Kent train lines fall victim to Beeching report

In 1959, Beeching became a member of an advisory board set up by Ernest Marples, Harold Macmillan’s Minister of Transport, to suggest how to deal with the dire finances of Britain’s nationalised transport services, run by the virtually insolvent and soon to be abolished British Transport Commission.

Beeching advocated drastic pruning of the rail network, an argument that led Marples to appoint him as the first chairman of the British Railways Board with effect from 1 June 1961, on an annual salary of £24,000 (nearly £500,000 in today’s money).

This matched his ICI earnings and was more than the prime minister’s salary and almost three times that of any other head of a nationalised industry in the 1960s. His report was published on March 27, 1963.

Ernest Marples and, after the 1964 General Election, the Labour transport minister Tom Fraser and (from December 1965) Barbara Castle were responsible for implementing Beeching’s recommendations, although some of his proposals were rejected on social grounds and some unprofitable lines kept open.

Kent escaped relatively lightly, since most of its unprofitable routes had already closed. As it turned out, only two areas of Kent were affected by line closures. In the west, the last train ran on the delightful 20-mile cross-country route from Tunbridge Wells through the middle of rural Sussex to East Grinstead and Three Bridges on January 1, 1967, some 101 years after the service opened. But the section of the line from Tunbridge Wells Central to Tunbridge Wells West and Groombridge, on the county border, was reprieved, surviving until July 1985. In 1997 the track between Tunbridge Wells West and Groombridge reopened as the Spa Valley Railway, now a popular heritage line.

In south east Kent, Beeching recommended closing the railway from Ashford to Ham Street, Appledore, Rye and Hastings. It was reprieved in 1967 because of the difficulty of providing ade- quate replacement buses, but services on its branch line from Appledore, to Brookland Halt and Lydd Town that had opened in 1881 and extended in 1884 to New Romney ended in 1967.

While all Kent’s main lines survived Beeching, several stations along their routes were closed. They included Grove Ferry and Upstreet (1966), Gravesend West (1968); Smeeth (1964); Folkestone East (1965), and Folkestone Warren Halt (1971). In the Sixties, ‘Beeching Must Go’ became a slogan of trade unionists and rail-users alike.

He was even accused of causing ‘the death of rural England.’ In the 1990s he inspired David Croft and Richard Spendlove’s BBC television sitcom ‘Oh, Doctor Beeching!’

In 1965, having recommended axing about a third of the rail network - 6,000 miles of track, 2,363 stations and tens of thousands of jobs – Dr Beeching accepted a life peerage and adopted the title Lord Beeching of East Grinstead, after the town in which he then lived; its railway station was soon to lose its services into Kent and West Sussex.

He retained his links with Maidstone Grammar School and in 1969 became president of the Old Maidstonian Society. He died on March 23, 1985, aged 71, leaving a widow, Ella (née Tiley).