Cheap fares, excursions, reservations and restaurant cars were abolished, daily timetables reduced to Sunday levels (things were that bad) and speed limits imposed. And Victorian gloom descended on night-time trains, at least until blackout curtains could be installed to allow faint blue lights inside the carriages. In 1914 these kinds of changes had happened gradually. This time the government acted at once, expecting imminent all-out war, then relented a little, then clamped down again in times of severe pressure, particularly before D-Day. By 1942 long-distance coach services were abolished, with bus services being diverted to the railway stations. The aim was to get travellers on the trains while simultaneously doing everything possible to keep them from travelling in the first place.
In this war, railway work was made a reserved occupation which exempted essential staff from conscription. And when the bombing did start, the railway engineers became vital workers, mucking in alongside the sappers to clear bomb damage and repair tracks. There were some 9,000 instances of enemy damage during the war, 247 of them bad enough to affect traffic for at least a week. The greatest need was the transportation of coal and, with coastal shipping out of the question, that put extra pressure on the main routes. The LNER was worst affected, both because it was so essential for coal traffic and because it was close to the east coast airbases, making it a particular target for enemy attack.
And so clapped-out, obscure and even closed-down railways were pressed into service, to a far greater extent than in 1914–18. Even the dear old Potts line in Shropshire – Coffee-Pot and all – was given a vital job. A huge ammunition dump was established at Kinnerley Junction. According to railway historian Leslie Oppitz: ‘More than two hundred huge storage sheds, camouflaged and decked out with turfed roofs, were built around the village.’ Each had its own siding. In Herefordshire, a similar facility was established near Pontrilas on the almost as moribund Golden Valley Line and is still known locally as ‘the dump’.
These were railways which every serious analyst believed should never have been built. And yet the British railway system, constructed with hardly any regard to military considerations, helped defeat Germany whose railway had been planned by generals with precisely that purpose in mind. Here was the quintessential triumph of British muddling-through: cock-ups elevated into guiding principles.
As D-Day approached, the pressure intensified. In the three weeks before 6 June 1944, there were nearly 10,000 special trains, with their load carefully concealed to avoid attracting attention. Railway officials called this ‘the tarpaulin armada’. In the month after the landings, with secrecy less obsessive, the number of special trains increased to more than 4,000 a week as troops and stores were moved to the south coast.
The man-in-the-street, and the man-in-the-railway-carriage most of all, was well beyond getting worked up about a little inconvenience and delay. But when Brief Encounter came out, a few months after the end of the war, it did not perhaps have quite the same impact on audiences that it does now. The British had had quite enough of stations like Milford Junction, slow trains, dim lighting, stale buns, imperious buffet manageresses, and perhaps also of lives in which their own impulses were always overridden by calls of duty.
The Times’s critic was completely underwhelmed by the film: ‘The composition is lacking in dramatic force and imaginative range’. He didn’t even say he liked the trains.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MELTON CONSTABLE
The last stationmaster of Melton Constable sat back in his armchair. Nice people, Harold Drewry, and his wife Jill, both happy to talk about the old days.
Harold was third generation on the railways – his grandfather was an engine driver, and his father was a bricklayer. Two of his uncles worked there too. That was the pattern in Melton Constable: practically every family had three generations on the railway but not four.
He started in 1947, as a clerk in the goods office. Then they made him stationmaster, over at Gayton Road near King’s Lynn, the youngest in British Railways’ Eastern Region. Then they brought him home to be stationmaster at Melton. The last.
Most English villages have changed seamlessly, from generation to generation. There are three totally distinct eras in Melton’s history. Before the railway, when it was just a hamlet close to Melton Constable Hall, ancestral home of the Lords Hastings. The railway era, lasting about sixty years. And afterwards.
For this was no ordinary country station. Melton Constable was at the heart of an extraordinary network of routes: the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, stitched together in 1893 from a series of individual lines, and extending for 183 miles from its two separate junctions with the Great Northern north of Peterborough, across the wide open spaces of the Fens and rural Norfolk.
