All of which is to say that Ernest Marples<\/a> was not a cartoon villain: he achieved some genuinely good things. But in several important respects \u2013 political, moral, the interests he fought for and kowtowed to \u2013 he was both the cause and symptom of a country about to get onto the wrong track.<\/p>\n Alfred \u201cErnest\u201d Marples was an early example of a character type then still rare: the genuinely working class and self-made Tory. (His grandfather had been gardener at Chatsworth, home to the in-laws of his rather more patrician ally Harold Macmillan<\/a>.) <\/p>\n Born in Manchester in 1907, he attended grammar school and qualified as chartered accountant before moving to London, where he made a fortune dividing large Victorian houses into apartments. From this he built up a sizable business empire, co-founding the international engineering firm Marples Ridgway<\/a> in 1948.<\/p>\n This expertise would prove useful when \u2013 after he was elected Tory MP for Wallasey, just across the Mersey from Liverpool, in 1945 \u2013 he was appointed Macmillan\u2019s deputy as housing minister, charged with getting Britain building the record 300,000 new homes a year it needed after the war. <\/p>\n In stark contrast to certain more recent housing ministers<\/a>, he succeeded. Before the 1950s were out, thanks to a stint as Postmaster General (where he oversaw the launch of premium bonds) and a talent for self publicity and eccentric dress (blue suits with orange-brown shoes, my god!), he was a familiar figure on the national stage.<\/p>\n And then, in 1959, Macmillan \u2013 by then Prime Minister \u2013 appointed him transport minister.<\/p>\n Marples\u2019s record at transport was not all bad. Creating the motorway network, whatever you think about car culture, must surely be counted a good thing. Ditto the Road Traffic Act (1960), which introduced the MoT, yellow lines and traffic wardens.<\/p>\n But in 1961, he also appointed Dr Richard Beeching, an executive from manufacturing giant ICI, to work out what to do with Britain\u2019s declining and heavily indebted network. He paid him \u00a324,000 a year \u2013 nigh on half a million today \u2013 to do it.<\/p>\n Two years later, Dr Beeching produced The Reshaping of British Railways. Better known as the Beeching Report<\/a>, it proposed the closure of over half Britain\u2019s stations and 30 per cent of its track. The move was furiously opposed by everyone from poet John Betjeman to Private Eye, which published cartoons of its author with limbs lopped off. Beeching has been a hate figure ever since.<\/p>\n This seems at least slightly unfair. For one thing the railways really were in trouble: freight traffic was moving to lorries, more than 300 branch lines had already closed, and the cuts would continue under Labour. People loved the railways \u2013 they just didn\u2019t use them.<\/p>\n But it was unfair, too, because Beeching was just doing the job he\u2019d been given. It was Marples who had set the terms of reference, which assumed railways had to make a profit, rather than being one of those things \u2013 like schools or hospitals or, come to that, roads \u2013 which have enough spillover benefits to be worthy of state investment. It was Marples whose company had financial interests in motorway construction. (He\u2019d handed his shares to his second wife, but come on.)<\/p>\n And it was Marples who decided how to implement Beeching\u2019s recommendations. That included the failure to invest in the bus services Beeching had proposed as an alternative: in an echo of Tory policies to come<\/a>, these too were closed if they couldn\u2019t make a profit. The idea that public transport might be vital infrastructure with value outside the farebox \u2013 that it could benefit the economy by connecting people to jobs or hell just make Britain a nicer country to live in \u2013 didn\u2019t enter into it.<\/p>\n In the decades since, a number of the lines closed in the 1960s have reopened, often at enormous expense. There are other signs that Marples was on the wrong side of history, too. <\/p>\n He commissioned Colin Buchanan\u2019s surprising smash hit Traffic in Towns report, whose ring roads, by-passes and windswept pedestrian precincts would be blighting urban Britain for the rest of the century. He declined to introduce congestion charges, or to toll motorways. It wasn\u2019t just that Marples was the man who accepted the inevitable decline of the railways: he simultaneously decreed the car king.<\/p>\n That, though, was the peak: Marples\u2019s later career was little more than a series of scandals. An investigation of ministerial sexual ethics conducted following the Profumo affair found that he frequented prostitutes, and liked to be \u2013 this feels very Nineties \u2013 whipped while dressed in women\u2019s clothing. That may be why he was dropped from the shadow cabinet in 1966, and never returned to high office. In February 1974 he left the Commons for the Lords.<\/p>\n By then, other problems were starting to mount. The tenants of his London properties were threatening legal action over his failure to deal with structural problems. He was arrested, ironically given who had introduced the rules, for drink driving. Finally, the Inland Revenue came knocking, asking when he might be paying those 30 years of back taxes due on part of his property portfolio. In 1975, he fled to Monaco before the end of the tax year. He never returned home and died in 1978.<\/p>\n \t\tYour next read<\/p>\n
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