The A303

by Tom Fort

  The longest serving (October ’59 to October ’64) and probably best-known post-war transport minister was Ernest Marples. It was Marples who opened the M1 in December 1959 by declaring that a new era in road travel had begun ‘in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age in which we live’, and who prodded the fledgling motorway network into a steady creep across the countryside. It was unfortunate for Marples’ reputation that his considerable achievements in government should have been overshadowed by subsequent dodgy business dealings. Fate also played him a mean trick in the shape of the slogan ‘Marples Must Go’, which began as a car sticker campaign against yellow lines and parking wardens. It achieved the status of legend as a graffito on a bridge over the M1 near Luton, where it survived well after Marples’ death in 1978.

  Marples belongs to a distant time, as do his equally dynamic predecessor, Harold Watkinson, and indeed Barbara Castle herself. But even those few among later transport ministers and secretaries who displayed a spark of initiative and drive were never allowed – or were never willing – to stay in the job long enough to develop worthwhile policies and see them through. No appointment – not even Northern Ireland – was more eagerly abandoned. Margaret Thatcher and John Major between them got through eleven transport secretaries in eighteen years – only Ridley, Norman Fowler (May ’79 to September ’81) and Paul Channon (June ’87 to July ’89) lasted longer than two years. After Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997, Prescott floundered and blundered for a time until Stephen Byers became transport secretary. Byers was followed by Alistair Darling – at four years the longest tenure since that of Marples. After Darling came Douglas Alexander, Ruth Kelly and Geoff Hoon and finally Andrew Adonis, who at least had the advantage of not being John Prescott.

  All of which may help explain the themes of incoherence, short-termism and extreme reluctance to take difficult decisions which have been the defining characteristics of the handling of transport issues by all governments during my automotive lifetime.

  One of the first reforms of Edward Heath’s government in 1970 was the creation of the Department of the Environment, which absorbed several previously separate ministries, including transport. The following year the transport minister, John Peyton, issued a report to Parliament prosaically entitled Roads in Britain. The intention of its authors was that it should be imbued with the flavour of forward-looking dynamism that Heath had sought, with some success, to inject into his election campaign. Clapped-out socialism had been muscled aside by business-friendly conservatism. Railways were out, roads and motor cars were very much in.

  Mr Peyton’s plan promised ‘a comprehensive network of strategic trunk routes to promote economic growth’. All cities with a population exceeding 250,000 would be connected by these routes. All towns with 80,000 or more people would be within ten miles of one. Existing motorway projects would be realised and exciting new ones would be put on the drawing-board – among them an extension of the M3 to Honiton. A pivotal component of the vibrant vision for Britain was a new airport for London, which would rise from the bird-infested mudflats on the coast of Essex (remember Foulness?) and would have a motorway all of its own.

  Roads in Britain was bolstered by a thicket of forecasts. One in particular was designed to allay the recently raised suspicion that a hidden and undesirable function of new roads was to encourage more people to drive on them. ‘The rate of increase in road traffic is expected to decline in the 1980s,’ the report stated complacently. It did not reveal the statistical evidence for this prediction.

  It was nothing new to be debating the place of the motor car in our lives, and its impact on town, suburbia and countryside. Over the previous half-century its allure had proved to be incredibly potent. It acted both as a symbol of freedom and individuality, and as the practical means of pursuing that freedom. As the magazine Autocar put it in 1929: ‘Public transport, no matter how fast and comfortable, inflicts a sensation of serfdom which is intolerable to a free Briton.’ The great motoring evangelist L. J. K. Setright celebrated the car’s immortal power thus: ‘It has enabled people to break out of their constraints, to attempt something they would never previously do, to venture somewhere they could never previously go, to support ideas and trends they could never previously endorse . . .’

  But as with other freedoms, there was a cost. The best thing about the car was also its biggest flaw. Anyone who could afford it and drive it could have it. This drawback was spotted early on.

