1. Forging a relationship: the army, the government and Britain’s transport experts, 1825–1914

On 18 February 1915 the Liberal member of parliament for Glasgow College, Henry Watt, asked the Board of Agriculture if farmers in England’s southern counties had raised concerns about the availability of Scottish seed potatoes for the coming crop. Four days later his colleague, James Hogge of Edinburgh East, questioned the president of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, over the availability of the ‘usual railway facilities’ for the upcoming flat-racing season on account of the ongoing war. On 4 May the Unionist member for Armagh North, William Moore, directed Runciman’s attention to complaints that bleaching, finishing and dyeing firms in Ulster were on the verge of closure thanks to restrictions on the amount of cotton allowed to leave Manchester. Moore implored Runciman to do whatever was required to avoid ‘unemployment and distress among the workers’ of his constituency.¹ In each of the above cases, and many more besides – despite the seemingly disparate nature of the enquiries – the government either referred to information already received from the Railway Executive Committee (REC) or assured the questioner that the matter would shortly receive the REC’s attention.

The REC was formally established less than two years before the outbreak of the First World War, but it embodied a longstanding professional link between the British state, its army and the principal means of transport available for the movement of the army on both home and foreign soil. Composed ultimately of twelve general managers, drawn from the nation’s most prominent railway companies, its existence helped ensure that political, military, economic and social questions with the potential to affect transportation in Britain received the consideration of technically proficient industrial specialists. By the summer of 1915 the REC had become an integral component of the nation’s ongoing organizational response to the emerging conflict, a position it retained for the duration of the war.

This chapter examines the interactions between the British army and the emerging railway companies at the organizational and operational levels before the First World War, contacts that emphasize the army’s willingness to seek out and exploit expertise from civilian sources. The partnership that emerged between the army and the railways was a component of a wider practice of knowledge exchange – particularly prevalent across the engineering profession – that was of mutual benefit to the civilian and military spheres. Members of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) were frequent speakers at the school of military engineering in Chatham and the authors of articles in the Royal Engineers Journal, while their military counterparts were regular lecturers at ICE’s headquarters in London.² Both parties were beneficiaries of the close links established between the railways and the army, although recent research has raised questions about the prevalence of former soldiers within senior roles in the early railway companies.³ As Di Drummond has observed, ‘the military element’ exemplified early railway management, while the idea of a ‘railway servant’ inspired by the concept of service in the armed forces remained popular across the industry before the war.⁴ Even as the railways matured, the bonds between the army and the railway companies did not break. British and imperial railways provided opportunities for soldiers to obtain practical experience in the repair, maintenance and operation of lines, and across the empire British railwaymen worked alongside the military to protect and project London’s power. British soldiers actively sought out and engaged with the experience and expertise that railway managers and their workforces possessed. Together, they contributed to the creation of an army proficient in the skills required to work ‘a vast business organization’ under the most intense pressure.⁵

A cooperative endeavour: the government, the army and the railways

A connection between the government, the army and the railways of Britain was established as early as 15 September 1830 at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and the Liverpool MP William Huskisson were among the dignitaries in attendance. The new method of conveyance got off to an inauspicious start. Huskisson was fatally injured by a passing train, while Wellington was subjected to ‘hooting, cat-calling and shouting’ from a hostile Manchester crowd.⁶ The day’s events ‘prejudiced the Duke for ever against railways’, but their ‘practical utility’ for the carriage of troops was clear to the hero of Waterloo. Shortly after its infamous opening day the Liverpool and Manchester became the first railway line in the world to carry soldiers on active service, when newly arrived soldiers from Ireland were sent inland by rail on 10 July 1832. The 91st (Argyllshire) Regiment were saved a two-day march on the reverse journey before their embarkation to Dublin on two steamers.⁷ From these small beginnings, over the next eighty years ‘the potential of the railways … captured the imagination of many soldiers, not merely Royal Engineers but also senior commanders both at home and overseas’.⁸ In the decades prior to 1914, soldiers of the British army and servants of the country’s largest railway companies participated in a range of civil–military ventures designed both to improve the nation’s security and increase the army’s understanding of a novel and complex industrial tool.

The influence of soldiers over the development of railways in Britain and beyond was considerable. Across Europe, the presence of uncertain land frontiers between emerging nation states and the collective memory of the Napoleonic Wars fuelled military and political interest in the strategic potential of railways. From the 1830s until the eve of war railway construction on either side of the French-German frontier was eyed with deep suspicion, as the laying of more lines and the expansion of railway capacities near the border provided the foundations for the deployment of ever larger forces at the outset of a major war.⁹ Pamphlets and treatises written in France and Germany prophesied the sudden appearance of hostile forces, or championed the railways’ potential as a defensive resource even before widespread construction of lines had taken place.¹⁰ Shortly before his death, General Lamarque declared to the French chamber of deputies that the strategic use of railways would lead to a ‘revolution in military science as great as that which had been brought about by the use of gunpowder’.¹¹ In Die Eisenbahnen als militärische Operationslinien betrachtet und durch Beispiele erläutert, published under the sobriquet of ‘Pz.’ in 1842 by Captain Karl Eduard Pönitz – like Lamarque a veteran of the 1813–15 campaigns – the author argued in favour of the employment of railways for military purposes before he elaborated upon a scheme for the construction of a network of strategic lines to serve the whole of Germany. The protection of Germany’s frontiers from French or Russian attack was the central motivation behind Pönitz’s proposal, and an examination of traffic and equipment within Germany and its neighbours was undertaken by the general staff in Berlin before 1850. However, as Denis Showalter observed, the advocacy of authors such as Pönitz and the relatively puny capabilities of early railways stymied the wholesale embrace of the medium within Germany until Prussian troops demonstrated the practical utility of railways during the counter-revolution of 1848–9. The Prussian forces ‘crisscrossed Germany by rail despite the network’s shortcomings’ and the railways were integrated into the state’s mobilization plans shortly after.¹²

