Wednesday, 27 March 1963 marked the day when a civil servant with a doctorate in physics, seconded from ICI, proudly flourished a report he had written. That man was Dr Richard Beeching, and the result of his recommendations contained in The Reshaping of British Railways are with us to this day.

Beeching identified many unprofitable rail services and suggested the widespread elimination of a huge number of routes. He identified 2,363 stations for closure, along with 6,000 miles of track — a third of the existing network — with the loss of 67,700 jobs. His stated aim was to prune the railway system back into a profitable concern. Behind Beeching, seconded to the newly-established British Railways Board, stood the figure of the publisher-turned-Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. He knew a thing or two about railways, having been a pre-nationalisation director of the Great Western Railway. It put him in the delightful position of never having to pay for a train ticket. 

Macmillan observed from a shareholder’s point of view, “you can pour all in money you want, but you can never make the damned things pay for themselves”. In his view, the railway network and infrastructure of wagon works, tiny branch lines, cottages for signallers, crossings keepers and station masters, with most halts staffed 18 hours a day, amounted to a social service, albeit an expensive one. It had made the prosperity of Victorian Britain possible and was sustaining it still. From nationalisation in 1948, the railways themselves had attempted to make savings, closing 3,000 miles of track and reducing staff from 648,000 to 474,000. That famous Ealing comedy film of 1953, The Titfield Thunderbolt, about a group of villagers trying to keep their branch line operating after British Railways decided to close it, already reflected concern and railway nostalgia. 

Britain’s literary and celluloid love affair with iron rails and steam began as long ago as 1905 with the publication of Edith Nesbit’s The Railway Children, a success which peaked when the book was made into a highly successful movie in 1970. Meanwhile, professional sleuths and loafers like Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Bertie Wooster capitalised on the branch line network in their methodology of moving swiftly about pastoral England in their hunts for miscreants. It was the success of The Lady Vanishes, a 1938 mystery thriller set on a continental train, that launched Alfred Hitchcock as a world-class director. David Lean’s Brief Encounter of 1945, based on Noël Coward’s earlier one-act play, Still Life, attached deep romance to station platforms and waiting rooms, reminiscent of so much heartache in the recently fought world war. It is still regarded as one of the greatest of all British-made films. None of this mattered to Beeching, the man who was “Britain’s most-hated civil servant” at his death in 1985, a moniker still used today. 

Railways had become deeply ingrained into the British DNA. After all, they started here. On 27 September 1825, the world’s first steam service ran from Darlington to Stockton with George Stephenson at the controls. He slowly opened the throttle and pulled his train carrying 450 people at the astonishing speed of 15 miles per hour. In 1828 at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the former Leader of the House of Commons and President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, became one of the new-fangled railway’s first casualties, when he stepped into the path of Stephenson’s Rocket.

All of this amounted to the very real world of the Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine, who published the first of an eventual 26 volumes with his rose-tinted view of British railwayana as long ago as 1946. I was brought up on his colourful books and the voiceover by Johnny Morris that was recorded in the 1960s. I still have dim memories of trainspotting locomotives at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s railway station, a branch line of the North Staffordshire Railway. My family made its fortune producing bricks to line the many bridges and tunnels of this 200-mile network, but Newcastle’s station was an early and inevitable Beeching victim, closing in 1964.

One night he stumbled into the path of the Shrewsbury to Crewe express

Awdry apart, there was always something about churchmen and locomotives that seemed to go together. Perhaps it was the serene setting of a parsonage, governed by church bells and train times. The Bishop of Wakefield, Eric Treacy, captured the dying age of steam with an eventual 12,000 photographs. He himself died suddenly in 1978 on Appleby Station, whilst photographing the locomotive Evening Star. When he was a curate, my grandfather was his bishop, and my grandfather remembered visiting to admonish him for spending too much time on rolling stock and not enough on parishioners. Instead, they enjoyed a whole day playing with his miniature railway. 

My great uncle Sydney was another vicar with a life-long obsession of steam. Alas, after 17 years in his quiet rural parish in Shropshire, one night he stumbled into the path of the Shrewsbury to Crewe express in a “dazed state”. The newspapers grimly announced he had “achieved the feat of scattering himself over a distance of twenty miles”. At his funeral, his parishioners agreed there could have been no more fitting an end. I still have his collection of plate glass negatives of locomotives dating back to 1910.

The cold, dispassionate Beeching was absolutely the wrong man for the job. As he told the Daily Mirror at the time, “I have no experience of railways, except as a passenger. So, I am not a practical railwayman. But I am a very practical man.” John Betjeman, writing persuasively and eloquently in the Daily Telegraph each week, and later Ian Hislop, hit the right note in observing that Beeching,and all he stood for were technocrats. They “weren’t open to arguments of romantic notions of rural England, or the warp-and-weft of the train in our national identity. They didn’t buy any of that, and went for a straightforward profit and loss approach, from which we are still reeling today”.

