Last Trains

by Charles Loft

  Of the network of lines between the Brighton and Hastings main lines, only those to East Grinstead and Uckfield survive today. Closure of the Uckfield–Lewes section involved a bizarre procedure when the condition of a viaduct required a replacement bus to operate for the final months of the service. It could not get up the approach road to Barcombe Mills station so the BRB had to provide a taxi to take passengers from the station to the bus, but, farcically, they had to walk up the same road to buy a ticket at the station first. Closure marked the start of a long-running campaign to reopen this line on the grounds that it is silly to remove such a short link, so far without success. A tiny part of it is preserved as the Lavender Line. The Eridge–Tunbridge Wells section has been preserved as the Spa Valley Railway, having closed in 1985 despite the TUCC’s recommendation, enabling the extensive site at Tunbridge Wells to be used for a supermarket. The Bluebell, of course, is the most famous of the area’s survivors, saved primarily by a bunch of teenage students, inspired by Miss Bessemer. Inching towards East Grinstead as I write, it reopened between Horsted Keynes and Sheffield Park in 1960 as the first standard-gauge passenger line to be preserved in Britain, initial hopes of restoring a commercial service using a former GWR railcar having been abandoned. Among the visitors in its first season was Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Madge Bessemer is commemorated in the name of the tea room at Sheffield Park station and rightly so; without her it is unlikely that it would have survived to be preserved. Those seeking a simple symbol for the supposed decline of the industrial spirit in 1960s Britain need only to compare her quixotic defence of this unnecessary but delightful relic with her great-grandfather’s invention of the Bessemer Converter, from which she must have derived much of the wealth and social standing she used so effectively against the BTC. Miss Bessemer did not single-handedly derail the attempt to ‘cut off all the heads at once’, but the Bluebell case highlighted just why that attempt got nowhere. As the Commission’s representative Lord Rusholme put it when explaining the change of direction to the CTCC, the BTC ‘were under an obligation to pay their way, but no one allowed them to run the business as if this was their object’.123 Watkinson arrived at the ministry thinking that he could turn the railways into ‘an organisation that functions on normal and sensible business lines’.124 Older and wiser, he later reflected that ‘three years in charge of the Transport ministry provided … a useful corrective to any illusions that politics is about doing things in a businesslike fashion’.125

  † ‘South Downs’ is one of three Your Britain – Fight For it Now posters designed by Newbould during the Second World War. Windy Corner is the home of the Honeychurches in A Room with a View; Eel Marsh House is the setting for The Woman in Black. The Railway Children referred to here is the 1999 television adaptation.

  † One correspondent was Mr Bessemer, the other was a Colonel Temple, friend of Miss Bessemer and old school friend of the Home Secretary, to whom he had written a not-even-thinly veiled threat to go to the press if something was not done.

  Chapter 6

  White elephants: the M&GN and the collapse of faith in the railways

  The 200-odd miles of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway (M&GN) were created when a variety of small local companies coalesced under the joint ownership of the Great Northern and Midland companies in 1893. Although the point of the M&GN was to break the monopoly of the Great Eastern Railway (GER) on traffic to the resorts of Norfolk, peace very soon broke out and the final parts of the system were constructed jointly with it. The M&GN route started in the middle of nowhere as a continuation of a branch of the Midland Railway from Saxby on the line from Leicester to Stamford. This was joined at Bourne – the original starting point – by a branch from the Great Northern main line, which predated the M&GN and had taken over the elegant seventeenth-century Red Hall as its booking office. Attempts to demolish the hall at both the inception and demise of the M&GN were thwarted by public protest and it still stands, having seen off the passing industrial irritation. From Bourne the line headed out across one of the most daunting of English landscapes: the Fens. Maybe it is because I was brought up in inner London, but there is something eerie about somewhere so utterly flat and deserted. Between Bourne and Spalding the former marsh was so sparsely populated that the stations were named after drains: Twenty, Counter Drain and North Drove (disappointingly, the railway ignored the names of local hamlets and spared the timetable ‘Counter Drain for Tongue End’). Having bypassed the relative civilisation of Spalding, to which it threw out a couple of spur lines, the main route was joined by a branch from Peterborough at Sutton Bridge where the Nene was crossed on a swing bridge. The few passengers changing here for Wisbech could enjoy possibly the most highly polished waiting room in the land and check their hair for smuts in its table’s mirror finish. From here, the M&GN meandered the length of Norfolk; at first through fruit farms around King’s Lynn and then fields of wheat or beet or cattle before a sumptuous concluding section through the Broads to sun, sea and sand dunes, down the coast to Yarmouth and the joint GER line to Lowestoft. Beyond King’s Lynn, which it did its best to avoid, the only places it served of any size at all were Fakenham and Aylsham, each of which was at least as well served by the Great Eastern and neither of which can boast 10,000 souls even today.

