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 "strategic" city of Plymouth must be even more significant. The otherwise admirable R.H.N. Hardy has written a dubious hagiography. He 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 prospec! 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.