Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  The outdoor suburban sections of the London Underground were frequently damaged by bombs too, while its deep-level Tube lines became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of people. Originally the authorities had tried to dissuade Londoners from using the Underground to hide from the bombs, but soon bowed to public pressure. Up to 200,000 people a night took shelter in the system at the height of the Blitz, while the trains kept running normally during the day and evening. The numbers in the shelters fell sharply when the worst of the Blitz subsided in 1941 but people returned en masse during the attacks of 1944. Although there were a handful of incidents when bombs did, through terrible bad luck, penetrate deep into the system, the shelters undoubtedly lived up to their reputation as the ‘best shelters of them all’. The deadliest incident was not a result of enemy action but involved a panic at Bethnal Green station in March 1943, started by the noise of anti-aircraft guns. The long, poorly lit stairs had no handrail and a woman with a baby fell over, triggering an horrific stampede that left 173 people, including sixty-two children, crushed to death.

  Whereas in the early days of the war, passengers had accepted the injunction not to travel unless they had to, as the conflict wore on the trains filled up again as people were desperate to get away from the troubled cities whenever they had a chance of a break. Huge numbers of service men and women on leave, as well as newly arrived Americans desperate to see the London sights and experience the night life, crowded on to the system. By the latter stages of the war, when the V1 and V2 flying bombs were raining down on London, the war-weary population flocked to the railways and ignored the injunctions. By the end of the war, railway usage had reached record levels. There were about a million passengers per week more than in 1938, with the annual total for 1944 reaching 1.3bn journeys.9 Of the Big Four, only the Southern, which had lost much commuter traffic, showed a decrease, while numbers on the Great Western had risen by over 50 per cent.

  O. S. Nock had no doubts about the achievement of the railways in this grim time: ‘In plain terms, the cumulative effort of the British railways over the years 1940–1945 represents the greatest achievement in railway transportation in the history of the world.’10 Yet, the public, ever critical of the railways, did not fully appreciate this success. Many of the more affluent classes, who had been forced out of their cars to travel by railway for the first time, were not impressed by their uncomfortable and slow journeys on overcrowded trains, and that climate of criticism helped to ensure that public protests against Labour’s plans to nationalize the railways after the war were muted.

  In a near repeat of events after the First World War, the railways were dealt a rough hand by the government over the financial arrangements resulting from their wartime nationalization. The government, a coalition of all three main parties, had initially promised to allow them to have first call on any profit up to £40m and a share of subsequent profits up to a total £56m. But a couple of years into the conflict the railways were being allowed to retain only £43.5m of their profits annually, divided in set percentages between the Big Four and London Transport,11 an arrangement which proved lucrative for the government. While before the war the five railway businesses (including London Underground) had an annual income of £200m, and made profits of £40m, by 1944 they were netting £93m on double the turnover. There seemed to be no rationale for the government to retain just over half the £350m in profits generated by the railways during the war, although in compensation it created a trust fund for investment in the railways and most of the money, about £150m (£3,750m today), was handed over to the British Transport Commission (which ran British Railways after nationalization).

  Immediately after the end of the war, the General Election of 1945 brought to power a Labour government committed to nationalization, not just of the railways but also other key industries such as coal and steel. In a November parliamentary announcement, Herbert Morrison, the Deputy Prime Minister and the creator of London Transport, confirmed the manifesto promise of nationalization. The policy was not as controversial as might have been expected. The struggles of the Big Four in the run-up to the war and the efficient running of the system as a unified network since 1939 had ensured that there was no question of returning to the old system. Moreover, support for nationalization was again not confined to left-wing circles. Large public corporations like the BBC, the Central Electricity Board and London Transport had been created between the wars by the Tories. As Terry Gourvish, the official historian of British Railways, put it, ‘an increasing body of opinion in all parties certainly favoured a greater measure of governmental control in the interests of both industry and the consumer’.12

  The railways were on their knees and ripe for nationalization: the war had drained them far beyond the experience of the First World War and the industry had already been in a financially strained situation in 1938, with only the Great Western paying a dividend that year. Intensive use had also taken its toll: by the end of the war, the railways were carrying 50 per cent more freight and passenger mileage had increased by two thirds with the same amount of equipment; to make matters worse, routine permanent-way maintenance had been slashed, creating an estimated backlog of 2,500 track miles,13 about two years’ work in normal circumstances. Bridges, tunnels and buildings had also been allowed to decay, while many locomotives were at the end of their useful lives. Over 8,000 locomotives, 40 per cent of the total, were over thirty-five years old as was a fifth of the 56,000 coaches. Moreover, apart from resuming work on a couple of long-planned electrification schemes, no improvements to the network were carried out. Previous commitments made during the war to a major modernization of the system were quietly dropped and not revived until the mid-1950s.

  Yet, despite the desperate need to improve the state of the railways, the money available in the government’s trust fund remained largely unspent because the rail companies showed little interest in improving the railway or even bringing it up to standard. The top brass were distracted by their decision to resist nationalization in every way possible rather than work with the government, but even when they did make concerted attempts to restore the railway’s physical condition, their efforts were hampered by the lack of raw materials and skilled labour, both of which were in short supply following the war. Even more ‘temporary’ speed restrictions had to be imposed because of the condition of the track and travelling on the run-down railways, therefore, was not an attractive proposition as the companies failed even to keep to their slacker timetables. Carriages were tatty and many stations had not seen a lick of paint since long before the war. Petrol rationing eased, enabling the more affluent to take to the roads, while the rest, their income squeezed as the austerity of the post-war period began, could not even afford rail travel. Consequently, passenger numbers fell by a third in the first couple of years after the war14 and inevitably the companies’ finances suffered. This downward spiral was to last for the rest of the decade, turning their profits into heavy losses.

  Even safety was compromised by the poor state of the track and the lack of investment. Safety had improved in the pre-war days of the Big Four. In the 1920s and 1930s, only an average of thirteen people per year were killed in train accidents, far fewer than in any period since the mid-nineteenth century, but the war inevitably led to a sharp rise in fatalities. There was no equivalent to the terrible Quintinshill accident of 1915 but there were a lot of minor accidents and collisions, and the death rate among workers also increased dramatically, hardly surprising given the risks to the gangs on the track in darkness. (The roads, incidentally, were far more perilous and the death toll reached its highest ever – 9,000 annually – three times today’s figure, principally as a result of drivers not being allowed to use headlights on roads where streetlamps had been switched off.) After the war, the accident rate on the railways increased sharply and there was a spate of disasters in 1946–7 culminating in two crashes in the space of three days in October 1947, at South Croydon and Goswick in Northumberland, w
hich killed a total of sixty people. That year, in his annual report, the Chief Inspecting Officer of the Railways blamed the poor safety record of the railways on the backlog of track maintenance and the failure to replace old semaphore signalling with the safer colour lights – which had become all the more necessary given the frequency of pea-souper fogs, caused by widespread burning of domestic coal. Even when trains were not crashing, they were breaking down with ever greater frequency. The performance of the railways was particularly bad in the summer of 1947 when the poor quality of locomotive coal caused by the fuel crisis of the previous winter, the coldest on record, was responsible for many engine failures and delays. Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, echoed the feelings of many when he told Parliament in December 1946: ‘This railway system of ours is a very poor bag of physical assets. The permanent way is badly worn. The rolling stock is in a state of great dilapidation. The railways are a disgrace to the country.’15

  That did not stop the railway companies receiving over-generous compensation terms, a result of timid government and powerful lobbying from the companies and their City friends. The hostility of the train companies to nationalization meant they concentrated more on maximizing compensation for their shareholders than on ensuring their networks were in a reasonable state when they were handed over to the British Transport Commission. Their profits may have been falling, but they made sure their shareholders received some last-minute rewards. Despite the capping of the total profits at £43.5m, the shareholders, with the exception of those unfortunate enough to hold LNER stock, had done well out of the war thanks to the increased traffic. Dividends during the war were well above pre-war levels, and in 1946–7 the payments on all four were increased substantially: the Great Western paid out over 6 per cent, the LMS nearly 4 per cent and the Southern 3.5 per cent, with the LNER, as ever lagging behind, with just 0.4 per cent, having paid nothing in the war. These rises were a deliberate strategy by the companies to boost shareholder income in the run-up to nationalization in the knowledge that the government’s compensation would have to be based on these figures.

  The shareholders were given £900m (a remarkable £22.5bn in today’s money) in government stock which guaranteed 3 per cent annually. The government had initially suggested a lower sum but pressure from the companies, helped by sympathetic press coverage, notably in The Economist, weakened ministers’ resolve and the railways were saddled with a valuation that is now widely recognized to have been far too high. This was a political fudge, not based on any transport imperatives or financial rationale but on ‘political and administrative expediency’.16 The government used the Stock Exchange prices of the first week in November 1946 when the shares were doing well, and then used the interest rate from the spring of 1947, just after it had risen from 2.5 per cent to 3 per cent. In any case, the Stock Exchange price was an artificial one, based on the temporary high level of traffic in the war and further boosted because investors knew the government was about to take over the industry. The valuation of the railways failed to take into account the likely future performance of the industry in the face of increased road competition and the burden of the backlog of investment. In other words, the shareholders got a good deal in both respects, as the stock was overvalued and the interest rate paid on it was high, guaranteeing them a handsome income for ninety years even though the railways were a mature industry, likely to stagnate, at best, or even decline. British Railways was burdened with annual interest payments of £27m (£675m today) to reward these stockholders,17 a handicap that was to hamper its ability to invest in the railways.

  The other issue to sort out before the handover was the future structure of the railways, and here again mistakes were made from the outset. Instead of giving the railways autonomy, they were placed under the control of the mammoth British Transport Commission which oversaw the ports, lorry haulage and the waterways – and had the difficult financial remit of breaking even as a whole organization. While the railways had their own executive, there was a lack of clarity about whether the Commission, housed in the London Transport headquarters at 55 Broadway over St James’s Park station, or the Railway Executive, sited at 222 Marylebone Road, opposite Marylebone station, was in charge. The tension between the two was ever present and was deeply damaging for the industry. The railway needed to be an independent financial entity so that its investment needs could be properly identified, rather than being buried in the Commission. Moreover, the Railway Executive was weakened by the refusal of many former managers of the Big Four to sit on it because of their opposition to nationalization. The Executive’s directors were ‘essentially a body of experienced railwaymen of the old school’, in other words, lacking the innovation and dynamism which was so needed at this crucial time. It is hardly surprising then that the Executive barely changed the existing structure of the railways, creating six regions out of the four companies by hiving off the Scottish lines from the two northern railways and splitting the LNER into two at Doncaster. These regions were again to become fiefdoms for the managers who ran them. For the public there was very little difference in the railway network when British Railways18 was created on 1 January 1948. As a measure of the continued importance of railways in the nation’s transport system, at the time of nationalization there were 20,000 private shunting locomotives used in company sidings, the same number of engines that would be transferred to British Railways from the Big Four.

  It was around this time that trainspotters – or gricers as they have become known – began to appear at the end of platforms, with their uniform of flimsy anoraks, pencils in one hand and the Ian Allan ABC of British Railway Locomotives in the other. Trainspotting is a strangely British phenomenon, which for a couple of generations was to become the principal hobby of boys (there were few girls) of all classes.19 The legendary Allan was a clerk on the Southern railway when he first produced a list of all the rolling stock for his own benefit, and published it after the war. There had been railway enthusiasts before then and special trains had even been run by the Great Western between the wars to visit the workshops at Swindon, but Allan’s rapidly burgeoning publishing empire turned the hobby of a few into an activity for the masses with its own language and odd mores. Most trainspotters were attracted by an interest in steam engines and it seemed that their days were numbered as diesels had begun to appear on the network. However, as we see in the next chapter, the railway industry clung on to steam technology for far too long and the trainspotters had a field day as British Railways continued to build locomotives right up to the mid-1960s.

  FOURTEEN

  AN UNDESERVED REPUTATION1

  Just as the Big Four companies had started out with one hand tied behind their backs, so British Railways (BR) on its creation on 1 January 1948 had to cope with several handicaps from the outset. As just one of several transport organizations buried within the structure of the unwieldy British Transport Commission (BTC), it struggled to establish a separate identity. The attempt to nationalize virtually every mode of transport, apart from local lorry deliveries, was over-ambitious; although, at first glance, it might have had the appearance of a sensible integrated transport policy, in practice it was not thought through at a local level, where each mode was kept separate. The BTC was not one unified organization but a series of empires that were deeply hostile to each other and there were frequent rows between the Railway Executive and its supposed masters at the BTC.

  Melding such a diverse, unwieldly system of railways – replete with old rivalries and a variety of long-established practices – into one organization was never going to be easy. But doing it at a time of austerity and shortages in post-war Britain compounded the difficulties. No one quite knew how many staff there were, with estimates ranging between 632,000 and 649,000, and the extent of the undertaking was vast: 20,000 steam locomotives, 1.2 million freight wagons, 56,000 coaches (of which 631 were restaurant cars), 54 hotels and 7,000 horses, some of which remained working in the yards until 1
964.2 Moreover, British Railways lost the central control that had been enjoyed during the war when it was split into regions which continued to act independently, without common standards or working practices, and with fierce rivalries little different from the competition between the old companies.

  Above all, there was the legacy of underinvestment, combined with the overuse of assets. BR’s historian Terry Gourvish concludes: ‘The postponement of essential maintenance and renewals, coupled with the more intensive use of the network and the effects of war damage, proved to be a most unfortunate legacy for postwar managements.’3 To compound these problems, the railways lacked a champion. There was no equivalent of Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister who was the father of the National Health Service, to nurse the railways into public ownership. Alfred Barnes, Attlee’s Transport Minister, has rightly been consigned to obscurity by history despite being the longest serving custodian of that job. The new structure of the industry was devised by civil servants and committees – a lethal combination, especially as there was negligible input from railway managers. The railways were off the government’s radar, despite their continued importance in providing one in five of all passenger journeys.