Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

But in every one of these cases it is possible, looking back fifty years, to think that they could have had a future, if anyone had loved them. The Isle of Wight is vilely overrun by cars; the Woodstock line, languid though it was then, could have been a major asset as Oxford jammed solid. And the Bluebell Line opened a third time in 1960, as the first fully fledged standard-gauge preserved passenger line, and as such thrives to this day.

  The pioneer had been the Talyllyn Railway, a narrow-gauge slate line somewhere in the wastes of gawd-knows-where-in-mid-Wales, rescued from the edge of extinction in 1950 by a group of eccentrics/visionaries, led by the author L. T. C. (Tom) Rolt. Next came the Festiniog Railway, further north into Snowdon, which was brought back from extinction itself. They do well too. You could imagine that similar things might have happened in the Vale of Lune, the Isle of Wight and Dartmoor if anyone had had the wit, energy and bloody-mindedness to make it happen. The Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt, in which George Relph, John Gregson and Stanley Holloway make it happen, was filmed in 1953 after the writer T. E. B. (Tibby) Clarke paid a visit to the Talyllyn.

  And in the case of Swansea, this story should break the local council’s heart. The Swansea & Mumbles Railway, that lovely name curving along that lovely (on a good day) bay, could have been billed as the oldest passenger line in the world and knocked the Blackpool trams into a cocked hat.

  But it was impossible in the 1950s to envisage the sentimentality for old railways that would develop later. It was even hard to imagine the extent to which the car would choke our cities. However, at least one of the closures of that era just beggars belief. Before the war, London Underground had been planning to take over the GNER line from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace, and add it to the Northern Line, as with the High Barnet and Mill Hill East branches. Those works were completed before the war, but the Ally-Pally line was never converted. So it mouldered, and was closed in 1954, leaving the otherwise desirable suburbs of Crouch End, Stroud Green and Muswell Hill with the worst transport links in London to this day. No one had yet made a distinction between urban transport problems and rural ones.

  But it was always asking a bit much to imagine that urban planners and transport planners might talk to one another. The different offspring of the British Transport Commission didn’t talk to one another. The departments of British Railways didn’t talk to one another. David St John Thomas noted that some of the maddest acts of all came because the commercial and engineering departments failed to communicate. ‘During the 1950s several branch lines were extensively relaid or resignalled shortly before closure. At one station – Clifton Mill [in Warwickshire] – the office was actually being enlarged to take a new stove, which had just arrived, two days before total closure.’

  According to Thomas, the new trains arrived far too late for many lines that could have been viable. By the time the railcars or diesel multiple units appeared in any numbers, steam was being phased out, and so the main lines wanted them. And the five different types of lightweight railbus, precursors of the wretched Pacer, specially developed for branch lines, were all totally unreliable. The miracles they wrought could be overstated, anyway: the Donegal lines all closed in 1959. You do reach a point in trying to run a train like a bus when you might as well run a bus.

  The pace of closures quickened in the late 1950s, pushed by Boyd-Carpenter’s successor at the Ministry, Harold Watkinson, who later groaned: ‘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.’ His most urgent task was to give Britain the beginnings of a modern road system: Hitler had been building Autobahnen in the 1930s; Britain did not have a mile of motorway until 1958. He also had to battle the railway unions. Watkinson did see off the Muddle & Go Nowhere; it is hard to imagine there could have been an alternative future for most of that extraordinary monument to late Victorian optimism. Finally, the Whitehall gardeners were beginning to snip away some of the most straggling stems of the rambling railroad.

  And through all this, Richard Beeching PhD was rising through the managerial ranks to become the technical director of Imperial Chemical Industries. He had built up quite a good reputation within the company for improving the profitability of zip fasteners and Terylene. He had no known connection with railways.

  No More Will I Go to Blandford Forum …

  In early August 1963 a youth appeared before Linslade magistrates in Buckinghamshire, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. Asked why he had done it, he said he was bored. ‘Nothing ever happens round here,’ he said.

