'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 9 / 1

Management Services, Western Region

I returned to the Western Region in 1974. I still think that my move came about because of the analytical nature of the work I was engaged in on the Parcels Business Strategic Plan. Alan Englert, the Board Head of Productivity Services, cannot remember my giant Critical Path Analysis, but remembers my interview. Of that I have no recollection. Such is our respective selective memories.

On all Regions bar the Western, Management Services was the name by which the Work Study and Organisation & Methods (O&M) practitioners went. However, my predecessor, Geoff Goldstone, was a visionary and had developed the WR Work Study and O&M teams into an effective internal management consultancy organisation working with the senior Regional Management team. Geoff had transferred his expertise to the Board where his enthusiasm for technology in the office was to be given free rein. I still remember his repeated mantra of the ‘paperless office’ and the cynicism this provoked, born out I’m afraid over the years as only too true a reservation.

The Western Region Management Services department was around 35 strong with a small office at the Paddington HQ and outbased staff in the three Divisions in Cardiff, Bristol and Reading. However, they were all HQ staff and could be deployed in any of the Divisions. As well as deputies with Work Study and O& M backgrounds (Sidney Manning and Richard Fortt) I had a number of middle range management graded staff with functional rather than productivity professionalism supported by a balance of staff with line management experience and trained Word Study or O&M practitioners. I reported directly to the Assistant General Manager, Jim O’Brien, and had a position on the Western Region General Management ‘cabinet’, unlike my opposite numbers on the other Regions where the department was seen as a fairly low level support group.

However, before I could get my feet under the table and size up my new task, I was nominated to attend the eleven-week BR senior management course at the railway’s Woking Staff College. This was indeed a sign that I’d made it as the course was designed for the mid-career development of those fortunate enough to be destined under the Board’s sophisticated management planning process to be elevated to top management in due course.

On arrival at Woking – still the home of my parents – I found that two of my contemporaries and close friends, Stan Judd from Western Valley days and Ken Shingleton, my successor at Bridgend, were not only members of course 36 as well, but were actually allocated to the same syndicate for a lot of the group exercises we were to undertake. This was totally at odds with the college intention, which was to mix experience and skills as far as possible, but because we now did widely different jobs on different parts of BR, there was no recognition of our common background. The other members of our syndicate sussed out very quickly the rapport between the three of us, which did lead to some fairy efficient division of labour in the various tasks we were given to do, based on our knowledge of each other’s strengths. At 35 I was nearly the ‘baby’ of the group, although I had to give way to the 28 year-old Chris Green already pencilled in for higher things.

I remember that one of the skills we were taught was public speaking and media presentation and each of us had to deliver a five minute talk from a rostrum on a subject of our choice while being videoed and then watch (painfully) the playback whilst being subjected to critical comments from both staff and our fellow students. I have no idea what I spoke about, but I do know that my experience as a preacher in the pulpits of Welsh chapels provoked much comment as did my habit of flinging my arms around and wandering about which gave the video camera operator a very difficult task. The session was immediately after a heavy lunch and the college Principal, Gordon Beard, came in and sat in a chair at the back of the auditorium to listen. At some stage in my oration, I paused and thumped the lectern to drive home my point and there followed a tremendous crash as the Principal woke up with a start and fell out of his chair. The other students were convinced that I had noticed Gordon slumbering and had woken him on purpose, but frankly I was far too carried away by my own imagined eloquence to have noticed that.

The main highlight of the course and looked forward to eagerly by all participants was the one-week overseas tour, where we would visit a mixture of railway and other business enterprises. We got Switzerland in mid winter and were based at Berne for most of the week. On the first Sunday we had our only ‘day off’ when we were guests of the SBB and the Gornergrat private railway, travelling to Zermatt and then high into the mountains, with spectacular views of the Matterhorn. At the top of the Gornergrat Railway, our Zambian member, head of a bus company I think, stepped out of the train into more than a metre of snow and disappeared chortling into the stuff as he’d never seen snow before!