It was like a giant fantasy railway, with a map reminiscent of the Reverend W. Awdry’s map of Sodor. The M&GN, the Muddle and Go Nowhere, barely seemed to intersect with the real world; little golden ochre engines pulled varnished wooden carriages to places an outsider might hardly believe existed: Twenty, Counter Drain, Whaplode, Clenchwarton, Hindolvestone, Corpusty & Saxford. As a joint operation, it effectively kept its independence even after the 1923 mergers and continued running its own sweet way to its own sweet stations.
And yet, up to 1959, there might be four trains simultaneously from Melton’s two platforms, going west to Fakenham and King’s Lynn, north to Sheringham and Cromer, east to Yarmouth, and south to Norwich. Unfortunately, this was not Norwich Thorpe, where you could catch a train to London, but the more glamorous-sounding if less useful Norwich City.
Who needed London? After the war, when Harold and Jill were young, Melton could seem like the centre of the universe. ‘When the Midland trains came in at holiday times, they were packed,’ said Jill. ‘You couldn’t prick a pin on them. We used to run down the line with newspapers and we learned how to let the coppers slide out of our hands so they’d tell us we could keep the change.’
And the railway was Melton’s heart. ‘The left-hand side of the village were the railway houses,’ she said. ‘The other side were “private houses”. Posher, they thought they were. But we had flush toilets in the railway houses. You had to go across the yard, but they did flush. Pride, poverty and pianos, that was Melton Constable. Even if you couldn’t play, you had to have a piano just to fool the neighbours.’
But then the 1950s came, and Midlanders started going on holiday in their own cars, and the trains grew emptier, and the whispers grew louder. Before Dr Beeching went near the railways, managers were looking for cutbacks, and the M&GN was an awfully tempting target.
‘Did you know it would close?’
‘We did know that traffic over the M&GN was being siphoned off, so there were little hints of what was going on,’ said Harold. ‘They were drawing so much into Norwich Thorpe we were just getting dribs and drabs. It was deliberately run down. Definitely.’
The news was announced in 1958, a payback from the British Transport Commission, which needed economies to fund a staff pay increase. Most of the line closed the following March, the biggest fell-swoop railway closure Britain had seen. The response was muted: just little wreaths or black flags at each station. The track was lifted within months, but Melton station lingered on, running diesel railcars up to Holt and Sheringham, before shutting for good in 1964. It was no more than a sad coda. ‘The life went out of Melton when the main line closed,’ said Harold.
‘He was asked to be the under-stationmaster at Liverpool Street,’ said Jill. ‘We couldn’t imagine him in a top hat. Didn’t have a top hat at Melton. We’ve got one in the loft. That was Uncle Ernie’s. But he was an undertaker, that’s another story.’
So Harold spent most of his working life in insurance, and that was fine. And there are grandchildren, and that’s great. But you can’t escape the melancholy when they talk about the railway, and the way the village has changed since it vanished. ‘They’ve got no idea,’ said Jill. ‘They’re different people here now. They just
dash in and dash out. They don’t come here to settle.’
The bowling green is threatened; the school has merged; the Hastings Arms has closed down; and Melton Constable Hall, a seventeenth-century gem, is in a bad way. The Railway Institute – sold off cheaply to the locals – still thrives, under the improbable title of the Melton Constable Country Club. And the industrial estate, on the site of the old station, seems to be doing pretty well.
I told Harold I’d like to take a look and he said he would drive me, but he seemed uneasy: ‘I haven’t been up there in years. There’s no reason at all for me to go.’ And most of the industrial estate was as unfamiliar to him as to me: The Big Prawn, MC Dismantlers, SFX Signs, Flexsys and Portable Toilet Hire. Harold pointed out the loco shed, tucked away behind holly bushes and buddleias. The water tanks are still the most impressive sight in the village, and he proudly showed me where they were patched up from a German raid.
‘So where was the station exactly?’ I said. He looked around at the anonymous modern buildings producing prawns and signs and portable toilets, and a look of alarm crossed his face. ‘To be honest, I don’t know … Oh dear me, I’m lost. I can’t even tell you now where the East Box stood.’
