The Subterranean Railway

  Ultimately it was the fortuitous combination of these two great talents on which the success of LT was founded: ‘The two men seemed to work together like the blades of a pair of scissors. But there was a difference. Whereas neither blade of the scissors will cut without the other, it could not be said that Pick was indispensable to Ashfield as Ashfield was to him. The real dependence was all one way.’4 Perhaps that is harsh, since capable administrators of such talent are a rarity. As the historians of London Transport put it: ‘The combination of the experienced, far-sighted politically astute chairman, who was willing to adopt accommodations on the way to securing his objectives, with the brilliant chief of staff whose cast of mind did not so readily accept compromise, provided a balance of flexibility in approach with rigorous management methods which made the LPTB in its first years an object of (sometimes unwilling) admiration.’5 It was a remarkable team, which worked together for a third of a century and does not appear to have fallen out significantly until late on, at the outbreak of the Second World War, in what was ostensibly a dispute over fares policy but in fact centred around the mundane issue of Pick’s pension.

  And London Transport nearly did not happen. Had it not been for a series of fortuitous events and remarkable political machinations, London would have got a semi-regulated private monopoly with none of the vision and creativity of London Transport. The need for a more integrated system had long been recognized by Ashfield. In a 1924 pamphlet,6 he explained the fundamental problem with railway economics. Railways, he argued, were essential for the development of outer housing zones because to reach the centre by tramway or bus was too time-consuming. But there was a conflict between people’s desire to live on estates laid out in spacious grounds and the need for density required by mass transport systems. At twelve houses per acre, the standard generally applied in the 1920s, Ashfield calculated that there would be only 6,000 houses within a half-mile radius – walking distance – and at 500 railway journeys per year, which assumed the sole breadwinner went to work every day, the passenger traffic would be 3 million: not enough to ‘yield a sufficient income to support a tube railway except at high fares’. Ashfield concluded that ‘either the circuit covered by a station must be rendered wider or the traffic denser by some means; cheap auxiliary forms of transport such as the motor omnibus may be developed to concentrate traffic on the railway stations … A measure of coordination among the transport facilities in a district is thus unavoidable for success.’ As he later pointed out, ‘it may be a surprise … to know that the Underground railways in London have never been, in their whole career, a financial success. In other words, they have failed to earn a reasonable rate of return on capital invested in them.’7

  Instead of integration, from the mid-1920s the system became more fragmented, with the outbreak of bus wars in the capital. The Underground Group, which since its takeover of London General had run the majority of buses in the capital, found itself up against countless small companies – often consisting of just one man and a bus – who were able to cream off passengers on well-used routes at busy times. The Group was short of buses for several years after the Great War because many had not been returned by the War Office, and it was powerless to prevent these independent operators, dubbed ‘pirates’, from causing chaos on the streets. The pirates, who bought cheap new buses from manufacturers eager to push their wares, would try to run just ahead of a General service to maximize the number of passengers, and they frequently raced each other because the income of the drivers – who were often exceptionally skilled – depended on speed. Pirates were even known to do a U-turn, rapidly dumping any passengers if the driver noticed more potential customers waiting on the other side of the road. Passengers may have enjoyed the occasional low fare or quicker ride, but the pirates were more prone to accidents and breakdowns than were the more conventional operators. It was a risky business, as one passenger recalls: ‘If there was an accident, they never used to wait for the police or anything like that, unless it was serious, but in a smaller accident, they’d just pat the bloke on the head and most likely slip him a quid and away they went.’8 By 1924, there were nearly 500 such pirates on the roads; it may have only been 10 per cent of the number run by the General, but it was enough to dent the larger company’s profit margins, which were used to subsidize the Underground system.

  A fundamental difference of opinion over how to deal with this unruly situation led to a five-year battle between Ashfield and Herbert Morrison, who was already a strong local political force in London. Morrison’s vision for London transport’s system had been set out in a pamphlet published in 1916, The People’s Roads,9 in which he argued that ‘the answer [to the lack of coordination between tram and bus routes] was the municipalization of the entire London passenger traffic’. Coordination, rationalization and equalization of burdens could, he said, all be achieved by common public ownership and control.

  Ashfield wanted much the same, with one major difference: the word ‘public’ was not on his agenda. Of course he wanted control and a monopoly, but he sought to ensure that it was a private one, protected by regulation which would keep the pirates off his back and allow his company to make enough profits to pay its way. He also had his eye on taking over the tramways run by the London County Council and local boroughs, and which therefore were not coordinated with either the Underground Group’s buses or its trains. Ashfield’s vision clearly fitted in with the ideology of the ruling Conservatives and, in a Parliamentary Bill, they backed his idea, setting out a scheme through which the Ministry of Transport, advised by local interests, would regulate routes. Morrison, by then an MP, was aghast. He organized the opposition and devised a striking poster showing a London County Council tram menaced by the grabbing hand of the Combine (Underground Group).

