by Charles Loft
The Lewes and East Grinstead railway was precisely the sort of line the Commission had in mind when it responded to the CTCC’s request, made in the wake of the Isle of Wight case, for more information on the use of lightweight diesels on branch lines. The Commission was in the process of introducing diesel multiple units in a number of areas in 1954, but while diesels could operate a more intensive service than steam, this was only an advantage if the traffic potential justified it. On lightly used branches the crucial comparison was not with the existing steam service but with road transport. The decisive advantage of the bus was convenience, because it could pick up passengers nearer their home; but it also won on cost, being available for a third of the price of a railcar and not requiring dedicated track and signalling, all of which was nearly as expensive to maintain for one train a day as for twenty. Moreover, on lines where a steam locomotive could operate freight and passenger services, or where seasonal and other peaks might need longer trains, diesel railcars could not cope.
By 1954 the Lewes–East Grinstead line was up for closure; the TUCC was examining the case and Madge Bessemer was leading the opposition. By the end of 1955, the ministry’s file was fat with correspondence, chiefly to and from Miss Bessemer and her brother, H. Douglas Bessemer, one of the nation’s leading collectors of butterflies and stamps. At some point in the campaign to save it, the line had begun to be referred to as the Bluebell and Primrose line, possibly at Madge’s instigation. In accordance with the Railway Executive’s policy since 1953, the costs of alternative operation had been considered, but with passenger receipts at around £10,000 a year and a net saving of £59,000 from closure, there was no prospect of closing the gap, assuming the figures were accurate. That assumption was vigorously disputed and the refusal of either the BTC or TUCC to provide objectors with detailed figures was the cause of much complaint, but the line closed anyway in June 1955. And that, it appeared, was the end of the story; when the last trains ran over the Lewes and East Grinstead, there was no sign that the controversy around its closure would help derail attempts to publish a Beeching-style closure programme in 1956.
By 1953 the BTC had established that stopping-train services outside urban areas and short-distance haulage of small freight loads were fundamentally unprofitable, and by the end of 1954 a further traffic survey had found that about 40 per cent of stopping train services earned only a third or less of their movement costs (the cost of running the train itself). In October 1955 the Cabinet had realised that the provisions in the 1953 Act that would have required the BTC to sell its bus assets were a deterrent to closures and had decided not to implement them. The same month, the CTCC received a BTC paper arguing that few rural services would benefit from the use of railcars and by December the ministry had seen a BTC paper anticipating the replacement of many rural services by buses. By March 1956 the Commission had asked the area boards to review uneconomic services and submit comprehensive proposals to replace them with buses. The Commission was planning a campaign of publicity and persuasion designed to expedite the closure process. It prepared a memorandum for area boards to send to TUCCs, warning them to expect a number of major proposals for the complete withdrawal of stopping services, pointing out that ‘even if diesel operation were to double the receipts and halve the costs, a substantial proportion of stopping services would not even cover their direct costs’ and requesting cooperation ‘in carrying out this new and urgent programme of positive improvements with all possible speed’.97 These developments caused some excitement at the ministry. Convinced that there were large potential savings in a programme of closures, the parliamentary secretary, Hugh Molson, was keen to find some way of bypassing the consultative process. Anticipating that a large-scale closure programme would be ready by the time the BTC’s 1955 accounts were published, he suggested they be published simultaneously and accompanied by a ministerial authorisation to bypass the TUCCs.