However, it has also been argued that Beeching was the unwitting fall-guy for the Minister of Transport of the day, Ernest Marples. He was a self-made businessman who “got things done”, but he retained an air of shadiness about him. Macmillan should have known better. Marples had been managing director of Marples Ridgway, awarded contracts to build the first motorways. When challenged about a conflict of interest, he sold his 80 per cent shareholding to his wife. Elevated to the peerage, Marples fled to Monaco in 1975 to avoid prosecution for tax fraud. So, in some ways, the thing was a stitch-up. Marples directly benefited from the widespread cuts advocated by his subordinate, Beeching. Macmillan had his eye off the ball and was already considering retirement, hastened by an operation for prostate cancer six months after Beeching’s report. 

The Prime Minister was astute enough to ensure the press presented the cuts in a positive way, however. From the Cabinet papers of the day, we now know the day before the publication of The Reshaping of British Railways, Beeching’s findings were rewritten to suggest the cuts were the first phase of a co-ordinated national transport policy, with advanced plans to replace the axed rail networks with improved minor roads and local bus services. In reality this was political fantasy (my inner lawyer cautions against more extremist language), for the bus-road subsidy would have cost more than that already paid to the railways. The promise of replacement bus services should have come with a guarantee of remaining in place for at least 10-15 years, because most were withdrawn after two, forcing more motor traffic onto an already inadequate road network.

The net effect was that towns like Merthyr Tydfil, Leek in Staffordshire and Leigh in Lancashire were left bereft of any railway connectivity. The ancient cathedral city of Ripon lost its station in 1967; today, the building has been repurposed into luxury flats. The significant new town of Milton Keynes would have no rail station until 1982. Seasonal holiday resorts were most affected by the closures, with Beeching wanting to cut all services along the coasts of north Devon, Cornwall and East Anglia aside from Norwich to Great Yarmouth. Some 75,000 people who live in the Scottish borders remain completely isolated from the rail network, where the last stopping point closed in 1969. It is the only mainland region of Great Britain without a railway station.

Those on the Isle of Wight were recommended for closure, as were all services in the Lake District, never mind almost every inch of iron rail in Wales. One of the most significant closures was the line from London Marylebone to Leicester and Sheffield. Michael Palin observed that his father used to travel to London regularly on an express called the Master Cutler, from Sheffield to Marylebone. “It suddenly disappeared. Beeching was definitely a villain, to me. There was something about the scale and the brutality of the attack that I remember at the time I felt was wrong.” In wider terms, railway towns such as Crewe and Swindon went into rapid decline. Modern research by the LSE has concluded that the places most exposed to rail cuts have seen 24 per cent less population growth, with a brain drain of young and skilled workers, and an ageing of their inhabitants.

Not all of Beeching’s recommendations were implemented; Harold Wilson’s incoming government of 1964 won partly on a pledge to reverse Beeching. The new Minister of Transport Barbara Castle started to halt the more extreme surgery in 1965, but most damage had already been done. Had Beeching had his way, there would have been no railways north of Perth or west of Aberdeen. The nation has never quite forgiven him for his carnage — advertised as pruning at the time, but amounting to a wholesale butchering of the network. There remains the suspicion that misleading data was used, where observations of passenger and freight volumes were made at off-peak hours, which did not reflect real usage rates. It is noticeable that Beeching also favoured lines running north-south into London, over those running east-west, especially in the Midlands and the north of England. We see this trend continuing with HS2. Without doubt, Beeching contributed to the London-centric nature of today’s UK’s economy. The north-south divide was not preordained, and not even evident in 1960, but Beeching more than any other individual helped create it.

One side effect with us still today was the complete absence of legacy planning. There was no attempt to preserve the routes and their infrastructure for possible future reuse. This has left the extraordinary situation where the old lines and buildings were sold for housing, industry or agriculture, meaning almost none of the former system was salvageable. Infrastructure like viaducts and tunnels remain, however, which their successor railway companies have to maintain at their expense to this day. A decade later, the government of the day was forced to acknowledge that no savings to the railway network had been achieved. Costs had risen through increased wages of the much smaller workforce, new rolling stock, whilst the wear and tear on roads had multiplied alarmingly as motor usage mushroomed. It had all been a shambolic, short-sighted disaster. 

The nation should have learned its lesson from this catastrophe, but a new Beeching is at work today. It is none other than the Home Secretary and her obsession with illegal migrants. She wishes to house some of them on hallowed ground once belonging to the Royal Air Force. Built between three villages, RAF Scampton first opened for business in August 1936. Through happenstance it has survived with many of its wartime buildings as one of the best preserved Bomber Command airbases in the country today. The hangars and control tower, accommodation blocks, offices, guardroom and Art Deco-era officers’ mess, all built of distinctive yellow-ocre Lincolnshire brick, still stand amidst 300 acres of windswept concrete hardstanding. 

Scampton is unlike any other airbase. The 1939–45 war saw the shadows of Hampdens and Manchesters, even Spitfires and Hurricanes, fly over its pastures. After the war, B-29s, Canberras, Vulcans and eventually the Hawker Siddeley Hawks of the Red Arrows flashed overhead. Above all, Scampton was home to the Avro Lancaster. Hundreds of them departed these Lincolnshire fields to bomb Nazi-occupied Europe, and rather fewer of them returned.

