ABSTRACT
Sir David Serpell, who arrived at the Ministry of Transport as deputy secretary responsible for railways in March 1960, has described the railways’ position on his arrival as being like ‘an old film where a girl has been tied to the railway track and you find there are two trains coming’.1 The two trains were the inability of the BTC to ever repay its accumulated deficit and the impending report of the Guillebaud inquiry into railway wages, which was obviously going to recommend a pay award that would substantially increase the deficit and which had taken so long that it had acquired an irresistible momentum. After the usual consultations between the Government and the Commission, a railway strike was averted in February by an interim award and Guillebaud’s recommendations were largely implemented under an agreement reached in June, the ultimate cost of which was over £40 million.2 In the early months of 1960 the slow process of transforming the Padmore committee’s recommendations into legislation on the BTC was overtaken by these two concerns. When Macmillan returned from his ‘wind of change’ tour of Africa to ‘a great log-jam of problems’, he insisted that the important point was not officials’ concern over how to subsidize the BTC legally (a problem eventually solved by including the sums involved as spending not lending in the 1960 budget) but how to reorganize it, bring in new men to oversee a new plan and persuade the unions to accept these measures and a smaller railway industry, in return for the Government’s acceptance in principle of the Guillebaud Report.3 This he attempted to do in a statement to Parliament on 10 March 1960 which stressed the need for the unions and the public to accept the remodelling of the industry and of the modernization programme to ‘a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects’, higher fares and reorganization of the BTC.4 This statement is the fulcrum of the public face of railway policy, the point at which the dream of the Modernisation Plan began to become the nightmare, or at least the reality, embodied in the Beeching Report.
