London Transport

A Hybrid in History 1905-48

James Fowler, Kevin D. Tennent, Alex G. Gillett

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789739558
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: Business

The London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) was a unique hybrid public body accountable only to a small number of stakeholders, yet it delivered substantial improvements in public services and provided good working conditions for its employees at the cost of its investors.
London Transport: A Hybrid in History 1905-48 innovatively combines a revisionist historical narrative with a systematic analysis of quantitative and qualitative research to explore how and why the LPTB achieved rare popularity amongst its customers. Divided into three sections, the book explores the financial operations of the Board, the Board as a system of governance and the leadership and management within the LPTB. Using the extensive Transport for London archives, James Fowler conducts a timely assessment of the public network utility that once made London transport domestically popular and internationally admired.
With debates about British transport policy ongoing, this book is an illuminating read for scholars and students researching within the areas of business management history, transport and public sector governance and administration.

Chapter 1

Modern Relevance

London Transport’s Current Situation

A total of 1.35 billion journeys are made on the London underground every year. Another 2.24 billion journeys are made on London’s buses. These are record levels in the history of the organisation and they are comparable to the 1.7 billion annual journeys made on the entire national rail network and the 2.20 billion trips made on buses nationally outside London. If that were not enough, then it is worth considering that the 1.7 billion national rail journeys include a significant proportion of journeys on London commuter lines that are not counted as part of Transport for London (TfL). The size scale and dominance of London in the public transport market is self-evident. Simply, it is as big as all other public transport in the UK combined.

Rising usage has gone hand in hand with a quarter of a century of major investment, most visible in the form of the Jubilee line and Crossrail projects. As well as these flagship developments the system as a whole has grown palpably newer, cleaner and safer. But it has not always been so. After the Second World War a long decline in the service and usage set in, cumulating in a nadir of public usage in 1982 with just 1.5 billion journeys on all modes and major disasters at Moorgate in 1975 and Kings Cross in 1987. But despite the period of decay London transport remained firmly in the public eye, albeit for the wrong reasons (Cutler, 1982). London transport’s scale and preponderance guarantees attention, whatever the wider narrative.

The more positive and prestigious story since the 1980s runs in parallel with the re-invention of London once again as a pre-eminent global city as it was in the nineteenth century. Once again it is a home not only to the British governing elite but international financial elites, only seriously rivalled by a few conurbations in the United States and Asia. This prominence is symbolised politically by the devolution of power given to the Mayor and by London’s successful hosting of the Olympics for a third time in 2012. This catapulted London’s mass transit system up the public and political agenda, with the four yearly contests for the mayoralty dominated by the transport issue above any other (Edwards & Isaby, 2008).

In national and municipal politics the contested legacy of utility privatisation in general and rail privatisation in particular at this current moment indicates that the search for the best system of service, ownership and control of London transport is far from over. In the public sphere, as well as the daily media coverage, the wealth of literature from the purely nostalgic through the technical and political to the academic shows how much the issue of London transport is engaged with by hundreds of millions of people in the UK and visitors from abroad. Given the stakes, it is a safe bet that the provision of London’s transport will remain highly contentious for decades to come.

A Brief Overview of the Contents of this Book

The purpose of this book is a simple one. It is very easy to find facts, figures, pictures and maps from past and present about London transport. It is much harder to find out why the system works as it does or make valid and reliable judgements about it. Many people have a view about whether it is good or bad, but few arguments are situated in historical context, presented analytically or systematically backed up with evidence. In place of these there are a number of uncritically accepted assumptions, most of them dating back to the period 1905–1948, the time scale which this book focusses on.

The book aims to redress this. It provides a systematic analytical account of whose financial interests London transport operated in, how it was governed and how it was led. It asks why those things came to be and what the implications were. It does not concern itself with rolling stock, rural branch lines or the design of signalmen’s buttons. It does not want to add anything significant to the detail of the chronological history. Its central purpose is to ask why things happened, not to describe what or how. It situates its analysis in the area of business, organisational and management history and provides a historical perspective on the present service and theories of quasi-public or ‘hybrid’ organisations.

It finds that contrary to previous accounts, in financial terms the passengers rather than the investors were the primary beneficiaries but that investors were nevertheless better remunerated than was thought. It also finds that London transport was run by an essentially unaccountable body. However, contrary to current theory on hybrid organisations, there is no evidence that this was detrimental to the quality of service provided. In fact, service quantity and quality markedly improved over the period in question. Finally, the management and leadership qualities of the two central figures in London transport in first half of the twentieth century are critically and systematically assessed here for the first time. Previous accounts do not place their evidence within relevant theoretical frameworks and are often somewhat hagiographic. The scale of the achievement in unifying London transport is held to have been a strategic end in itself. Which corporate strategies were pursued and what their long-term implications were has been left largely unexamined up until this book. All these conclusions have important implications for TfL today.

In summary, initial accounts published 40 or 50 years ago have been uncritically accepted and are themselves too unquestioning of the sources they used. The history of London transport is overdue a revision. Having seriously censored of the current state of affairs in what is known about London’s transport system, this critique should now justify itself by a much closer look at what has been said and written up until now.

Arguments, Omissions and Misinterpretations

Conceptually, what are people arguing about? The gist is straightforward as the tension between the ideals of public administration and the realities of politics in the governance of large public network utilities is a well-trodden theme. In London transport the controversy arose out of a growing political conviction the late nineteenth century that purely private sector provision no longer provided the necessary services for the capital. This ran up against an immense institutional resistance to idea of public ownership rooted in concepts of laissez-faire and the defence of private property. This argument has never gone away.

However, the detail is a great deal more nuanced than this. Regrettably, the reader will not get much of it from most of the classic histories or the nostalgia industry which, as I will show, were written with a very different purpose. It is easy to find what and how things happened in London transport, but surprisingly hard to get to grips with why they did. In this book, the evidence and arguments for why are laid out in this section in three blocks: financial, governmental and executive. However, before looking at those specifically, I make some general observations.

Firstly, the nostalgia industry is dominant in the history of London transport rather than more rigorous evidence-based argumentation. This book is firmly pitched at the latter, though I acknowledge that the cultural influence of London transport in general and the London Underground in particular has been so great that it is impossible to ignore nostalgia completely. It has undoubtedly influenced academic writing on the subject. Thus Barker and Robbins (1976) reference ‘Metroland’, a concept they acknowledge as entirely originating in popular marketing and literature. Ashford (2013) discusses both the development of the inner London tube network and suburban ‘Metroland’ underground through the medium of novels, paintings and films. Dennis (2008) considers the development of London through fictional writing and art in his book Cities in Modernity. Whilst the focus here remains on academic texts, the influence of popular culture is recognised and acknowledged throughout.

Secondly, few accounts of the development and history of London transport discuss it in terms of the service provision being a result from the clash between organisational dynamics and political models. As Tennent (2017) observes the case studies are often focussed on the sequential narrative at the cost of critical analysis or focusses on the passenger experience rather than the actions of overarching institutions.

Both these tendencies are present in the canonical histories of London’s transport. Some of these include Jackson and Croome’s Rails Through Clay (1993), Barker and Robbins’ A History of London Transport (1976) and Wolmar’s The Subterranean Railway (2005). Their principle form and purpose is a descriptive chronological narrative covering the progress of network expansion coupled with a supporting cast of technical developments that made each stage of development practically feasible. This method of approaching the topic is understandable, as the authors’ purpose is mainly to give panoramic views of the entire development of the system and its component organisations over more than a century. Nevertheless, concentrating on the physical results of transport policy and neglecting the politics of its governance is a considerable omission. As we will see almost all the recurring arguments described are in a strategic sense the highly attributable but under acknowledged product of the actions of London’s private, public and quasi-public bodies.

The issue with relatively descriptive and uncritical accounts is that whilst the critical junctures in the development of London transport are all carefully documented, the authors ask few critical questions about why events turned out as they did or in whose interest these outcomes were. For example, both books cover the issue of the under-payment of the ‘C’ stockholders by the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) in the 1930s. In theory, this should have resulted in the receivers taking over, but in the event nothing happened. Few explanations are offered, though the row over the issue was important enough to lead directly to the Vice-Chairman’s resignation. Similarly, when covering the initially unchecked expansion of private ‘Pirate Bus’ operators in the early 1920s, little is made of the intense political struggles and compromises between figures in the London County Council (LCC), The Labour Party, Trade Unions and Parliament that determined the course of events. Finally, there is a tantalising section in Jackson and Croome (1993) entitled ‘Why the LCC failed to control London Transport’. Sadly, this discussion is scarcely a page long and concludes by informing the reader that the government failed to transfer powers to the LCC ‘For reasons best known to itself’. This is distinctly uninformative. The preference for description over asking hard questions and analysing the ‘so what?’ of each situation presented is a structural weakness throughout these books which means that whilst the physical effects of the development of London transport are well described, the link is seldom if ever made to the underpinning political causes and interests.

