Reshaping had one fundamental, incontestable virtue. For the first, and last, time someone with the power to act sat down and asked: ‘What are Britain’s railways for?’ No one, least of all in government, had done that in the 1830s when the network began, nor at any other time in the nineteenth century, nor after 1918 when the railways were consolidated, nor after 1945 when they were nationalized, nor after 1955 when the Modernization Plan emerged. And certainly no one ever did it before privatization. Beeching, a scientist and businessman with no special interest in railways as such, asked the questions.
He was rightly horrified by what he found: it was a filthy mess, especially on the goods side, almost invisible to the public. The railways’ wagons spent only one-sixth of their time actually carrying anything, and the least-used one-third of the route mileage carried one per cent of the freight-ton mileage. Equally, the most deserted one-third of the 18,000 passenger route miles was responsible for only one per cent of the total passenger miles. Two thousand stations and 5,000 miles of track were to close, and the overwhelming majority duly did.
The case did indeed sound unanswerable. It is hard to avoid medical analogies with Beeching, even though his doctorate was in physics. He was inclined to talk about surgery himself. Someone had at long last diagnosed the railways’ ailments; it followed that the operation must make things better. And its drastic nature was detailed in Sections 3, 4 and 5 of the report:
PASSENGER STATIONS AND HALTS TO BE CLOSED
It is only a list of place names, but to my ears no more beautifully melancholy poem has ever been written, at least not since the list of failed schemes of 118 years earlier. No one mourns Pilbrow’s Atmospheric Railway any more than they mourn the children that were never conceived. They do still mourn the railways closed by Beeching. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who were wonderfully precise observers of the early 1960s, famously turned the station names into their song, Slow Train:
No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road …
But the list itself was like an elegy: the fifth name in Section 3, the stations to be closed in England, was Adlestrop, which gave its name to one of the best-loved of all railway poems. And you just have to savour some of the names to conjure up the lost world of the country branch railway: Bassenthwaite Lake, Ben Rhydding, Bere Ferrers, Bishop’s Nympton and Molland, Black Dog Halt, Blue Anchor, Cross Hands Halt, Evercreech Junction, Ham Green Halt, Luton Hoo for New Mill End, Marazion, Marishes Road and, ah, bless it, Melton Constable (what little was left of the once-bustling junction by 1963) …
. . . Moira, Morebath Halt, Morebath Junction Halt, Newton Poppleford, Newton St Cyres, Pampisford, Penda’s Way, Pleasington, Point Pleasant, Shepton Mallet Charlton Road, Shoscombe and Single Hill Halt, Three Oaks and Guestling Halt, Tinker’s Green Halt, Trouble House Halt.
(This one, which gets a mention in the Flanders and Swann, served a pub near Tetbury. Quite bizarrely, it had only opened in 1959.)
The names didn’t even have to be rustic to produce the effect: Broadbottom, Castleford Cutsyke, Codnor Park and Ironville, Corkickle, Daimler Halt, Vulcan Halt. And some had the virtue of glorious simplicity: Cole, Drax, Drigg, Frant, Hole, Holt, Hope, Pant, Pill, Shap, Sleights, Swine.
Swine? That was north-east of Hull on the Hornsea line, closed on October 19, 1964. It was not a coded reference to the report’s author.
England, our England. The proposed closures for Scotland and Wales were listed separately, and parts of those do not even have to be edited for euphony.
. . . Kennethmont, Kennishead, Kentallen, Kershope Foot, Kilbarchan, Kilbirnie, Kilbowie, Kilconquhar, Kildonan, Kilkerran, Killiecrankie, Killin, Killin Junction, Kilmacolm, Kilmaurs, Kinaldie …
And one could keep going all the way through Kittybrewster (aye, what a lovely lassie she was) to Longmorn, Longside, Lonmay, Lossiemouth, Lugton, Luib, Lumphanan and Lundin Links. With connections perhaps to Maud Junction, Moy, Racks, Rumbling Bridge, Salzcraggie and Whifflet Upper.
