by Charles Loft
The man appointed to conduct the study in Beeching’s place, Lord Hinton, felt that the railways only existed because modern road transport had not been available when they were built. Unsurprisingly, his views were not what Labour was looking for and by the summer Wilson was seeking ways to bury the whole exercise. Meanwhile, Fraser was at loggerheads with Houghton, over the latter’s plan for the creation of a British Transport Authority. Based on proposals from Raymond, and supported by the NUR and TUC, this would have had significant powers to force freight traffic onto rail. Fraser won the battle, but had no alternative ready to put in a Bill. His continued insistence that Labour’s transport policy should be based on thorough studies of the problem created mounting frustration among his colleagues, the rail unions, Labour backbenchers and other Whitehall departments. The ministry began constructing a transport costs model covering the next thirty years, a study of future demand and an examination of how road pricing could be used to increase the cost of using congested roads. There was little prospect of results before 1967 and these studies, like the ones Beeching had proposed to Stedeford, were overtaken by the need for action. With an election obviously approaching, Wilson sacked Fraser in December and brought in Barbara Castle to heal Labour’s divisions on transport. Transport planning, it turned out, was at odds with the maintenance of an aura of dynamic change.
Raymond wrote to Castle just before the March 1966 general election begging for a decision on the Great Central, which had now become a ghost line: all freight traffic diverted; the few remaining services sometimes leaving Marylebone with no passengers at all; a demoralised skeleton staff awaiting the inevitable end. Raymond used the line himself and was appalled at the waste. A recommendation on closure had been sitting in Castle’s in-tray since the middle of February. The assistant secretary dealing with the case, admitting it was ‘not for officials to advise on the electoral aspects’, but clearly frustrated, tried to give Castle a push. He suggested that a consent to closure that mentioned the enormous savings would surely be as likely to achieve ‘a favourable effect’ as a refusal and if she wasn’t convinced could she ‘at least’ take the decision now for official release after the election to ‘avoid the necessity for these papers to take their place in the long queue that will inevitably have built up … with the money still ticking up at £2,400 per day’.247 He was clearly getting used to the new minister’s ways and she took up the latter suggestion. Castle was not afraid of tough decisions but she fully appreciated the electoral significance of transport. This was most obvious in her promise to authorise a bridge over the Humber during Labour’s successful campaign in the vital by-election in January 1966 at Hull North. In the subsequent general election she made a point of visiting North Norfolk to reassure voters over the future of the line to Sheringham.
Once Labour was re-elected with a workable majority, Castle’s decision was announced and the Great Central closed in September 1966. But there was a sting in the tail for the ministry. In the early years of the twentieth century, the GWR and the Great Central had constructed a joint line which allowed Great Western trains from London to Birmingham to avoid Oxford by running direct from Paddington to Banbury via High Wycombe. Great Central trains used the route to avoid the congested line into London it shared with the Metropolitan, by running from Marylebone to West Ruislip, over the joint GWR line to a junction at Ashendon and then on a new Great Central line to Grendon Underwood junction on the original London Extension. By the time the Great Central faced closure the Ashendon–Grendon Underwood link was used by just one through train from the main line a week. Unfortunately, this train had been forgotten and the link line had not been mentioned in the formal closure proposal. It had been unlawfully closed. Needless to say, the Great Central Association spotted this and the whole rigmarole of formal closure had to be gone through. The association objected to the new proposal, but this was no Bluebell; the only stations on the line had been closed for years, no one else noticed and no grudging service was temporarily restored.
