This was not a sentimental time. This was a year the world appeared to be on the brink of global revolution. No one was looking to the past, and certainly no one in British Rail had the wit or foresight to see how steam nostalgia could be turned to advantage. For some years after 1968, all steam locomotives were completely banned from the network, except on the Vale of Rheidol line in Wales, which BR continued running as a tourist attraction, though without much conviction.
That mood ran throughout the corporation. When the driver of one of the last steam trains got out of his cab, he gave the engine a sharp kick and announced to a startled group of passengers: ‘Well, that’s the last of those cast-iron bastards then.’
A Strange Enchantment
And then nothing happened. This is obviously not exactly true. But for the next quarter of a century the railways, to the naked eye, seemed to become frozen in time.
The British fell out of love with the notion of progress for its own sake, and the now-vanished steam engine assumed the glow in the national imagination that it has retained ever since: as the embodiment of a lost innocence, of unlocked front doors, cheery pubs and laughing policemen giving kids a clip round the ear for scrumping.
The generation so desperate to change the world in the 1960s started taking their offspring to the Santa Special or Thomas Day at the local heritage railway to show them a steam train. In the early 1970s the environmental movement was just gathering its first surge of momentum, and protesters saw off a grand plan for a ‘London motorway box’. The new Euston was reviled; old St Pancras, down the road, was now thought beautiful. Beeching’s public reputation plummeted; John Betjeman, credited with saving St Pancras, became the much-loved poet laureate.
British Rail gained no benefit from any of this. Having failed to anticipate the steam nostalgia, it clunked forward like one of its nastiest diesel railcars, a Pacer 142 perhaps. It became ‘good old British Rail’, always spoken with weary sarcasm, famous for being delayed by leaves on the line in autumn and ‘the wrong kind of snow’ in winter. Internal morale, particularly in the early 1970s, was terrible.
Governments, ministers, chairmen and organizational plans all came and went. Every step forward seemed to be followed by a crashing fall. The High Speed Train, introduced on the Paddington main line in 1976, was an immediate success; the tilting Advanced Passenger Train (1981), which made passengers sick, was a disaster. The Channel Tunnel was on! Then (1975) it was off again! There was talk of investment. Then came the 1976 financial crisis. The trade unions, then at the peak of their power, might agree to some new technical innovation. But then they would insist on having an unnecessary fireman or guard to preserve their members’ jobs, thus preventing any savings.
Even the advertising reflected the constantly changing moods. The success of the High Speed Train and the associated Inter-City brand (which was adopted across the world – even, without translation, in Germany) brought forth ‘This is The Age of The Train’ with Jimmy Savile, cigar in hand as I recall, leaning back in a first-class carriage. It was followed by the defensive, defeatist slogan ‘We’re Getting There’.
Relations with government were decidedly patchy, reaching a nadir in the mid-1970s when British Rail’s chairman was Dick Marsh, the ex-Labour transport minister who had fallen out of love with his party. Marsh had been given the job by Heath’s Conservative government but, when Labour came back, found himself having to work with his old enemy Fred Mulley. ‘Sensible dialogue … became practically nonexistent,’ Marsh wrote later. ‘The board’s financial position continued to deteriorate on a massive scale and no one in Government, from the Prime Minister down, gave a damn.’
Even BR’s official history accuses Marsh of ‘whingeing’. He should have counted his blessings. No one now expected the railways to make a profit, not that there was any chance of them doing so. And closures virtually ceased after 1970, with Marsh himself saying that the mileage, which had now stabilized at about 11,000, was about right. Beeching, who was occasionally sniping (and mentally snipping) from the sidelines, was contemptuous: ‘He doesn’t have to build anything because he’d never be able to make a case for it and he doesn’t have to close anything because it would be highly unpopular if he did. I think that’s almost too miraculous to happen to anybody except an ex-politician.’
