Beeching Cuts - The People and The Politics

The People and The Politics

The Conservatives increased their Commons majority in the 1959 General election of 8 October, their first with Harold Macmillan as prime minister who famously said that most people 'had never had it so good'. Ernest Marples, previously the Postmaster General, was made Transport Minister two weeks later in a cabinet reshuffle of the Conservative Government 1957–1964; Marples was described by some as 'cocky', 'flash', 'slick' and as a 'construction tycoon', and Macmillan noted that the Northern working-class boy who had won a scholarship to a grammar school was one of only two "self-made men" in his cabinet.

Marples had a background with a successful road construction company. When opening the M1 motorway he said: "This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold scientific age in which we live. It is a powerful weapon to add to our transport system". His association with a high-profile construction company, Marples and Ridgway did, however, become a matter of concern to both the public and the politician during the period. As is customary, he resigned as a director of the company in 1951 on first becoming a junior minister, but he only sold his shares in the company in 1960 after the company won a contract to build the Hammersmith Flyover, when questions were asked both in the media and also in the Commons on 28 January 1960; he made a statement to the House later that day confirming that the sale of shares was in hand and would be completed 'very soon', noting that as part of the agreement he could be required to buy the shares from the purchaser at the original price after he ceased to hold office, if so desired by the purchaser. In July 1964, Marples Ridgway and partners were awarded a £4.1 million contract for the 'Hendon Urban Motorway' extension of the M1, in the same year that the company was taken over by the Bath and Portland Group. There was no evidence of any wrongdoing on anyone's part in this or any of the other contracts awarded to the company during his term of office, it did however lead to a sense of unease, not least within the railway sector.

In April 1960, Sir Ivan Stedeford established an advisory group, known as the Stedeford Committee at the request of Harold Macmillan to report on the state of British transport and to make recommendations. Sir Frank Smith, a retired former Chief Engineer at Imperial Chemical Industries was asked by the Conservative Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, to become a member of an advisory group; Smith declined but recommended Beeching in his place, a suggestion which Marples accepted. Dr Beeching, with a PhD in Physics, had been appointed to the main board of ICI at the age of 43. The board consisted on senior figures in British businesses, and none of the board had previous knowledge or experience of the railway industry. Stedeford and Beeching clashed on Beeching's proposals to prune the rail infrastructure. In spite of questions being asked in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was not published at the time. In December 1960 there were questions in the Lords asked about this 'secret' and 'under-the-counter' study group. It was later suggested that Stedeford had recommended that the government should set up another body 'to consider the size and pattern of the railway system required to meet current and foreseeable needs, in the light of developments and trends in other forms of transport… and other relevant considerations'.

Marples then appointed Beeching as Chairman of the British Railways Board in March 1961. He would receive the same yearly salary that he was earning at I.C.I., the controversial sum of £24,000 (£367,000 in today's money), £10,000 more than Sir Brian Robertson, the last chairman of the British Transport Commission, £14,000 more than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and two-and-a-half times higher than the salary of any head of a nationalised industry at the time. At that time the Government was seeking outside talent and fresh blood to sort out the huge problems of the railway network, and he was confident that he could make the railways pay for themselves, but his salary, at 35 times the level paid to many railway workers has been described as a 'political disaster'.

The Transport Act 1962 dissolved the British Transport Commission (BTC) which had overseen the railways, canals and road freight transport and established the British Railways Board which took over BTC's responsibilities on 1 January 1963. The Act put in place measures which simplified the process of closing railways by removing the need for pros and cons of each case to be heard in detail. It was described as the "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854",

The "Beeching Plan" was published in 1963 and was adopted by the Government; it resulted in the closure of a third of the rail network and the scrapping of a third of a million freight wagons.

The General election in October 1964 returned the Labour Government 1964–1970 under Prime Minister Harold Wilson after 13 years of Conservative government. During the election campaign, Labour had promised to halt the rail closures if elected but quickly backtracked and at a faster rate than under the previous administration. Tom Fraser was appointed Transport Minister, soon to be replaced by Barbara Castle in December 1965 who decided that at least 11,000 route miles (17,700 km) would be needed for the foreseeable future and that the railway system should be stabilised at around this size.

Section 39 of the 1968 Transport Act made provision for a subsidy to be paid to in relation to loss-making lines, however many of the services and railway lines that would have qualified had already been closed. A number of branch lines were saved by this legislation.

By 1970, when the Conservatives were returned to power in the United Kingdom general election, 1970, the 'Beeching closures' were largely complete. However, in 1983, under the government of Margaret Thatcher, Sir David Serpell, a civil servant who had worked with Beeching, compiled what became known as the Serpell Report in which it was again proposed that a profitable railway (if that was the aim) could only be achieved by closing much of what remained. The infamous "Option A" in this report was illustrated by a map of a truly vestigial system with, for example, no railways west of Bristol and none in Scotland apart from the central belt. Serpell was shown to have some serious weaknesses, such as the closure of the Midland Main Line (a busy route for coal transport to power stations), and even the East Coast Main Line between Berwick-upon-Tweed and Edinburgh, part of the key London/Edinburgh link. The report was met with fierce resistance from many quarters and was quickly abandoned.

Ian Hislop comments that history has been somewhat unkind to "Britain's most hated civil servant ", by forgetting that he proposed a much better bus service that ministers never delivered and that in some ways he was used to do their "dirty work for them". Hislop describs Beeching as being: "a technocrat wasn't open to argument to romantic notions of rural England or the warp and weft of the train in our national identity. He didn't buy any of that. He went for a straightforward profit and loss approach and some claim we are still reeling from that today". Beeching was unrepentant about his role in the closures: "I suppose I'll always be looked upon as the axe man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping."