised at the ease with which they convinced him to continue the programme. A week after the election, briefed by his officials ‘entirely in accordance with the Department’s earlier thinking’, Fraser warned the Cabinet that the party’s manifesto ‘appeared likely to be misconstrued’ as a promise not only to halt all rail closures but to reverse those of Marples’s consents that had yet to come into effect.236 The clearly disputable advice that Fraser had no power to intervene was quickly accepted not only by him, but by the Cabinet.
This apparent retreat was covered by a statement in Parliament reiterating Fraser’s commitment to halt major closures while regional transport plans were drawn up. The impression of change was reinforced by announcing Beeching’s agreement to leave the track in place where lines did close and a new ‘early sift’ procedure, under which proposals were sent to the minister before publication so that any obviously unacceptable ones could be vetoed.237 For good measure Fraser also announced his refusal to close a number of stations on the Settle–Carlisle line. However, neither ‘early sift’ nor the retention of track amounted to a significant change, nor were they expected to. There is every likelihood that Marples would have reached a similar decision on the stations Fraser reprieved, as the BRB’s inability to meet the ministry’s requirements for alternative services had been the subject of discussions since the spring. Crucially Fraser had done nothing to alter the criteria his officials considered when advising him on individual closures. By ensuring the £20 million figure had made an appearance in the statement while defining ‘major closures’ as those likely to conflict with plans that would not exist for some time, officials laid good ground for continuity. The gradual erosion of the Whitby Gazette’s post-election optimism, leading to its profession of bewilderment at Fraser’s statement, makes sad reading.
Almost the first question Fraser was asked in the wake of his statement was whether the Great Central would be classed as a major closure and by the start of 1965 he may well have regretted the policy of ‘early sift’. Instead of being able to rebuff queries about the proposed closure of the Great Central until it had made its way through the TUCC machinery, he was under pressure to veto it before it was published. With savings of over £800,000 at stake from the passenger closure, this was almost out of the question. At the start of February ministry officials recommended allowing publication of the Great Central closure on the grounds that the ‘publicity and pressure have got out of all proportion’ given that only a handful of passenger trains were affected and the minister had no say on the freight side anyway.238 Fraser and most of his colleagues accepted this, but Wilson was increasingly concerned. The publication of Trunk Routes, although generally well received, in January had brought the issue of rail closures back into the spotlight (despite Fraser’s success in getting Beeching to tone down the maps to make it look less like a closure programme†). Shortly afterwards the insincerity of Labour’s pre-election talk of halting closures was exposed when it refused to make time to pass a ten-minute rule Bill introduced by the Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby, Sir Alexander Spearman, which would have amended the Transport Act to allow Fraser to reverse Marples’s decisions. This was all the more embarrassing as Spearman reminded the House of Commons that Wilson had ‘clearly … precisely and unconditionally’ pledged to halt the Whitby closures and had subsequently confirmed that this would have been done were it not for the 1962 Act.239 To be told by Fraser, on top of this, that the Great Central case was ‘very far from being “major” in any sense of the word’ was too much.240 Wilson brought the whole issue back to the Cabinet, telling Fraser,
I am very worried about this. Our election pledge was clear – to halt major closures. We qualified this in November … Now we seem to be going much further. The Aylesbury (G.C.) line really is a major closure and we do not appear to be halting it.241
His concern increased two days later when he saw that the Cabinet committee had approved the closure of the Guildford–Horsham line despite the TUCC’s finding of hardship.
