A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  In fact, for a while, the car looked as if it would be a thundering disaster. The economics behind it were also, to say the least, obscure. The basic model sold at £350, much cheaper than rival small cars such as the Triumph Herald (£495) and the Ford Anglia (£380) and indeed BMC’s own old Morris Minor (£416). Yet it had been very expensive to develop and required its own machine tooling to make. How was this possible? Ford tore one apart to cost it and decided it would cost them more to build than BMC were selling it for. It seems unlikely there was any profit: in their urge to undercut its competitors, the makers of the Mini were ignoring the development costs and selling the car at a loss. (Company people say they continued to sell it at a loss for years.) BMC would eventually sell more than five million Minis but its success only came about thanks to what we would now call celebrity endorsement, and even spin. Issigonis happened to know Princess Margaret’s new husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, and presented the glamorous couple with one as a birthday present. They were duly photographed whizzing round London in it. The Queen tried one out, and soon Steve McQueen, Twiggy, the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, were seen in them too. This was completely the opposite image to BMC’s and Issigonis’s original idea of a cheap, no-frills car for the working classes; conservative-minded people found their car taken up as a chic emblem of youthful impertinence. In the end, of course, whatever works, works. Yet the mechanical problems, lack of good teamwork and unbusinesslike pricing strategy show that there was a darker side to the Mini story from the first. Issigonis’s biographer concluded that ‘far from being a business triumph for the shaky British Motor Corporation, the Mini was the first nail in their coffin.’

  Issigonis was a naif in the world of business but he was prescient in one respect. He hated mergers. The Austin-Morris one produced huge internal pain with two mutually hostile company bureaucracies locking horns. The results were not immediately obvious. Through the fifties BMC rationalized its cars and cut the number of engines used, while keeping its old Austin and Morris dealers happy. With fast economic growth and an insatiable appetite for affordable cars, the domestic industry did well. There was American competition but then, there always had been – General Motors had been a big player in the UK since it took over Vauxhall in 1928, and Ford had chosen Britain as its European base even earlier. By the sixties, German and French imports were also frequent sights on British roads.

  Still, there were few signs of a domestic car industry in crisis. Other producers were marketing long-lived and successful models, from the sleek Jaguars to the stolid and stately Rover Eights and Rover 50s. Issigonis was not the only free spirit of the times – Rover went far down the road (at 150mph) towards a commercial jet-powered car. Yet industrial action was growing, despite managers who bought off the unions with generous settlements in an era when they could easily sell every car they made. There was a particularly bad strike at BMC in 1958. There were some strange management decisions, egged on by politicians. Ministers trying to bring employment to run-down parts of Scotland and the North of England persuaded BMC to create a cumbersome and expensive empire of new factories which it did not have the expertise to manage properly. Little of this was apparent to the ordinary observer then, the first years of popular motoring mania.

  39

  The Growth of Car Mania

  Britain was slow to catch the motorway addiction. There had been a spate of road-building in the thirties but it was not until 1936 that the government took national responsibility for a network of major roads. All building then stopped when war began three years later. But America’s vast highways were an inspiration to British engineers; and Hitler’s Germany had been known for its gleaming new autobahns. With Britain’s cramped, slow, badly congested roads full of military vehicles, in 1941 a cabinet committee was being urged to consider ‘motorways’ as a vital part of post-war construction. The man responsible was Frederick Cook, a gifted and pushy highways engineer, though his committee included Attlee, Ernie Bevin and the founding Director General of the BBC, Lord Reith. Lord Leathers, the wartime transport minister, duly announced that Britain had been converted to the idea of ‘motorways to be reserved exclusively for fast-moving traffic’ while warning that they must not be developed on too grand a scale as advocated ‘by some enthusiasts who are perhaps unduly influenced by continental analogies’. No Nazi speed mania here, in other words. The result was a Special Roads Act in 1949 which led eventually, when money allowed, to the motorways which began to carve up and transform the country.

  In theory, motorway Britain had been only one of two possible options. The world’s first industrialized nation was still wired tightly together with a massive railway network. By the end of the fifties, British Rail controlled 17,800 miles of track linking most small towns and every city. It ran more than 7,000 stations and a million freight wagons, all of it worked by a massive staff – 475,000 people in 1961. But the system was making an equally massive loss and needed major investment. With cars becoming the dream of middle-class families, perhaps the railways at that scale needed some pruning. Instead an affable, moustachioed former ICI manager called Dr Richard Beeching came along and cut them to ribbons. Beeching was greatly admired at the time as a living symbol of thrusting new Britain. In the early sixties to ‘do a Beeching’ became flattering shorthand for ruthless management efficiency. Hired as the chairman of the railways, he conducted a ‘reshaping plan’ which proposed the closure of 2,361 stations and 5,000 miles of track – and that was just for starters. It was one of the most extreme liquidations in the history of British commerce, on a par with the collapse of the car industry a decade later, or the end of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

  Suspicions have been heard ever since that the Beeching cuts were politically motivated. They had been prepared for by a secret committee on which sat industrialists but no railway people. They came a few years after a savagely effective strike by two railway unions which had reminded Conservative ministers that while a country could be closed down if it was linked by trains, this was very much harder if it was a lorry and car economy. The Tories had already denationalized road transport, putting 24,000 lorries back into the hands of private hauliers; everything from fish to potatoes, newspapers to engine parts, seemed to be transferring from rail. This was what ‘modern’ meant. And to cap it all, the minister in charge who had given Beeching his mandate to cut the railways until they made a profit, without taking social or wider economic interests into account, was hardly neutral on the issue.

