Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Whether the £927 million was fair or not, the cost was not absorbed by the government but remained as a charge on British Railways, so the new operation was minus £50 million every year before anyone had filled a shovel full of coal. The operation was legally obliged to pay its way, yet management had little freedom of action because it was expected to follow national directives and objectives. This was not just the Labour Party way. In April 1952 the government suspended a rise in rail fares because of growing fears among their own backbenchers about inflation, and here was a simple way of solving a political problem. By then the Conservatives, under Sir Winston Churchill, were in power. The real mismanagers were the government, whoever they were.

  The Billion Pound Hotchpotch

  In 1954 Churchill called in an able and undemonstrative junior treasury minister called John Boyd-Carpenter, and asked him to become what was by then known as minister of transport and civil aviation.

  It did not get him a seat in cabinet though he thought, as had happened to one previous incumbent, it might give him a nervous breakdown. His immediate predecessor and distant cousin, Alan Lennox-Boyd, had been ill several times in the job and was known to be desperate to escape: he was an expert in colonial affairs. The permanent secretary, Sir Gilmour Jenkins, was an expert in merchant shipping. ‘He declined to interest himself in anything else,’ recalled Boyd-Carpenter in his memoirs, ‘although in fact shipping was the area in which fewer serious problems arose than any other.’

  By then the Conservatives had abolished the Railway Executive and Hurcomb had gone from the BTC, to be replaced by General Sir Brian Robertson Bt, the former governor of the British zone of Germany, where he had been a sympathetic and effective presence as West Germany progressed from defeat to democracy. The railways though, that was a tough one. ‘He was a splendid man, and a fine soldier,’ wrote Boyd-Carpenter. ‘It was some months before I could get on human terms with him. He would come to my room, sit bolt upright in his chair – almost at attention – and very formally call me “Minister”.’

  Eventually Robertson loosened up, and the two men acquired an understanding. The hopeless railway lines would have to go, but Boyd-Carpenter would support modernization for the major routes. There had never been any mandate or appetite for denationalizing the railways, though Lennox-Boyd had successfully pushed through a bill sending almost all the road haulage business back to the private sector.

  In any case, who would want the railways? Dalton’s comments on their wretched condition were now even more applicable. As people became prosperous, the car was taking over: passenger numbers were stable, but only in the context of a huge general increase in travel; the freight sector was in meltdown; and BR as a whole was now losing money steadily. The trade unions had lost interest in being partners with management or having round-table conferences. They wanted higher wages, specifically to catch up on the increases given to other sectors in the early 1950s as post-war austerity began to lift. In particular, the two major unions – the NUR and ASLEF – wanted to ensure that their rises were higher than the other’s.

  It was a chastened, consensual, cautious Conservative Party that held power in the 1950s, very reluctant to take on the forces of the proletariat which had ejected it so brutally in 1945. Sir Walter Monckton, the minister of labour, was the pioneer of the beer-and-sandwiches approach to settling union disputes. Or, to be more precise, the large-neat-whisky-and-sandwiches approach, as Boyd-Carpenter discovered at one set of negotiations at the ministry, when he gulped down a glass intended for one of the union leaders, and choked.

  This magic did not always work as quickly as intended: there was a seventeen-day ASLEF strike in 1955 and, continuing the process dating back to 1911, the nation was again obliged to make itself a little less dependent on the railways, and again found it was possible. It was settled, as usual, not by the employers but by the government.

  The deal between Boyd-Carpenter and Robertson had borne fruit in January that year when the BTC’s great modernization plan was announced. The underlying premise was now undeniable: Britain’s trains were so dreadful, and already so far behind those elsewhere in Western Europe, that something had to be done. Since nothing had been done, certainly since 1939 and not much since 1914, the amount involved was staggering at the prices of the time: the newspapers did not even have an easy way of expressing amounts over £1,000 million – officially a billion still meant a million million. This was £1,300 million. Who ever used such numbers? Railwaymen were striking to get their wages up to ten quid a week.

  Yet the plan sounded most enticing: an overhaul of track and signalling; replacement of steam by diesel and electrification; updating of rolling stock; a revamp of freight; and closure of branches. The public were bewildered to be told just how bad things had got. For instance, some goods trains had to be stopped at the bottom of hills and again at the top to alter the brakes manually, because they had no continuous braking. The immediate response was one of delight: the Observer summed up: ‘heartening and exciting’, although its columnist Paul Jennings had a slightly different take:

  Once those gaunt strong engines, named after people and places one has never quite heard of – Sir Henry Thomkins, Stindon Hall – are replaced by secretive diesels; once continuous brakes in goods trains have silenced for ever the night-long mysterious bingbongbang from misty, moonlit yards that for generations has told millions, in our warm beds, of our ancient, endless commerce; once the fretwork stations are replaced by pin-bright foyers … a certain openness, a certain ancestral earthy communion with fire and water and the lonely native hills, will have gone for ever. The British … instead of thinking primeval, empirical thoughts in a sort of permanent pre-Creation mist, an aboriginal foggy steam or steamy fog, may become just another Scandinavian country, matter-of-fact under a pale, clear sun.

