Richard Beeching, David
Serpell and Ernest
Marples
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If George Hudson was the Railway King, then Marples was the ruthless destroyer of the railway system and great beneficiary of this destruction: it is ironic that he fled Britain by the Night Ferry to evade his tax dues.
Richard Beeching
Born 21 April 1913. Educated Maidstone Grammar School and Imperial
College of Science & Technology, London. ARCS, BSc 1st class Hons. PhD
London. Fuel Research Station, 1936 Mond Nickel Co. Ltd 1937. Armaments Design
Dept. Ministry of Supply, l943. Dep Chief Engineer of Armamemts Design 1946.
Joined Imperial Chemical Industries, l948. Director, 1957-61 and 1965. Deputy
Chairman 1966-69. Various other senior positions within ICI. Chairman British
Railways Board 1963-65. Famous for Beeching reports which showed an utter
disregard for geography and even absurder prospects for British heavy industry.
Merry-go-round and liner trains were his major positive legacies. Sacked
by an incoming Labour administration which lamentably failed to reverse his
most dubious failures in political geography: the Scottish Borders being
the most obvious, but the tidal train service to the formerly? "strategic"
city of Plymouth must be even more significant. The otherwise admirable R.H.N.
Hardy has written a dubious hagiography. Beeching died on 23 March 1985 in
East Grinstead.
Anne Pimbott Baker has produced an excellent
ODNB study which includes Barbara
Castle's diary comments: that he approached transport policy ‘with an
arrogance that comes, I suspect, from a clear mind that sees a logical answer
to a situation and cannot tolerate any modification of it to meet human
frailty’ (Castle Diaries, 1964–70, 122). Furthermore, the
biographer records Tony Benn's astute observations: after a lunch in January
1965 at which Beeching had launched an attack on ‘overblown
democracy’, observed: ‘I think Beeching imagined himself as a new
de Gaulle, emerging from industry to save the nation’ (Benn, 205).
Mathew Engel has given a sharp
portrait of Beeching: "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 [KPJ's emphasis].
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 [KPJ: this is especially damning for
a man from Maidstone who commuted from Sussex, where the Southern Railway
had changed the geography of South East England]. 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 concentratiilg 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. There has been a minor
flood of literature to mark the fifthieth anniversary (Golden Jubilee??)
of the dreaded report.
Dr. Beeching's remedy: a cure for a century of the
railway's ills. David N. Clough. Ian Allan, 160pp. GBS ***
This is reviewed by Geoffrey
Skelsey in Backtrack, 2014, 28, 62: an alarming number
of errors are listed, but notes that the biography of Beeching appears to
be good. KPJ has since borrowed this book (cost 55p from "free" library in
Norfolk) and doubts whether it is worth that amount: in his opinion too many
largely irrelavant pictures; too little text; no index.
Those tempted to read David
Henshaw should also consult
Geoffrey Skelsey's excellent thoughtful
review in Backtrack, 2014, 28, 126.
Sir David Serpell
David Radford Serpell was born in Plymouth on 10 November 1911. He
was brought up in the city and attended Plymouth College. His father, Charles,
who inculcated his family with a strong Nonconformist ethic of duty, had
a law practice. In 1930 Serpell went up to Exeter College, Oxford, where
— distracted by a hectic social life and the river — he gained
a poor third in history. To make amends to himself and his father, he went
to France, where he earned a doctorate in history at Toulouse University
with a thesis on the Cathars. In 1934 he became an English assistant in a
Gymnasium in Templin, north of Berlin. He also had first-hand experience
of the growing anti-Semitism when he had a bout of appendicitis and a Nazi
orderly delayed his operation because his name was David and he was circumcised.
From Germany he moved to academic research as a Fellow at the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy attached to Tufts University. While in the US he met
Ann Dooley, a student at Syracuse University, whom he persuaded to move to
England in 1937 and to marry him. Once back in the UK he joined the Civil
Service as a member of the Imperial Economic Committee until the outbreak
of war in 1939. From 1939 to 1942 he was with the Ministry of Food and from
1942 to 1945 he was with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Immediately after
the war he was involved in planning for the Berlin airlift.
He continued his ascent of the Civil Service ladder through the 1950s. One
of his notable achievements was the negotiation, early in the decade, of
favourable terms for the supply of oil from Iran. He was under-secretary
at the Treasury, 1954-60; deputy secretary at the Ministry of Transport,
1960-63; and served in Ted Heath’s Board of Trade, 1963-68. In 1968
he returned to the Treasury before being appointed KCB, and then appointed
Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Transport. In 1970 he moved to the
new Department of the Environment, serving until his retirement in 1972,
aged 61. Serpell set great store by the public service ethic of never taking
political sides, and this he passed on to generations of subordinates and
protégés, among them, Ian (later Lord) Bancroft, who became
head of the Civil Service. When Bancroft died in 1996, Serpell gave part
of the eulogy at St Margaret’s, Westminster, to a congregation which
included Jim Callaghan and Michael Heseltine. He made it clear how much he
was dismayed by the break-up of the Home Civil Service in favour of
government-funded agencies no longer operating with the same culture,
professional standards and training.
After retirement from the Civil Service, he took on several demanding roles.
He was chairman of the Nature Conservancy Council immediately after its
establishment; he was a director of British Rail and the Waterways Board;
and he chaired a committee reviewing the Ordnance Survey in 1979.
The Serpell report, commissioned by the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher,
on options for the future of Britain’s railway system was the project
which attracted the most attention. The report looked at the financial state
of the post-Beeching system, which had reached its nadir in 1982 with strikes
and rapidly falling revenue. There were several options to reduce British
Rail’s deficit of £933 million, all painful in requiring a sharp
reduction of the network’s 10,000-plus route miles. The committee made
several recommendations. The most drastic was nearly halving annual passenger
miles by closing all but intercity services and main commuter lines in the
South East. Each option was graded according to cost saving and impact on
passenger service. Such substantial savings would inevitably leave people
without rail service and forced on to the roads, and the report, portrayed
by many rail supporters as “a second Beeching”, did not result
in any substantial network changes. But Sir Peter Parker, the chairman of
British Rail from 1976 to 1983, exploited the proposed closures to persuade
the train drivers’ union Aslef to call off a threatened strike that
would have shut the rail system. The Economist, no supporter of rail
transport, considered the report to be absurd (one option would have deprived
Plymouth of rail access). The long hours of preparing the report, followed
by the politicking and the unwelcome attention of the media, persuaded Serpell
that enough was enough and he finally retired for good.
Despite a professional aversion to personal publicity, Serpell did give an
interview to The Times in May 1972. He was described as “a witty,
introverted man, and as an under-secretary he had the fire-breathing reputation
of a man with extraordinarily high standards and little time for those who
did not measure up to them”. In his retirement proper Serpell moved
to Dartmouth and enjoyed walking, golf, reading — crime novels in particular
— and his family. He died on July 28, 2008, aged 96
Marples, Ernest
The bulk of this entry is based on D.J.
Dutton's ODNB extensive entry which significantly excludes Marples's
escape on the Night Ferry with his ill-gotten gains. This event is
in the Wikipedia entry and in the National Archives. It is ironic that his
exit was by rail, rather than by road. Born Levenshulme, Manchester, on 9
December 1907, the only child of Alfred Ernest Marples, an engine fitter;
later foreman engineer, and his wife, Mary Hammond. Ernest Marples was educated
at a local council school before winning a scholarship to Stretford grammar
school. Marples moved to London in the late 1920s and purchased a house on
a mortgage while letting part of it to cover his outgoings. This was the
start of a successful career in property development in which he bought up
Victorian houses and converted them into flats. Before long he had set up
a construction firm which he financed from his savings and a loan offered
by the civil servant Jack Huntington, whom he had met on holiday and who
became a lifelong friend. Huntington also introduced Marples to cultural
and intellectual issues, including the study of political philosophy, which
his own limited formal education had not encompassed.