  A few hours after that, the Glasgow to London travelling post office train was stopped by a red signal just outside Linslade. The light was actually green but that was covered by a glove, placed there by a group of thieves who had powered their own red light. They had rather more bread in mind than the boy in the courtroom.

  Thus began the Great Train Robbery, probably the most famous non-fatal crime in British history, at least since Colonel Blood stole the Crown Jewels. Two and a half million pounds were stolen in old banknotes while being sent for shredding. Taking into account inflation, this was probably not surpassed in Britain until the £53m Securitas robbery of 2006.

  But Securitas has not passed into folklore. The places associated with the Great Train Robbery impinged themselves on the national consciousness: the signal at Sears Crossing, the actual robbery site at Bridego Bridge, the hideout at Leatherslade Farm. The robbers became and remained famous: years later, Buster Edwards would be the florist at Waterloo Station, to be pointed out to tourists and become the subject of a biopic starring Phil Collins; Bruce Reynolds became a well-known media guru on crime; and the escape and adventures in Brazil of Ronnie Biggs were so entertaining that his fate (even after he returned to jail in Britain) was still a major story forty-five years later.

  They were famous, note, not infamous. From the start, the crime was tinged with a romantic glow. The plot was ingenious; the money was only going to be destroyed, so no one actually lost anything; and no one got hurt. Much. Or so it was believed, although the train driver, Jack Mills, was bashed about the head, never fully recovered and died before his time. Even the evidence that caught the gang members had a human touch: some of their fingerprints were on a Monopoly board at Leatherslade Farm, where they had been playing with real notes. One of the robbers, Roy James, was nabbed because he had given the farm cat some milk, and his fingerprints were on the bowl. (No good turn goes unpunished, as the saying goes.) The judge at the main trial imposed thirty-year sentences, way above the normal tariff. He appeared to be passing sentence on the public rather than the villains, punishing us for having the gall to glamourize them.

  And why, above all else, was the crime so alluring? It was a TRAIN robbery. The Great Van Robbery? The Great Bus Robbery? The Great Charabanc Robbery? They wouldn’t have had a fraction of the resonance. It was the magic of the tracks that made it so special.

  And yet 1963 was also the year when Britain finally and officially fell out of love with the railways. Like Ronnie Biggs, the name Beeching still has instant recognition to generations unborn in the 1960s. In late 2008, the BBC, obsessed with commemorating anniversaries, put together a special TV night on his legacy, which appeared to mark the forty-fifth and a half anniversary of his report. And here the word ‘infamous’ might truly be applied. When I started telling people I was writing a book about Britain’s railways, several just shrieked ‘Oh, Beeching!’ as though no one and nothing else had ever happened.

  It is an extraordinary fate, given that, as chairman of British Railways,2 he was merely a functionary – answerable to politicians – and that he held the job for just four years, from 1961 to 1965. And for almost all that time, he was a far less controversial figure than his boss, Ernest Marples, the highest-profile transport minister of them all.

  Marples was a grammar school boy from Manchester, the son of a foreman; he never went to university and trained as an acco
untant instead, before arriving in London to run a then novel one-man business converting terraced houses into flats. After the war he founded the civil engineering company Marples Ridgway. Marples was a flamboyant entrepreneur and already an up-and-coming Conservative MP; Reginald Ridgway was the workaholic details man. ‘He had no discernible interests outside work,’ said the Daily Telegraph obituary, when he died in 2002. His partner certainly did.

  As a politician, Marples made his name as a junior housing minister, pushing through the big Tory home-building programme of the 1950s, cutting corners and getting things done. When Harold Macmillan became prime minister in 1957, he gave Marples the high-profile job of postmaster-general, in charge of both post and telecommunications: Marples made it higher profile still. He was ‘Ernie’, shiny-new and slightly risqué just like Ernie, the fancy computer that determined the monthly premium bonds draw. Two years later Ernie the human was elevated to the Cabinet, a self-made millionaire surrounded by Etonians, as Minister of Transport. He held the job for five years: only the undemonstrative Alfred Barnes lasted longer.