The syndicates split up for a number of tours and our group was scheduled to visit Zurich to be guests of the Swiss Credit Bank to learn something about the Swiss economy in the morning and after lunch we were due to have a session with the SBB Zurich Divisional Marketing people. We suffered one of those very rare Swiss train delays en route because of a freight derailment at Olten and subsequently arrived in Zurich an hour and a half late. We were escorted into the stained glass windowed boardroom, given the full and unabridged presentation and then sat down to a sumptuous lunch at which – and I can still see them – our places each had eight (eight!) glasses of various shapes and sizes of which only one was for water. When, eventually we finished the meal, about 3 o’clock, our hosts, instead of hurrying us to the SBB HQ, insisted on taking us on a walking sightseeing tour on the basis that they would deliver us to the SBB personnel in exactly the same lateness as SBB had delivered us to them. I saw the only revolving cathedral I’d ever experienced and a number of photographs that eventually were exposed and printed I had no recollection of taking. This was very unfortunate for our next host sat us down at a table and delivered us a talk in broken English on the Swiss Rail marketing strategies. Four of the eight of us fell asleep and our tutor, Charles Underhill, actually slipped gracefully under the table although the Swiss Rail manager politely pretended not to notice.

Whilst the Swiss railways are generally held to be the model of efficiency, we did see some surprising things, especially during a half day visit to Lausanne marshalling yard, a huge brand new hump yard that stretched as far as the eye could see from the Hump Tower where we were assembled for a briefing on the SBB freight business strategy. We were astonished to learn that Lausanne was just one of 28 brand new yards under construction – years after the yards built under the BR Modernisation Plan were already under threat of closure because of the emphasis on developing block train working. Because of its geography and laws limiting the size of lorries using Swiss roads, there was clearly more wagon load traffic than in the UK – but 28 modern yards for a country smaller than the UK? We thought we had misheard or that something had got lost in translation, but we were assured this was the case.

Back in London I got down to the task of marketing my new department to potential users from the functions. The Operating Department had been the major user of the organisation’s services and Jim O’Brien encouraged me to make some inroads into the engineering functions, which had been resistant to my predecessor’s offer of help to achieve their productivity and cost reduction targets. Neither Leslie Lloyd, the General Manager, nor Jim O’Brien were engineers and they suspected that all three main functional managers used their technical expertise to baffle general management and protect their budgets from the Board targets being imposed.

We had some success with the Mechanical & Electrical Engineer as the Region was on the brink of introducing the highly successful diesel High Speed Trains and depots had to be designed and the number of required maintenance staff assessed. A team on this liaised closely with our opposite number on the Eastern Region who were similarly poised and their manager, Tom Greaves, and I met occasionally to compare notes and help each other. The idea was to meet on neutral ground between our Regions, although on one occasion we met in a Liverpool pub renowned for its ‘Black Puddings’ (not my choice) and on another occasion we met at a railway model shop in Eastbourne, where we had common interests, as well as enjoying the sun on the promenade where we laid out our depot diagrams for mutual inspection.

The S&T Engineer was also co-operative, but I do remember that it took us a long time to persuade the Regional Civil Engineer, Philip Rees, to let us anywhere near his Department and I remember vividly his defence of the civil engineering budget at meetings chaired by the General Manager where he challenged anyone to question his professional judgement. The result of this stout protection could be appreciated when I moved to the Board and used – when under pressure – to take myself off to write an urgent paper closeting myself to work in isolation on a train going to Bristol or Preston or York. My secretary would complain bitterly about the legibility of my handwriting if I’d been on the West Coast Main Line, the East Coast was acceptable, but she always encouraged me to go west to provide a perfectly written piece of work on Brunel’s billiard table and Philip Rees’s ‘gold plated railway’.

The staff in my department were formed into appropriate small teams for each project, based on their functional background and the specific skills we – Sidney Manning, Richard Fortt and myself – thought necessary. The grades of the staff denoting their salary ranges were based on the experience they had to offer us when recruited and which we widely ignored when selecting the right team for each project. Sometimes we deliberately assigned a junior member of staff as team leader, to give them experience and because of the relevance of their background for the task. Once a fairly new member of the department used this to claim upgrading for the duration of the project. He was promptly persuaded by other staff members to withdraw his application as the other more junior staff relished the flexibility we had adopted and the occasional chance they had to demonstrate what they could do.

We soon found that we had plenty of work in the West of England and South Wales, but the Reading Division was very reluctant to ask for our assistance. This was in part due to the attitude of the Divisional Manager, Albert Barnes, who felt his own staff should make the improvements without outside help and avoid credit going elsewhere. I countered this by offering Albert some of my staff to be seconded to his Division to work with his staff so that the Division could claim the credit for results achieved. This approach was so successful that within six months the Reading Division had commandeered 60% of my resources and I had to look seriously at recruiting more staff.

(After 4 years in this role at Paddington I was promoted to lead the BR Board's Productivity Services and transform the other Regional teams into a strong internal consultancy organisation, as I and my predecessor had done on the Western Region - for my time at BR HQ, see Chapter 9 / 2).