By 1939 Marples owned Marples, Ridgway & Partners which had built several
power stations, including one in Liverpool, which probably explains his choice
of constituency. He had joined the London Scottish territorials, transferring
to the Royal Artillery in 1941, rose to the rank of captain, but was wounded
in 1944. At the 1945 general election he became the Conservative member for
Wallasey in Cheshire, a seat held until 1974. He became secretary of the
party's housing committee and produced a well-received booklet on housing
problems. He ensured his future ministerial career by responding positively
to the commitment given to the party conference in 1950 that the next
Conservative government would build 300,000 houses in a year. This was, he
told the 1922 Committee shortly afterwards, something which could be achieved
in five years and at a reasonable cost. When, therefore, Churchill appointed
Harold Macmillan minister of housing in October 1951, Macmillan chose Marples
as his parliamentary secretary—thus starting a political partnership
which ultimately led to the latter's elevation to the cabinet. It was an
unlikely partnership, uniting the Edwardian whose pretensions at least were
aristocratic and the entirely self-made and somewhat brash businessman who
had once been a bookie's ‘dodger’. Anthony Sampson stated
‘between Macmillan with his languid style and Marples with his boasting
efficiency, there existed an alliance of mutual advantage, between the amateur
and the professional’ (Macmillan: a Study in Ambiguity, 1968,
98). It was his spell at housing that catapulted Macmillan into the front
rank of Conservative politicians, and he never forgot the debt he owed to
his junior minister. Among Marples's tangible contributions was to initiate
the design of a house which needed almost no timber, then in short supply,
using concrete instead. But his greatest value was in terms of his no-nonsense
common sense, his limitless energy, and a capacity for self-publicity.
Marples was moved sideways to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance
in October 1954; here his talents were less well employed than at housing,
and he returned to the back benches and his business career in December 1955.
But when in January 1957 in the wake of the Suez crisis Macmillan became
prime minister, Marples had his reward, becoming postmaster-general. He brought
his ministry into the public limelight in a way in which few if any of his
predecessors had done. His was the right sort of ingenious mind to bring
new technology into the running of a government department which was more
susceptible than most to the techniques and practices of the business world.
During Marples's tenure subscriber trunk dialling was introduced, a new Atlantic
cable transformed communications with the New World, and a series of efficiency
studies was carried out to improve the profitability of the Post Office.
Macmillan had recently introduced premium bonds, in the face of considerable
opposition on moral grounds, and it seemed entirely appropriate that Marples,
with his flair for publicity, should inaugurate the ‘electronic random
number indicating equipment’—known by the acronym
‘Ernie’—to select the lucky winners. Overall, the minister
enhanced his public standing as someone who could get things done, and it
was no surprise when he was promoted to the cabinet as minister of transport
following the Conservatives' victory in the general election of 1959.
The Ministry of Transport was not a post that usually figured prominently
among Whitehall departments, but there was by the late 1950s a growing concern
about Britain's transport problems, especially about those resulting from
the rapid and seemingly inexorable growth in the number of motor vehicles,
and Marples approached his brief with an infectious conviction that such
problems could be resolved. He concentrated his early efforts on London,
where road traffic was already approaching gridlock, and soon achieved
considerable success in improving the flow of traffic. Many of his schemes
were controversial and aroused motorists' hostility, but later came to be
accepted as indispensable features of urban life. It was during his five-year
tenure at transport that yellow no-parking lines and parking meters, with
fixed fines imposed by traffic wardens without trial unless the offending
motorist insisted on a court appearance, became commonplace in Britain's
towns and cities. He also laid the groundwork for some of the reforms usually
associated with his Labour successor, Barbara
Castle, especially the introduction of the breathalyser as a means of
tackling the problem of drink-driving.
To his credit Marples recognized that short-term palliatives, however useful,
were not enough to deal with the problems of Britain's roads, and he invited
Sir Colin Buchanan to produce a comprehensive report on the entire road network.