In October 1967 Castle gave her consent to the disposal of the Great Central route south of Rugby. There do not seem to have been many takers and the route is still largely untouched, except at Brackley where a bypass has severed the viaduct. The Great Central Association had talked to the ministry about taking over the Nottingham–Rugby section to run a public service even before it closed. This came to nothing, although parts of the London Extension have been preserved as a steam railway, reopened as a commuter line and reused by Nottingham’s trams. From the 1960s onwards opponents – and would-be reversers – of the line’s closure have pointed to its potential as a high-speed route connected to the Channel Tunnel, often citing its large loading gauge as an advantage in this respect. However, it was not actually built to the standard later adopted on the continent. HS2 – according to the planned route at the end of 2012 – follows the line of the Great Central south of Brackley but uses relatively little of the trackbed. What side, one wonders, would Betjeman have taken in the contemporary struggles over this latest scar on the Chilterns?
Although the most strenuous complaints at the closure came from those who saw the Great Central as a lost main line, it was Woodford Halse that suffered most. Like Melton Constable, Woodford was a railway village where the large engine shed and goods sidings had been the mainstay of local employment. As well as the main line, it lost its trains to Banbury. Not many people used the station (about sixty on weekdays and 120 on Saturdays) but those who depended on it to reach Banbury’s shops (and one woman who used the main line to visit her elderly mother in Loughborough) were now marooned in the middle of nowhere and the 6.40am bus for those employed at Rugby was not much help for anyone else. The TUCC had recognised their plight but was unable to suggest a solution, given the tiny numbers involved. One ex-driver resident had been in the army with Fraser during the war and wrote to him after publication of the closure proposal asking the minister to receive a deputation from the village and reminding him that ‘in those days no matter was too small for your personal attention’.248 The feeling of betrayal among men who had worked for the railway all their lives was palpable. Today Woodford Halse is a sleepy little village, still in the middle of nowhere, but more comfortable with it. One imagines the residents are pretty relived HS2 goes nowhere nearby.
Closure of the Great Central as a main line left the stopping train trundling between the ill-named Rugby Central and the cavernous and otherwise deserted Nottingham Victoria as the last remnant of Watkin’s dream – until BR cut the service back to a reopened Nottingham Arkwright Street to make way for a shopping centre on the site of Victoria. Connecting with nothing at either end, half of the intermediate stations closed, the rest more abandoned than unstaffed, it was a very sorry farce that limped on into 1969. Every weekday evening, a few people would leave behind the bustle of Leicester’s rush hour and head down a back street to the grandiloquent Leicester Central station,
along a gloomy subway where their footsteps echoed off the tiled walls. At the top of a stairway stood the bleak platforms… where twenty or thirty people sat on shabby benches under the decaying iron canopy … the only sounds were distant ones.249
By the time it closed, Leicester Central was typical of the urban remnants scattered around the post-Beeching network in the sixties and seventies, when the term ‘inner-city’ began to emerge to describe a landscape of dysfunctional modern estates, derelict or half-abandoned Victorian industrial structures and the rundown homes of those who had worked in them. Unmitigated England indeed.
† Officials tried fruitlessly to persuade Beeching to change the date in the report from 1984 to 1985 to avoid jokes about the former’s Orwellian implications – ‘he is notoriously insensitive to public reaction’ sighed the under secretary (NAPRO, MT 124/1103; Scott Malden, note, 1 December 1965).
Chapter 11
A tiger in the tank? Barbara Castle and the stable network
When he begged Barbara Castle to take th
e job of transport minister in late 1965, Harold Wilson told her, ‘For God’s sake, say yes. I must have a tiger in my transport policy and you’re the only tiger we’ve got.’250 (At the time, Esso petrol was promoted using the slogan ‘put a tiger in your tank’.) Castle said she’d sleep on it. When she arrived at the ministry the studies Beeching set up had arrived at their conclusion, implying an 8,000-mile network of which under 5,000 miles would be open to passengers. Yet the cuts this implied were never made and in March 1967 Castle published a new map, British Railways Network for Development, based on the idea that the system should be stabilised at 11,000 miles, with approximately 8,000 miles open to passengers. In the retrospective notes that accompany her diaries, Castle claimed to have built a transport policy virtually from scratch, updating the Labour Party’s commitment to the coordination of transport to take account of the massive increase in road transport since the war, trying to transfer traffic from road onto rail and bringing more economists to bear on the transport problem. Her reputation as one of the few politicians who can claim to have played ‘a distinct leadership role in transport over the course of the last century’ rests primarily on Network for Development and a series of measures contained in the 1968 Transport Act: introducing subsidies for socially necessary rail services; urban and freight transport coordination; and attempting to transfer freight from road to rail through a ‘quantity licensing’ system for road haulage.251 These measures created the impression that she successfully challenged the supposedly pro-road bias of the ministry and its Permanent Secretary Sir Thomas Padmore and turned ‘the tide against railway closures’.252. Just as Marples’s willingness to sell the closure programme made a difference, so Castle’s attempt to present her policy as stabilisation of the rail network had an impact; but, as with Marples, Castle’s significance is not as great as has sometimes appeared.