Wilson seems to have genuinely wanted a change, and Fraser would not have stood in his way for long. However, while the Treasury was willing to accept a strong social or economic case for retaining services (for example, Manchester–Bury and Huddersfield–Penistone), once the initial post-election controversy was over its officials began trying to get the programme back up to speed, especially when it became clear that the railway deficit would be as much as £130 million in 1966. Officials presented the issue to ministers as a test of their ability to govern, and in particular to take the difficult decisions necessary to modernise Britain, and hoped to help them convince Labour supporters by calculating that the railway deficit represented five-and-a-half pence on a packet of cigarettes and three-and-a-half pence on a pint of beer. The Treasury was able to count on support from the Minister of Power, Fred Lee, who feared that if the rail closures stopped the NCB’s pit closure programme would be next. The Department of Economic Affairs (DEA), which Wilson had set up as a rival source of economic advice to the Treasury, presented no counter argument to justify a halt. Douglas Houghton, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and chairman of a Cabinet committee on transport policy, appears to have been the only minister to seriously resist these pressures. If Fraser had ‘fallen into the hands’ of his officials he was not alone.242 Wilson ensured that Fraser did not welcome Trunk Routes in a way that might imply the government was contemplating closures beyond the existing programme, and Fraser announced greater consultation with the Regional Economic Planning Councils (REPCs) that Labour had established, but once again this was little more than a cosmetic change and by the end of the year Treasury ministers and officials were united in calling for action on the implications of Trunk Routes.
Formal regional consultation was a development of the Conservatives’ informal practice of referring proposals to the Regional Study Groups they had established and it made little difference outside the north-west, where the REPC rejected any proposal affecting Liverpool or Manchester until it had finished its plan. Attempts to draw up regional transport plans were bedevilled by the same lack of data and expertise that Whitehall faced – regional bodies were given no information on freight until well into 1966. These difficulties were compounded by a lack of direction and overshadowed by the difficulty of drawing up wider economic plans. Regional opinion was not necessarily unfavourable to closures in any case. For example, the South West REPC saw the closure of ten intermediate stations between Salisbury and Exeter as a good thing, because it would speed up services to London. As far as the Great Central was concerned the introduction of a further largely irrelevant consultation simply delayed the inevitable. Fraser’s officials drafted a letter consenting to publication, which both Fraser and the BRB hoped would provide an opportunity to publicise the railways’ case and emphasise the massive financial benefits. But it was left on the file unsent while the proposal went through the new procedure. In June the East Midlands council dealt with the case ‘in about thirty seconds flat’; and the thirty seconds were devoted to Nottingham City Council’s view on the importance of redeveloping Victoria station.243 The proposal was finally published in August 1965, two months after the BRB had
been ready to close the line. As this suggests, the changes to procedure introduced under Fraser did little except delay decisions. He presided over some particularly controversial cases including consenting to closure of the Somerset and Dorset (Bath–Bournemouth), probably the closure most regretted by railway romantics, and Oxford–Cambridge, probably the closure most regretted by modern rail planners.
The inability of ‘early sift’, track retention and formal regional consultation to satisfy demands for a fresh approach within the Labour Party increased pressure on Fraser to deliver a new plan for transport. Probably the best chance of doing so quickly was lost when the Cabinet derailed the appointment of Beeching to draw up Labour’s plan. Given that Wilson’s critique of Reshaping had been the supposedly narrow remit given to its author, giving Beeching a wider one was a logical move and Fraser had persuaded Beeching to take the job. However, the Cabinet, with Cousins prominent, saddled Beeching with a team of ‘assessors’. As those behind this move probably hoped, Beeching decided to go and was replaced as chairman at the end of May 1965 by experienced railwayman Stanley Raymond. Cousins may well have been motivated by Beeching’s view that heavy lorries were not covering the costs they imposed on the road network, but there were few tears in the Labour Party at the departure of someone so closely associated with an unpopular Tory policy. This reaction was not universal. Michael Shanks, leading contributor to the ‘What’s Wrong With Britain?’ debate, bemoaned Beeching’s departure and lauded his achievement: ‘It is hard to think of any man in Britain who could have done more to overcome the obstacles facing him in the time he had available.’244 One senior railwayman, Gerard Fiennes, reflected that Beeching ‘opened a lot more things, including minds to ideas, than he closed’; another, Richard Hardy, wrote a biography of Beeching subtitled Champion of the Railway? – its author certainly thought so.245 There is little doubt that Beeching had a galvanising effect on a railway management that had appeared confused and outdated under his predecessor, but whatever their reaction to his departure, few contemporaries would have disagreed with the Sunday Telegraph’s view that ‘the impact he has made will last long after the word “Beechingisation” has disappeared’.246