  There was no chance of that. A thousand million? A million million? Did this industry know the difference? The allegation that railway companies did not understand the economics of their own business had been flung at the London & North Western in 1904. Half a century on, it seemed truer than ever. Introducing the plan, the British Transport Commission had predicted the railways would break even in 1960. In fact, by 1960 the deficit was turning into an abyss, the modernization plan was regarded as complete madness, the Ministry of Transport was blaming the commission and the Treasury was blaming the ministry (which it had always considered hopeless, anyway). The economist Christopher Foster concluded that the commission had never had figures to tell what should be modernized and what should be closed, and was just guessing. Five years later officials had to admit to the Commons that they did not know whether the London-Manchester line was profitable or not.

  Looking back in an interview more than half a century after the plan, Foster (by now Sir Christopher) also fingered the crucial non-financial error: ‘It was full of mistakes but the absolutely key mistake was that they believed the future of the railways was freight, so enormous money was poured into it. They built a whole lot of marshalling yards that were virtual white elephants from the moment they were built.’

  You could argue that, in other respects, the plan had been far too cautious. On electrification, it was a retreat from the proposals made in 1931. There was no suggestion that all the main lines out of London should be electrified, just those from Euston and King’s Cross. But at least those schemes got a result, in remarkably quick time by modern British railway standards: less than twenty years for Euston to Glasgow; less than forty for King’s Cross to Edinburgh.

  The main effect of the fiasco, however, was to change attitudes in Whitehall. Previously, senior civil servants had thought for years that, sooner or later (preferably later), something would have to be done to improve the railways. Now the mood was that something would have to be done about the railways. Quickly.

  And yet, where did the blame really lie? Ministers wanted the railways to compete but would not allow them the freedom to set wages or prices or decide serv
ices that might have made that possible. In the words of the academic Charles Loft: ‘Whatever the failings of management, the foundations of the BTC’s eventual failure were all laid by the Government.’

  A Drug-like Fascination

  In August 1951 the Manchester Guardian sent one of its correspondents to investigate a newly discovered tribe, found wandering in a steamy jungle. Guardian expenses being what they were, this was in Crewe rather than New Guinea.

  The tribe, about a hundred strong, apparently all male, and from as far afield as Shipley and Walsall, were on the ‘sulphurous’ footbridge north of Crewe station, all carrying their special notebooks. ‘Some of them don’t seem to have any homes to go to, they spend so much time here,’ said a porter. ‘There’s no law against it once they have bought their platform tickets.’

  The headline read:

  THE ALLURE OF TRAIN-SPOTTING

  SEARCH FOR AN EXPLANATION AMONG THE ADDICTS AT CREW

  And so the word ‘trainspotter’ (the Guardian hyphen was an indication of its unfamiliarity) began its tortured journey through the public consciousness and the English language. It was puzzling that in the decade when one generation – politicians, civil servants and passengers alike – were losing their faith in the railways, their sons were flocking towards Crewe Station. Perhaps it constituted an obscure form of rebellion.

  But it was also the perfect time. Travel was cheap and easy by bus and (for all its faults) train. It was a boom time for model railways too, but childhood then was not a period of imprisonment, unless you were sent to boarding school. Parents of that era did not go into paroxysms of fear if their pre-adolescent children could not be located by satellite tracking every second of the day. There was not a huge range of alternatives to trainspotting: in 1951 most households still did not have TV. And from the footbridge at Crewe there was an extraordinary panorama no little black and white telly could match: an astonishing variety of locomotives, representing a good half-century of railway history, still clanking and wheezing and occasionally whooshing their way up and down the old LMS system and beyond.

  Railways as a hobby dated back to late Victorian times: there were two magazines and, in 1899, a London gentleman’s club, the Railway Club, which still exists. But it only erupted among the young in the post-war years. One of the earliest references to it comes from 1946, when two teenage boys were sitting on a fence by the main line at Hatfield taking engine numbers, and saw the King’s Cross to Aberdeen sleeper derailed. Eleven people were injured. The boys, Richard Shearman and Brian Clements, gave important evidence to the inquiry. Had their sons or grandsons been there for the more infamous Hatfield derailment fifty-four years later, they would probably have been locked up as terrorists.

  By 1951 Ian Allan’s Locospotters Club had 250,000 members, a number inflated by the fact that you had to pay only once, which left the secretary complaining that there were too many members to cope with. Yet still adults were left a bit baffled. John Grant, the Guardian representative at Crewe, did not get the explanation he sought. This worried him although most people, especially young ones, find it hard to explain why they enjoy something. (Why do you like strawberries or ale or sex then, Mister?)

  And so Grant was left unimpressed. He talked of ‘the drug-like fascination’ the engines held for the boys, and decided: ‘It is difficult for the uninitiated to see much positive value in standing on a grimy railway bridge to tick off the numbers of passing engines, unless it is that train-spotting inculcates a strict regard for truth.’