It was the easiest way out all round. With the exception of a handful of reopenings, new airport links and the Channel Tunnel line, the railway system in England in 2009 remains almost precisely what it was almost forty years ago, preserved as if under a strange enchantment. Government retreated from Beeching into total inertia.
How much of a shambles was British Rail? The economist Sir Christopher Foster, one of its sternest critics, believes it was a total shambles, and that Beeching was partly to blame for distracting attention from the real problems. ‘By writing that chapter on closing branch lines he ensured that the enemy won,’ he said, looking back. ‘The railway accounts were appalling. No one realized until later that all the railway was unprofitable. Branch lines distracted attention from the main issue that the whole railway was badly run.’
It is certain that successive chairmen, especially those from outside, had severe trouble getting a grip on the realities of the railway. Right from the moment of nationalization, three alternative power bases emerged beyond the control of the nominal bosses. One was the unions. Another was the bloc of regional general managers who, well after Beeching’s reign, still operated rather like Afghan warlords, treating instructions from the capital with disdain, knowing that they controlled the troops.
‘I remember being taken to lunch by Bobby Lawrence, manager of what had been the London, Midland and Scottish,’ Foster recalled. ‘Silver on the table. Port. It was like an officers’ mess. Lots of people sitting round. Very long lunch. It was absolutely stunning.’
London often had very little idea what was going on its more remote possessions. Duncraig station, on the line to Kyle of Lochalsh, was closed in 1964 – except, it emerged eleven years later, that trains still stopped there if anyone wanted to get on or off. In a nice display of British pragmatism, BR then agreed to restore it to the timetable.
The third power base belonged to the engineers, who found it easy to bamboozle outsiders with technicalities, especially if the magic word ‘safety’ could be mentioned. The engineers had dominated the railways from the days of Stephenson and Brunel, and that appears to have been continuous right through the days of the great engine-builders like Gresley and Stanier until the very end of British Rail. In the 1990s a Herefordshire farmer got a visit from a BR official trying to cut out unnecessary farm crossings. ‘This is a very large engineering concern,’ the railwayman remarked during the conversation. ‘The passengers and freight just get in the way, quite frankly.’ He was joking. Sort of.
The notion that managers of the nationalized railways were a bunch of incompetents who would never survive the rigours of private enterprise was bitterly resented by the people involved. ‘There was stricter cost control under BR than there is now,’ one former manager, Richard Malins, told me. ‘You had to work within budgets and you couldn’t budget more than one or two years ahead because you didn’t know what the Treasury was going to give you. A BR manager was as good as any manager in Britain. Because we operated in very public and difficult circumstances, probably better.’
However, the malign influence of government was beyond dispute. In the words of John Welsby, chief executive of British Rail in its closing days: ‘There was a complete lack of clarity about the objectives of BR.’ And political considerations constantly intruded. In the 1970s Marsh was desperate to close the Heysham-Belfast shipping service which he said was losing £800,000 a year; the government told him it would exacerbate the political crisis in Ulster.
In the 1980s a nasty invader called teredo worm started eating the Barmouth Bridge in mid-Wales and floods north of Inverness washed a bridge away. The Thatcher government was very sensitive to suggestions th
at it didn’t care about these remote corners. ‘Politically, these things had to be actioned immediately,’ recalled Welsby. ‘The fact that the money had been earmarked for the West Coast Main Line was irrelevant. The priorities were dictated by politics. You had an incompatible set of objectives.’ Fare increases were also determined by the political timetable, he added. ‘It was not unknown for the minister’s private office to ring up and say “You do realize there’s a by-election on?” ’
Marsh’s chief whinge was that whenever he did try to cut costs, ministers opposed him. ‘In any debate in the House of Commons on the nationalized industries, the first half was concerned with how wicked and wasteful we were in losing public money, and the second half consisted of a long list of things they would like the nationalized industries to do, all of which cost more money.’