Britain’s situation as an island power afforded its railway promoters a degree of insulation from the strategic considerations that exercised French and German leaders, which reduced the efficiency of the British railway network from the point of view of national defence. Whereas the 1871 German constitution gave the military a standing right to supervise railway construction through the Imperial Railway Office, British soldiers lacked similar influence over – and their naval colleagues sufficient interest in – the provision of lines for principally strategic rather than economic roles. Concerns over a potential French invasion in the 1840s inspired a range of proposals for new railways to improve Britain’s defences on the south coast. However, although the inspector-general of fortifications, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, affirmed in evidence to a royal commission that ‘the whole safety of the kingdom’ depended upon the nation’s ability to concentrate men swiftly – and his stance was bolstered by Wellington’s endorsement – the government declined to act.¹³ At the opposite end of the country, Lord Fisher’s decision to move the Grand Fleet to Scapa Flow in the 1910s was taken without consideration of the railway requirements of a modern navy. While Moltke the elder implored his countrymen to build railways rather than fortresses, ‘[n]othing whatever was done by the State to improve the land approaches to Scapa Flow’ in the decade before the First World War.¹⁴ The Highland Railway, an unavoidable link between the Grand Fleet and London, remained single-tracked for more than three-quarters of its length; it also lacked sufficient siding space and employees to discharge the extra burdens thrown upon it by the flows of wartime traffic.¹⁵

Yet despite their failure to influence the composition of the British railway network, military experts played a considerable role in the industry’s governance prior to the First World War. The unexpected popularity of the Liverpool and Manchester line among passengers prompted the spread of railways across the country. Between 1835 and 1837, parliamentary acts for the creation of fifty new lines – comprising 1,600 miles of track – were passed in the nineteenth century’s first railway mania. By 1848 Britain possessed more than 13,000 miles of track, over which passed some £10 million worth of traffic.¹⁶ As the network expanded the government began to take a more active role in its administration. The railways had, according to the vice president of the Board of Trade, Henry Labouchere, ‘bound the country in chains of iron’.¹⁷ However, the subject of government supervision of the railways divided opinion among the talents of the emerging industry. On the one hand, Isambard Kingdom Brunel warned that ‘Government inspectors would receive no cooperation from railwaymen [who understood very well] … how to look after the public safety’. On the other hand, George Stephenson advised Labouchere to establish a railway department for which ‘supervision without interference’ could provide a guiding principle.¹⁸ The 1840 Railway Regulation Act followed Stephenson’s advice and authorized the Board of Trade to ‘appoint any proper person or persons to inspect a railway’. To guard against potential abuse from those with vested interests the act disqualified anyone who had been a director of, or ‘held any office of trust or profit’ in, a railway company from being appointed as an inspector of railways.¹⁹ Such stringent requirements rendered the vast majority of the small number of railway engineers in Britain ineligible for service with the railway inspectorate. Consequently, the Board of Trade turned to the Royal Engineers to supervise the expansion of Britain’s railway network across the country and to investigate the causes of accidents on parliament’s behalf. Beginning with Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Frederick Smith in 1840, from the 1840s until the 1960s every chief inspector of railways possessed a background in the Royal Engineers. Their relationship with the nascent industry was, in the words of one historian, ‘characterised less by hostility than by signs of partnership’.²⁰

Alongside the government, the railway companies themselves provided opportunities for ex-servicemen in the industry’s first twenty years. Several of the early railways in Britain benefited from former military and naval officers’ experiences in accounts, bookkeeping and the coordination of large bodies of men. Captain Mark Huish, who became the LNWR’s general manager in 1846, was not an isolated case. The Manchester and Birmingham, London and Birmingham, Great North of England, Caledonian and Manchester and Leeds all claimed former captains and lieutenants among their senior staff prior to the era of the ‘railway professional’. Huish’s experience typified the transition. His tendency towards micro-management provided him with a remarkable knowledge of the growing industry, but produced friction that isolated him from his subordinate officers and the LNWR’s directors.²¹ George Neele, the LNWR’s former superintendent, recalled in 1904 that managers with military backgrounds demanded ‘quarter deck discipline … which compared unfavourably in public estimation with the business capabilities of the more practical and less pretentious Carrier’.²² After twelve years at the company’s helm Huish was replaced by William Cawkwell, a man who had begun his career as a clerk at Brighouse station in 1840 and risen through the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway before moving to the LNWR in 1858.²³

As the railway companies gradually erased their connections to individual soldiers, significant developments across the English Channel provided a catalyst that drew the railway industry and the army into closer contact. In 1858, a new rail link between Paris and Cherbourg opened, accompanied by a significant enlargement of the latter’s capacity as a port. The provision of ‘cannons, cannons, cannons, wherever you turned’ at Cherbourg – in conjunction with the increased capacity of the line from Paris to the coast – inspired a reassessment of the national defences across the Channel.²⁴ In August 1859, a royal commission under General Sir Harry Jones was appointed by Palmerstone’s new Liberal government to consider Britain’s defences, in view both of recent improvements in naval technology and the global distribution of the Royal Navy’s assets.²⁵ The commission’s report opened with the stark admission that the navy’s resources were ‘insufficient’ and ‘could not … be entirely relied upon’ to maintain naval superiority and eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. The commission considered the coastline from the Humber to Penzance to be at risk, and recommended that fortifications with an estimated cost of £11,850,000 be constructed across southern England and Wales to protect Britain’s most important dockyards and arsenals.²⁶

The challenges of national defence – coupled with the government’s authorization of the formation of volunteer rifle corps for the first time since the threat of invasion had passed in 1814 – caught the attentions of the ICE. Recruitment for the Volunteer Force had been swift, despite the requirement that all members had to pay a subscription fee to enlist. Whereas the Volunteers of the Napoleonic Wars had no option but to march across country, the British railway network of the 1860s comprised thousands of miles of track upon which men, horses and equipment could be moved to any point of danger.²⁷ However, that track was owned and operated by a byzantine configuration of large and small companies, many with their own locomotives and rolling stock, rather than a single corporate entity. In anticipation of the complications likely to be encountered in the event that a large-scale movement of the Volunteers was required, the ICE’s honorary secretary, Sir Charles Manby, wrote to the institution’s council on 2 July 1860 to suggest the formation of a ‘Volunteer Engineering Staff Corps for the Arrangement of the Transport of Troops and Stores, the Construction of defensive works and the destruction of other works, in case of Invasion’. A month later Manby proposed a new ‘Volunteer Corps of Engineers’, which could organize the railways when war threatened. The corps’ officers, Manby suggested, could be drawn from the railways and would serve under the command of a member of the ICE’s council. Sidney Herbert, the secretary of state for war, responded to Manby’s proposal warmly and ‘asked that a small committee of members of the Institution’s Council and officers from the War Office be formed to consider the proposal fully’.²⁸

Surprisingly, given the prevailing image of the Victorian army under the duke of Cambridge as a stagnant and conservative organization, the most difficult obstacles to the establishment of the new corps came from civilian rather than military figures. Some opposition to Manby’s proposal came from members of the ICE’s council while, despite the War Office’s encouragement, ‘the Railway Companies could not be brought to understand the necessity for, or the advantages of, the proposed system’.²⁹ A full four years elapsed before Manby acquired the names of twenty men who were willing to join him in the new corps, and a list of twelve civil engineers and nine general managers of railway companies was submitted to the War Office in November 1864. The Engineer and Railway Staff Corps (ERSC) was eventually formed the following January, and all twenty-one men were commissioned as lieutenant-colonels in the new corps. The ERSC’s role was to:

The ERSC was thus conceived in 1865 in purely defensive terms, as a bulwark against invasion – a position it retained for the rest of the nineteenth century.