Wilson’s overriding transport policy objective was to make sure transport policy was not a problem and it was Castle’s job to deliver that objective. Thanks to the narrow majority he had won in the 1964 general election, the Prime Minister needed to go to the polls again in 1966 and did not want to do so with no policy on a contentious issue that was already proving divisive in the party. Without an integrated transport policy, he told Castle, ‘I can’t hold the Party … And the Party is the key to everything.’253 Virtually her first act as minister was to avert a potentially damaging strike by the NUR in early 1966 by promising a new deal for the railways, a promise supported by her commitment to creating a new body to coordinate nationalised freight transport, which was intended to benefit the railways. She reinforced the pledge after the election with a presentation at which she and Raymond showed union representatives maps of the closures implied by Beeching’s studies and what they proposed to do instead. For Wilson, the need to defuse party divisions over transport policy appears to have far outweighed any interest in what the policy actually was. Once the threat was removed – and in the face of declining popularity and threats to his leadership – he whisked Castle off in April 1968 to deal with a similar but larger problem at the Department of Employment. If the content of her massive Transport Bill had really mattered to him, he would probably not have moved her when it was in committee stage in Parliament facing over 2,000 amendments – Castle was presenting its clauses while waiting for the call confirming her new appointment. He certainly would not have replaced her with a minister – Richard Marsh – who did not support key elements of quantity licensing. Castle believed in her policy enough to criticise Marsh for not following it through, but not enough to resist a promotion into ‘the thick of it’.254
If Barbara Castle was one thing, she was a party politician. Her achievement as minister was to produce a policy that kept both the rail unions and the TGWU, and both the party and her officials, if not happy then at least quiet. To this end she built on the attempts to strengthen the ministry’s planning that had been underway since the start of the decade, restructured railway finances, produced coordination without further nationalisation (the National Freight Authority and urban Passenger Transport Authorities) and – in quantity licensing – promised a transfer of freight from road to rail (at some point in the future, to an extent that would implicitly make economic sense – and therefore be limited). This was no simple reversal of Beeching and Marples, but a mixture of continuity dressed up as change and change that looked more radical than it was. As we have seen, the lack of subsidies for individual services had never meant that all loss-making lines would close. Likewise the introduction of subsidies now did not necessarily mean a larger network. The writing-off of more of railways’ accumulated debts was the logical and likely (if not inevitable) development of Conservative policy, while Passenger Transport Authorities was an idea the Treasury had been attracted to before the 1964 election. The initial pro-rail aim of the National Freight Authority was soon abandoned and the body itself fell short of the recreation of the BTC that was the party’s ideal, while quantity licensing was largely a device to secure the support of the rail unions for a policy that was not all they had wanted. Castle accepted a compromise that delayed the introduction of quantity licensing until the Freightliner network had proved itself. Although she later blamed her successor for failing to implement the scheme, she would have found it difficult to justify doing so, given this restraint. Castle was also well aware that any measure designed to produce a shift of freight from road to rail which could not be justified on economic grounds would never have been accepted by the TGWU and the MPs it sponsored. At the same time she strongly defended the roads programme against cuts. She understood the political dangers of antagonising motorists (she received death threats over introducing the breathalyser), particularly as increasing numbers of Labour supporters would be acquiring cars in the future. The development of road pricing, which officials saw as a vital component of the modernisation of transport policy, but which Castle realised would be controversial, received no ministerial encouragement. Meanwhile, total gross investment in the railways in 1969 was over a third lower in current prices than in 1964 and lower in real terms than at any time since nationalisation.