Ministry assistant secretary, Alison Munro, influenced by the apparent health of the Dutch railway’s finances as a result of closing more than two-thirds of the stations open before the war, supported Molson’s suggestion. Munro does not quite fit the myth of a ministry packed with pro-road officials. Having lost both her parents at thirteen, she was left a widow by the Battle of Britain when just two months pregnant aged twenty-seven. A single mother, she became a rare woman in a civil service that required female staff to resign when they married. She had all the dynamism and ability required to survive these circumstances and had made an important contribution to the development of post-war civil aviation before arriving at the railways and inland waterways division of the ministry (she went on to become High Mistress at a leading girls’ school in the 1960s where she abolished many regulations, including the uniform – motivated, she said, by practicality rather than liberal ideology, but doubtless typifying ‘New England’ to some of the more conservative parents). She had backed the Modernisation Plan when it arrived at the ministry and, forty years on, was one of the few people who had a good word for it:
I gave [railway modernisation] that gigantic kick and I’m glad I did. If it had been nowadays it would have got bogged down by nitpickers, the statisticians would have got hold of it … we’d lived through the war and Churchill won the war because he thought big and I admire him for that reason… I know I’ve been criticised much since [for lack of economic analysis] … but … [the critics] don’t realise the state the country was in, nothing had been spent on the transport infrastructure in the whole of the war.98
By the 1980s she was chair of the CTCC where she was praised by opponents of the proposal to close the Settle and Carlisle line as ‘a doughty champion of the consumer’.99 Nevertheless, in 1956 she felt the savings from closures to date represented only a ‘minute fraction’ of what was possible and that the closure procedure could be speeded up if ‘some really startling and comprehensive statement of Commission policy’ were made. She suggested setting out the new policy in a White Paper accompanied by clear ministerial support.100 This was fortuitous, as a White Paper was just what the minister needed.
Harold Watkinson had been appointed Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation just before Christmas 1955, his experience as parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Labour during the previous winter’s pay dispute still fresh in his memory. He was determined to turn the railways into a sensible business. Eager to make an immediate impact, he supported a swift pay award in the hope that this would improve industrial relations and encourage progress on productivity. When the settlement was followed by the usual application for increased charges, the Cabinet saw an opportunity to demonstrate its determination to break out of the wage-price spiral, using the BTC as an example. Anthony Eden had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955, winning an election with a secure majority the following month. Unwilling to pursue legislative curbs on trade unions, a formal incomes policy or to abandon the commitment to full employment, Eden’s government attempted to create a wage and price ‘plateau’. Ministers could only exhort private sector employers and the trade unions to show restraint and keep wages and prices stable, but they could impose such policies on the nationalised industries (albeit informally through discussion with their chairmen). In March 1956, Brian Robertson was pressured into setting an example by agreeing to a six-month moratorium on some passenger fares and only half of the increase he had wanted in freight charges. In June, before the moratorium was up, the government imposed a general six-month price freeze on all the nationalised industries. The policy failed to stabilise anything, and its destabilising effect on the finances of the nationalised industries was an important stimulus to the Treasury’s subsequent search for a different approach. The year 1956 was the first in which the railways officially operated at a loss.
The March moratorium was heavily criticised and by May the opposition was claiming that the government had forced the BTC to breach its statutory duty to break even. Watkinson, who knew that the BTC would probably be left wi
th a deficit for years to come, defended the decision by announcing in April that he and the Commission were undertaking a major review of its prospects. The minister was now effectively committed to producing a document in six months’ time that could justify a deficit heading in the direction of a million pounds a week. The ministry’s deputy secretary George Stedman dismissed Munro’s proposal for a White Paper as ‘a little over-dramatised and highly coloured’ and issued dire warnings of the political consequences of bypassing the consultative committees.101 However, Molson was filled with enthusiasm, pointing out that CTCC recommendations meant nothing unless the minister issued a direction as a result – and he would hardly issue one that contradicted his own policy. If the BTC were told to meet 25 per cent of its deficit through savings and cut its coal consumption by half a million tons, Molson told Watkinson ‘the burden would be carried on your broad shoulders’.102 Watkinson liked the sound of this. ‘Let us cut off all the heads at once in a White Paper if necessary,’ he told Molson; ‘I have no objection to drastic action,’ he told officials.103 He told Robertson he wanted a comprehensive programme of closures for a White Paper and warned the chairmen of the TUCCs to expect one.
