The post-war settlement

The idea of railway nationalisation was no novelty in 1914, and had made some modest headway on the basis of support from trade unions and from railway customers in the small business sector. But it was the First World War which brought the issue to the fore, and indeed made it hard to evade. This was partly because of the success of wartime arrangements, when the railways were operated ‘as one complete unit in the best interests of the state’ (Boscawen 1931, p. 21) and an increased volume of traffic was handled by a smaller labour force. A further consideration was that many of the smaller companies would have been unviable at post-war levels of cost. As in other areas of policy, wartime experience automatically posed the question of whether the gains of state intervention ought to be secured for the future, even if this involved permanent reorganisation. For a short time at the end of the war ‘a political consensus existed for the implementation of a centrally adminstered transport scheme’ (Grieves 1992, p. 24).

In 1919 a bill was introduced to set up a new ministry which would control virtually all forms of transport, and even gave the government authority to assume direct ownership by issuing Orders in Council. This reached the statute book by August, but without its more radical clauses. By 1920 the political climate had changed, and a white paper in June set out the essentials of the new policy. This retained private ownership, with compulsory amalgamation into four territorial groups.