  Soon, he wasn’t the only one complaining. Before 1951 was out, Tamworth and Preston became the first stations to ban trainspotters as a nuisance. This policy spread. Three years later seven boys were summoned by Stockport magistrates for trespassing: a policeman had spotted one of the boys lying on his back on the Manchester to Euston main line. Asked what he was doing, he said: ‘Listening out for trains.’

  One of the fathers said books on trainspotting should be banned. But another pointed out that, since stations were barring the boys, trespass was their only recourse. That same summer an excursion train from Stockport to Blackpool was wrecked by ‘drunken youths’, probably not the first and certainly not the last. It was easier to pick on trainspotters than drunks. The whole saga does seem like an illustration of the managerial doltishness of British Railways in the 1950s. A decently run organization would have harnessed the enthusiasm to its own ends, and its infinite benefit. Instead petty officials used extreme cases to blacken the majority. The only other institutions that generally ban their most zealous customers are pubs.

  By 1964 Crewe was also trying to mop up remaining pockets of resistance. Officials claimed that some boys had used railway communication systems to tell signalmen to get their trains moving. Oh, give over. By this time many teenagers were starting to find more direct ways of discovering ‘drug-like fascination’. And these weren’t ways that necessarily inculcated a strict regard for truth.

  The End of Civilization

  The young enthusiasts of the 1950s gathered for choice at the great junctions of the railway system, not on the little branches where the same old tank engine might reappear spasmodically with the same grubby old carriages. No one was much interested in that.

  The adoration of Britain’s branch lines is largely a retrospective romance. It was widely agreed, and assumed, that the new nationalized railway would act dynamically where the Big Four had been so dilatory, and embark on mass closures of hopeless railways. There was no real opposition to that in principle; there was nothing in the Transport Acts of 1947 and 1953 saying that British Railways had to keep lossmaking lines going because they were inherently a good thing. ‘Is there any reason why a great many more branch lines and small stations should not be closed at once?’ asked the Manchester Guardian in 1951. But which lines and stations? And how do you calculate loss in an industry that had difficulty calculating anything?

  In any case the new organization quickly proved itself incapable of taking coherent decisions. The most ardent advocates of supporting branch lines wanted to replace steam with diesel railcars or railbuses. The world’s shining example, somewhat improbably, was held to be County Donegal. There had also been some experiments on the Great Western in the 1930s, and they were said to decrease costs by up to two-thirds. They had to be worth a try. Instead, British Railways chose to build – as Owen Prosser of the Railway Development Association wailed despairingly – ‘dozens and dozens and dozens’ of tank engines, specifically for passenger use on rural branches.

  The world’s most famous tank engine had first appeared in book form in 1946, three years after the Revd W. Awdry began telling Thomas stories to his son Christopher. Thomas was popular enough in the 1950s, though without the worldwide adulation and marketing that followed later. But at that time the imaginary railways on the imaginary island of Sodor were no more improbable than a great many of those that still did exist – indeed rather less improbable than the Potts line or the East Kent Light Railway, perhaps Colonel Stephens’ finest comic creation, where the laughter finally died in October 1948.

  Elsewhere, however, the process kept proving rather troublesome. The 1947 Act had established a complicated – what else? – procedure before closure, involving a regional Transport Users’ Consultative Committee and a central body. When the Railway Executive tried to halve the fifty miles of track left on the Isle of Wight, the county council hired Melford Stevenson QC, later a well-known and rather bad-tempered judge, who quickly elicited the fact that the Executive could not back up their own figures. That won a stay of execution, at least.

  The Bluebell Line between East Grinstead and Lewes was closed in 1955 and then had to be resuscitated when a local resident, Miss Margery Bessemer, discovered a provision in an Act of 1878 specifying how many trains on the line had to stop where. British Railways was forced to reopen it and operate what was called the ‘Sulky Service’, fulfilling the minimum statutory requirement until they could get the law changed
and the line shut again.

  Almost every line had its stout defenders, most of them totally unconvincing. A taxi-driver in Sedbergh called the twenty-seven-mile line through the Vale of Lune from Tebay to Clapham ‘a mark of civilization and progress’. Everyone in the town was terribly upset about it closing, though a visiting journalist found it hard to find anyone who used it. In 1955 the Prison Commission objected ‘very strongly’ to the closure of the lonely, curvaceous Dartmoor line to Prince-town. But it had to admit that the prisoners were transported by road. So was the jail’s coal supply. The Times gave extensive coverage to protests against the loss of the branch from Oxford to Woodstock in 1954, even though there were said to be an average of five passengers per train.

  And a succession of peers rose in the House of Lords to defend the Swansea to Mumbles railway, then running as a locally owned electric tram but first operated by a one-horsepower engine (to wit, a horse) in 1807. ‘As a boy I often rode on this railway,’ said Lord Silkin, ‘and sometimes had to help it along because it got into difficulties on its journeys.’ ‘The thing that struck me most,’ said the more lordly Lord Ogmore, ‘was that, as we went along, there were little boys fumbling in the sands for pennies. I persuaded my mother to give me some money to throw out to them.’