Officials began writing the report they wanted the Commission to provide, a draft of which was sent to the Commission on 17 May. This set out six strategies used to tackle the problems of rail systems worldwide: modernisation, productivity improvements, charging freedom, subsidy, the restriction of road transport (which it ruled out) and, heading the list, closures. This is what the ministry invited the Commission to say on the subject:
The conclusion reached by this reassessment is that the railways will always, as far as can be foreseen, have an essential function to perform, but that they can only perform this function efficiently and economically if there is a radical change in the pattern of railway services and if the non-essential and unremunerative services are rapidly eliminated… The target for all railway policy planning must therefore be to adjust, as rapidly as circumstances permit, the railway system to this more limited but essential function and to eliminate the dying wood. This is the basic thinking underlying the … modernisation programme.104
The final document was expected to contain statistics showing the financial and traffic improvements expected, the mileage closed to passenger and/or freight traffic, the numbers of stations closed and of passenger services to be discontinued in 1956 and succeeding years. At a meeting with BTC representatives in May, chaired by the minister, it was agreed that ‘there was no time for prolonged discussions if results were to be produced in time for the White Paper … it was important to show a progression of lessening deficits over a reasonable number of years until a balance was secured. Some five or six years at most should be the aim.’105
Unsurprisingly, the figures produced in response were essentially cosmetic alterations to the made-to-measure predictions in the 1955 plan, which in no way justified the predicted surplus of £3 million in 1961 or 1962 and £48 million in 1970, excluding interest on the accumulated deficit (or a deficit of £17 million and a surplus of £38 million respectively if interest payments on the accumulated deficit continued). Within days of the meeting at which the need to show the BTC breaking even in five years had been discussed, ministry deputy secretary George Stedman had been warned by Sir Reginald Wilson that 1961 or 1962 was ‘the very earliest date at which the Commission can hope to break even in the most favourable circumstances’, and had concluded that it was important to avoid giving the Cabinet the impression that 1961 or 1962 was ‘in any way a firm date’.106 Wilson’s warning was made before the government imposed its second price freeze, a development which clearly did not fall within the compass of ‘the most favourable circumstances’. On 12 June, Watkinson told the Cabinet that the full extent of the Commission’s financial woe would soon be public knowledge. The BTC’s accumulated deficit would probably top £100 million at the end of 1956 and the operating account would probably be in the red for many years to come. Hard decisions would be necessary, he warned, including closures.
The realism of Watkinson’s plan was always open to question. Success rested on a willingness to ride out any storm and the signs were not encouraging. Watkinson expected the BTC’s emphasis to be on withdrawing stopping trains on lines that would remain open for through traffic, which he felt could be treated as timetable changes that – unlike closures – need not be referred to the TUCCs before they were implemented. It was never clear that this would actually make closures easier, because there was no way of preventing passengers affected by timetable changes from referring them to the committees anyway. By early April the TUCC chairmen had baulked at the widespread opposition any attempt to prevent objections would provoke, the unmanageable increase in their workload if the ‘timetable changes’ were referred to the committees (as experience suggested they would be) and the impossible task of judging proposals already endorsed by the government. They wanted the detailed proposals to be published before they were implemented so that public reaction could be assessed and perhaps dealt with at an inquiry into the proposals as a whole. Meanwhile, officials queried whether Watkinson should endorse the closure programme himself, thereby compromising his position as the final arbiter of individual proposals. Did the advantages, they wondered, of having ‘one big row’ over a programme of closures outweigh the prospect of stirring up ‘a hornet’s nest of opposition all over the country’ – in Scotland in particular?107