The Home Secretary might as well fill the Tower of London with asylum seekers

Then came Guy Gibson, 617 Squadron and the “Upkeep” bouncing bomb. On the night of 16 May 1943, Gibson led 19 Lancasters from Scampton to attack the Sorpe, Eder and Möhne dams, whose water flow was vital to Germany industry in the Ruhr Valley. Eight failed to return, and fifty-three aircrew were lost. Following the raid Gibson became the third airman based at Scampton to receive the Victoria Cross. To this day, Operation “Chastise” remains the RAF’s most famous and widely remembered operation in its 106-year-old history. His men came from all over the world — from all corners of the British Isles, from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Some ground crew hailed from the Caribbean. Gibson became a household name in the USA, too, where he toured to promote the British war effort later in 1943.

The RAF’s commemoration of Gibson and 617 is not about the obliteration of German lives and German cities. The highly successful visit just made by the King to Germany underlined Britain’s contrition and a new spirit of unity. It is about leadership and training. Gibson was only 25 when he led the Dambusters mission. We might have heard more of him after the war, for he had been selected as the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Macclesfield, a seat the Tories held in 1945. It was not to be. On 19 September 1944, he was shot down and killed whilst piloting a Mosquito over Holland.

The RAF’s achievements are commemorated nearby at the superb International Bomber Command Centre overlooking Lincoln, where the names of the 57,861 men and women who gave their lives supporting the organisation are memorialised. I was humbled to find an uncle I never knew, Pilot Officer Eaton Geoffrey Cubitt, RAFVR, listed there. He was killed in 1941 when flying a Whitley with 102 Squadron. He, too, might have gone on to greater things, for a fellow pilot was Leonard Cheshire. There is also the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, London, unveiled by the late Queen in her Diamond Jubilee year, 2012. 

The Centre in Lincoln and Memorial in London are less meaningful without an airbase to inspect. The local authority, West Lindsey District Council, realised this. Working with a number of local partners, it agreed a £300m deal to revive the site as a centre for aviation, heritage, tourism, education and research. Guy Gibson’s office is there, with his 1940s-style utility furniture, notice boards and Bakelite telephones. 

All seemed well for Scampton until the Home Secretary stood up in the House of Commons on 7 March this year and announced, “There are 100 million people around the world who could qualify for protection under our current laws. Let us be clear — they are coming here.” When challenged, she doubled down the very next day, insisting, “There are 100 million people displaced around the world, and likely billions more eager to come here if possible.”

Whilst it is true that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated the global number of forcibly displaced people at 100 million, most remain in their own countries or neighbouring states. They are certainly not bound for these shores. If she believes they are, then she herself needs housing in more secure accommodation than that she is proposing for the asylum seekers. If she does not, then (and my inner lawyer again cautions me) we are being misled.

She has earmarked Scampton to house some of them. Now, make no mistake. Once you pick at the infrastructure of an old airbase, alter the buildings, demolish others, plough up runways and put up fences, you commit the same sins that Richard Beeching did in the 1960s. Scampton will become meaningless as a centre of RAF heritage. My senior friends in the armed services, good civil servants that they are, are not allowed to comment. One admiral of my acquaintance observed that the Home Secretary’s behaviour over Scampton is the equivalent of shoehorning as many migrants as possible into the hulk of HMS Victory, happily sitting in her dry dock at Portsmouth. Equally, a general vouchsafed to me the Home Secretary might as well be filling the Tower of London with asylum seekers, such seems to be her attitude to heritage and history.

What makes me cross (my inner cardiologist advises nothing more) is the temporary nature of it all. The Home Secretary’s Scampton “hospitality” can only be a short-term fix. In the dying months of his Prime Ministership, Jim Callaghan confided in an aide, “You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.” I suspect the General Election, January 2025 or sooner, will be another such moment. The Home Secretary and her policies will be blown away as dust. Her name will be forgotten, but her legacy is in danger of being the destruction of Scampton. 

On a quiet night when the wind is still and the moon is full, you can sit on the terrace of Scampton’s officers’ mess. It requires little imagination to hear the cough and splutter as first one Merlin engine struggles into life, then another and eventually all four. A flare signal from the control tower and a heavy dark shadow glides past, then another and another. There is the reek of aviation fuel and rubber on concrete, and they are gone. Rather later, they struggle back, perhaps fewer in number, limping along, some on mostly-silent engines. The control room picks up faint signals from over the North Sea. SOS. SOS. Today, those signals mean “Save Our Scampton”.

Were the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman still with us today, I feel sure he would already have penned a volume of protest entitled Planes and Buttered Scones. Instead, my friend Russell Chapman (who is not good at blowing his own trumpet, so I shall blow it for him) wrote these lines a few days ago:

Once the home to six-one-seven
Gibson’s little piece of heaven
Front line now in culture wars
Jenrick laying down the laws
Braver men than Braverman
Chastise those who think they can
Cancel Eder, Möhne, Sorpe
Heritage to ragged pauper.