Ernest Marples: The Shadow Behind Beeching

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The BBC TV comedy series Oh, Doctor Beeching!, broadcast from 1995 to 1997, was set at a small fictional branch-line railway station threatened with closure under the Beeching cuts. Rail Engineer article - Derailed: The complicity dividend". Archived from the original on 16 November 2018 . Retrieved 4 August 2015. He joined the Conservative Party and was elected Member of Parliament for Wallasey in the 1945 election – despite the winning Labour Party surge. Around the same time he became a director in a construction firm. In 1948, with civil engineer Reginald Ridgway he founded Marples Ridgway and Partners which went on to build roads, dams and power stations. Department details: AH/37 (British Railways Board)". The National Digital Archive of Datasets. Kew: The National Archives. Archived from the original on 14 October 2006.

Among them the use of seats belts, using mobile phones while driving, in-vehicle distractions such as Sat Nav, driving with illegal drugs in the system, remote control parking, smoking in vehicles, using mobility scooters, and the Theory Test – introduced in 1996 and replacing questions about the Highway Code that were originally posed during the driving test itself. Calvert and Kinneir’s motorway signs were modern, simple and easy to read when driving fast. The government became concerned that these signs made other British road signs – a chaotic mix of different words, styles and fonts – seem inadequate and outdated and asked them to redesign and rationalise the whole national road sign system.The Beeching cuts were a major series of route closures and service changes made as part of the restructuring of the nationalised railway system in Great Britain in the 1960s. They are named for Richard Beeching, then-chair of the British Railways Board and the author of two reports– The Reshaping of British Railways (1963) and The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (1965)–that outlined the necessity of improving the efficiency of the railways and the plan for achieving this through restructuring. Some have accused him of being part of or even the scapegoat for a conspiracy against the railways involving politicians, civil servants and the road lobby. [23] [24] The report was commissioned by a Conservative government with strong ties to the road construction lobby and its findings were largely implemented by the subsequent Labour governments whose party received funds from unions associated with road industry associations. [ citation needed] The overgrown viaduct across Lobb Ghyll on the Skipton to Ilkley Line in Yorkshire, built by the Midland Railway in 1888 and closed in 1965 A nineteenth-century railway bridge over the River Spey, closed in 1965 and now part of the Moray Coast trail Part of the former Chippenham and Calne line, now a cycleway Ian Hislop commented in 2008 that history has been somewhat unkind to "Britain's most hated civil servant", by forgetting that he proposed a much better bus service that ministers never delivered, and that in some ways he was used to do their "dirty work for them". Hislop describes Beeching as "a technocrat [who] wasn't open to argument to romantic notions of rural England or the warp and weft of the train in our national identity. He didn't buy any of that. He went for a straightforward profit and loss approach and some claim we are still reeling from that today". [27]

The Beeching review went too far, and ignored the social and environmental benefits of railways. It was also flawed in that much of its research on passenger numbers took place in the depths of the harsh winter of 1962/63, giving unusually low numbers for usage. They Shall Grow Not Old - Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (223a - Kenneth Beeching)". Irish Brigade . Retrieved 14 June 2021. Beeching 1963a, p.2, "It is, of course the responsibility of the British Railways Board so to shape and operate the railways as to make them pay".The Conservatives increased their Commons majority in the general election of 8 October 1959, their first with Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister. Ernest Marples, previously Postmaster General, was made Transport Minister two weeks later in a cabinet reshuffle; Macmillan noted that the Northern working-class boy who had won a scholarship to a grammar school was one of only two "self-made men" in his cabinet. [46] The first Beeching report, titled The Reshaping of British Railways, was published on 27 March 1963. [19]