The absence of an invasion did not equate to a paucity of work for the new corps. In the twenty years that followed its formation the ERSC was presented with a range of scenarios by the War Office, and directed to prepare timetables for the transportation of varying numbers of troops to different locations around Britain. The specificity and scale of the exercises emphasized the recognized importance of the railway network both to the mass transportation of large bodies of troops and the sustenance of the national economy. For the ERSC’s first exercise, presented to the corps on 3 April 1865, the scenario called for a swift movement of 280,000 men – drawn from across the country – to forestall an invasion between the Thames and the Wash. Alongside ensuring the movement of the troops ‘with the utmost rapidity and certainty’, the general managers of the railway companies were asked to ‘give special consideration’ to the maintenance of food supplies to London and other large towns ‘which were wholly dependent on the railways for their daily supply’.³¹ The complexity of the movements required to concentrate a force in East Anglia took over a year to disentangle, and when printed by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway the timetable linked to the exercise ran to 311 pages. Over a period of just eighty hours following the companies’ receipt of an order to begin the move, the timetable called for the movement of 962 trains – more than double the number required for the BEF’s embarkation in August 1914.

The ERSC’s response to the War Office’s hypothetical scenarios was time-consuming and expensive. The surviving documents make it impossible to accurately identify the number of man-hours employed in the creation of the timetables, but the costly nature of the activities undertaken by the ERSC was noted by Sir John Burgoyne shortly after the first exercise was complete. ‘It is evident’, Burgoyne wrote, ‘that every Memoir and Paper … must have required much labour not only from the officer himself but his assistants – draughtsmen, clerks, etc., and that many were also the occasion for considerable other expense, such as for Travelling, Books, Maps and other matters’.³² Burgoyne’s comments demonstrate that even when movements were confined to internal distribution – and, therefore, did not involve the coordination of land and sea transport or consideration of many of the accoutrements that accompanied the BEF in 1914 – the military machine’s requirements for transportation demanded an industrial response that could not be restricted to a tiny cadre of trusted individuals.

Changes in the international situation greatly affected both the nature of the scenarios that the ERSC was asked to consider and the urgency with which their responses were developed. The threat of a French invasion, which inspired the first three exercises issued to the corps between 1865 and 1870, receded in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War. Consequently, according to one author, the inspiration for the fourth exercise was the invasion of Britain by a German-speaking enemy as depicted in George Chesney’s contemporaneous novella The Battle of Dorking. The scenario called for the concentration of over 100,000 fewer troops than had been the case in 1865, but discussions on the fourth exercise meandered on for four years before a timetable was produced.³³ A fifth and final exercise appeared in June 1882, after which the reduced threat of invasion eroded the principal reason for the ERSC’s existence. The corps was reduced to an establishment of sixty officers in August 1907 – the initial complement of twenty-one having ballooned after 1865 to over one hundred as entry to the corps was extended to new professions and more railway companies – and by 1910 the corps existed largely on paper rather than as a vibrant civil–military exchange.³⁴ According to Sir Sam Fay, an officer in the corps from June 1902 onwards, by the time war was declared in August 1914 the only function for which the ERSC met was an annual dinner at the War Office.³⁵

One of its members may have perceived the corps to have been moribund by 1914, but the continuation of the annual dinner at the War Office emphasizes both the army’s desire to maintain links with highly qualified civilian specialists and the social status ascribed to voluntary military service by the senior executives of the private firms. (The modern-day Engineer and Logistics Staff Corps retains the same voluntary ethos.)³⁶ Furthermore, the reduced workload assigned to the ERSC did not mean that the professional link between the War Office and Britain’s transport experts was severed after the final timetable was submitted in March 1885. Instead, the working relationship between the military and the railways migrated to a specialized forum that – like the ERSC before it – owed its birth to the formation of war clouds over Europe.

The REC, eventually formed in the wake of the Agadir crisis of 1911, underwent a long gestation. The ERSC’s first call for a ‘central and responsible authority’ to be created for the purpose of coordinating the military’s railway needs was made in 1870, and repeated in response to the fourth mobilization exercise in 1876.³⁷ However, the reduced frequency with which the corps met after the Franco-Prussian War meant that the question lapsed for more than a decade until it was rekindled by the War Office in July 1888. An initial memorandum on the subject of railway coordination in the event of a national emergency was produced the following year by Sir George Findlay, the LNWR’s general manager and a lieutenant-colonel in the ERSC. Findlay’s paper opened with a clear statement in support of the corps’ involvement in railway operations in the event of a war, and emphasized that a portion of the ERSC’s council should sit en permanence at the War Office.³⁸ The pace of change was slow. Eight years passed before a civil–military committee composed of Frederick Harrison, Sir Henry Oakley, George Henry Turner and Sir Charles Scooter – general managers of the LNWR (Findlay died in March 1893), Great Northern, Midland and London and South-Western (LSWR) railways respectively – was established to advise the secretary of state for war on railway matters in the event of a national emergency.³⁹ All four were lieutenant-colonels in the ERSC and advocated that their role, alongside providing a permanent council to examine railway matters on the secretary of state’s behalf, should be to draw up ‘a detailed scheme for the movement of the different troops on mobilization on [sic] data supplied to them by the War Office’.⁴⁰