The lack of engagement with the governance London transport can be overcome by moving further afield from London, and in some cases further away from transport itself. Given the title this may appear self-defeating, but the paucity of the specific compels an investigation of what is related. There are a variety of books such as Barker and Savage’s An Economic History of Transport in Britain (1959), Bonavia’s Railway Policy between the Wars (1981) or Hannah’s Engineers, Managers and Politicians (1982) all of which do deal with the interplay between the organisation and management of public sector network utilities and political trends. More currently, Hibb’s The Dangers of Bus Re-regulation (2005) or Wolmar’s Are Trams Socialist? (2016) discuss the governance of public transport in Britain in greater detail but are either too focussed on one mode (Hibbs) or else move too far in other direction by adding few specifics to an already too generalised commentary in other previous books (Wolmar). Overall, the issues considered are clearly highly analogous but the conclusions are either too indiscriminate, focussed on parallel but separate industries or consider too narrow a slice of the entire transport market.

Finally, there are series of books which directly deal with the issue of the changing governmental framework surrounding all sectors of the economy in the interwar years at a national level. Middlemass (1979), Broadberry (1986), Millward (1995), Chick (1998), Greaves (2005) and Floud and Johnson (2008) all offer commentaries on the 1905–1948 period which are invaluable in understanding the political-economic context. Occasionally London transport merits a specific mention as an organisation. However, the focus here is on sectors rather than organisations, and on macroeconomic trends and industrial policy in general rather than the particular. As such, they offer highly important contextual understanding but few useful details.

In terms of municipal governance, the general history of London’s government in the periods discussed here is covered by Robson (1939), Laski, Jennings, and Robson (1936) and Finer (1941) as well as forming part of Chandler’s book Explaining Local Government (2007). Other books from the period such as Porter (1907), Shaw (1908), Masterman (1909) and Knoop (1912) are highly illustrative of the state of political debate about public, municipal, quasi-public and private organisations providing collective goods at the time in question, though as the reader will see, Porter and Shaw’s perspectives are very narrow financial ones. There are also a wide range of recent books and articles considering the overall performance of quasi-public bodies in providing public services such as Common, Flynn, and Mellon Managing Public Services (1992) and Overman’s Agentification and Public Sector Performance: A systematic comparison in 20 countries (2016). Again, the issues raised are analogous but the focus of the research either does not concern either transport or London (Overman) or deals with just one element of the London transport network amongst many other studies in a later time period (Common).

We are left then with a handful of books and articles that explicitly cover both London’s transport, its governance and its management. The principle example from the period is Herbert Morrison’s Socialisation and Transport (1933). This is an excellent analysis of the situation from a well experienced though biased politician. Obviously, it also stops short in 1933 at the very inception of the first wholly unified body running London transport. More recently, there are a series of articles and academic works each covering different aspects of London transport. These include Turvey’s 2003 article ‘The London County Council’s River Steamboat Service’, Hey’s ‘Transport Co-ordination and Professionalism in Britain Forging a new Orthodoxy in the Early Inter-War Years’ (2010), Darroch’s ‘London’s Deep Level Tube Railways: Visibly Invisible’ (2012) and Turner and Tennent’s ‘Progressive Strategies of Municipal trading: The Policies of the London County Council Tramways c. 1891–1914’ (2019). Taken as whole, these are excellent guides that explicitly cover critical arguments in all the issues mentioned above. Nathan Darroch’s work is especially useful as it examines the changing attitude towards land ownership in London and its pervasive influence on the construction of the underground railway network. Turner and Tennents’s article does a similar job in linking the politics of the LCC to the construction and amalgamation of the tramway network. Overall, they emphasise that political attitudes to property ownership versus collective or ‘club’ goods such as transport are a key element in explaining the governance puzzle on London.

Finance

We now move to a number of specific observations about the way in which the financial data that underpins many of the authors’ assumptions is handled and presented. The primary weakness which is that Lord Ashfield’s¹ highly personalised and inconsistent views on the finance of London transport are uncritically accepted. Given his extraordinary length of service and seniority it is easy to understand why his opinions have been regarded as synonymous with the truth. The problem is that Ashfield’s views changed frequently, and whilst this is faithfully documented in both volumes, no critical questions are asked about why he might have changed his mind or about which audience he was addressing when he gave varying speeches. Ashfield’s mostly downbeat financial prognostics are propagated and left unchallenged by the authors, leaving readers to wonder why bond issues in the 1920s for the tubes were so enthusiastically bought up by investors. Ash...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Modern Relevance
• Chapter 2 The Historical Development of London Transport
• Chapter 3 Follow the Money: The Investors, Employees and Passengers
• Chapter 4 Who Shall Guard the Guards? The Governance of London’s Transport
• Chapter 5 Solving the London Transport Problem
• Chapter 6 Conclusions for Theory and Public Debate
• References
• Index