Most of these stations must indeed be regarded as sweet but hopeless. Beeching was generally right to close the smaller stations on main lines, which complicated the signalling and clogged up the system. And how on earth had the Killin line stayed open this long? A branch off a branch of a branch, barely even a twiglet, heading towards the shores of Loch Tay, connected Killin (population: 640) with the Callender and Oban line. Somehow, it had retained its independence until 1923 when the newly formed London, Midland & Scottish insisted on exercising its right to take the poor mite over. The Killin managed to bid up the LMS from £1 a share to £8, for which the giant was rewarded with a hand-written set of accounts. ‘I am without a typist,’ explained the company secretary. It didn’t close until 1965.
Rural railways had had their day (most of them long since) and both the Big Four and the BTC before them should have imposed closures more quickly. Beeching’s brief was to do something about the railways’ galloping losses. If the government wanted to retain lines for non-commercial reasons, that was not a decision for him, though he made it clear he thought that was a bad idea. Soon after his appointment as chairman, he squashed an interviewer from the Panorama programme on this point. He had said the railways were fossilized. The interviewer protested that it was not necessarily fossilizing to keep a line open just because it wasn’t strictly economic. ‘No,’ replied Beeching tartly, ‘but you might still have stagecoaches if you did that.’
Given how late – 130 years late – the simple review of the railways’ purpose was, it is perhaps unreasonable to expect Beeching to have glimpsed the future accurately as well as the present. But we can see now that he misread the future very badly. First, he believed that his cuts would take British Railways into profit, or very close to it, by 1970. They did nothing of the kind, and had no prospect of doing so. Second, he thought the future of the railways lay primarily in bulk freight, which it did not, rather than passenger traffic. Third, he failed to see the importance of urban railways, even though towns and cities were already starting to choke. Fourth, being neither a historian nor a rail enthusiast, Beeching never thought ‘Well, you never know’. Obscure railways had helped save Britain in two wars; he never saw how some less obscure ones could provide options in the future. There was a fifth failure too, the most important of all, which we will come to shortly.
Most of the first four points tie in, as usual, to the wider failure of government. The Conservative Party was not thinking of potential traffic problems in the twenty-first century; it was concentrating on getting through the distinctly unpromising 1964 election. It wanted to show the electorate that it was dynamic, unstuffy, forward thinking and possibly even cool, with-it and groovy by grasping the problems of the railways. But there was next to no liaison between the transport and housing ministries about how the plans might link with another government policy of moving people out of London. In 1962 it was decided to triple the population of Haverhill in Suffolk; in 1963 Haverhill station was listed for closure.
The initial enthusiasm for Beeching quickly faded as Tory backbenchers contemplated the possible consequences for their own majorities. The reshaping of the railways was a popular policy; the closure of a local station was not. So the government started making political decisions about which lines would go and which would stay. Beeching, remember, did not shut so much as a single deserted wayside halt: only the minister could do that.
Behind Beeching was Marples; and behind Marples was Macmillan, who praised Beeching’s efforts as ‘Herculean’ but skilfully avoided any association with the whole messy business. The one decision where he did get involved and blamed was over the demolition of the Doric Arch at Euston, the high point – and perhaps the turning point – of 1960s cultural vandalism. The last massive volume of Macmillan’s prime ministerial memoirs contains no mention at all of either Beeching or Marples, except in the context of one pay dispute. The book is filled with stuff about Ad
en, Nyasaland and Katanga, where British government policies by that time made not an iota of long-term difference. Prime ministers much prefer strutting round the world to the boring task of building Britain’s infrastructure, where their decisions can actually have an effect.
Instead, Macmillan outsourced the job to someone who had no more of a long-term vision than the politicians did. For this is the fifth and most crucial indictment of Beeching. He had no sense whatever of a future in which fast, efficient long-distance railways could take on cars and planes and beat them. This became clear in an interview he gave in 1981, sixteen years after he had left the railways, for a BBC TV programme called Hindsight.
By then he was a far more relaxed figure, with his pension and his peerage: his accent had become less stilted, his hair less ludicrous, and he seemed altogether jollier. This must have been the kind of man Sampson had glimpsed. He didn’t mind being remembered as a mad axeman, he said cheerfully. ‘Most people aren’t remembered at all.’
He did not have many regrets although, he said, ‘some of the excellent planning in my day has not been pursued with the vigour I would like’. The interviewer, Eric Robson, asked what he meant. He regretted that more lines had not closed; about half the surviving trunk routes should go, he thought. Pressed to give examples, Beeching first demurred then gave in to temptation: it was quite unnecessary to have more than one route to Scotland, he said. ‘The East Coast route beyond Newcastle could be closed without any hardship to anyone except people in Berwick-upon-Tweed.’
This was madness even in 1981, never mind from the standpoint of 2009. Electrification? He didn’t care for it. Faster trains? They make no difference. Robson quoted British Rail’s then slogan which for the first time was just beginning to acquire a little resonance: ‘Is this “The Age of the Train”?’ ‘Well,’ replied Beeching. ‘I don’t wish to say that it isn’t because my successor is saying that it is, but judge for yourself.’
If Beeching had had a genuine modernizing purpose to sit alongside his removal of ancient relics, there could have been an age of the train: he had the clout to make it happen. But he didn’t. The cartoons of the time, which showed him pruning so hard that in the end there was no tree left, came dangerously close to his true intentions.4
The week after Reshaping was published, the papers were filled with letters, many of them over-sentimental or downright silly. This one, however, from Barbara Preston of Marple Bridge, near Stockport, was published in the Guardian. She was complaining about the planned closures of commuter routes into Manchester, and the effect on road congestion.
‘Is this what is really necessary here and now?’ she asked. ‘Or shall we, in a few years, when traffic in Manchester has inevitably become denser, be bitterly regretting these closures and at great expense be rebuilding commuter lines?’ In Manchester they now call them trams.
Who saw the future more clearly? Baron Beeching of East Grinstead, or Barbara Preston of Marple Bridge?
Last of the Cast-Iron Bastards
After the brief interregnum of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Labour, under Harold Wilson, won the 1964 election. Wilson was a straightforward politician in the sense that everyone thought he was slippery, and he was. The party’s manifesto, amid much talk of a New Britain and a Scientific Revolution, said that Labour would halt major rail closures pending the preparation of a national transport plan. Of course, it depends what you mean by ‘major’.
In the month before the election, Marples had actually stepped up the pace of closures, possibly out of bloodymindedness, possibly to stop his successor reneging. Despite local fulminations – including a near-riot involving the Labour candidate on the closure of the Carlisle-Silloth line – there was no sign that the issue swung any votes either way. Transport has always been a subsidiary issue at British elections: that is one reason why it has been so neglected.
Beeching did not last long under Labour, but not because he was seen as a liability, far from it. Wilson actually wanted him to take charge of his transport plan. ‘He represented the breed of man who could bring about Labour’s Scientific Revolution – the technocrat, the skilled manager, the thrusting, capable expert,’ wrote the lobby correspondent Anthony Shrimsley. The gloss had not entirely worn off. But there were objections within the government because Beeching was seen as anti-roads.
Wilson gave way, which he regretted. Beeching, with some relief, returned to ICI, having first produced what was supposed to be Reshaping’s nicer younger brother, The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes. It still assumed that the emphasis was on freight, and that the railways could not compete with air travel for inter-city passengers over distances of more than 200 miles, i.e. from London to anywhere beyond Manchester. He also changed British Railways’ lion symbols to the double-arrow logo, which has survived privatization, and shortened the name to British Rail. Perhaps that saved on ink.
The Labour government which lasted from 1964 to 1970 was splendidly riven by fear and loathing. Wilson got through four transport ministers – Tom Fraser, Barbara Castle, Richard Marsh and Fred Mulley. Castle thought Fraser was dominated by his civil servants and hated Marsh (‘cynical, superficial and lazy … disloyal lightweight’). Marsh hated Mulley (‘our working relationships were appalling’). And doubtless Fraser and Mulley had their own opinions, but no one was interested in publishing their memoirs.