The Permanent Railway Council, later known as the Army Railway Council and subsequently the War Railway Council, met in full just four times between 1897 and 1910. However, it established the principles upon which the British army and the railway companies interacted before the First World War and undertook voluminous quantities of statistical work on the War Office’s behalf.⁴¹ From the council’s inception all communications between it and the army were directed through the Quartermaster-general’s (QMG) office to avoid duplication of effort, and until 1903 the council’s railway representatives were drawn solely from among the companies with headquarters located in London.⁴² In 1903 the comparative insularity of the council was rectified, and membership was widened to acknowledge both the Royal Navy’s mobilization requirements (which necessitated the name change from Army Railway Council to War Railway Council) and the presence of important railways based outside the capital. The North-Eastern Railway, whose head office overlooked York station, and the Manchester-based Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway both employed huge workforces and operated large shipping fleets in addition to their railway interests. Yet neither had been represented on the Army Railway Council. The railways of Scotland and Ireland, both crucial to the mobilization procedures of the army and navy, were similarly notable absentees. The War Railway Council’s expansion amended these deficiencies: the North-Eastern and Lancashire and Yorkshire railways were added to the English contingent, while Robert Millar and Henry Plews – general managers of the Caledonian and Great Northern Railway (Ireland) respectively – were appointed to represent the Scottish and Irish railways.⁴³

Alongside expanding the council’s membership, the 1903 reorganization extended the scope of its deliberations. For the first time the naval, military and railway elements of the mobilization process could be coordinated, although considerations of national security demanded that only the railway companies directly affected by any contemplated manoeuvres were invited to attend council meetings. Each of the companies represented on the council nominated employees to coordinate the technical work involved in the creation of railway timetables and to liaise with the other companies concerned with the movements of individual trains. Through these methods, timetables for home defence that identified the numbers of troops, horses, vehicles and stores to be moved, the departure and arrival locations for each train involved and the date after mobilization upon which the movement was to take place were compiled and submitted to the War Office within two years of the War Railway Council’s establishment. Following a process of consultation and amendment between the War Office and the railways – one that was mirrored after 1911 in the production and revision of the BEF’s mobilization scheme – by 1909 the railway companies were able to prepare what they regarded as ‘mobilization timetables proper’ for the national defence.⁴⁴

In addition to providing the environment in which a comprehensive mobilization scheme could be devised, the War Railway Council’s expansion presented opportunities for a forensic examination of the possible effects of modern warfare upon Britain’s economic prosperity. As the world’s largest exporter and importer, pre-war Britain lay at the heart of a vast maritime communications network. Britain’s ports played a central role both in the delivery of British products to the globe and the world’s foodstuffs to Britain. Any dislocation to the traffic flows in and out of the country had potentially profound implications for the flows of traffic around the British transport network. On 19 January 1909 the ship owner and Lloyd’s chairman, Sir Frederic Bolton, wrote to the prime minister about Britain’s food security in the event of war with Germany. Bolton warned Herbert Asquith that ‘a suspension of imports [from ports on the North Sea or Channel coast] would divert trade to ports farther from the danger zone, which are not used or adapted to handling import trade. A difficulty would therefore arise in supplying the area normally dependent on the port into which trade had temporarily ceased to flow’.⁴⁵

Bolton’s letter to the prime minister did not represent a serendipitous alignment between the state and private enterprise. Instead, it emerged from another example of the professional union between the armed forces and Britain’s transport experts. As chairman of Lloyd’s, Bolton had been part of a special committee of prominent figures in the shipping industry that assisted with the organization of the Admiralty’s naval manoeuvres in 1906. The manoeuvres had been designed ‘with a view to studying the important question of the Attack and Defence of Commerce’ at sea, and called for the participation of privately owned vessels alongside the Royal Navy’s forces. Between December 1905 and June 1906 Bolton worked out many of the details required in relation to the insurance of the commercial vessels, presented ship owners with an indemnity package to cover their involvement and helped to ‘weed out’ unfit vessels within those offered to the Admiralty for use in the manoeuvres. His work for the committee earned him a knighthood and sparked an interest in the potential dislocation of shipping that inspired his 1909 letter to Asquith.⁴⁶

Bolton’s observations were sufficiently concerning to compel the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) to investigate further, and Bolton joined representatives of the Admiralty in an examination of the challenges involved in the distribution of food supplies and raw materials around Britain in the event of war with another maritime power. The conclusions of their interim report, issued by the CID in December 1909, were pessimistic. ‘The problems involved’ in an investigation of such magnitude and complexity, Bolton began, were ‘many and far reaching’:

The movement of coal provided just one example of the difficulties that might have to be addressed in the event of wartime interference with Britain’s maritime traffic. In 1908 Greater London had received 8.1 million tons of coal by rail. Over the same period just over eight million tons arrived in the capital by ship, the majority of which was despatched from ports on the north-east coast.⁴⁸ In the event of a prolonged closure to traffic of the North Sea, Britain’s railways would be required to provide a vast quantity of rolling stock to undertake journeys far in excess of the distances typically covered by goods trains on the British railway network. As John Armstrong’s analysis of freight traffic in 1910 has demonstrated, the average distance of a goods haul on the railway network was less than fifty miles. South Shields, the port of origin for roughly one-quarter of London’s coal in the same year, was almost three hundred miles away from the capital.⁴⁹ Bolton remarked in his preliminary report that Britain’s strategic planners had hitherto given ‘no thought’ to the requirements of the civil population, and stressed that the naval, military and civilian interests of the nation had to be dealt with in concert.⁵⁰ At the end of his year-long investigation, Bolton expressed doubts as to whether the railway companies could ‘cope with the extra strain that would be thrown on them in time of war’.⁵¹ In response, a further CID sub-committee was established to ascertain whether – given the scenario that all ports from Hull in the north-east, past the Thames estuary, and as far along the south coast as Portsmouth were closed to traffic – the railways of Britain could adapt sufficiently to ensure the delivery of adequate supplies of food and raw materials to the nation’s urban centres.

