No. 1576
RETIRED RAILWAY OFFICERS’ SOCIETY
www: rros.org.uk
Minutes of Meeting
held in the Gascoigne Room at the Union Jack Club, Sandell St. London SE1 on Monday 30th April 2012.
Present:
President: Theo Steel
Hon Secretary: Richard Malins Hon Treasurer: John Sellar
Thurstan Adburgham / Jim Evans / Bob Malpas (G) / Mervyn RogersChris Austin / Phil Evans / David Maidment / Andrew Salisbury
Stephen Bennett / Les Giles / Ian Markey / Brian Sandham
Ernst Birchler / Richard Goldson / Jim McKie / David Sargent
Bob Bishop / Tony Goodyear / John Meara / Larry Shore
John Bladen / Hugh Gould / Chris Mew / Dennis Simmonds
George Bowden / Ken Green / Philip Millard / Les Singleton
Bob Breakwell / Nigel Green / Mike Miller / Bob Smalley
Vivian Brown / Bob Greening / Geoff Mitchell / Alan Sprod
Ken Burrage / Brian Hammond / Bob Murton / John Stedman
Neal Clarke / Ralph Harding / Peter Northfield / David Stimson
Brian Clementson / Mike Harvey / Ian Osborne / Gerald Summerfield
Richard Cook / Ken Haysom / Mike Papps / Alan Taylor
Alan Cracknell / Donald Heath / Gerry Papworth / Roger Temple
John Craik / Alan Hobson / Mark Papworth / John Tidmarsh
David Crathorn / Maurice Holmes / Gordon Pettitt / Keith Turner
John Cronin / John Jagger / Mike Pipes / Mike Tyrrell
Reg Davies / Tom Jay / Ron Puntis / Terry Warburton
Ray Diver / Alan Keitch / Peter Ratzer (G) / Derek Webb
John Dodd / Iain King / Stuart Redding / Peter Willmore
Derek Doling / Ray Loft / Brian Redfern / John Wilson
John Dunn / Don Love / John Robb / Michael Wright
John Ellis / Bob Wyatt
1. Minutes of the Meeting held on held in York on Monday 2nd April 2012.
These were approved without correction, but subject to the inclusion of David Crathorn and Hugh Gould as members present (their error). The inclusion of Bernard Nield as a guest attracted some comment since he had resigned his RROS membership. It is said he considers membership of the NER Dining Club sufficient to justify attending the York meetings.
2. News of Members.
The President reported with regret the death on 28th March of Otto Robert Benz von Albkron, age 71, born in Budapest and educated in France and Canada after a dramatic rail escape from wartime Hungary. He joined BR from the CEGB as Director of Information Systems and Technology. Funeral at St Mary’s Church in Marlborough on 30th April.
Better news is reported of Malcolm Southgate, now able to smoke too.
3. Welcome to Members Recently Elected.
Philip Millard, Mike Miller and John Willmore were attending a meeting of the Society for the first time and were accorded the customary warm welcome. Philip Millard said he was delighted and privileged to join and flattered to be remembered by members as it is now 30 – 40 years back in time for those who attended courses at the BTSC. The President recalled Course 57 in 1982, when closure of the College was announced, and few would forget such things as the Bank of Millardia.
4. Pension & Travel Facilities Matters.
John Mayfield was at a pensions meeting in Darlington. John Meara said current “Bite” discount cards for SSP outlets will expire on an as yet unannounced date. New ones could be obtained on 0845 450 4652 or at www.bitecard.co.uk where registration requires one to answer a few silly questions but there is the prospect of future Bite card validity at airports.
5. Any Other Business.
The President drew attention to the unveiling of the railway memorial at the National Arboretum on 22nd May (see Meeting Agenda 1575) which he would attend on behalf of the Society. Maurice Holmes and Sam Reed will be there for the BTPF. All RROS members are welcome.