  The M&GN delighted in an array of enticingly named destinations: Eye Green, Bluestone, Corpusty, Hindolveston, Potter Heigham, California Halt and Clenchwarton; but the most important was Melton Constable, from which a branch headed south to Norwich (much better served by the Great Eastern) and another north to Sheringham and Cromer. From Cromer another joint GER line looped back around the coast to rejoin the ‘main’ line at North Walsham. Busy as Melton was when summer was in full swing, one could hear cows in the milking shed when standing on the platform. The entire network was single track and on busy summer weekends between the wars it would be chock full of specials to and from the Midlands and the north, with harvest peaks of freight that could be almost as extreme. Absorption of its parent companies into the LMS and the LNER initially made little difference and, although Melton lost its works in the 1930s and the line was absorbed by the LNER, little had been done to divert traffic to the roughly parallel Great Eastern route from Peterborough to Norwich and on to the same coastal destinations before the war.

  In a single nationalised system the M&GN’s straggling duplicate route was an easy target for anyone seeking expensive burdens to shrug off and by 1958 throwing off expensive burdens was very much on government minds. The national humiliation of Suez saw petrol rationing return and Eden resign in January 1957 a broken man – his replacement Harold Macmillan, former director of the GWR, was initially unsure if his government would survive more than a few weeks. Most importantly, however, Suez brought home the reality of Britain’s diminished status in a world dominated by superpowers and by the growing fear that conflict between them could unleash the Third World War. Whatever people’s feelings on international politics, the shock of Suez created a context in which concerns about the nation’s economic performance gave rise to the widespread suspicion that something was fundamentally wrong with Britain and required change, even if it was not always clear what that something was. Macmillan is remembered today for the apparent complacency of his comment – made in a speech some six months after he became Prime Minister – that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, but the theme of his speech was the danger to that prosperity posed by inflation and the uncertainty over whether it was possible for Britain to combine full employment, stable prices and economic growth.126 Divisions in his government over how to address this problem cost Macmillan his Chancellor and two Treasury ministers at the start of 1958. Even as he appeared to epitomise ‘Old England’ to the satirists who rose in response to the mood of dissatisfaction that typified the turn of the decade, Macmillan was as aware as anyone of the need to modernise and it was the question of how to do this that kept him awake at night.

 
In both symbolic and economic terms rural railways were out of step with this new mood. In June 1958 the BTC announced its intention to close 174 miles of this ‘railway relic of the last century’ from Saxby and Peterborough to Yarmouth and Norwich.127 This was by far the greatest closure to date and the operation had been well planned. The region provided a confidential book for the two area TUCCs that would hear objections (the public got a less detailed one). This made a strong case for the railways’ expectations that most of the freight worth carrying would be retained – about 100 miles would remain open for freight and there had been discussions with most customers about alternatives. The Commission’s figures were presented on the basis agreed after the Bluebell inquiry and supported by detailed calculations. They pointed to net savings of £640,000 a year, which were defended as a conservative estimate because they ignored renewals on stock rendered surplus and savings on other parts of the network that depended on closing the M&GN. The usual uncertainty over line renewals was reduced by the need to replace Clenchwarton Bridge at a cost of over a quarter of a million pounds. BTC-owned bus companies would provide more than half-a-million additional bus miles of alternative services a year; none of the stations was more than about 13 miles from an alternative rail facility; the average load per train was forty passengers.