  Ernest Marples was a bouncy, chirpy Manchester engineering worker’s son who had won a grammar school scholarship and gone on to work as a miner, a postman, an accountant and a chef before his war service. A Labour activist in his youth, he was demobbed as a keen Tory and after becoming an MP, served as one of the few real modernizers in the 1951-64 governments. He brought in ‘trunk’ or automatic dialling, designed to make telephones more popular – until the late fifties, everyone had to call up a telephone exchange, give the number and wait to be put through by an operator. He had launched Britain’s Premium Bonds too, denounced by Harold Wilson as a ‘squalid raffle’ but instantly popular. Marples’s enthusiasm for the new extended most dramatically, however, to roads. He charged around the world looking for examples of the traffic systems of the future, and brought in the first yellow lines, the first parking meters, the first major roundabouts. He had formed his own civil engineering company, which would soon be responsible for West London’s Hammersmith flyover, and much else. Marples was not keen on railways, though. When challenged about the conflict of interest in having his motorway construction company, he simply passed the shares to his wife. Under him, Britain finally embarked on its motorway age.

  Those were the days. The first was opened on 5 December 1958, an eight-mile bypass of Preston. No major road had been built for twenty years. British engineers had learned something about pre-stressed concrete from the French, but still had a lot to discover about motorw
ay design from colleagues in the United States. It was all something of an experiment for the man in charge, John Cox of Tarmac, who had made his name building instant airstrips during the war. The Preston bypass had to be closed forty-six days later because of frost damage. Though the central reservation later allowed it to be widened for levels of traffic undreamed-of in the late fifties, it was still too narrow and its rather beautiful bridges, which had been designed to last for 120 years, were knocked down and replaced after thirty. Still, it worked and the experience was vital for the first long stretch of British motorway, a 67-mile stretch of the M1 linking London and Yorkshire, opened the following year. Built in only nineteen months, it had three lanes in either direction and that now humdrum novelty, the first motorway service stations. Marples opened the Watford Gap service station, run by Blue Boar, on 2 November 1959. Newport Pagnell opened six months later.

  Britain has never been the same since. From then on, motorway building spread at a brisk pace. Stretches of the M60 and M6 appeared during 1960-3; the first section of the A1(M) was completed in 1961 and the M5 the following year. Scotland’s first motorway building, the M8 outside Glasgow, came in 1967. The early seventies saw a dramatic expansion, with the M4 linking London and Bristol, the M40 reaching towards Oxford and Birmingham and the cities of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield all being interconnected. The first five-lane dual carriageway arrived outside Belfast in 1973 and it was only after the completion of the M25 round London in 1985 that the pace of building faltered. In the early years of the new century it virtually stopped. By then the network had grown from eight miles to 2,200 miles – and the A-roads servicing it greater still.

  The creation of the motorway network has been called the first centrally planned roads system in Britain since the Romans left. It makes a pattern the Romans would have recognized, with London the hub, radial routes spinning out from it, and only the further West Country, rural Wales and northern Scotland ignored. The Romans might have been surprised at the absence of motorways across East Anglia, and the quantity of civil engineering lavished on the north and Midlands of England; but that is a consequence of the industrial revolution. Today’s motorways are more curved than the legions would have found acceptable, avoiding hills and towns – though the straightest stretch of all, part of the A1(M) near Stilton, is so because it follows the old Roman street for seven miles. The system is rational and heavily used, heavily policed, heavily taxed and has engorged a swathe of rural England. Even as late as 1985-2001, transport projects (mainly roads) took up a further tract of sparse land equal to three times the area of Nottingham. If usage equals success, then few acts of post-war political decision making have been as popular as the designing and building of what Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car economy’. For every car or van on the roads of Britain in 1950 – 2.3 million of them – there were twice as many by the end of the decade and more than three times as many by the early sixties. By 1970 there were 12 million and by the end of the century, more than 24 million, ten times as many in half a century. This only gives part of the picture, because these cars are also used much more, going further and for longer. In the last fifteen years of the century, car journeys increased by nearly 30 per cent. Year by year, despite propaganda for a healthier lifestyle, high fuel taxes, congestion charging and widespread worry about global warming, the British drive more and walk, cycle or use buses less.