  ‘Thirty years ago these people [the urban working class] never left the town except for perhaps one week in the year. Saturday night was spent in the gin-house and Sunday morning was spent sleeping it off. But such is the new democratic weekend, even if it is mainly devoted to covering decent sand with orange peel and cigarette cartons.’ The words come from a book called The Heart of England published in 1935 and written by a well-known theatre critic and all-round journalist called Ivor Brown. He was one of a band of unashamedly elitist commentators who were appalled by the ease with which ‘these people’ were able to penetrate and ruin cherished beauty spots previously reserved for the privileged few. The popular philosopher C. E. M. Joad included the motorist among The Horrors of the Countryside, the title he gave to a pamphlet-length rant which he brought out in 1931: ‘The faces are strained and angry; upon them is a look of tense expectancy and in the intervals between their spasmodic bursts of activity they glower at one another.’ Elsewhere Joad likened cars to ‘a regiment of soldiers who had begun to suffer simultaneously from flatulence’, and the sound of their horns to ‘a pack of fiends released from the nethermost pit’.

  Others fell in love with the car. In a collection of travel pieces called Along the Road, Aldous Huxley rhapsodised about his 10 HP Citröen. ‘The temptation of talking about cars when one has a car,’ Huxley wrote, ‘is quite irresistible. Before I bought a Citröen no subject had less interest for me; none, now, has more.’ Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard paid £275 for a second-hand Singer. ‘The motor car is turning out the joy of our lives,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Soon we will look back at our pre-motor days as we do now at our days in the caves. Nothing has ever changed so profoundly my material existence as the possession of a motor car.’

  For the lucky few their possession permitted them to participate in the Golden Age of Motoring – even though its exact timing was a matter of dispute. In his autobiography, Landscape with Machines, Lionel Rolt – the biographer of Brunel, Telford and other great British engineers – wrote: ‘By 1934 it had already become clear that the previous decade was the golden age . . . Though the roads had become dustless by then, they were still traffic-free. The term “the joy of the open road” was still literally true and carried no cynical overtones.’ But W. A. Mackenzie, long-serving motoring correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the post-war years, located it firmly in the 1930s – ‘motoring was good . . . better than at any time before or since, because cars were more or less grown up but the volume of traffic hadn’t grown up with them.’

  Between 1930 and 1938 the number of cars on British roads more than doubled, to 2.5 million, and congestion was beginning to be recognised as a problem. Nevertheless motoring was still regarded as an exciting new pastime, and the ownership of a car as a passport to a new pleasure. The glitter of Hollywood stars fell upon the automobiles they favoured; Jean Harlow was pictured beside her Packard Roadster, Sir Guy Standing at the wheel of his Cadillac, Ginger Rogers leaning on a Pierce Arrow 12. Such creations were for gawping at, but increasingly the booming car industry was able to bring the motoring dream within reach of average middle-class families. In 1936 you could have bought a second-hand Morris Oxford from Charterhouse Motors in Great Portland Street, London, for £62. A new Morris two-seater was £118, a Hillman Minx £175, a 20 HP Alvis Crested Eagle saloon capable of 74 m.p.h. £800. Autocar magazine was full of articles enthusing about motoring holidays in France and Italy – even Palestine. The adventurous were urged to try Pretoria in South Africa
to Salisbury in Rhodesia.

  By the 1950s inquiring minds began to realise that the car presented a particular challenge to modern society. The democracy of car ownership was blossoming – by 1958 there were eight million cars on the roads. In that year the Scottish engineer and urban planner Colin Buchanan published a study of the motor car whose title – Mixed Blessing – indicated the Janus character of its subject. Buchanan believed that it was the state’s duty rigorously to manage the growth of road traffic. He conjured a nightmare which he called Motopia, a place of ‘death and injury, pain and bereavement, noise and smell. . . of vast winding trails of serious damage to urban and country amenities, with vulgarity, shoddiness, and the squalor of mud, dirt and litter . . . traffic like some destructive lava welling out from the towns, searing and scorching in long channels, ever ready to invade new areas.’