Such a detailed and complex investigation demanded expert contributions. The railway companies provided them. In January 1911, the general managers of companies involved in the supply of London and the transport of goods to and from Britain’s major commercial ports were instructed to consider how best the railways could address the hypothetical challenge placed before them. The sub-committee presented its findings eight months later, during a summer in which Franco-German disputes over Morocco illustrated the fragility of European peace and a railway strike at home emphasized the industry’s importance to British economic life.⁵² Fay, the Great Central’s general manager and one of the sub-committee’s participants, recalled that:

The sub-committee’s report contained a stark conclusion: if no effective arrangements were in place to connect London by rail to the ports on the southern and western coasts, then ‘famine prices would soon be reached’ in the capital due to lack of supplies. To minimize the risks of dislocation and congestion on the railway network – and to ensure that London’s shops remained stocked and its factories fuelled – the sub-committee recommended that ‘the General Managers who have already been consulted be formed into a Permanent Committee with power to add to their number’. This committee, it continued, should be authorised to control movement over the railway network as a whole in the event of an emergency – to ensure that government priorities received the immediate attention of the railway companies. Fay and his colleagues stressed the importance of ensuring that the ‘controlling body should be in close touch with the military and naval authorities in order that military movements by railway should not clash with special working for provisioning London, and that the same carts and horses should not be requisitioned by both bodies’.⁵⁴

The report’s final observation revisited a familiar theme, as it diverged little from the request first made some forty years earlier by the ERSC:

The contents of the statements made by Britain’s transport experts in the 1870s and 1910s may have been similar, but the contexts in which they were made differed profoundly. France’s humiliation in 1871 had reduced the imminent threat of invasion in the minds of Britain’s military authorities. The entente cordiale of 1904 had removed the French invasion threat entirely, and set in motion a concerted effort between the militaries of France and Britain to understand each other’s working practices. The Agadir crisis in 1911 provided the catalyst for a reinforcement of Britain’s military commitment to the French army – solidified by the Wilson–Dubail memorandum on 21 July, which stated that six British infantry divisions, one cavalry division and two mounted brigades would be deployed on the left flank of the French army by the fifteenth day of mobilization.⁵⁶ The potential for the railways to be called upon to effect the swift movement of 150,000 men and 67,000 horses to the coast, the provision of adequate stocks of coal for the nation’s fleet and factories, and the preservation of goods and commuter services across the country simultaneously offered compelling reasons for the establishment of a permanent link between the government, the armed forces and Britain’s transport experts.

The REC as eventually formed in November 1912 reflected the government’s acknowledgement of the unique skills possessed by Britain’s transport experts. Stanley Baldwin, the president of the Board of Trade, was named the committee’s nominal chairman, but responsibility for the operation of the railways in the event of war was unambiguously left in the hands of the professionals. At the REC’s first meeting Baldwin emphasised that the government ‘had no idea of running the railways themselves. All they wanted was to place the State in such a position that it would be able to give binding instructions and to require separate railways to cooperate as part of a single system … The control of the system would be vested in the … Executive Committee’.⁵⁷ In addition, the establishment of a permanent body comprising the general managers of the country’s most prominent railways afforded the War Office and Admiralty with the opportunity to educate the companies ‘in matters relating to naval and military transport before any emergency arose’.⁵⁸ To prevent confusion and duplication of effort the War Railway Council was disbanded in February 1913, and a communications board was established to coordinate the activities of each party in the REC.⁵⁹

The composition of the communications board illustrated the importance of the railways to an industrial nation on a war footing. The railwaymen – in the first instance comprising the general managers or nominated representatives of the LNWR, Midland, Great Western, North-Eastern, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Great Central, Great Northern, LSWR and Caledonian railways – were joined on the board by prominent individuals with executive responsibilities in their respective departments of state. The QMG, Sir John Cowans, was chairman, and other members of the board included: Sir Edward Troup, the permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office; Rear Admiral Alexander Duff, the director of the Admiralty war staff’s mobilization division; Brigadier-General D. Henderson, the director of military transport; and William Marwood, assistant secretary of the Board of Trade’s railway department.⁶⁰ The board’s members were officials ‘of such high standing that … they were able to decide on their own authority, most of the matters that the Railway Executive Committee … brought up for consideration. In this way a large number of questions, including many of the highest importance, were settled in advance’.⁶¹

The fitting out of the REC’s offices provides an example of the small but important details that the board grappled with in the final months of peace. Sir Frank Ree, general manager of the LNWR and the REC’s first acting chairman, argued at the board’s first meeting that ‘ample offices’ were required for the REC and its staff to coordinate the programme of movements required on the declaration of a general mobilization. The offices, he suggested, needed to be ‘connected by telephone directly to the government departments concerned and with each railway’. The board concurred, and Marwood ‘undertook to bring the matter before the Board of Trade’.⁶² Two months later Marwood reported that the General Post Office was ‘preparing an estimate for the installation of the suggested telephone connection’ with the LNWR, whose Westminster office had been identified as the most suitable location for the REC’s headquarters.⁶³ By November 1913 the work was ‘practically complete’, ensuring that the REC entered the mobilization period before the First World War with a direct connection both to the latest requirements of the state and the situation across the British railway network.⁶⁴

By drawing together Britain’s transport experts, the armed forces and key government departments, the REC’s communications board provided an opportunity for each group to gain valuable insights into the others’ concerns and requirements. Close and frequent access to senior naval and military authorities ensured that senior figures in the railway industry were kept informed of the armed forces’ evolving transport requirements, while contact with the railway companies’ senior executives allowed government and military officials to develop a clearer understanding of the national network’s possibilities and limitations. Yet in the decade prior to the First World War these cross-sectoral exchanges of knowledge were restricted neither to those at the pinnacle of their chosen professions, nor solely to the development of plans for national defence. The railway industry played an active role both in the reform of British government and the education of Britain’s military transport authorities.

The transmission of transport expertise

In a 1973 article, Terry Gourvish analysed the origins, careers and social statuses of the chief executives of Britain’s fifteen leading railway companies between 1850 and 1922. His study revealed that ‘the economic position of the chief executives … showed a steady improvement as the industry developed, and this improvement was in time reflected in a higher social status’. By 1900 the senior managerial figures who went on to populate the REC had already broken down the barriers that separated the ‘paid official from the big business capitalist’, a process that created opportunities for the ambitious railway manager to ‘involve himself in a wide range of industrial, commercial, and even governmental activities’.⁶⁵

Sir George Gibb exemplified the latter of these endeavours. As general manager of the North-Eastern Railway and then managing director of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, Gibb received his knighthood in acknowledgement of his contributions to two royal commissions in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the first, Gibb sat alongside prominent figures from the political and military spheres, and examined the organization of the War Office following the army’s bleak performance at the beginning of the South African War. In addition to hearing evidence from senior military and political figures with obvious links to the War Office’s operations, the committee obtained information from the Admiralty – about the working practices of the Royal Navy – from ‘railway companies, from important manufacturing companies, and from large cooperative societies with reference to their business procedures’.⁶⁶ In the second, Gibb joined a panel of parliamentarians, civil servants and selected experts – including his compatriot on the ERSC, the civil engineer Sir John Wolfe Barry – to investigate potential improvements to London’s transport network.⁶⁷ Over the course of two years the committee held 112 meetings, interviewed 134 witnesses and visited the United States and ‘various continental cities’ to observe measures taken elsewhere to deal with the rapid growth in demand for urban transportation.⁶⁸