  In the days of Marples it was believed that such an increase would also mean vastly more Britons being killed and maimed on the roads. This is one gloomy prediction that has been robustly disproved. Safety campaigns from the Tufty Club of the fifties to the Green Cross Code have had their effect but the real reason is that the British, who think of themselves as lovers of liberty, have allowed their freedom to be drastically curtailed on the roads. From the first general speed limits in the thirties to today’s ubiquitous metal snoop-force of remote cameras, Britain has developed a driving culture which kills proportionately far fewer people than most comparable countries. If there is a single heroine of that part of our motoring history it is Barbara Castle. A non-driving minister in her rather glamorous mid-fifties, Castle had been disappointed to be offered Transport by Harold Wilson in 1965. She had hoped to be Home Secretary. But she was formidably ambitious and media-savvy and quickly turned the job into a great personal success. When she arrived some 8,000 people a year were dying on Britain’s roads. Figures produced at the time suggested there would be half a million such deaths by the year 2000.

  Castle’s Road Safety Act brought in the breathalyser to combat drunk driving, extended the trial 70mph speed limit and made it compulsory for all new cars to have seat belts. There was already a bill prepared but she toughened it up, rejecting random breath tests but making the penalty a year’s automatic disqualification. Castle revved up a storm. The Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss attacked ‘socialist hypocrisy’. Letters came in reading ‘You’ve ballsed our darts matches up, so get out you wicked old B’ or wishing her ‘evil Christmas and a whole year of unhappy days. These are the views of the public, you bitchy old cow.’ Her long-suffering husband Ted, who did drive, was pursued by journalists eager to catch him over the limit, and had to confine himself to tonic water at public events. But in the test’s first year road deaths fell by 1,200. As Castle wrote in her autobiography, she was soon afterwards introduced to a London ambulance driver who told her that before the breathalyser, ‘their night’s work had followed a regular pattern. As soon as the pubs closed the accident figures shot up and they were operating at full stretch. Now, he said, they spent the night playing cards.’ Seatbelts, which saved the looks of thousands of people, and the lives of others, were equally vigorously opposed as an infringement on liberty and a diabolical liberty for women with large bosoms. But they helped stem the deaths. By the end of the century, with nearly three times as many cars on the road as when Mrs Castle took office, the numbers killed each year were less than half the toll in 1965. Compared to most similar countries, Britain’s roads are congested, but safe.

  40

  Slipping Through Our Fingers

  To the ordinary observer, there was plenty to be cheerful about throughout British industrial life. The coal industry, though nationalized, was nevertheless at last rationalized and modernized. In these years, some 200,000 miners’ jobs went and super-pits were developed using newer and safer technology, while on the other hand, around Britain the first nuclear power stations came on stream. When Calder Hall was connected to the national grid in 1956 it was the world’s first nuclear power station providing energy commercially, and its Magnox gas-cooled reactor incorporated British technology. A further ten similar nuclear power stations followed. Here, as in the car industry – and lesser-known examples, such as industrial glass, chemicals and jet engines, not to mention the beginnings of the offshore gas industry – British technology was as good as any in the world. In an entirely different area, P&O was then the largest shipping line in the world with 366 vessels, seemingly dominating commercial traffic across the oceans. This was not, in short, the basket-case industrial economy that is sometimes misremembered. But during the fifties overseas competition was quietly surveying the British market and its complacent industrial giants, planning to attack.

  The story of motorbike manufacturing can stand for other industries, too. In the early years of the decade, Harley-Davidson in the United States were complaining (unsuccessfully) to Washington about the unfair competition from the better, cheaper, British-made Triumph motorbikes – one of which starred in The Wild One, featuring Marlon Brando, in 1954. Another American manufacturer, Indian, gave up and began importing Royal Enfield bikes; rock stars and Hollywood actors were seen on British machines; there were more than 300 Triumph and BSA dealers in the United States. Yet in 1955 Yamaha began producing their first motorbikes, followed by Suzuki, using wartime aircraft manufacturing kit. At the end of the decade, when British motorcycle sales were at their all-time peak, Honda
entered its first bike in the TT race. British executives toured Japan in 1960 and were horrified by the scale of production by the three rival companies: Japan was making more than 500,000 motorcycles a year, compared to a maximum UK output of just 140,000. Two years later these Japanese bikes were winning key races in Europe and a new manufacturer, Kawasaki, appeared on the scene. It was a story that would be repeated in electronics and cameras. In this period, West Germany’s share of world trade grew nearly four times as fast as Britain’s, while the Japanese were already in another league for growth. The Americans were racing ahead in starved, post-war markets all round the world.

  It was the structure of Britain’s working world that was the problem, not the lack of hardworking people or enterprising companies – not even, at this stage, inflation or industrial militancy. On one side, the industrial companies were dwarfed by the vast nationalized corporations, sucking capital and talent away from the consumer industries that were becoming so central to people’s lives. ICI was vast, as has been described; but every three years, the Electricity Board spent enough capital to create a new ICI. On the other side, there were simply too many tiny companies, inefficiently and traditionally run without any knowledge of new management styles, product designs or marketing. By the middle of the fifties, of the nearly 300,000 British companies that existed, only around one in a hundred was actually listed on the Stock Market; the vast majority were under-capitalized traditional private businesses. The economic historian Keith Middle-mass describes a business ecology dominated by ‘the continued survival of a mass of small firms, reliant on sheltered domestic markets, which were unable or unwilling to reform their practices or their low productivity’.