Ernest Marples: The Shadow Behind Beeching

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BR British Rail or British Railways could not then carry out the closure until the Committee had reported to the Minister who, having considered their recommendations on easing the resulting hardship, would consent to the closure with or without adopting them. Perhaps Marples is most infamous for appointing Dr Beeching to British Railways with a brief of devising a profitable railway network.

I also didn’t like references and citations being placed throughout the text, rather than separately at the end or as footnotes, as this breaks up the reading too intrusively. A stickler for historical accuracy he has recently performed the marathon task of mining the online newspaper articles for all BMC>MG related stories.The railways were also hamstrung at that time by the legal requirement to carry any goods regardless, hence the comment above about racehorses. It was the minister who made the decisions: initially Marples and then, after the Labour party won the 1964 general election, Tom Fraser (for 14 months) and Barbara Castle. Quite when Ernest Marples took possession of the car is not known, as he did not officially take ownership of the car until August 1968, when the Mini had evolved into the MkII version and the Cooper 1275S had long supplanted the 1071S.

When Ernest Marples left his post in 1964, Britain produced 1,868,000 cars, it was little better in the record year of 1972, at 1,921,000 cars. With the relatively empty A roads, and even emptier Motorways, I’m sure people would have paid to use them. Most of the information available on the information super highway about the man who built many a concrete highway is openly hostile. But this background in construction also meant that he was the best choice in Westminster to push forward the modernisation of Britain’s road network, and the political consensus of the time was that this was the way forward. However in the late 80s with the rail union’s neutered, British Rail operated with the lowest subsidy per passenger mile of any national railway system in the 1st world.In anticipation of the 1962 Act, the government appointed Dr Richard Beeching as Chairman of the British Railways Board with a brief to recommend and implement such changes as were necessary to end the losses that were growing rapidly at the time. It would make the design of these roads far too complicated to build ‘cycle tracks’ into them … It would be very expensive, and probably impracticable, to build a completely separate system of tracks for cyclists. His subsequent report “ The Reshaping of British Railways” (commonly referred to as “Beeching’s Axe”) led to drastic cuts across the UK and the dismembering of many of Britain’s local and historic railway lines. Instead of having one aperture for the rear window and one for the boot, we ran them into one and turned it into a boxed channel.

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. Five years ago Boris was Mayor of London and the likelihood was George Osborne would be PM by now, while Trump was more interested in reality television and his property empire.There was an alternative, to follow the Continental model and allow private companies to build the fast road network and charge a toll to the motorist to use it. By this time Marples’ own front-rank political career was over and BMC was now part of the British Leyland Motor Corporation. It may not be entirely a coincidence that as Beeching was closing railway lines, the government was providing funding for the construction of motorways, which were being built by companies in which Marples had an interest. Information presented on this page was prepared from the XML source files, together with information from the History of Parliament Trust, the work of Leigh Rayment and public sources. The diaries reported the transport minister's fetish for being whipped while dressed in women's clothing, as described in great detail by one of the prostitutes who had provided these services to Marples, and confirmed at the time by her detailed knowledge of the interior of Marples' home where the events took place.