Gibb’s inclusion on such committees guaranteed that their deliberations received the input of a man with considerable experience in an industry that had faced the administrative challenges of large-scale organization – which had graphically taxed the extant military bureaucracy in their struggle against the Boers – and one that had ‘led the way in developing relatively advanced techniques in business management’.⁶⁹ Yet Gibb’s contribution to the enhancement of Britain’s military administration was far from unique among his peers in the railway industry. At both an organizational and a technical level, Britain’s transport experts engaged in activities designed to improve the army’s ability to operate efficiently in the years preceding the First World War. These links were particularly valuable in Britain as, unlike those of other European powers, the pre-war British army relied upon voluntary enlistment for its supply of officers and other ranks. The abolition of the purchase system in 1871 had been partly conceived to encourage men from middle-class backgrounds, ‘by whose energy the industrial system’ was maintained, to consider the army as a suitable profession.⁷⁰ However, the expanding influence and growing number of learned professions offered more attractive career prospects for the most talented public school and university graduates in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As the twentieth century began, the regular army remained dependent upon what Bidwell and Graham dubbed the ‘left overs’ of the landed classes for its supply of officers and unable to compel trained railwaymen to enlist in the ranks.⁷¹ Consequently, while the continental armies enjoyed largely unfettered access to men with relevant technical and administrative skills – and could direct them into positions where their experience could be exploited most effectively – Britain’s industrious and innovative young men were not drawn to the military life.

The effective use of military railways depended upon the planning of train schedules, an understanding of speeds and carrying capacities, the arrangement of loading and unloading facilities, the coordination of movements with the civil railway authorities and the knowledge of myriad technical details regarding locomotives, rolling stock and the infrastructure that comprised a railway.⁷² To acquire the necessary expertise to handle such demands the Prussian army established a specialist section of railway troops in 1886, which comprised over 4,500 troops by 1900 and provided a cadre for the rapid (and vast) expansion of the railway section through the enlistment of civilian railwaymen upon the outbreak of war.⁷³ Following the shock of the Franco-Prussian War the French had comprehensively reorganized their railway administration. They created joint commissions of military and technical officers able to coordinate the national network in the event of war, and drew their dedicated railway troops from among new recruits with experience on the railways, existing soldiers who wished to train in railway duties and from lists of employees supplied by the six largest railway companies in France.⁷⁴ The British army did not possess a regular force of railway troops until the formation of the 8th Company Royal Engineers in 1882, but did receive substantial voluntary support from the nation’s largest railway company five years later. In 1887 the LNWR’s locomotive works in Crewe provided 6,000 officers and other ranks for the 2nd Cheshire (Railway) Engineer Volunteers, the majority of whom were ‘engine drivers, firemen, cleaners, boilermakers, riveters, fitters, smiths, platelayers, shunters, and pointsmen’.⁷⁵ Like all volunteers the railwaymen were only liable to be called out in case of invasion. Yet in addition to their ordinary infantry drill, the Crewe volunteers underwent a course of instruction in military engineering and – in recognition of their potential value to an army on campaign abroad – each man was encouraged to enlist in the Royal Engineers for a day before being placed on the army reserve for six years. As reservists the men received pay and made themselves available for service ‘in case of need either at home or abroad’. By 1890 a ‘considerable number of men’ had taken advantage of the offer, and the Crewe volunteers served with distinction in South Africa between 1899 and 1902.⁷⁶

However, the recruitment of volunteers did not provide the British army with a large, permanent pool of technically proficient railway personnel. Therefore, in addition to encouraging the enlistment of their men on the reserve list, the railway companies contributed to the practical education offered to regular soldiers. The Midland Railway provided both opportunities for officers to gain experience of the engineering work undertaken by one of Britain’s largest private enterprises and the blueprint for a self-contained course organized by the Royal Engineers at the Chatham Dockyards.⁷⁷ At the Midland’s gigantic locomotive works in Derby a voluntary course of instruction in mechanical engineering was offered to men who wished to enhance their knowledge of the machines deployed in support of a campaigning army. The course’s existence demonstrated a growing awareness within the military of the importance of mechanical appliances to the fighting troops and the increasing complexity of the machines an army depended upon. The instructions issued to officers who took the course explained that it had been designed to give each man ‘a thorough practical knowledge of machine design, the fitting, erection, and repair of machinery, and the care and working of boilers, such as will enable him to superintend work of these descriptions, and distinguish between good and bad material, workmanship, and design’.⁷⁸ Following completion of the course officers were employed ‘upon machinery in the course of erection by the War Department’ so that the army could make the best use of their newly acquired skills.⁷⁹

In the case of Ralph Micklem, the Midland Railway provided the foundations upon which he constructed a successful military career. After eighteen months at the Royal Engineers’ school of military engineering in Chatham, Micklem applied to specialize in the corps’ railway section for ‘no particular reason’ in September 1904. Writing later in life, Micklem reasoned that his cousin Henry had ‘gravitated towards the railway side in Sudan and South Africa and had done well in both countries’.⁸⁰ Micklem’s initial experiences were less exotic than his cousin’s, as his training with the Midland began with a ‘fortnight at Brecon on a single line, then two or three months in London on goods working, then to Derby, where I did a month as a fireman, and then to various other places on civil engineering jobs. Altogether’, he summarized, ‘it was an enjoyable year’. Following a brief spell on the Royal Engineers’ new instructional railway at Longmoor – opened in 1905 to provide soldiers with the opportunity to construct and operate railway lines in peacetime – Micklem followed in his cousin’s footsteps and departed for Africa, where he joined the Egyptian army and participated in the survey of a possible line to link the Nile and Congo rivers. The railway was never built, but Micklem was involved in the construction of the Atbara to Port Sudan line in 1911 before he spent a ‘pleasant’ three years as assistant to the general manager at Atbara. In 1915 Micklem took charge of a company of the Egyptian Railway Battalion and was wounded at Cape Helles. Following recuperation in London he was passed fit for light duties and, thanks to his previous experience, was ‘snapped up’ by the movements directorate at the War Office. He spent the remainder of the war in London, where he was engaged in ‘very technical work with the home railway companies’. The outcome of Micklem’s seemingly impulsive decision to attend the Midland’s training course in 1904 was that he became responsible for the railway arrangements connected to the defence of Britain and, despite having reached the compulsory retirement age of fifty-five in 1939, he played a prominent role in the directorate of transportation throughout the Second World War.⁸¹