Nevertheless, Castle’s attempt to identify and fund a social railway was genuine. The outcome fell short of her ambition, due to the familiar shortcomings of state machinery – or the unrealistic nature of the aim, if you prefer. Castle had hoped to apply cost–benefit analysis to every unremunerative line, but this proved impossible, not least because the BRB could not produce the data required. A test-case analysis of Machynlleth–Pwllheli produced in 1969 took two years to complete and recommended closure, although there was a great deal of argument over its findings and the line remains open. An attempt to analyse rail services using a computerised survey announced in March 1970 proved so complex that it was abandoned two years later when officials realised the survey would be out of date by the time it was completed. In the absence of cost–benefit analysis the ministry sought a simpler means of arriving at similar results using an estimate of the value of time lost to passengers, hardship and social and economic factors. However, this was too time-consuming to be applied to every case and so the ministry used a simple test of deficit (i.e. grant) per passenger mile to select services that would be proposed for closure and then subjected to the fuller analysis. Those with a deficit of less than sixpence per passenger mile were generally given a grant and those with a deficit of more than eight pence per passenger mile were likely to be put forward for closure (the deficit per passenger for whom no alternative service was available was also calculated). Officials recognised the limitations of this crude approach and in 1970 it was replaced by a calculation of earnings as a percentage of short-term and long-term costs, but this was not much more sophisticated. The grant-aid procedure involved officials in decisions over the level of service, fares and the relationship between services. Even without a full cost–benefit analysis, it proved impossible to process much more than two-thirds of the grant applications before the 1968
Act came into force. By 1970 it was clear that the level of grant bore little relation to the marginal cost of retaining a service and that, without more staff, the ministry could not hope to fulfil the objectives of the 1968 Act in terms of assessing the value of services. If this was some distance from the ideal of a railway funded on the basis of cost–benefit analysis, did Castle identify a socially necessary railway in a way that was a departure from previous practice?
The proposal to stabilise the railways at 11,000 miles came from the BRB and while Castle appears to have been glad to accept it, it would have been very difficult for her – or anyone else – to have closed more lines more quickly than she in fact did. Had the proposals Beeching’s studies implied been implemented, there would be no passenger railway today north of Glasgow–Aberdeen; most of Carlisle–Kilmarnock and the Stranraer, Oban, Fort William and Mallaig lines would have closed. The sum total of lines in Wales would have been the main lines to Holyhead/Caernarfon and to Swansea plus a few branches in the Cardiff area and Shrewsbury–Wrexham–Chester. The Shrewsbury–Hereford–Newport route would have closed almost entirely. In the south-west only the main lines from Bristol to Plymouth/Torquay and Basingstoke to Weymouth, a branch to Westbury and another to Salisbury would have been left. Skipton, Whitby, Scarborough, Skegness, Cromer, Newbury, Yarmouth and Lowestoft would have had no railways. Huddersfield to Manchester and Oxford to Worcester would also have closed. While some railway managers had enthusiastically backed Beeching’s approach to rationalisation as a way forward for an industry in trouble, there had always been sceptics, even among those who, like Gerard Fiennes, thought highly of him as a chairman. From late 1963, the view that the emphasis of attempts to improve the railways’ finances should be on reducing total operating costs on all services, rather than simply cutting out unremunerative ones, gained ground within the BRB. In early 1966 this bore fruit in the proposed 11,000-mile network.