Bob Reid's Railway Revolution

Sir Robert Reid, how he transformed Britain's railways to be the best in Europe

George Muir

• Publisher: Unicorn
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781914414756
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Bob Reid's Railway Revolution describes the life and career of the first Bob Reid, always known as Bob Reid One, and the history of the railways since nationalisation. It shows how the organisational changes he forced through when Chief Executive from 1980 to 1990 turned British Rail into one of the best railways in Europe. His reforms, described as revolutionary, saw Inter-City become profitable, the creation of Network SouthEast and for the first time in 30 years, a growth in passenger numbers and freight.

13

PART ONE

BOB’S EARLY LIFE
and the
POST-WAR RAILWAY

14

1

BOB’S FATHER

Reid was a railwayman through and through; he started out, after all, as a young man, a traffic apprentice, carrying luggage and checking parcels onto freight wagons at a small station in the Scottish countryside. But his parents’ life was very different.

When he was born in Sevenoaks on 7 February 1921, his father was far, far away in Rajshahi, a place just north of the Ganges on the vast, hot Indian plain, hundreds of miles from Calcutta and the sea. For leisure, his father had duck and snipe shooting in the winter and pig-sticking in the summer. ‘The finest sport in the world,’ his father wrote, ‘whenever the ground was dry. The wild boar is the bravest brute God made. He goes like smoke for a short burst when first beaten out in the open, then will turn and charge, with a ‘woof-woof’ all he ever says.’

He was a District Magistrate in the Indian civil service, a high-flyer, destined years later to become Governor of Assam and Bengal. One would not have foreseen that his son would become a railwayman.

Bob was born shortly after one of his father’s periods of long leave. The youngest of four, with two brothers and a sister, he was brought up and looked after when his mother was in India by his aunt, Aunt Magdalene, in a fine Nash house overlooking Regent’s Park. As he and his father are both called Robert, the father shall be called Robert and the son Bob.

There is a good record of Robert’s life in India in his book Years of Change in Bengal and Assam. It shows someone who is clever, reliable, intent on the well-being of the people, but conventional in his views. The book’s title is apt, it was a period of time which spanned huge changes.

His first proper posting in 1908 was to Muzaffarpur on the Ganges plain, to help deal with a local famine. There was no electricity, no telephones, no water closets. Motor cars were so rare they would seldom be seen. A weekly leg of mutton would arrive, a risky meal in hot weather after a slow, ten-mile journey on a porter’s head. He would never have seen an aeroplane, but the railway, a harbinger of change, had arrived and was spreading out across the country.

Though a lonely place, it was there, in November 1909, that he met 15and married his wife, Amy Helen Disney, whom he very much loved. Amy was ‘English but with a bit of Northern Irish’. She was full of energy and ideas and kept her husband going when things got tough; it was a good marriage. Their son Bob got his energy from her, explains Janet, Bob’s daughter.

They had three children, two boys and a girl, before Bob was born. Though he never joined his father in India, the periods of leave were long and the letters regular. Bob was close to his father and he would have grown up hearing stories of life in that hot, faraway country.

There was a long period of leave in 1923 when Bob was 2½ years old. It would be the first time Robert had seen his son. There was another when Bob was 7½, lasting a full year until December 1929. By then, they had sold their home in Sevenoaks and moved to The Warren, right on the coast at Thorpeness in Suffolk. It was a happy 16place where the children could stay when their mother was home from India. During this period, Bob, as was the custom of the time, started school life in a boarding prep school.

A further period of leave began three years later, in April 1933, when Bob would have been 12 and about to go off to public school. There was another in 1936, when Bob would have been 15, and another in the summer of 1939, when Bob was 18. Five in all.

With the reform of government in India, falling short of independence, but providing that Britain step back from control of local administration, a new type of State Governor was required, a constitutional Governor, someone who would work with and promote Indian political life. Robert, though not an aristocrat, had an aristocratic bearing, was affable and understood what was required and how to make it work. In 1936, he was appointed Governor of Assam – which he loved. On two occasions in the following years he served also as Governor of Bengal and therefore of the great city of Calcutta.

But it was Assam he loved. As Governor he was responsible for the outlying areas and toured them all, often on foot, for days on end.

There are lyrical passages in his book describing the countryside: ‘There is nothing to beat the climate in spring: the bright sun, cloudless blue sky, and perhaps a glimpse of a big river in the background or, most mornings, very far off, the glorious glistening snows of Kanchenjunga.’

That he loved the work is evident from the number of tours of the frontier and his visits with the peoples living in these remote areas. The hardship, he seemed to relish. They had a day in Cherrapunji, reputedly the rainiest place in the world. He met the Dafla, the Aka, and the Miri, primitive tribes. He met the Abors, short people with powerful legs, well adapted to steep hillsides. He met the Khasi and the Lushais, ‘at first unfriendly for they, too, were raiders of the plains’, and he met the Nagas, ‘warlike and only recently weaned off human sacrifice, but proud to welcome the Governor with a vast parade of marching and dancing’.