Even as the ministry and Commission laid their plans, something was stirring in Sussex: the Bluebell and Primrose line was rising from its grave. Miss Bessemer obviously suspected that if she dug around in the technicalities of the law long enough she would find a chink in the ministry’s armour. She wrote several letters in an apparent attempt to demonstrate that the minister had, technically, not received a recommendation to close the line from the CTCC, which she presumably thought invalidated the closure, before she hit the jackpot. Either she or her solicitors uncovered a clause in the Act of Parliament under which the Lewes and East Grinstead company had been absorbed into the London Brighton and South Coast Railway, requiring the LBSCR to run four trains a day for passengers. In February 1956 her solicitors wrote to Waterloo arguing that the clause now applied to the BTC. Such clauses were not unheard of and checking that there were no legal barriers to closure was standard procedure, but it was unusual for them to be contained in an Act transferring a line to a second owner. One can only imagine Hopkins’s reaction on receiving a letter from the BTC’s chief solicitor in early April stating ‘it was most unfortunate that when my department was asked to advise whether there was any legal objection to closing the line, attention was not drawn to the statutory provisions’; all we know is that he put a line in pencil next to this statement, possibly with some force.108
Given that the BTC’s argument for closing the Bluebell line had been accepted, Hopkins was prepared to leave it closed until the troublesome clause could be repealed. Munro encouraged him to ‘play for time by such well-known methods as discussions with the parties, investigations of costs of restorations etc.’. He was defeated by the Commission’s legal department, which did not want to ask Parliament to repeal an Act it was disregarding, especially as it had been successfully sued in a similar case involving the Kennet and Avon canal only the previous year. Munro and her superior J. R. Willis were tearing their hair out at the region’s decision to reopen the line – ‘lamentable’, she wrote – but the ministry could hardly tell the Commission to disregard a law.109 The news provoked a clearly fuming Willis to the only direct expression of anger I have ever seen in a civil service minute:
this is a sorry tale which hits us at an unpleasantly inconvenient time when we want to streamline the procedure… Also, it makes me very angry that the Bessemers, who – I suspect from motives of pride rather than disinterested regard for the public good – have inflicted a lot of wearisome correspondence on us and wasted hours of official and ministerial time, should get a
way with it like this.110
This reaction needs to be seen in context – there was more at stake than whether a railway closed.
The Crichel Down affair, with which two correspondents had compared the case, had arisen from the poor handling of a small parcel of land requisitioned for wartime use and not properly returned.† In the panorama of government activity it was an even smaller speck than the closure of the Bluebell line. Yet in the summer of 1954 it had led to the resignation of a government minister, had damaged or wrecked the careers of several officials and provided the catalyst for the appointment in November 1955 of Sir Oliver Franks to inquire into the conduct of the myriad of tribunals now involved in British life. Franks’s report was still a year away, but the fact that it stressed the importance of impartiality and openness reflected the concerns behind its establishment and shows what dangerous ground the ministry and Commission were now on. Although the TUCCs were not tribunals, there were many for whom the distinction was unclear and many others who thought they should be (including Miss Bessemer, who later devoted a great deal of effort to providing the ministry with a lengthy memorandum on the subject). Bessemer’s MP, Major Tufton Beamish, was far more concerned by the secrecy surrounding the process and the inability of opponents to challenge, or even see, the evidence than the fact of closure itself and this view was widely shared. Nor was the Bluebell an isolated example of dissatisfaction. The Railway Development Association, which had supported objectors to the Isle of Wight closures, had now been joined by the Society for the Reinvigoration of Unremunerative Branch Lines in the United Kingdom (1954) in organising opposition. The Isle of Wight hearing inspired a private member’s Bill in December 1955, supported by thirty-three MPs, which sought to replace the consultative procedure with a public inquiry under the Transport Tribunal at which the BTC representatives could be cross-examined on the detailed figures they would be obliged to publish. For good measure, it would also reopen all cases heard in the previous five years. A week later branch line closures were debated again and in March 1956 the House returned to the topic of rural transport. This was not a good time to mishandle a closure, nor to reopen a case in which the TUCC had been criticised for precisely the shortcomings Franks was examining. It was an even worse time to try to bypass the consultative process altogether.