  These preparations paid off when the East Anglian and East Midlands TUCCs approved the proposals and the CTCC praised the BTC’s handling of the case. Closure was implemented in March 1959; but if this was a strong case – and it was – its strength simply reiterated the impossibility of closing any railways without causing hardship and the widespread dissatisfaction with the idea that loss-making railways should be closed in the national interest. While many holiday expresses were quicker after closure than before it, there was no avoiding the fact that sending traffic from the Midlands to Cromer via Norwich instead of Melton appeared to be, as one local critic put it, like ‘going round the candlestick to find the handle’, adding over 40 miles to the route; and Yarmouth was never going to welcome the possibility of losing roughly a quarter of the holiday business that had formerly arrived via the M&GN.128 The most obvious difficulty arising from closure was that of Melton Constable. As discussed in Chapter 1, Melton owed its existence to the railway that a third of its entire population now worked on. As John Marshall, a fifty-year-old signalman and vice chair of the parish council pointed out, while they were likely to be offered jobs elsewhere on the system, this would be of little comfort to those like him who owned homes they feared they would be unable to sell – ‘nobody will want to live in Melton’.129 Wary of criticising the railways publicly, other Melton men helped brief opponents of closure among the public.

  There was protest enough elsewhere in any case. Complaints that the consultative committees had prejudged the case and rushed their hearings reached the minister, a deputation of parish and district councils reached the parliamentary secretary, a petition from the ‘humble subjects and parishioners of Hindolveston’ (who were losing a pretty good diesel service straight to Norwich) reached the ‘Gracious Person’ of the Queen, asking her to intervene on the grounds that the ‘high-handed, arbitrary manner in which the decision to close the line was announced and the absence of factual proof of losses makes nonsense of our claim to be a democracy’.130 Elsewhere, it was suggested that the line should be retained in case of another petrol shortage (the Suez crisis had led to petrol rationing between November 1956 and May 1957). L. J. Roll, who had represented one of the councils at the East Midlands hearing and delivered a thirteen-page treatise to the ministry opposing closure, was one of many who complained that the line had been deliberately run down. Here was an argument the BTC could not win. There was no sensible case for running through traffic between the Midlands and the coast on both the former M&GN and GER routes when it could all be accommodated on one with investment in faster services concentrated there. However, when concentrating through traffic on the GER line left the M&GN with insufficient traffic to justify its retention, efficiency began to look like conspiracy. The M&GN was a duplicate interloper, built to challenge a monopoly, and was now transferred by the BTC into the control of a regional management that had previously run that monopoly. Obviously they were running it down with malice aforethought. Similar complaints were heard around the closures of the Somerset and Dorset and Great Central. It was nonsense, but damagingly believable nonsense.

  The warning in the BTC’s press release announcing the M&GN closure that ‘a new point of balance must be found between the obligations of public service on the one hand, and the requirements of the railway budget on the other’, combined with the unprecedented size of the closure and the TUCCs’ acquiescence, were indications of a shift in attitudes to closure at the BTC as its losses mounted.131 The M&GN contributed to a massive increase in the estimated savings from closures authorised in 1958 (£1,069,000 compared to £179,000 the previous year and a similar figure in 1956). The year 1959 saw the closure of another white elephant duplicate route, the Hull and Barnsley, and the first nail in the coffin of the biggest of the lot, the Great Central, when its express services were removed. By the time the M&GN closure was proposed in mid-1958, the trade and industry representatives on the CTCC were pushing for a more extensive closure programme. The same week, R. G. M. Street, chair of the Wales and Monmouth committee, shocked at how few people actually used some services, suggested that the BTC submit lists of cases that it felt required no further investigation to the TUCCs who could then agree to the immediate suspension of services for six months, pending further study.