He recovered his composure, showed me the Hastings estate with a local’s aplomb and took me down to trace the cutting where the main line used to run. And then I left to catch the bus back to Sheringham, the nearest the modern British railway system gets to Melton Constable.
But I never got to Sheringham, not by bus. For as we passed the chi-chi little town of Holt, there – on a sunny afternoon in the spring of 2008 – was a J15 goods engine, the old workhorse of the LNER, in steam and waiting to pull half a dozen former British Rail carriages and a substantial number of tourists back to Sheringham. And just walking along the platform towards the cab was an elderly gent in fireman’s overalls, wearing the biggest smile I’ve seen in years. Gosh, he was having fun.
This was the North Norfolk Railway – the Poppy Line – one of the most thriving heritage railways in a county that seems to have more preserved lines than actual ones. It is not normally the sort of train people race for, but I leapt off the bus and ran like hell.
Holt station, as it now exists, is a charming fake on the eastern edge of town. The Poppy people would like, in theory, to extend back to the old station in Holt and then to Melton Constable and then, heaven knows, to Peterborough if they thought it was do-able. But it isn’t, and they are fairly content with what they have: ten miles of the old M&GN between Holt and Sheringham, where their station is the real thing, and very lovely it is too. It is separated by a sliver of road from the nasty, pinched little platform offering the National Express service to Cromer and Norwich which is marketed, not unsuccessfully, under the name of the Bittern Line.
The J15 pottered along at roughly the same pace as the Bittern Line, with far more elegance, conviction and charm, though of course none of the public service obligation. At Kelling Heath Park (where the train only stops when going downhill), we drew level with a massive very East Anglian ploughed field and there suddenly appeared a broad view across Weybourne Mill to the North Sea, a vista as sudden in its enchantment as anything on the remaining national network.
In defiance of all traditional railway instructions to passengers, I was leaning out of the window. And as we came into Weybourne, the breeze from the sea – just sweetly refreshing on a golden afternoon – slapped me gently in the face, as it must have hit Harold Drewry’s grandfather when he drove this line a hundred years ago.
It’s A Disgrace. Let’s Buy It!
In 1948 Britain’s railways were finally acquired by the people of Britain.
The nation woke up on the third New Year’s Day of peace to find itself the owner of about 19,000 route miles of track, 1,230,000 wagons, 45,000 passenger coaches, 20,000 locomotives, 50,000 houses, 25,000 horse vehicles, 7,000 horses, 1,640 miles of canals and waterways, 100 steamships, 70 hotels, plus 34,000 commercial lorries, acquired as a result of the partial takeover of the road haulage industry. It also acquired almost 700,000 new employees.
For reasons lost in the mists of railway history, the nation did not acquire the Talyllyn and Festiniog Railways in Wales, two omissions that would prove more significant than expected. It also failed to acquire the North Sunderland Line (rather a long way north of Sunderland, between Sea-houses and Chathill) and also the two-mile railway between Grimsargh and the Lancashire County Mental Hospital at Whittingham. This hauled heavy goods to the hospital, and gave free rides to staff and villagers. These omissions proved less significant.
There were no celebrations, by order of the new British Transport Commission, which said there would be celebrations when there was something to celebrate.1 It also said it had no plans to repaint the trains and signs just for the sake of it.
However, a few months later, in September, there was a bit of a shindig at Liverpool Street station to mark the opening of the new electrified service to Shenfield, one of the few investment projects to survive all the government’s post-war austerity cutbacks. The minister of transport, Alfred Barnes, was given the honour of driving the first train. As he was being shown how to start it, he asked, ‘Do you mean like this?’ sending the train on its way with its doors open and half the dignitaries still on the platform.
The analogy is of course irresistible. Clement Attlee’s Labour government nationalized the railways because it had a huge majority and a manifesto commitment, and because nationalization was an idea whose time had come. The case for it was no stronger in 1948 than in 1836, 1844, 1867, 1907, 1913 or 1921 – possibly weaker. And the government certainly did not take possession because it had the faintest idea how it would play with its new train set. It wasn’t just that there was no new colour scheme for the trains to replace the old ones; there were no new ideas either.
