Ernest Marples: The Shadow Behind Beeching

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In his first year of office, Marples opened the UK’s first stretch of motorway – the M1 from Watford to Rugby. Marples would only be liable for capital gains tax at 30% on the transfer to Vin which, as an offshore company, would only be liable for stamp duty at 2%.

The reality was that most people with cars would do the whole journey driving rather than just going to the nearest big town to catch a train. Marples was finding, like so many Ministers in the decades to come, that upsetting motorists was not a wise policy. Interviewed by Graham Robson in the January 2000 edition of MINI Magazine, he said: ‘A friend told me about this car in 1979. Ian Nicholls tells the story of the man who opened our motorways and had a soft spot for Minis with a twist. The author speculates a bit too often – “We may speculate that Ernest’s marriage to Edna had not been a happy one…” May we?

Emerging initially as a relatively dynamic, young thrusting politician in the comparatively placid world of 1950s Conservative politics, today there are more than a few clouds over his character namely the apparent conflict of interest between his pro-car transport reforms and personal business interests, his tax exile and his penchant for being whipped while wearing women's clothes. The Minister had transferred his shares in Marples Ridgeway to his second wife Ruth, who he had married in 1956, but it is highly likely that he benefited from the contracts handed out by his own Ministry. Marples resigned from Parliament in 1974 and was later awarded a peerage as Baron Marples of Wallasey. Wasn’t the whole idea of the Beeching plan to try to make BR break even, something it never got close to doing even with all the loss making branches closed.

In 1948 the two men founded Marples Ridgway and Partners, a civil engineering company that started with one five-ton ex-army truck and one crane. This was the era when one could drive a Jaguar E-type on the M1 at a three figure speeds and not feel guilty about it.

The Conservatives served a full five-year term before succumbing to what many people thought was an inevitable defeat in October 1964 by a reinvigorated Labour Party, which promised a planned economy harnessing the best that new technology could offer. He believes in some pre Beeching fantasy land, he overlooks that at the time people and freight were deserting the railways in favour of the Roads, because simply the Railway was not flexible enough.

The question for Marples was whether the rail network had a realistic future in the face of competition from the road? At the time of Marples' appointment as Transport Minister, railways, canals and road freight transport were all overseen by a single body, the British Transport Commission (BTC).The railways were also hamstrung at that time by the legal requirement to carry any goods regardless, hence the comment above about racehorses. Ernest Marples, having decided that the future was road, then cut back on the railway modernisation programme and, in December 1960, he announced that the British Transport Commission was to be abolished and its constituent parts replaced by separate boards and thus the British Railways Board came in to being. Although nobody realised it at the time, Britain was undergoing a transport revolution that would transform the nation from public transport users to motorists, all by the time of the October 1973 energy crisis.

John Holmes was a neighbour and ‘friend’ of my father’s and I well remember him dropping in and talking about this case. By 1964, the M6 linked the West Midlands and the North West, and the M4 and M5 had started their spidery progress in the Thames Valley and the West. With his front-rank political career effectively over, Richard Marsh, the Minister who had approved many rail closures, left Parliament in 1971 to become Chairman of British Rail. His main interest, however, has always been the railways of Britain and their economic, social and cultural impact.I was interested to discover that the much-maligned Beeching never had the actual power to close railway lines, although this is what he is now associated with.