  Perhaps encouraged by the post-Suez mood of national self-criticism, Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation, Harold Watkinson, and his officials also wanted to see more done to increase the ‘almost pitiful’ savings closures had produced in 1957.132 An opportunity to do so presented itself when they found themselves obliged to justify the Cabinet’s claim that a wage rise paid to avoid a strike in May 1958 had been funded by new savings. Watkinson met the CTCC and TUCC chairmen in June to urge swifter progress and for his part agreed to publicly state that the BTC was under no obligation to ensure that alternative services were available following closure. He did so twice in July, telling the House of Commons that ‘the railways are no longer a monopolistic organisation with an obligation to provide all sections of the community with a railway service … [and] the Commission is under no obligation to provide an alternative service’.133

  Change was slow, however, and limited by the BTC’s fear of the public’s reaction in the wake of the Bluebell controversy. It rejected Street’s suggestion of closures in advance of inquiries and an attempt to resurrect the use of timetable alterations that reduced services to the legal minimum. Similar fears undermined the effect of Watkinson’s statement when, in attempting to reassure opposition members that passengers’ needs would not be totally ignored, he mistakenly implied that the TUCCs had a statutory duty to take alternative services into account when judging closure proposals. The list of closures the Commission produced in response to the ministry’s request for savings to fund the wage deal confirmed official suspicions that the proposals were half-baked and deflated expectations of an increase in the committees’ workload. Of the thirty-two lines on the list, only eight or nine would close completely and seven of these had lost their passenger services some years previously. The M&GN proposal may have benefited from the use of the financial data agreed in the wake of the Bluebell case, but that agreement had only been reached after months of haggling motivated by the BTC’s fear that more detailed figures would be too onerous to prepare and would expose it to increased criticism from objectors. The tension between the pressure for savings and the fear of public reaction was encapsulated when the BTC representatives used their votes at the North-Western TUCC to secure a majority in favour of closing the Coniston branch only for the BTC, in the face of the subsequent controversy, to instruct its representatives to refrain from voting in future.

  By the en
d of 1958 such vacillations were beginning to look irrelevant as the railways faced what today would be routinely described as ‘a perfect storm’, but in the more inventive mind of Sir David Serpell, recalling the circumstances that brought him to the ministry as deputy secretary, appeared ‘like one of those old films in which a girl is tied to the track and there are two trains approaching’.134 The two trains were the deficit and the Guillebaud inquiry into railway pay. The May 1958 pay deal had been reached in a desperate hurry by a government that did not want to fight the railwaymen and the London bus drivers at the same time. In order to persuade the railwaymen to accept less than they wanted, the Cabinet agreed to establish an inquiry into railway pay under the academic Claude Guillebaud. Guillebaud did not report until 1960, but his inquiry quickly developed such political momentum that a major pay award was certain.

  In the autumn of 1958, as the TUCCs prepared to hear the Midland and Great Northern case, Treasury officials realised that even without the effect of Guillebaud’s report, the Commission was unlikely to meet the financial targets set out in the 1956 White Paper. Not only had Watkinson expressed a determination to have a proper inquiry into the Commission’s position if it failed to meet these targets, but Treasury officials would not allow a third plan for the railways to slip through their grasp – a major investigation of the Commission’s prospects was inevitable. The bad news for the railways was the context in which that investigation would be conducted. By 1959 the government’s policy towards the nationalised industries and the Treasury’s view of the nation’s future transport needs had both altered significantly since the 1955 Modernisation Plan had been framed. It was this change, rather than a simple reaction to the BTC’s losses, that explains the Beeching Report.