Entitled Traffic in Towns, it was published in 1963 and called for
the systematic planning of urban development so as to reconcile the needs
of road transport with those of social amenity. The minister had already
authorized the building of a full-scale network of motorways across the country,
expanding the plans initiated by his predecessor Harold Watkinson. Many schemes
for new bridges, flyovers, and embankments were also put in place. Overall
it amounted to a considerable record of achievement. The ODNB biographer
fails to record his subject's personal gain from this activity through
Maples-Ridgeway
Marples's legacy to the railway industry was less fortunate. The nationalized
network was making heavy losses and losing customers to the roads in an
apparently irreversible fashion. Marples brought in Dr
Richard Beeching, a leading executive from ICI, to join the British Transport
Commission, with a view to succeeding the existing chairman, Sir Brian Robertson.
Beeching then became the first chairman of the British Railways board with
instructions to carry out a searching inquiry. He recommended concentrating
resources on long-distance inter-city routes and the provision of special
goods-carrying services to industry, conclusions which entailed the closure
of about 2000 stations, particularly in rural areas, and 5000 miles of track,
on the grounds of underutilization. Marples, who believed that the railways
must, in the last resort, compete in the market with road transport, with
the customer as final arbiter, gave Beeching's recommendations his full support,
despite fierce opposition in the country and from the Labour opposition in
parliament. At the time, Marples seemed to have had the courage to do something
about the intractable problems of a remorselessly declining industry, but
later concerns about the environmental pollution caused by an ever-growing
number of motor cars and his refusal to recognize the railways as at least
in part a necessary social service render his achievements somewhat less
impressive.
By the time when the Conservatives lost office, Marples's career had peaked.
He did shadow the new Ministry of Technology, but his relations with Edward
Heath, who became leader of the party in July 1965, were never easy; he was
dropped from the shadow cabinet, with some bitterness, after the general
election of 1966. Heath did, however, make some use of his talents from the
back benches. It seemed to make good sense to employ a self-proclaimed technocrat
to consider ways of improving party organization. But Marples lacked a specific
brief beyond looking at possible money-saving schemes, and he soon resigned,
making it known that he had received no clear remit. Later he was put in
charge of a public sector research unit, designed to study the application
of modern management techniques to the machinery of government. There was,
however, no place for him when Heath formed his government in June 1970.
Marples left the Commons in February 1974 and became a life peer as Baron
Marples, though he was never prominent in the upper chamber.
Early in 1975 Marples suddenly fled to Monaco. Among journalists who investigated
his unexpected flight was Daily Mirror editor Richard Stott: "In the
early 70s ... he tried to fight off a revaluation of his assets which would
undoubtedly cost him dear ... So Marples decided he had to go and hatched
a plot to remove £2 million from Britain through his Liechtenstein company
... there was nothing for it but to cut and run, which Marples did just before
the tax year of 1975. He left by the Night Ferry with his belongings
crammed into tea chests, leaving the floors of his home in Belgravia littered
with discarded clothes and possessions ... He claimed he had been asked to
pay nearly 30 years' overdue tax ... The Treasury froze his assets in Britain
for the next ten years. By then most of them were safely in Monaco and
Liechtenstein.". As well as being wanted for tax fraud, one source alleges
that Marples was being sued in Britain by tenants of his slum properties
and by former employees. He never returned to Britain, living the remainder
of his life at his Fleurie Beaujolais château and vineyard in France.
Marples died in the Princess Grace Hospital in Monte Carlo on 6 July 1978.
According to Humm (J. Rly Canal Hist.
Soc, 2015, 38, 252)
he is buried in the Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-cum-Hardy..
Ivan Stedeford
Born in Exeter on 28 January 1897; died 9 February 1975. Educated
Shebbear College and King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham. Engineering
apprentice at Wolseley Motors. Chairman Advisory Group on British Transport
Commission 1960.
MacGregor. John Roddick Russell (Earl of
Pulham)
Minister of Transport between 1992 and 1994 when he dismembered the
British railway industry which led to the politically sensitive Hatfield
and Paddington railway accidents and has escalated the cost of travel. He
was educated at Merchiston Castle in Edinburgh and at St. Andrews University.
He is small in stature and is usually known as Wee MacGregor. He must be
proud of the frightful lack of cross-country train services from Norwich
(Truro has far more) and the slowness of trains from Diss (one of the impediments
to less slow trains from Norwich to London).
2015-11-14