PROFILE Beeching Accepts £24,000 A Year Challenge

Press, Volume C, Issue 29514, 16 May 1961, Page 18

PROFILE Beeching Accepts £24,000 A Year Challenge

(St/

SIMON KAVANAUGH]

There is one well-publicised fact that it helps to forget when you begfh finding out about Dr. Richard Beeching: that his annual salary, as the new chief of British Railways, will be £24.000. It is admittedly difficult. The impressive rate his job will carry is just about all that the world has yet gathered about this leastknown of Top Men, since he stepped from personal obscurity last week into a public row, But if you start from that row of noughts, unfortunately, the real man behind it remains frustratingly disembodied: a symbol of the Government’s bold, splendidly broad-visioned enterprise or of its cynical irresponsibility, whichever way your sympathies happen to lie. And at once you are hopelessly awash in a sea of figures, computing that he will draw £461 a week for running those railways: which is almost £66 a day, or £2 15s an hour waking or sleeping. Nor is "Who's Who” much help. He makes its pages for the first time this year, but only by two inches. In the end there is really only one way of discovering Dr. B. You just have to move in close, to the wrong side of a huge mahogany desk on the sombre sixth floor of London’s Imperial Chemicals House. And there is certainly nothing disembodied about the burly, balding businessman of 48 who sits on the right side of that desk: who will soon be earning two and a half times as much as the Prime Minister (and the chairmen of most other nationalised boards). He looks fit and power-fully-built. His clipped moustache could as easily label him another of those memoir-writing generals, as a successful scientist turned industrial manager. Little Experience He admits disarmingly and charmingly that his railway experience adds up to little more than daily commuting between East Grinstead and Victoria, and a few months’ service on a Government committee. But there is one thing you notice right away about Richard Beeching. When the conversation switches to his new job, and the strength of his conviction that he can sort order out of expensive chaos, his voice is suddenly steel-tipped. “This is a difficult, challenging job,” he says. “It is not easy to forgo a challenge of that sort. I expected criticism. But I think my performance may cause any controversy to die down.” If it does. Dr. Beeching will be cheap to Britain at almost any price. Losing £306,000 a Day For his money, he will be required not only to run the railways (which are losing £300,000 a day), but to chart a vast reorganisation for an industry that is never left unnudged for long by political elbows. As chairman of the British Transport Commission, and later of the new British Railways Boards, he must master quickly the whole intricate complex of timetables, engineering, management, unions, and finance. He has five years’ leave of absence from Imperial Chemical Industries in which to decentralise Britain's railway system, giving more authority to regional managements and

/setting the whoje thing humming profitably.

He chose his word well when he said challenge. It has to come back to that salary in the end, of course. Dr. Richard Beeching would not be the proven resultsman he is if he failed to reckon with so relevant a factor as a Parliamentary row about pay, before he even arrives on the politically tricky railway scene. Clearly it was not the money that enticed him into this troubled field. He was getting as much already in 1.C.1. as technical director. But, equally clearly, he finds no quarrel with the Government's reasoning: that it is no more than good business to hire the best man for the job, and that you really must pay him his full market worth. Opposition Protests And that, although one would not want to spell it out in these terms to a railway porter, there is only about £6500 of the £24,000 left after tax anyway, for a married man with no children. There is no visible quivering of that neat moustache at the Opposition howls about his “Himalayan” salary, and about his lack of railway experience. Results come better without bristling, Dr. Beeching has always found. Results are his line. He has been used to getting them fast, with formidable versatility, ever since he left Maidstone Grammar School to take a first-class honours degree as a physicist at the Imperial College of Science and Technology.

He served first at the Fuel Research Station. Then, lent during the war by the Mond Nickel Company, Ltd., to the Ministry of Supply, he worked in the armaments design department, and continued for a time after the war as deputy-chief engineer of armaments design. He could hardly have chosen a better spot, a dozen years ago, for learning about decentralisation than at the heart of the huge powerdelegating cobweb of 1.C.1. The Way Cp He also found there an arena to match his talents. Within an unprecedentedly short time, for a grammar school boy who had not grown up inside the organisation, he was swiftly and surely on the way up to eminence and high pay. His first big job, after three years, was in Canada: the development there of the "Terylene” organisation. He went there as a vice-president of I.CJ. (Canada). Ltd.: he returned home after two years to be chairman of the 1.C.1. Metals Division. Four years ago he was appointed

to the 1.C.1. board as technical director. And last year. Dr. Beeching survived an earlier Opposition protest when, with other non-transport industrialists, he was appointed to the Stedeford special advisory group on the reorganisation of British Transport Commission operations. His searching, highly-criti-cal analysis in this capacity of the present shortcomings of railway administration commanded serious attention in several quarters. Had the Government found “Mr Railways”? Was this perceptive planner, who showed them so sharply what was wrong, also the man who could put it right? The challenge was made, and Dr. Richard Beeching accepted it. "Practical Man” At his mock-Tudor home in the little Sussex village of Ashurst Wood, he potters in his two-and-a-half landscaped acres, and navigates his motor-mower, with untroubled zest. “I may have no expert knowledge of the railways,” he says (a little too modestly already), "but I am a very practical man.” He is He has mown that lawn between jobs before. It has never been long before he came up with a winning action-plan. “Railways,” says Dr. Richard Beeching, “are basically a different management problem, made more difficult by the political interest displayed in them. “It is my sincere hope that they will cease to be a political shuttlecock, and that the difficult task of management will be carried out in something like a reasonable atmosphere." There is in almost every Briton an inbuilt affection for railways that does not exclude often enough antiquated, costly branch lines. If Dr. Beeching excludes them from the start, and gives Britain a slick, spanking service, no porter is ever going to hold that row of noughts against him.—(Express Feature Service.)