Commercialising public services makes sense

IN the early 1960s, two of Britain's great traditional industries had as their chairmen two self-important men whom Harold Macmillan's government had appointed as modernisers and cost-cutters. They were alike in so many ways: their black moustaches and baldness, their modest social backgrounds, their peerages and their generous frames. But perhaps only one of them wanted to be liked. "Compared with Alf Robens at the Coal Board, poor Dick Beeching is hardly a winsome personality," wrote Labour's Richard Crossman in the Guardian.

"He makes every cut in a local service look like a piece of deliberate cruelty, and every closure of a station like an act of class war." Crossman was writing soon after the publication of Dr Richard Beeching's report, 'The Reshaping of British Railways', which next month will celebrate its 50th anniversary as one of the most notorious documents ever published by a British government. When it appeared I had a job as an assistant in a public library, and I remember how, unusually for any government document other than the Highway Code, it was occasionally requested in the reference department. Also, again unusually for anything printed by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO), it had a contemporary look: the covers of its two parts were in dark blue rather than light blue, and did without the royal coat of arms. Nowhere did it name the man who'd written it; authorship hid its human face behind the words British Railways Board.

Still, everyone knew about Beeching, if only because his salary was headline news. At £24,000 (Dh133,358) it was nearly five times as much as his political mentor, Ernest Marples, was getting as minister of transport and 90 times more than the wage of a teenage library assistant in Fife. No other head of a nationalised industry earned as much, but Beeching had been borrowed by the government on a five-year contract from ICI, which paid him that salary as its technical director. It amounted, apparently, to the going rate for the kind of "brilliant business brain" that was needed to sort out the railways; an argument that could be heard in a changed railway context - the bonuses for Network Rail directors, for example half a century later.

In fact, Beeching was not a businessman as we presently understand businessmen or businesswomen to be. He could never have been Lord Sugar's apprentice. He could never have been Lord Sugar. He was a maker rather than a seller. The son of a journalist and a schoolteacher, he went from a grammar school in Kent to Imperial College London, where he got a first in physics and a PhD in the behaviour of electrons. His career after that took him into the laboratories of the Mond Nickel Company and the armaments division of the Ministry of Supply. At ICI he spent two years superintending the building of an artificial fibres plant in Ontario. Companies such as ICI and Courtauld were then the aristocrats of British manufacturing, respected for their innovation and forward thinking, and Beeching was known to be the kind of bold manager who took pleasure in calling a spade a spade. To a government anxious to remodel a vast and increasingly unprofitable public enterprise - it had 500,000 employees, 4,700 stations and losses of £86.9 million in 1961 - he seemed the ideal choice.

And perhaps he was. Certainly his later reputation as "the man who destroyed Britain's railways" may owe as much to his gift for personal publicity as to his report. Long before the report's publication on March 27, 1963, newspaper stories of its possible findings had begun to prepare the ground. An anonymous writer in the Guardian described it as "the most assiduous public relations effort this oddly old-fashioned industry has ever made... we have all been prepared, quite deliberately, for the worst".

Of course, a lot of the worst did arrive: Beeching proposed closing 2,363 stations and 6,000 out of 18,000 route miles. But Crossman was right. The tone of "deliberately cruelty" came more from the chairman's persona and behaviour than anything he wrote.

This week, reading the report itself for the first time, rather than a second hand summary, I was struck by its brevity: 60 pages hardly seem enough to describe the problem, never mind a cure that, through changed travel patterns, job losses, torn-up tracks and demolished Victorian architecture, would change Britain's landscape and how it felt to live in it for ever. But that wasn't the only striking thing. A second, strange to say, was the humane conduct of the argument.