The on-site vocational training offered by the Midland Railway, and later by the Royal Engineers themselves at Longmoor, were not the only examples of professional development available to military personnel who wanted to better understand the complexities of railway operations prior to the First World War. Alongside the practical experience delivered by a combination of civilian and military practitioners, the advent of the Liberal government in 1906 inspired the creation of an academic course that provided its students with a wider appreciation of the business methods that underpinned the railway industry. The incoming secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, entered the War Office with the twin aims of promoting ‘military efficiency’ and reducing defence spending foremost in his mind.⁸² A trip to Berlin during his first year in office gave him a chance to study the German general staff’s organization in detail, and exposed him to an army that he considered to be ‘as near perfection as possible, and at a cost proportionately much less than ours’.⁸³ Haldane’s admiration for the German army remained high and was expressed once again in the infamous CID meeting of 23 August 1911, when the army and navy presented their plans for British intervention in the event of a European war. On that occasion he referred to the German military as ‘a perfect machine’.⁸⁴ Haldane was particularly struck by the degree of specialization in the German army. The general staff took no part in the administration and supply of the forces, a separation that left ‘the army in the field free from the embarrassment of having to look after its transport and supplies’. The new secretary of state wished to implement the same partition within the British army, and envisaged a thorough reformation of the administrative staff tasked with providing logistical support to the fighting troops. As Hew Strachan noted, such an organization was particularly relevant to the British army due to the nature of Britain’s imperial responsibilities – the planning for which predominantly required the fulfilment of tasks that were ‘administrative and logistical’ rather than the outcome of operational thought.⁸⁵

To assist him in his goal of building an administrative organization composed of highly skilled experts – a ‘thinking school’ of officers – Haldane drew upon the knowledge and expertise of men from inside and outside the military profession. In January 1907, just a year after Haldane had become secretary of state for war, the first cohort of students enrolled on a course for the training of officers for the higher appointments in the administrative staff of the army at the London School of Economics (LSE).⁸⁶ The importance attached to such a training course is evident in the speed with which it was established, and owed much to the work of two men: Sir Edward Ward, the permanent under-secretary at the War Office and a former colonel in the Army Service Corps (ASC); and Halford Mackinder, the LSE’s director.⁸⁷ The goal of the course they devised was the creation of a pool of officers who possessed a thorough knowledge of the principles required to run what Mackinder termed the ‘greatest single business concern in the country’.⁸⁸ In time, as the officers who passed the course obtained promotions to senior positions within the logistics and supply departments of the army, Mackinder hoped that the course would develop a tradition of its own – one that placed its graduates on a similar footing to those who passed through the staff college at Camberley. To ensure that the army accrued a long-term benefit from the material studied at the LSE, the age limit for entrants to the course was set at thirty-seven.⁸⁹

The LSE course was designed to teach a new generation of officers the skills required to manage and operate a large-scale, data-intensive, complex organization. The first cohort of students studied subjects that disseminated lessons learned in the ‘practical experience of recent campaigns, which had demonstrated the need for specialised administrative officers whose training should include financial, commercial and legal qualifications’.⁹⁰ The breadth of knowledge considered of importance to the British army’s administrators can be deduced from the course’s syllabus. Instruction was delivered in the following topics: accounting and business methods; commercial law; carriage by sea and land; economic theory; economic geography; and statistical method, and each class was taught by prominent academics or men with significant practical experience. Staff who contributed to the delivery of modules before the First World War included the statistician Arthur Bowley; the University of Birmingham’s former professor of accounting, Lawrence Dicksee (who provided a colossal sixty lectures in the first year of the course’s existence); the Allied Marine Assurance’s Douglas Owen; and the railway expert and former North-Eastern Railway employee, Wilfred Tetley-Stephenson.⁹¹ The teaching programme was supplemented by a sequence of informal after dinner ‘smoking meetings’, which included lectures provided by specially invited business leaders – referred to as ‘practical men’. The guest lecturers in 1907 included Sidney Webb, who discussed the organization of trade unions; Thomas Brassey, who spoke about his role as the managing director of ‘a group of distant mining and smelting works’; and T. H. Beckett, who explained the organizational systems that underpinned the Railway Clearing House. Mackinder reported in his survey of the course that their lectures had been ‘greatly appreciated by the class’, and in subsequent years the lectures were augmented with field trips to locations including the Railway Clearing House, the Great Western Railway’s signalling school and Surrey Docks.⁹² Emphasizing the interaction of civilian and military figures prior to the war, the students on these observational visits were encouraged to ask questions and discuss matters with the academic staff to ensure that the course taught material of ‘direct utility’ to the forces.⁹³

The syllabus taught at the LSE was not designed for men whose future career was expected to involve the administration of a so-called colonial gendarmerie. As Bertram Wilson, the leader of the business organization module explained, ‘special attention [was] paid to the manufacturing industries, chiefly with regard to factory and office organization, arrangement of factory [sic] into departments for efficient control, methods to secure internal economy, storekeeping and checks on waste, systems of costkeeping, [and] systems of wage calculation’.⁹⁴ These were lessons that reflected Haldane’s and Mackinder’s shared belief in the coincidental intent of both military and civilian ‘business’, while the advisory board established to oversee the content and delivery of the course emphasized the complementary nature of the expertise possessed by those within the army and the private sector. Alongside Mackinder and Ward (who chaired the board), the LSE course was overseen by: the director of supplies, Brigadier-General Frederick Clayton; the director of staff duties, Lieutenant-General H. D. Hutchinson; the QMG, Major-General Herbert Miles; the director of fortifications and works, Brigadier-General R. M. Ruck; the commandant of the ordnance college, Woolwich, Colonel G. R. Townshend; the chairman of the institute of bankers, Sir Felix Schuster; and, in his position as the LSE’s governor, by Sidney Webb. In his capacity as director of staff duties at the War Office, Sir Douglas Haig sat on the advisory board in 1908 and 1909. Unsurprisingly, given their size, the complexity of their operations and their pre-existing working relationships with the government and the army, the railway industry was also represented on the advisory board. Sir Hugh Bell, a North-Eastern director, sat on the board throughout the pre-war period, while Sir Frederick Harrison, the LNWR’s general manager, contributed to the board’s deliberations in 1907.⁹⁵

