Richard Beeching

Beeching was born in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, the second of four brothers. His father was Hubert Josiah Beeching, a reporter with the Kent Messenger newspaper, his mother a schoolteacher and his maternal grandfather a dockyard worker. Shortly after his birth, Beeching's family moved to Maidstone where his brothers Kenneth (who was killed in the Second World War)[4][5] and John were born. All four Beeching boys attended the local Church of England primary school, Maidstone All Saints, and won scholarships to Maidstone Grammar School, where Richard was a prefect. Beeching and his elder brother Geoffrey attended Imperial College of Science & Technology in London, where both read physics and took First Class honours degrees. His younger brothers both attended Downing College, Cambridge.[2]

Beeching remained at Imperial College where he undertook a research PhD under the supervision of Sir George Thomson. He continued in research until 1943, first at the Fuel Research Station in Greenwich in 1936 and then the following year with the Mond Nickel Laboratories in London, where he was appointed senior physicist carrying out research in the fields of physics, metallurgy and mechanical engineering.[2]

In 1938 he married Ella Margaret Tiley, whom he had known since his schooldays. They initially set up home in Solihull, and remained married for the rest of his life. They had no children. During the Second World War Beeching, at the age of 29, was lent by Mond Nickel on the recommendation of Dr Sykes at Firth Brown Steels to the Ministry of Supply, where he worked in its Armament Design and Research Departments at Fort Halstead. His first post was with the Shell Design Section where he had a rank equivalent to that of army captain. Whilst with Armament Design, Beeching worked under the department's superintendent and chief engineer, Sir Frank Smith, a former chief engineer with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).[2]

After the war, Smith returned to ICI as technical director and was replaced as chief engineer of Armament Design by Sir Steuart Mitchell who promoted Beeching, then 33, to the post of deputy chief engineer with a rank equivalent to that of brigadier. Beeching continued his work with armaments, particularly anti-aircraft weaponry and small arms. In 1948 he joined ICI, as personal technical assistant to Sir Frank Smith; he remained for around 18 months, working on the production lines for various products such as zip fasteners, paints and leathercloth with a view to improving efficiency and reducing production costs. He was then appointed to the Terylene Council, and subsequently to the board of ICI Fibres Division.

In 1953 he went to Canada as vice-president of ICI (Canada) Ltd, and was given overall responsibility for a terylene plant in Ontario. He returned after two years to become chairman of ICI Metals Division on the recommendation of Sir Ewart Smith. In 1957 he was appointed to the ICI board as technical director, and for a short time also served as development director.[6]

Sir Ewart Smith, who retired from ICI in 1959, was asked by the Conservative Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, to become a member of an advisory group on the financial state of the British Transport Commission to be chaired by Sir Ivan Stedeford. Smith declined but recommended Beeching in his place, a suggestion which Marples accepted.[2] Stedeford and Beeching clashed on a number of issues connected with Beeching's proposal to drastically prune Britain's rail infrastructure. In spite of questions being asked in Parliament, Sir Ivan's report was not published until much later.

Upon returning to ICI, Beeching was appointed liaison director for the agricultural division and organisation and services director. He later rose to become deputy chairman from 1966 to 1968. In the 1965 Birthday Honours[17] it was announced that he would be made a life peer, and he was created Baron Beeching, of East Grinstead in the County of Sussex on 7 July 1965,[18] in the same year he became a director of Lloyds Bank. In 1966 he was appointed as chairman of the Royal Commission to examine assizes and quarter sessions; he eventually proposed a mass reorganisation of the court system, involving the setting-up of regional courts in cities such as Cardiff, Birmingham and Leeds leading to the Courts Act 1971.

The following year he became chairman of Associated Electrical Industries, a role he also held with Redland from 1970 to 1977, Furness Withy from 1973 to 1975 and the Economic Insurance Company.[19] In 1968 he was invited to deliver the MacMillan Memorial Lecture to the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. He chose the subject "Organisation".[20]

On 21 May 1969, Beeching performed the official opening ceremony for the heritage railway between Totnes and Ashburton, then known as the Dart Valley Railway.[21]

He died at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, in March 1985.[1]

The lines chosen in the 'Beeching II' report "for future development". The fate of other lines was not discussed.