Brian Clementson mentioned his own appearance in a forthcoming BBC Programme on 20th May about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and featuring a visit she made to the railway in Stratford and East London in 1962, recorded on Pathe film, when as an apprentice of 18 he presented her with a model of a Deltic locomotive in the presence of Dr Beeching.
6. Spring Luncheon 19th April 2012.
123 members and guests attended this event at the refurbished ex-Bonnington Hotel. The President admitted that in welcoming Sir David Higgins, Chief Executive of Network Rail, as guest of honour he should declare an interest because his daughter works for them. He also wanted to welcome Delphine Milligan, who had worked at Liverpool Street as Secretary to 4 later Society Presidents and is remembered by many more members. Other guests of note included Lord Richard Rosser and the President’s brother Robin, sometime of LUL. Sir David he said was Brisbane born and Sydney educated, but had come to Britain by way of Regeneration. He built Bluewater and they met at English Partnerships.
Sir David said he had spent a year at Network Rail, only to discover that railways run on a different language to his more normal experience with 10 companies and in 5 previous Chief Executive jobs. His spell at the Olympic Delivery Authority had taught him about timescale problems and land ownership risk, where a very major project could be dependent on allotment holders and their marrow harvest. The key was to listen to the public and use ideas wherever they could be found. As to railways no-one else could come up with the British model, but there is no putting the genie back in that bottle. But it does produce unintended consequences, when business is about taking risks and lawyers should not be distorting behaviour. Yet the public sector is the ultimate risk taker, while NR needs to takes risks with its people to get them to the next level of productivity. This could be through alliances with customers and giving engineers scope to use their judgment. Railways he believes are now a good business to be in and a building block to making communities work. The nation has an infrastructure deficit and transport is the essential connectivity to transfer wealth. NR has a good team and the aim is a new line of sight to future achievement. John Ellis, in giving a vote of thanks, presented Sir David with some evidence of past achievement, a book on the Cotswold Line Past and Present, double, single and redoubled.
7. Talk by Nick Comfort on the Life and Times of Sir Alastair Morton.
The President welcomed Nick, and also Bob Malpas and Peter Ratzer who had been with Sir Alastair at Eurotunnel. He said he had first met Nick at London & Continental where he used to write speeches, but he is from Essex (Loughton) and had attended Highgate School and Trinity Cambridge (overlapping there with Prince Charles). His main career has been in journalism, mostly at the Telegraph where he writes Obituaries, some with good purple patches. Nick said he had also briefly been a SPAD (not the railway version but a political special advisor), only to find his MP reshuffled 4 hours after his appointment. He is the author of a book on the Channel Tunnel (not yet remaindered), the Mid Suffolk Light Railway, and one on the decline of British industry. He reckoned there were people in the room who could give as good a talk on Morton as he could, but the man was a larger-than-life character, described as an elemental force or a colonial born out of his time. Above all he was an honest and committed man, never interested in personal gain, and though remembered for his temper and for not suffering fools gladly, he bore no grudges and his staff were deeply loyal to him. He is of course best remembered as the man who forced the Channel Tunnel into existence.
Robert Alastair Newton Morton was born in Johannesburg in 1938 to a Scots engineer father and an Afrikaner mother. After Wits University he came to Worcester College, Oxford as a de Beers scholar and later to MIT. He began a career in de Beers and was posted to Rhodesia (where he met his wife Sara), but never sympathetic to apartheid he declined a return to South Africa and so went to Washington for a job with the World Bank. He came to London 3 years later, into Wilson’s Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, part of Labour's interventionist approach to ailing industries that created companies like British Leyland. There he became a protégé of Sir Frank (later Lord) Kearton, who thought him a very able young man in a world that had attracted the brightest and best. The IRC did not survive the changes under the Heath government in 1970 so Morton went into business elsewhere. In 1976 he re-joined Kearton at the fledgling British National Oil Corporation, where he was responsible for arranging massive bank loans to finance new North Sea fields. He particularly relished the atmosphere of optimism among oilmen tackling exploration problems in deep seas and rough weather. But BNOC was a prime target for break-up and privatisation by the incoming Thatcher government, a policy which both Kearton and Morton (by then MD) vehemently opposed and so he resigned. A Directorship at British Steel under Ian McGregor kept him occupied and in 1982 the Bank of England asked him to rescue Guinness Peat, a finance house facing serious difficulties. Impressed by his performance there the Bank installed him at Eurotunnel as British co-Chairman along with the French André Benard. The major problems were financial rather than technical. Morton's crucial task was to hold the balance between Transmanche Link (TML, a consortium of 10 contractors) on one side and a syndicate of numerous banks on the other. In the middle was Eurotunnel, a company created to own and operate the tunnel. Benard was later to insist that they had to stick with TML or the whole project would be lost.