Sensible politicians tried to run away from the transport brief, even in opposition. Margaret Thatcher, elected Conservative leader in 1975, offered the job to Norman Fowler. ‘I know nothing about transport,’ he protested. ‘Norman,’ she replied, ‘I did transport. You can do transport.’ Mrs Thatcher famously knew nothing at all about railways, reputedly travelling just once on a train (the Gatwick Express) in eleven years as prime minister. But she knew what she didn’t like. In her early days as opposition leader, Fowler accompanied her to a getting-to-know-you lunch with British Rail’s senior executives. One of them incautiously remarked that the government was not spending enough on the railways. ‘She went airborne,’ recalled Fowler, ‘and was whizzing round the ceiling for the rest of the lunch. No one else got a word in edgeways, including me.’
The railway’s management was understandably apprehensive when she swept into Downing Street in 1979. But for once they had a series of lucky breaks. Fowler, the first of her seven transport ministers, already knew and liked Sir Peter Parker, the entrepreneur-cum-Renaissance man who had succeeded the disgruntled Marsh three years earlier. Like Barbara Castle, Parker’s first contribution had been to cheer everyone up. He was an enthusiast and a charmer, if not a details man. ‘He could charm the birds off the trees,’ as one civil servant put it, ‘but they would be albatrosses.’
Fowler, meanwhile, set to work, without much encouragement, on a prototype Thatcherite scheme to build the Channel Tunnel using private capital. ‘My stroke of luck was that Mrs Thatcher had this meeting with President Mitterrand of France,’ he recalled, ‘and the list of things they were likely to agree on was very short. But there had to be a final communiqué. Then she had this brilliant idea: “Fowler’s been banging on about the Channel Tunnel!” So it was decided to underline the importance of it. That made it a completely different project. It wasn’t Transport banging on about it, it was No. 10.’ Luckily, perhaps, no one had mentioned to her that it could have been a road tunnel instead.
The third bit of luck was perhaps more a piece of skill. If it ever thought about the railways, Downing Street under Thatcher was against them and had predictably rejected Parker’s suggestions for electrification. Instead it set up an inquiry into the shape of the railways under a crusty retired civil servant called Sir David Serpell. The inquiry was planning to announce a range of half a dozen options for a slimmed-down railway, one of which (Option A) slashed it back to 1,600 miles, beyond Beeching’s wildest fantasies, reducing the routes to a handful of spokes from London. This was the only one, the committee was about to say, that could possibly be profitable. Serpell seems to have had no intention of actually recommending this course of action.
It was 1982 and the next election was getting close; at that stage the Tories were far from certain to be re-elected. Option A was leaked to the Sunday Times – almost certainly by Will Camp, Parker’s stylish public relations adviser – as though this was a genuine plan, implying that Thatcher was about to destroy Britain’s railways. The backbenchers saddled up their high horses at once. David Howell, who had replaced Fowler as transport minister, ran a mile. And Serpell – berated by a guard on the way home to Devon – briefly became more notorious than Beeching. The report was quickly forgotten.
The former Liberal leader Jo Grimond compared Serpell’s fate to that of Lord Franks, who at the same time was investigating the causes of the Falklands War and finding, in the usual Whitehall fashion, that no one in the British government could possibly be blamed for anything. ‘How relaxing to examine anything as unemotive as a war,’ mused Grimond.
Until around 1988, when she introduced the poll tax, Thatcher had perfectly attuned political antennae. For all her boldness, she could sense which rocks were best left unkicked. And the Serpell affair seemed to reinforce her view that the railways contained some powerful muti, a man thing, folk-magic she did not quite comprehend. After the Conservatives did win the 1983 election, handsomely, Howell was sacked, and replaced by Nicholas Ridley, a Thatcherite avant la lettre and a ferocious opponent of nationalized industries. Yet he was also a practical man, with a background in engineering, and he now hit it off with Parker’s successor, Sir Bob Reid.