News from distant Europe became increasingly dark. In 1938, Hitler marched into Austria and threatened Czechoslovakia. The Munich Agreement was signed. It suggested peace but the prospect of war was very real. 17

When it came, it seemed far distant from Assam. But all changed when Japan entered the war. Days after bombing Pearl Harbor they began their sweep down through Malaysia to capture Singapore and threaten India.

It was then, on 15 December 1941, eight days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that Robert and Amy got news that their son Bob, then enlisted in a tank regiment in North Africa, was missing – but heard no more. Fearful for their son, and fearful for their home in Assam, it was a terrible time. Only later did they hear he was not dead but had been captured.

Assam is a finger of flat land and low hills pushed up towards China and into the eastern end of the Himalayas. It is not a door into India, for it is surrounded on the north and east by high mountains, but airfields in Assam were the closest to China. A massive airlift, thousands of sorties, from the very northern tip of Assam flew ‘over the hump’, the eastern Himalayas, to support Chiang Kai-shek in China in his fight against the Japanese.

By then, the army was dominant in his province, and Robert’s term as Governor came to an end. His last sight of his beloved home in Shillong, the capital of Assam, was in May 1942. He left, depressed and uneasy, to become the China liaison officer in Calcutta. It was a nebulous role with the objective of ‘keeping China in the war’, a task to which a liaison officer could contribute nothing. Robert returned to England in June 1943. But his son Bob was not there; he was a prisoner of war in Italy.

Robert spent the rest of the war heading Post and Telegraph Censorship at the Ministry of Information. He settled in Suffolk, where he lived for twenty years, prominent in local affairs. He died in 1964 aged 81.

AAA

There is, however, this postscript which speaks for itself.

After capturing Singapore, the Japanese invaded Burma and sought to invade India. Their forces aimed to cross the mountains from Burma into Assam, the land Robert Reid loved so much, and reach an important railhead by the Brahmaputra river. There was fighting all the way, in the jungles of Burma where the Chindits, the long-range 18penetration group, made their reputation, and in the mountainous lands of the hill peoples on the border with Assam.

The high pass, which the Japanese reached and through which they had to pass, was in Assam at a place called Kohima. There, a great battle was fought, the turning point of the defence of India. Lord Mountbatten described it as probably one of the greatest battles in history: ‘in effect the battle of Burma…. naked unparalleled heroism…. the British/Indian Thermopylae.’

Three years previously, while Robert was still Governor, an Assam Regiment had been formed. Its strength came from the hillman, the Nagas, the Khasis, the Cacharis, the Kukis, and the Lushais.

This from the book Defeat into Victory, by Field Marshal Slim. He was the ‘soldier’s soldier’, the commander of the Burma Corps:

The main might of the enemy advance fell on this regiment in the first battle of its career. Fighting in its own country, it put up a magnificent resistance, held doggedly one position after another against overwhelming odds, and in spite of heavy casualties, its companies never separated, never lost cohesion. The delay the Assam Regiment imposed on the 31st Japanese Division at this stage was invaluable.

And this:

The gallant Naga’s loyalty, even in the most depressing times of the invasion, never faltered. Despite floggings, torture, execution, and the burning of their villages, they refused to aid the Japanese in any way or to betray our troops….. They guided our columns, collected information, ambushed enemy patrols, carried our supplies, and brought in our wounded under the heaviest fire….. Many a British and Indian soldier owes his life to the naked, headhunting Naga, and no soldier of the 14th Army who met them would ever think of them but with admiration and affection.

These are the people around whom Robert conducted his tours as Governor and for whom he had such great affection. They were fighting for their own lands, but it was a terrible war.

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2

BOB’S EARLY LIFE

As he grew up, it was evident that Bob, though able, was not academic like his father and elder brothers. While his brothers went to Winchester, Bob was a late developer, more sporty than academic, and required coaching in Latin. He went instead to his father’s old school, Malvern College.

This he did not like. It is not clear why, but it is not surprising. These were still hard places and, if you were not clever or did not fit in, life was difficult. Unlike his father, his school record is sparse, showing only History VI, school prefect, Shooting VIII (Captain) and White Medal, awarded to the best shot at Malvern. He was a good shot.

He left at the end of the school year in July 1939, aged eighteen, and spent some time with his parents that summer, who were briefly in England. As talk of war had been everywhere he had joined the Westminster Dragoons, a reserve unit. At the beginning of the war, this Territorial Army cavalry unit became an Officer Cadet Training Unit.

War started in September. It was at first the ‘Phoney War’, nothing happened, so in October Bob went to Brasenose College, Oxford for the first academic year, and joined the regular army in 1940.

The Westminster Dragoons had a direct link with the Royal Tank Regiment so, when Bob joined the regular army, it was to be the 8th Royal Tank Regiment, where he became a captain.

He spent time in Thorpeness, on the Suffolk coast, in the summer of that year, waiting to be called up. There he met Bobby. She was much taken with him, and he with her, but it was not to be. The call-up papers came, and he was away.

WAR AND CAPTIVITY

The 8th Royal Tank Regiment left the UK in April 1941, travelling by ship, the long way aro...