  Buchanan’s reputation as the country’s foremost expert on road transport issues persuaded Ernest Marples to commission him to produce his famous study Traffic in Towns, which created such a stir that Penguin issued an abridged version as a popular paperback. Its prophetic tone was set in the foreword by the influential economist, Sir Geoffrey Crowther. ‘We are nourishing a monster of great potential destructiveness,’ Crowther wrote. ‘The motor car is clearly a menace that can spoil our civilisation. But translated into the terms of the particular vehicle that stands outside our door, we regard it as one of our most treasured possessions or dearest ambitions, an immense convenience, an expander of the dimensions of life, a symbol of our modern age.’

  Crowther and Buchanan put their fingers on an impossible dilemma. ‘It is a difficult and dangerous thing in a democracy to prevent a substantial part of the population from doing something they do not regard as wrong,’ Buchanan observed astutely. But traffic must somehow be restricted if our towns and cities were not to be made unbearable. Buchanan’s answer was a complex balancing act, in which enhanced public transport, pedestrian precincts and concepts such as congestion charges and park-and-ride all had a place, but which still found room for the car. What happened, of course, was that the more radical suggestions – in particular for the redevelopment of urban centres on multiple levels, with roads soaring over the top – were never taken up because they were too expensive, contentious or imaginative. Instead, a new generation of town planners went to work wrecking town centres across the country in the name of modernisation and the promotion of commerce and business – a process in which the construction of ring roads, flyovers, inner distribution roads, multi-storey car parks and the like played a full part.

  Outside urban centres the transport policies of successive governments from the 1960s onwards became concentrated on two parallel strands: running down the railways and building new roads. Long ago it had been the railway industry before which ministers genuflected, chequebooks in hand. Now the roads lobby held sway. No politician who wished to be identified with the cause of progress and prosperity could afford to question the philosophy behind road-building.

  On the A303 the first significant stretch to be converted to dual carriageway extended west from the junction with the A34 to the eastern side of Andover, completed in 1962. Seven years later the Andover and Amesbury bypasses were opened. By then the M3 was eating its way from London to Basingstoke. In 1983 the link between the M3 at Popham and the A34 junction was rebuilt as dual carriageway and reclassified as A303 instead of A30. Two years after that the Weyhill bypass and a new section of dual carriageway at Thruxton were completed.

  A bright future beckoned.

  * * *

  Had Mr Bob Brown looked behind him before or after cutting the tape to open the Andover bypass – as he may well have done – he would have seen a sizeable tract of woodland straddling the road and extending some distance either side. Had he asked the Mayor of Andover, Mrs Thorne, or any of the other dignitaries what it was, he would have been told that this was Harewood Forest, a part of the ancient royal forest of Chute. And had he taken a stroll along a path which cuts through the northern side roughly parallel to the A303 – which he probably didn’t – he might have spotted, half-hidden among the trees, an unusual monument to a very dark deed.

  Deadman’s Plack

  It consists of a cross above a granite pillar which rises from a granite plinth. The inscription is as follows:

  About the year of Our Lord DCCCCLXIII upon this spot beyond the time of memory called Deadman’s Plack tradition reports that Edgar, surnamed the Peaceable, King of England, in the ardour of youth, love and indignation, slew with his own hand his treacherous and ungrateful favourite Earl Aethelwold, owner of this forest of Harewood, in resentment of the Earl’s having basely betrayed and perfidiously married his intended bride, beauteous Elfrida, daughter of Ordgar Earl of Devonshire, afterwards wife of Edgar and by him mother of King Ethelred II. Queen Elfrida, after Edgar’s death, murdered his eldest son King Edward the Martyr and founded the nunnery of Wherwell.

  Phew, what a story is that! Royalty, lust, treachery, betrayal, revenge, a brace of murders, a nunnery – across more than a millennium I could feel my journalistic taste-buds tingling.