  Marples was a very intriguing figure. Charles Loft, in his academic account of the era, found no evidence of corruption but noted, rivetingly, that ‘he certainly showed a carelessness towards the rules’ and that ‘rumours of an exotic private life abounded among his colleagues’. And he certainly seemed dodgy, with his unBritish addiction to publicity and a look and manner rather like Hughie Green, the host of the TV show Double Your Money. Marples was rather good at doubling his own money. George Cole might have played the part, with just a few variations from his role as Arthur Daley. Marples was undoubtedly one of life’s used car salesmen.

  In the early 1960s he was one of the most reviled men in Britain. The slogan ‘Marples Must Go’ passed into the language and lingered on a bridge over the M1 for decades afterwards.3 Most of the hatred actually came from motorists, who blamed him for parking meters, traffic wardens and the totting-up system of penalties for speeding, all of which clouded life on the once carefree open road.

  But Marples liked cars. And his appointment as minister after the Tories’ thumping 1959 election win coincided with the general loss of patience within the government at the hopelessness of the railways. The situation was worsened in 1960 when a government-appointed commission handed the NUR a large pay rise. The prime minister was Harold Macmillan, former director of the Great Western, and an instinctive nostalgist. In 1952 he had complained about the lack of reverence for tradition on the nationalized railway: he said it would give great pleasure if the Western Region could be rechristened the Great Western, with its old colours restored. ‘Our men used to be proud of their chocolate brown suits and all the rest … the regimental system is a great one with the British and it is always a mistake to destroy tradition.’

  Eight years on, when his complaints carried more weight, he told the Commons: ‘If fair and reasonable wages are to be paid, which I think is right, in an industry which is losing as much money as this, everybody is under an obligation, in return, to play their part in any form of reorganization which may help it to do better.’ He spoke, he said, ‘with real affection for the railways’. Those charged with the task had altogether less affection.

  Marples set up his own rather secretive advisory panel under the industrialist Sir Ivan Stedeford to try to sort out the mess. Someone in ICI recommended Beeching for the committee and he immediately established himself as a combative and clear-minded character who got up Stedeford’s nose, and impressed Marples enough for him to offer Beeching the chairmanship of the BTC, which was about to mutate into a new British Railways Board.

  There then came what was known at the time as ‘the Beeching Bombshell’. This was nothing to do with his list of closures, which was still two years away. In March 1961 it was announced that he was to receive the salary he received at ICI; £24,000, more than double the going rate for chairmen of nationalized industries. Ministers then only got £5,000. There was a horrified reaction, not least from the chairmen of other nationalized industries. There had always been an understanding that public corporations had a different ethos to private ones, and that money was not the prime consideration. That was shattered by Beeching’s salary. ‘It was almost as if the Royal Navy had sold out to Shell,’ wrote Anthony Sampson in Anatomy of Britain. ‘The Beeching bombshell seemed to imply that public and private service were indivisible, that service was not its own reward.’

  It is necessary to understand the spirit of the times, which might not be obvious from this distance. In the early 1960s there was far more tolerance of the economic ambitions/greed of the workers and far less of the economic ambitions/ greed of their bosses than would later become the case: Conservative politicians were still suffering residual guilt from the 1930s.

  But there was also, far more briefly, a burst of almost Victorian faith in the future: in technology, in novelty, in youth. The British were uninterested in the past and the Arcadian idyll: old country houses and cottages were almost worthless. People wanted cars, televisions, washing machines and fridges (which were beyond the average pocket even a decade earlier). They embraced even the goriest aspects of the future: as the new M1 slashed through the fields, elderly ladies who now had to plant their hollyhocks amid the roar of traffic would shrug and say ‘Well, you can’t stand in the way of progress’. The Beatles and the satire boom were about to take over. Macmillan, with his elegaic understanding of the past, struggled to keep up. Marples and Beeching were far more in tune with it all. The railways represented the past; the car represented the future.