  However, the Conservative government fell before the Bill could become law, and was replaced by the minority Labour administration of 1923. Morrison, who had hoped to become the Minister of Transport, thought the legislation would be dropped. However, he was passed over in favour of Harry Gosling, and as the result of a shadowy deal between Gosling and Morrison’s lifelong enemy, Ernest Bevin, the Tory Bill was pushed through virtually unchanged. Although recognizing that the legislation was weak, the ministers argued that the chaos on the streets demanded urgent action. Morrison was so incensed that he even voted against his own government. The new Act created a limited amount of regulation – such as specifying routes for buses for the first time – but while it moderated the behaviour of the pirates, they were still able to operate on a significant part of the network. Moreover, the legislation did nothing to address the fundamental problem of the absence of integration between the various transport concerns. This lack of coordination meant that the trams and the buses were often rivals to the Underground trains, rather than complementary, and passengers still faced all sorts of difficulties in buying tickets which could take them right across London.

  As a result of the new law, Ashfield managed to incorporate some of the smaller rivals into the Combine, but his main target was the LCC tram network. The new Traffic Advisory Committee, set up by the 1924 Act, recommended such a merger in a report of 1927 and early the following year the Underground Group, together with the LCC, prepared Bills which would coordinate their services and pool their income, while falling short of an outright merger. The Tories were back in government but Morrison fought a successful rearguard action to stop the Bill.

  Morrison, reviving the potent symbol of the LCC tram being grabbed by the capitalist Combine, argued that the Bill was ‘common theft, a capitalist counter offensive against public property’.10 He managed to delay the progress of the Bill by organizing a lengthy filibuster at the London County Council and through fervent opposition in Parliament held up the Bill’s progress sufficiently to prevent its third reading by the time the government went to the country in May 1929. With Labour elected, and Morrison newly installed at the Ministry of Transport, the Bill was effectively dea
d. Morrison had seen off Ashfield, but at the end of the bloody battle through the previous six years, the two were like a pair of tired gladiators, only strong enough to shake hands.

  Morrison was clear about what he did not want, but he had failed to prepare an alternative plan, apart from a vague notion for a publicly controlled transport system. After some deliberation, he decided that the best option was a public corporation, a body which was state-owned but which had a commercial remit and consequently would not require any subsidy. That was a shift away from his previous notion of municipal socialism, whereby transport would have been under the direct control of the local authority, as the tramways already were. That change was an illustration of an enduring feature of Morrison’s political career, his fundamental pragmatism. While he always fought his corner hard, he was nevertheless ready to compromise if he could achieve most of what he wanted, which the creation of London Transport undoubtedly did. Morrison had realized that a London Transport based on local authority boundaries was a pipe dream, at least in the short term. The LCC at that time covered only central London, while the transport authority would have to stretch out in a much wider circle, at least twenty-five miles from the centre. Extending the LCC’s boundaries that far would have required a major reorganization of local government, but this was not on the agenda – indeed it would take another three decades before the expanded Greater London Council was born. Therefore Morrison accepted the inevitable compromise, despite derision from his left-wing colleagues. As his biographers put it, ‘the public corporation was the logical extension of Morrison’s previous attitude to socialism which he always stressed had to stand the tests of being both ethically and economically sound’.11 There is no doubt that, much to the benefit of Londoners, London Transport passed those tests.

  Morrison began the difficult task of selling his Bill. He was part of a minority government and had to try to keep the other parties on board. Like all brilliant politicians, Morrison was able to face different ways depending on his audience. To the Labour left, he had to show that this was socialism in action, talking up his plan by telling them it was the ‘greatest socialist scheme ever put before the House’ and that ‘real coordination means a single consolidated ownership’12 which could not be achieved in any other way. To Ashfield, and indeed the Tories, he had to downplay the socialist element and stress that a public corporation was the most efficient way of running the capital’s transport system and that the board would not be a ministerial poodle but would have genuine independence.

  The strongest weapon in Morrison’s armoury was the threat – mostly implied but sometimes stated explicitly – that in the future, a more left-wing Labour would create a much stronger model of state control. While the idea of creating a public corporation might have seemed socialistic to some of the old Tory duffers sitting on the backbenches, it was similar to the measures introduced by their own governments during the 1920s in creating publicly-owned organizations such as the BBC and the Central Electricity Board which were largely free from government interference. Public opinion towards such public–private enterprises had changed from hostility to acquiescence; the Financial News commented that a proposal to nationalize a group of private business undertakings, which not long previously might have been treated as a ‘mild flight of collectivist fancy’, now ‘arouses very little excitement indeed’.13 It was, after all, the era of Keynesian economics. In any case, the creation of a London-wide body responsible for transport was long overdue. The concept of unifying London’s passenger transport facilities stretched back to the recommendation of a select committee of the House of Lords which had reported in 1863, the year the Metropolitan first opened for business, and therefore it could hardly be seen as a revolutionary measure.