  The fullest version of the tale was compiled the best part of 200 years after the event by the chronicler known as William of Malmesbury. He told how Edgar, king of the West Saxons as well as Mercia and Northumbria, commissioned his friend Aethelwold to travel to the house of Ordgar to inspect the earl’s daughter Elfrida with a view to offering marriage if the reports of her beauty were justified, which they were. Unfortunately for Aethelwold’s long-term prospects he fell for her himself and married her, without informing her of Edgar’s interest. To the king he reported that she was really nothing special, not worthy of his attention. Eventually Edgar became suspicious. He proposed a visit to his friend and his new bride. Aethelwold knew trouble when it was coming. He begged Elfrida to conceal her charms beneath her drabbest set of clothes. Poor sap.

  In William’s words: ‘She adorned herself at the mirror and omitted nothing that could stimulate the desire of a young and powerful man.’ Considerably stimulated and considerably angered, Edgar invited his old friend for a day’s hunting in Harewood Forest, ran him through with a javelin and married his ungrieving widow.

  But this was not the end of the saga. Elfrida had a son by Edgar, named Ethelred. After Edgar’s sudden, early (but apparently natural) death in 975, he was succeeded by his son from a previous marriage, Edward. But not for long. The lad paid his stepmother Elfrida a visit at Corfe Castle and was pulled from his horse and stabbed to death by her thegns. Whether or not she actually ordered the murder is not clear, but her reputation was not helped by the prompt installation on the throne of young Ethelred. He, by the way, was blameless; he is said to have wept so violently at the news of Edward’s murder that Elfrida was provoked to beat him with candles, traumatising the seven-year-old boy so severely that he could never bear to have candles near him again.

  The finale, in the best traditions, has Elfrida repenting her crimes and endeavouring to expiate them. She founded one abbey at Amesbury and another at Wherwell, a couple of miles from where Aethelwold met his end. There she spent some years as abbess, ‘beseeching Christ to grant her pardon’, before falling into the Test one day and drowning.

  By the volatile standards of the times, Edgar’s fifteen-year reign was comparatively uneventful. Other sources – such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – lay emphasis on his strength and good looks, his wisdom, the soundness of his judgement, his piety and support for the monastic orders. But history does not care for his virtues. It is the William of Malmesbury version, stitched together from various doubtful stories two centuries after the event, that has gradually acquired the status of accepted fact. Although William mentions Edgar’s achievements, he prefers to dwell on the allegedly less savoury aspects of his character, in particular his ‘inordinate lustfulness’. He includes an account of Edgar abducting a young woman called Wulfryth from a convent at Wilton near Salisbury, and having a daughter b
y her. The episode in Harewood Forest merely cements his reputation as a king unable to keep his urges under proper control.

  In another age, one feels, William of Malmesbury would have been a highly paid feature-writer on a national newspaper or a spinner of best-selling historical fiction. His credentials as a historian did not impress Dr Edward Freeman, Regius Professor of History at Oxford in the 1880s. Freeman took a dim view of these old chronicles. In his view – which in his view was the only one that counted – they hardly qualified as sources at all. He disapproved strongly of the weakness of these uneducated monks for including accounts of romantic or dramatic incidents without anything resembling corroboration. He would sternly instruct his students to reject these accounts, even if they fitted in with the known character of the subject. To illustrate his point, Freeman would cite what he regarded as the grossest example of tittle-tattle masquerading as history, the murder in Harewood Forest. He described it as ‘a confused and rambling narrative’ and rebuked later historians for having ‘given credence to what was nothing more than a balladeer’s invention’.

  I like to imagine Dr Freeman spinning in his grave in the Protestant cemetery in Alicante (where he died of smallpox in 1892) in indignation at the longevity of William’s myths. His own vast output – his History of the Norman Conquest in five volumes, his History of Sicily in three volumes, his Growth of the English Constitution, his two-volume Historical Geography of Europe, his six volumes of Historical Essays – have long since disappeared into the storehouses of the unread. William’s Deeds of the Kings of the English, in contrast, has continued to bob buoyantly along the current of received knowledge, recycled countless times in guide books, local histories, tourist leaflets and on websites.