The Beeching Report remains controversial. Critics have accused Beeching of ignoring the social consequences of his proposals (there is little doubt that rail replacement bus services were rarely a success[22]); encouraging car use; ignoring possible economies that might have saved lines; and, getting the figures wrong.

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.

Others have argued that it was ministers, not Beeching, who were responsible for any shortcomings in assessing the social case for retaining lines and that economies had been tried and largely failed; also that the road lobby was less significant than the Treasury in making policy, and the Labour Party was funded by rail unions.[25] Beeching's findings have also been reviewed in two books by his contemporaries: R.H.N (Dick) Hardy: Beeching – Champion of the Railway (1989) ISBN 0-7110-1855-3 and Gerry Fiennes: I Tried to Run a Railway (1967) ISBN 0-7110-0447-1. Both are broadly sympathetic to Beeching's basic analysis and the proposed solution.

It is worth noting that the size, shape and level of service of the railway network in Great Britain was the subject of debate for many decades before the appointment of Beeching. The Salter Report of 1933 attempted to address the issue of growing abstraction of rail traffic by road and the low level of road pricing. At the appointment of the British Transport Commission in 1947, the question of uneconomic branch lines and their selection for closure was the subject of a Railway Executive branch line committee. The British Railways Modernisation Plan of 1955 stated, "there will be a marked reduction in the stopping and branch-line services which are little used by the public and which, on any dispassionate review of the situation, should be largely handed over to road transport". Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stated in 1960, "the industry must be of a size and pattern suited to modern conditions and prospects. In particular, the railway system must be modelled to meet current needs". In this respect, Beeching can be thus seen to have taken a courageous approach to implementing an unpopular policy which politicians had deferred for many decades.

On the other hand, Hardy points out Beeching's political naïvete, and Fiennes notes that because a passenger service was producing a loss did not mean that it would continue to do so in the future. Like Fiennes and Hardy, Terry Gourvish's business history of British Rail sees Beeching as having a positive effect on railway management while not achieving perfection.[26] There is a broad consensus that the detail of figures used in individual cases were imperfect, but a wide divergence of view as to the significance of and motives for this.

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]

Several ex-railway sites have been named after Beeching:

• There is a pub that was called Lord Beechings at the end of the Cambrian Railways at Aberystwyth, which until its refurbishment by Brains Brewery was decorated with various railway memorabilia, in particular regarding the Aberystwyth – London and Aberystwyth – Carmarthen service, which he closed. It was previously called The Railway until the 1990s, and in 2022 its new owner renamed it The Hoptimist, claiming that it wanted to bring people together, not isolate them.
• The Beechings Way industrial estate at Alford, Lincolnshire is so named to commemorate the loss of the former station - whose buildings lie within the estate[28] - and line (formerly from Grimsby to London, via Louth and Peterborough) under the Beeching cuts.
• The road Beeching Drive in Lowestoft, Suffolk, located on the site of the former Lowestoft North station is also so named. Coincidentally, a smaller pedestrian area in the vicinity is known as Stephenson's Walk.
• The old station approach in the village of Upton, Oxfordshire, is now a cul-de-sac called Beeching Close.[29]
• There is a cul-de-sac in the Leicestershire village of Countesthorpe about 7 mi (11 km) south of Leicester city centre aptly named Beeching's Close. Countesthorpe railway station was served by the former Midland Counties Railway line between Leicester and Rugby, although this was closed in January 1962, well over a year prior to the publication of The Reshaping of British Railways. The gardens of the houses on the west side of the close meet the boundary of the old line.
• East Grinstead, where Beeching lived, was formerly served by a railway line from Tunbridge Wells (West) to Three Bridges, most of which was closed.[1] To the east of the current East Grinstead station, the line passed through a deep cutting. This cutting currently forms part of the A22 relief road through East Grinstead. Due to the depth of the cutting, locals wanted to call the road Beeching Cut, but it was decided to call it Beeching Way.[30]

In the late 1990s, a popular BBC sitcom, Oh, Doctor Beeching!, was set at a rural railway station in the shadow of the Beeching reforms.

• Why Does Policy Change?: Lessons from British Transport Policy 1945–99 Dudley and Richardson
• "Britain's most hated civil servant" (BBC website)
• "16 February 1965: Beeching plans for 'bloated' railways". BBC On This Day. BBC. 16 February 2008. Retrieved 7 December 2009.