This Reid was later to be succeeded by another Bob Reid, who also got the statutory knighthood. This oddity was to confuse outsiders but, within the business, both men were admired and there remains a widespread view that Reid I was the best chairman the railways ever had. He was a cool, patrician figure who had, nonetheless, grown up within the organization; all the while, the story goes, he was formulating his plan to reform it, but kept quiet, against the day when he might be in a position to do something. This suggests that here was a man who really did have the virtues of ruthlessness etc., that journalists so freely ascribed to Beeching.
It is also said that Ridley and Reid did a deal. Both men are dead now, and the exact nature of the deal remains unclear. One suggestion is that Ridley, more influential than the average transport minister, said he would secure investment if the railways could get rid of their losses. As practical men, they would have realized both halves of that were incredible. The more plausible version is that Ridley promised to keep out of Reid’s hair if this chairman, unlike his most recent predecessors, didn’t interfere in politics.
Politics were actually working to the management’s advantage in that the government was busy breaking the power and spirit of the unions, tilting the balance towards the bosses in a manner the railways had not experienced since Edward VII was on the throne. And Reid took full advantage.
‘He set about running it like a business, and not a great British institution like the opera,’ said Welsby. ‘The management hadn’t understood the impact of what they were doing at a market level. They understood gross income and gross costs but not how they were related.’ So Reid split the railways into five sectors: three for passengers and two for freight, which were each given their own bosses and clear objectives. Thanks to clear management and a little creative accountancy, the flagship, InterCity, became – according to Christian Wolmar – ‘Europe’s only profitable railway’. In boom years the London commuter lines, Network SouthEast, made money too. And the railways as a whole became ‘the most efficient in Europe and the least subsidized’.
It was hardly Nirvana: this was British Railways. But BR was allowed to undertake a (cheapskate) electrification of the East Coast line to Edinburgh, which Beeching and Serpell’s Option A would have abandoned. And there was a sense within the industry, if not yet among the public, that all would be well as long as she never went near the railways or its management and remembered how much she loathed them.
She was all-powerful in the mid-eighties when the great Thatcherite panacea, privatization, was at its peak. British Telecom, electricity and gas were all sold off, to great acclaim, partly because the new management did make them more efficient but mainly because the assets were grossly undervalued and, in a booming economy, a new army of small capitalists found themselves richer every time they looked at the share prices in the paper.
By 1990 Margaret Thatcher, as prime ministers invariably do after ten years in power, had not merely lost her touch but
gone – to use the medical technicality – a little bonkers. Which is perhaps why, in what turned out to be the closing weeks of her imperium, she allowed her seventh and last transport satrap, Cecil Parkinson, to tell the party conference at Bournemouth when he mentioned British Rail: ‘The question now is not whether we should privatize it but about how and when.’
CHAPTER NINE
PENTONVILLE ROAD
Even in 2009, after one of those dire train journeys always referred to as ‘nightmares’, people would often put the blame on ‘Good old British Rail’ or even ‘British Railways’. By this point, British Rail had not run a train in twelve years and the name British Railways had been abolished for public consumption for forty-five years. But in this industry the combination of inertia and nostalgia is always unstoppable.
They do still have a mysterious half-life, both of them, in an anonymous office block at the top end of Pentonville Road by the Angel station in London. I seem to remember a pawn shop on that corner.
There sit the offices of the British Railways Board, a nationalized industry that still holds regular board meetings, and – technically separate – the British Railways Board (Residuary), a limited company now wholly owned by the Department for Transport. And in command of it all sits the heir to Dr Beeching and the dynasty of Bob Reids, an amiable man called Peter Trewin.
There is no silver service, nor even any visible memorabilia or railwayana to distinguish this office from a typical Islington software house. There is no legion of flunkeys and public relations men. There is no legion at all, though you could think of this as Fort Zinderneuf, Beau Geste’s desert outpost. Having had nearly 700,000 employees at the start and 130,000 at what appeared to be the end, the two British Railways are now down to just thirty stout defenders, split between here and an engineering office in York. Trewin is a career railwayman, who joined British Railways as a management trainee a few weeks after the end of steam in 1968. Now, like the last survivor of a massacre, it is his job to look after the ruins.
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