The effect of the war was similar to that of 1914–18, only more so. The government was extremely anxious to emphasize the terrible state of the railways and talk down their value while it was in the process of buying them. ‘A very poor bag of physical assets,’ the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, told the Commons in 1946. ‘Those dingy railway stations, those miserable, unprepossessing restaurants. The permanent way is badly worn. The rolling stock is in a state of great dilapidation. The railways are a disgrace to the country.’
This was not entirely the fault of the previous owners, who had been obliged to let the government wear down the permanent way and dilapidate the rolling stock to save the country from the Nazis. They also had to let the Treasury cream off a large dollop of the revenue that came in from extra wartime use. One might have assumed the chancellor might have some plans to invest in the system. Otherwise, why buy it?
The consensus view is that the government paid too much to the shareholders to buy this disgrace, a ‘staggering’ (to quote Christian Wolmar) £927 million – £27 billion at 2009 prices. That was not the view of the reluctant vendors: the future prime minister Harold Macmillan called it ‘an act of robbery and confiscation’, but then he was a director of the Great Western at the time. ‘The terms,’ said the chairman of the LNER, Sir Ronald Matthews, ‘would bring a blush of shame to the leathery cheek of a Barbary pirate.’
Sir Ronald’s other comments might have seemed worthier of further discussion as the years went by. ‘Nationalization’, he said, ‘clogs the wheels of a developing industry. It places dictatorial powers and almost unlimited patronage in the hands of the Minister of Transport and creates another immense bureaucracy. It destroys every vestige of esprit de corps and competition.’
Certainly, the reality of British Railways quickly disillusioned the hopes of its most ardent admirers. On the day of the acquisition of the wagons (almost a million and a quarter of them!), the horses, the hotels and the 700,000 employees, one of the staff unions – the Railway Clerks’ Association – urged the commission to announce that there will be ‘a new staff relationship, on the concept that management and staf
f are partners in the task of serving the community’.
This charming new partnership was barely six months old before delegates at the National Union of Railwaymen’s annual conference were furiously complaining, apparently without dissent, that state capitalism was as bad as, or worse than, the old version. Nationalization had not provided a say for workers in ‘the sort of round-table conference system that they had envisaged’, said J. Martin, a relief signalman from Manningtree. J. Seaman of King’s Lynn complained that the people who had mismanaged the industry in the past were still mismanaging it.
Nor was there any obvious change from the passenger’s point of view. They didn’t feel included in any new relationship. As John Betjeman wrote:
I’m paid by the buffet at Didcot
For insulting the passengers there.
The way they keeps rattlin’ the doorknob
Disturbs me in doin’ my hair.
That verse was not included in his Collected Poems: ‘too hostile to the great British worker to be publishable in Attlee’s Britain’, said his biographer, A. N. Wilson.
Actually, it was not that clear who was mismanaging the industry. There was Barnes, the dangerous engine driver. Reporting to him was the British Transport Commission, under Sir Cyril Hurcomb, a former civil servant. The BTC also had responsibility for docks, inland waterways, London Transport, road haulage, buses and coaches. Reporting to Hurcomb was the Railway Executive, which was indeed controlled by former railway managers under Sir Eustace Missenden, from the old Southern Railway. Below them were the regions which, after a difficult start, reasserted their old independence and did their utmost to ignore London’s whims.
They all had knighthoods, in the British way, at the top of British Railways. And, in an equally British way, it is clear that they not only had no idea what they were doing but no idea what they were meant to be doing. Were the railways competing with road or co-operating with it? Was the BTC in charge of developing an over-arching transport strategy or making the trains run on time? According to British Railways official historian, Terry Gourvish, there was ‘a series of morale-sapping conflicts at all levels of management’. On the one hand the Executive sent up reports about the collapse of a staircase at Alloway Station in Ayrshire and the question of advertisements on train lavatory mirrors. However, said Gourvish, its members were discussing genuinely important matters ‘in an atmosphere of secrecy if not conspiracy’.
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