Some wondered how a South African could deliver an Anglo-French project, to which Morton retorted in fluent French that thanks to his father he held a British passport. He could also dress people down in Afrikaans, but one of his main tasks was to keep nervous bankers on board and he consistently argued that the project would succeed despite the cost overruns, delays and the confrontations with TML. If his abrasiveness enraged many of the parties involved, his determination, drive and clarity of focus won him many more admirers. In the end the conclusion was that God created Alastair to get the Channel Tunnel built. That was probably the epitaph many held when, at the Memorial Service in a full Southwark Cathedral after his untimely death at the age of 66 in 2004, people said how proud they were to have known him.
Bob Malpas was able confirm many of the points made, having been on the ET Board from 1987. After the breakthrough a dinner was held in the tunnel, a famously cold event at which they wore overcoats and ate to music from Verdi’s Aida, supposedly written to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, which went bankrupt. Jim Evans confirmed that Sir Alastair could seem a bully but he wasn’t if you stood up to him, and many believed in his passion for the project and his personal kindness. Terry Warburton spoke of Morton’s generosity in facilitating the Charity Walk through the tunnel which raised over £2m in 24 hours, against threats from TML that it would not happen. Nick said his own interest in the tunnel began at Folkestone visiting friends the de Haan family (of Saga fame). After its many false starts, to make the 5½ hour journey by man-rider was an experience, and ET and TML staff would give him stories like the Mile Deep Club. Other stories like the Rabid Animal Threat (never realised) would infuriate Morton because he said that was trivialising the project, but later illegal immigrants were to prove a serious problem. In reality the TML / ET confrontation was always a risk and bringing in John Neerhout of Bechtel was a key move that kept things out of the Courts. Sir Alastair, as he thus became, was a true Mover and Shaker and not an Operator, so he left Eurotunnel in 1996, with its subsequent history of the bankers taking a haircut and the final move into profit coming many years later. Today no-one asks what the Tunnel cost and its existence is accepted as established and useful fact. Unlike France, British decision making has always lacked clear strategy.
The time at the SRA was largely a disappointment; appointed by John Prescott he hoped it could be both strategic and authoritative but held in check by DfT, Treasury and Regulator it could be neither. His belief in public–private partnerships, long franchises and special purpose vehicles only bore fruit with Chiltern, but as a policy his vision now seems right and we miss his drive. It was clear that the Civil Service only created the SRA as a short term measure to satisfy Prescott and once he was out of the way set about its dismantling to reassert their control. He was not consulted by Byers when Railtrack failed, and Hatfield had given the railway industry what he described as a collective nervous breakdown. He left the SRA in poor health in 2001, and devoted much of his last years to another passion, his Chairmanship of the National Youth Orchestra. Chris Austin, in proposing a vote of thanks to Nick, with whom he had worked at ATOC for another notably idiosyncratic boss, George Muir, admitted that his own time at the SRA as its Director of Public Affairs was an interesting one. Sir Alastair was always his own best self-publicist, and he had little need of a spokesman, but he was a remarkable person and his story is one well worth telling.
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No. 1577 Agenda for Meeting
To be held at 13.45 in the Gascoigne Room at the Union Jack Club, Sandell Street, London SE1 on Monday 28th May 2012.
1. Minutes of the Meeting held in London on Monday 30th April.
2. News of Members.