Fraser took over the transport plan without doing anything in the fourteen months before he was replaced by Castle, who couldn’t drive a car (as all the papers immediately noted) but did have considerable skill at driving a department. She turned up smiling, which civil servants said they had never ever seen a minister of transport do before. Castle quickly decided she could not force passengers back onto the railways, though she had a feint at doing just that with freight. However, she did establish the principle that there was such a thing as social need, and that the railways should be subsidized to meet it. This was a crucial breakthrough.
Castle held the job for less than two and a half years. It is said, I think falsely, that she actually axed more railways than any other minister (there is a similar counter-intuitive statistic bandied around about Margaret Thatcher and comprehensive schools); but she certainly did not halt the process. As the 1960s went on, the more regrettable the closures got. Most of Watkin’s folly, the Great Central, disappeared in 1966, to little general regret until, years later, its usefulness as a freight artery was suddenly grasped.
At the start of 1967 the government announced that Bletchley and the other small towns of North Buckinghamshire would be subsumed into Britain’s biggest ever new town, to be called Milton Keynes. At the end of 1967 the Varsity Line from Oxford to Cambridge via Bletchley was severed. Crazy.
In 1968 Ruskin had his revenge: the Midland line north of Matlock was closed. And now people flock to Monsal Dale, divine as the Vale of Tempe, gaze at the Headstone Viaduct and think how beautiful and convenient and lucrative it might be if miraculously a train suddenly appeared out of the tunnel. And every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in about twenty minutes – by road.
In 1969 Marsh took another chunk out of the network by shutting the Waverley Line between Edinburgh and Carlisle, rendering the Scottish Borders almost wholly train-free. The Scottish Government is now paying at least £115 million to reopen part of it.
These decisions became highly politicized. Labour did want to cut the railways’ losses: and the longer, run-down lines offered useful savings – which the tiddly branches did not – whatever value they might have in a notional but distant future. But public opinion was starting to turn. Several urban lines were saved, and the setting-up of the passenger transport executives in the bigger provincial centres allowed more sensible local solutions to emerge.
Labour also refused to shut the beautiful but preposterous line – now known as the Heart of Wales – from Shrewsbury to Llanelli, which was earmarked for execution even before Beeching. Supposedly, it was saved after George Thomas, the Welsh
Secretary, exclaimed in Cabinet: ‘But you can’t do that, prime minister! It goes through seven marginals!’ This was an exaggeration: it hardly passed seven potential passengers. But Labour had just lost Carmarthen in a by-election, and this was no time to be taking any chances. The Scottish Highlands north of Inverness were also thick with marginals, so its lines also survived. Labour had no political interests to protect in the Borders, hence the loss of the Waverley Line.
Beeching’s successor was his deputy Sir Stanley Raymond, a rather short-tempered man who had worked his way up the hierarchy and thus had much to be short-tempered about. ‘In my twenty-one years in public transport,’ he recalled, ‘I calculate that at least half my time has been spent on organization, reorganization, acquisition, nationalization, centralization, decentralization, according to the requirements of the now regular political quinquennial revaluation of national transport policy.’ He was succeeded by another longtime railwayman, Henry Johnson. He reorganized.
In spite of everything, the trains did keep running, not well, not reliably, not profitably. But slowly, they were getting more modern. Almost unnoticed outside the organization and the fan base, steam engines were disappearing from their last strongholds, partly because the strongholds themselves were being abandoned to the brambles and the birdsong.
Then, on 11 August 1968, British Rail’s last steam train ran with great ceremony from Liverpool to Carlisle and back. It was a fifteen-guinea special (i.e. £15.75, or £200 at 2009 prices), cold luncheon, high tea and commemorative scroll included. There were large crowds at vantage points along the route including Rainhill, the scene of the 1829 locomotive trials, and by the Huskisson memorial at Parkside. ‘In forty-nine years on the railways I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said the chief steward Reg Maker. Yet it rated only marginal press attention.
Eleven Minutes Late Page 21