  Morrison’s key objective, as his biographers succinctly put it, ‘was to nationalize Ashfield’.14 Morrison quickly came to admire Ashfield, immediately thinking of him as the future chairman of the board because of his spirit of public service and his friendly relations with the unions. Ashfield, the consummate charmer, clearly won over Morrison and, for his part, began to realize that the public corporation was not such a bad compromise. It delivered the unified management that was essential and stopped fruitless competition.

  Morrison also needed to ‘nationalize’ Pick in order to ensure that his project was successful. Pick, though, was a tougher nut to crack. Morrison found him prickly, as indeed did much of the rest of the world. Morrison said of him – rather unfairly – that to Pick, London was just a market for transport: ‘he is without social conscience, the business is everything’. That was to misunderstand Pick’s great commitment to providing the best for Londoners, irrespective of class or status. As a London architectural historian put it, ‘whether you hailed from Stepney or South Kensington, Arnos Grove or Amersham, Pick believed you should be treated equally and well. So superb custom-designed and engineered buses and trains met Londoners and took them about their business and off to play.’15 That, in a way, was just as socialist as anything Morrison believed.

  Pick and Ashfield played a Mutt and Jeff double act in their negotiations with the wily politician, whereby Pick would set out the most radical alternatives to Morrison’s plans, which would be fiercely resisted, and Ashfield would come in to thrash out a compromise. Morrison, in fact, became so impressed by Pick that he eventually recommended him to be deputy chairman of the board.

  There was one big concession when the Bill was published in March 1931 (after some clever footwork by Morrison who even managed to irritate the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, in his haste to introduce the Bill). Originally, the plan was to have included the London suburban rail services, at the time controlled by the Big Four private railway companies; but, to the long-term detriment of Londoners, that part of the scheme was considered to be over-ambitious and was shelved. Later, Pick would describe that as the main ‘flaw’ in the arrangements for London’s transport system and therefore was a historic missed opportunity.16

  Once he was on side, Ashfield played a vital role in winning over two pockets of potential opposition – the House of Lords and the shareholders. Ashfield had to gain the support of the owners of the Underground Group and in May 1931, at a mass meeting of the company’s investors, he made one of the great speeches of his life in order to persuade them that amalgamation and integration were the only way forward. The shareholders had been very hostile but just before the vote was about to be taken, Ashfield made a personal appeal for them to support him. It was the kind of ‘back me or sack me’ speech favoured by today’s politicans. And they backed him. As one of the audience put it, ‘it was the power of his personality that turned the scales and secured a favourable vote’.17

  The main issue had been over the compensation terms for the shareholders and Morrison had made sufficient concessions for Ashfield to win them over. Morrison had agreed a scheme to give them new, redeemable stock without voting rights but which paid a rate of interest partly dependent on the success of the new enterprise. The amount varied between the different concerns that were incorporated into the new organization but the Underground Group shareholders received the most, which included a small amount of cash. Pick later thought that the deal had been too generous, thus lumbering the new organization with a level of debt that meant it soon got into financial difficulties.

  The most difficult negotiation was with the most powerful company being taken over, the Metropolitan. The death of Robert Selbie, the general manager of the Metropolitan, in 1930 had weakened the position of the Metropolitan but the company still put up a fight, managing to increase the offer for £100 nominal of its stock from £57 10 shillings to £67 10 shillings. Most importantly, the highly profitable property interests largely stayed with the shareholders; however the valuable Chiltern Court did go to the new board because it was directly controlled by the railway, unlike most of the rest of the property which was run by the Metropolitan’s subsidiaries.

  After the shareholders, it was
the turn of the Lords. The following year, Ashfield – in his only speech ever to the House of Lords – played a key role in convincing peers of the benefits of the creation of London Transport. By then Morrison had gone, swept away in Labour’s humiliating performance at the 1931 election, but the Bill survived. Indeed, after Morrison’s amazing political victory over the coordination Bills, another near miracle was needed to salvage the Bill once the government collapsed. Normally, Bills automatically fall between Parliaments but this was a hybrid Bill – affecting both private and public interests – and therefore not only survived the general election, at which the Conservatives gained by far the most seats, but was also accepted by the incoming government, which was a national all-party administration. Morrison could only watch from the sidelines, having lost his seat at the election.

  Ashfield used the old canard that worse might ensue from a later Labour government. His main aim was to convince his fellow Lordships that the Bill was not a socialistic measure and he argued, rather disingenuously, that there was little difference between the 1929 Bills which Morrison had blocked and the measure before them. Ashfield was also called upon to defend the arrangements for the shareholders. The Tory Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham,18 closed for the government with a remarkably sanguine statement commending the Bill to the House: ‘This measure is one which is conservative in structure, which is financially sound in its basis, which is urgently needed for the traffic of London, which is supported by the vast majority of those persons whose business is to look after the traffic of London’.19