  And Whitehall thinking was heading the same way. The new Transport Act shifted the onus on the railways much more towards profit, and made closures harder to fight. A month after Beeching’s appointment a White Paper specifically insisted that nationalized industries were not ‘social services absolved from economic and commercial justification’. The stage was set.

  Beeching did not start the process of railway closures, as we have seen. It was gathering pace well before he arrived. In 1960 the fuddy-duddy BTC recommended scrapping the four-and-a-half-mile branch that ran off the main line north of Sevenoaks to the little town of Westerham in Kent, prime commuter territory. The commission said only two hundred people a day used the line. Both the regional and central consultative bodies then involved in this process said that as many as two hundred people used the line, and that it should stay open. Against precedent, Marples rejected their advice and insisted it must go.

  So in 1961 it went, with the obsequies that were becoming familiar, including the presence on the last train of an octogenarian (in this case Mrs Jane Graves) who had been on the first. But the opposition in Westerham was unusually spirited and clued-up. Local activists put together a very credible scheme to reopen the line, running diesel railcars instead of clanking and expensive tank engines to Dunton Green on the main line on weekdays, and vintage steam trains on summer weekends. They had the rolling stock already in place. And even after Beeching took over, the railway authorities were not unsympathetic – with good reason because, after the closure, they had to subsidise the replacement bus service.

  But then things changed. Suddenly the re-opening plan began to run into obstructions from Kent County Council, which imposed impossible conditions. You may well have travelled over part of the railway today, but may not have noticed because it has a new name. It is called the M25.

  On the web, it is easy to find allegations that Marples closed railways to make money out of road construction: that, although he had sold his shares on becoming transport minister, he had merely shuffled them around relatives. Colin Divall of the University of York follows Loft in rejecting the notion of corruption: ‘a conspiracy theory too far’. But the county council knew where the London Orbital Motorway, as it was then known, was going; and quite obviously the minister did too.

  Marples is long dead now (he died in Monte Carlo, and you can’t get more exotic and dodgy than that), and the libel laws are
beyond his grasp. He is largely forgotten as well. But at the time he was seen as the chief perpetrator of rail closures. When the Cirencester branch closed down in 1964, it was Marples who was burned in effigy, not his highly paid appointee.

  Beeching was an improbable representative of the Swinging Sixties. He was neither mop-haired nor satirical. He was corpulent, with an unpleasant toothbrush moustache, and could easily have passed as a provincial Gestapo official or Hermann Gessler, the brutal enemy of William Tell, the eponymous hero of what was then a very popular children’s TV series. He also had the most extraordinary hairstyle, combing what little hair he had over the back of his head, as if to persuade someone standing behind him that he wasn’t really bald.

  Many well-placed judges did find him convincing. ‘He might be mistaken at first for one of those large phlegmatic men who tell long stories over a pint of beer in a country pub,’ wrote Sampson, to whom his virtues seemed endless: ‘fundamental niceness … dispassionate expertise … homely confidence … striking intellectual honesty.’ In the updated version of his book Anatomy of Britain Today, which came out three years after Beeching’s Report, Sampson threw in ‘brilliantly presented’, ‘ruthless analysis’ and ‘heroic’. Nor was he alone: the press response to the report – officially titled The Reshaping of British Railways – when it came out in March 1963 was close to adulatory.

  ‘BEECHING’S BLOCKBUSTER’, the Daily Mirror, the biggest-selling paper of the day, squealed with delight. ‘Unanswerable,’ said The Times. ‘Dr Beeching has shown brilliantly how the railways may be made to pay.’

  Paul Ferris, in the Observer, sounded a note of caution: ‘No one could be as perfect as some of his fans suggest.’ But that was only a momentary pause in Ferris’s argument: ‘He’s a business intellectual who thinks clearly, who also looks impressive … He has steamroller qualities – sometimes intimidating, but just what the railway needed.’ Beeching’s chief PR man, John Nunneley, had done his work well.