ABSTRACT
In 1969 Christopher Booker looked back at the preceding two decades and concluded that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Britain had been caught up in a collective ‘vitality fantasy’, a significant element of which was ‘the sense of being carried into a modernistic future’. As this fantasy progressed from dream to nightmare, a struggle took place between ‘New’ and ‘Old England’ culminating in the latter’s defeat in the ‘terrible year of 1963’. Booker says little about the railways and when he writes that by the mid-1950s ‘as prosperity went on increasing, people were beginning to forget the past and turn their imaginations with ever rising expectation to the future’ he isn’t talking about the Treasury.1 But it wasn’t only the public who had money to spend; while the increasing ownership of cars and televisions transformed Britain, the Government’s spending included large-scale investment programmes in the nationalized industries. At a press conference on 24 January 1955, anxious to stress the newness of what he was proposing and to prevent the railways appearing anachronistic, General Sir Brian Robertson GCB GBE KCMG KCVO DSO MC launched the BTC’s Plan for the Modernisation and Re-equipment of British Railways (the Modernisation Plan).2 At a cost of £1,240 million over 15 years, the plan promised ‘a thoroughly modern system’, featuring high-speed track, colour-light signalling, automatic train control, modern telecommunications, ‘several thousand electric or diesel locomotives’, modern coaches and computerized marshalling yards, which would allow the railways to earn at least £5 million a year more than was required to meet their central charges by the early 1970s. While the emphasis of the plan was on positive investment it was founded on an intention to concentrate on those tasks the railways could perform more efficiently than other forms of transport, the bulk carriage of passengers and goods, and it referred to closing uneconomic lines.3 By 1962 Robertson’s appeal to the mood of the times had failed. In that summer’s bestseller, Anatomy of Britain, Anthony Sampson, part of what Booker described as New England’s ‘rising chorus of “What’s wrong with Britain” journalism’,4
described the railways, with their ‘picturesque, feudal and delightful way of life’ as ‘the most embarrassing of all Britain’s Victorian leftovers. . . . [A] kind of caricature of all Britain’s problems’. Sampson found Beeching ‘reassuring’.5
He did not interview Robertson. That Old Englander had retired the year before,