The advisory board’s conclusions on the course’s first year were encouraging. They stated that:

These modifications included the replacement of material on banking statistics, public administration and geography – perceived as being of ‘less immediate practical bearing’ – with lectures from Wilson on ‘business organization’.⁹⁷ By 1909 the symbiotic process of military feedback and academic response had conceived a syllabus adjudged by the advisory board to be of such value to the army that they ‘strongly recommend[ed] that the course be made a permanent annual institution, in order gradually to create a body of officers well fitted to undertake the varied administrative duties that may fall upon them’.⁹⁸ The only significant change to take place after 1909 saw an increased stress placed on Wilson’s business organization module, which ‘emphasised the importance of process and the elimination of waste’ and incorporated the study of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s pioneering Principles of Scientific Management following its publication in 1911.⁹⁹

The so-called ‘Mackindergarten’ at the LSE created a forum for the dissemination of business knowledge that was otherwise absent from the professional training available to soldiers destined for administrative roles in the army. The advisory board recognized that the needs of a modern army reflected those of a supply-intensive industrial business, while the army acknowledged that the technical specialists responsible for maintaining a successful global trading empire could be tapped to improve its own knowledge base. However, it is important not to overstate the influence of the course’s existence over the efficiency of the army’s supply organization during the First World War. The conflict intervened before a substantial number of officers had participated in the course. Over the period 1907–14 only 243 officers successfully completed the course (see Table 1.1). In view of the army’s administrative manpower requirements during the war such a small number of graduates meant that, by necessity, only a tiny minority of the army’s supply duties were handled by men who had benefited from attendance at the LSE. Furthermore, the seven years between the course’s inauguration and the outbreak of the war left insufficient time for the comparatively junior officers who attended the course to attain positions of real influence at the army’s highest levels of authority. Mackinder’s vision for the long-term evolution of an ‘administrative tradition’, which reached to the highest positions of the supply branches of the army, was abruptly curtailed by the events of August 1914.¹⁰⁰

Table 1.1. Number of officers to pass the administrative training course at the London School of Economics, 1907–14.

Note: Number of officers from each rank to complete the course: 12 lieutenants; 162 captains; 64 majors; 4 lieutenant-colonels; 1 colonel.
Source: Various reports of the advisory board, 1907–14. For full details, see the bibliography.

Mackindergarten graduates were destined for roles that demanded proficiency in the execution of largely routine tasks, not those that involved planning the intricate network of inter-connected systems required to maintain the modern army in the field. At the outbreak of the war they were not in positions of sufficient seniority to influence the constitution of the arteries that directed the BEF’s blood to its vital organs. None of the officers to occupy the principal supply positions of QMG, inspector-general of communications (IGC) or DGT on the western front during the First World War had attended the Mackindergarten. Only Frederick Clayton, a member of the advisory board, possessed any connection to the administrative course at the LSE whatsoever. Instead, in August 1914 the graduates maintained the blood flow around the body in junior management roles. Most of them remained in comparatively minor positions, where they followed orders rather than made policy decisions, for the duration of the war. However, the multitude of new vacancies created by the rapid expansion of the British army during the conflict did provide opportunities for a number of officers to apply the skills they had acquired at the LSE in positions of considerable influence. The appointment of Colonel E. E. Carter as director of supplies at GHQ in 1915 represented the pinnacle of achievement for a Mackindergarten graduate within the BEF’s administrative hierarchy, and those who served in other theatres attained roles of similar responsibility. After a period at the base in Rouen, Major P. O. Hazelton – part of the first cohort to graduate in 1907 – became director of supplies and transport in East Africa in January 1916. Captain G. F. Davies and Major Wilfred Swabey, both from the class of 1908, occupied the same role in Egypt and Italy respectively. Two successive directors of supplies and transport for the British Salonika Force (BSF), Captain Oscar Streidinger and Major Philip Scott, graduated in 1909.

The syllabus developed by Ward and Mackinder represented an attempt to infuse mostly junior officers with business methods and mentalities, which were largely absent from the upbringings of such men. As noted above, the British army relied upon the landed classes – for whom the ‘bourgeois ethic of business was anathema’ – for its supply of officers throughout the pre-war period.¹⁰¹ Such men did not typically arrive at the LSE with any grounding in the complex world of railway operations, and were almost entirely dependent upon Wilfred Tetley-Stephenson’s module to provide them with an understanding of ‘the conditions of railway work in relation to the army in times of peace and war’.¹⁰² Their completion of the administrative course at the LSE provides a further example of the connections forged between Britain’s civilian experts and military officers in the final years of peace. Yet these links were not restricted merely to lecture theatres, site visits and meeting rooms at Whitehall. As one young but precocious railway manager’s early life demonstrated, the professional relationships between the army and the railways stretched far beyond British shores. For Eric Geddes, the permeability of civilian and soldier within the crucible of the empire proved invaluable in the conflict that followed.

The early career of Eric Geddes

Eric Geddes was not the most senior executive of a railway company in August 1914. Nor was he in the summer of 1916 when, as the battle of the Somme’s voracious appetite threatened to paralyse northern France’s transport network, he was despatched to the western front by Lloyd George to examine the BEF’s supply organization. Rather than approach Geddes’s superior, Alexander Kaye Butterworth, or the general manager of Britain’s largest railway company, the LNWR’s Guy Calthrop, the then secretary of state for war turned to the thirty-nine-year-old Geddes to conduct the investigation. The reasons behind Lloyd George’s decision to send Geddes to GHQ in late August 1916 can be discerned from a study of the latter’s early career, which demonstrates how Britain’s senior transport experts were ‘well known’ within the walls of the War Office and Westminster ahead of the First World War.¹⁰³ Geddes’s formative experiences reveal a ‘remarkable man’ on an unequivocal ascent to the peak of his profession,¹⁰⁴ and further entwines the strands of military, political and civilian expertise that have run throughout this chapter – and which underpinned the British response to events after 1914.

Born at Agra, India, on 26 September 1875, Eric Campbell Geddes was the eldest son of a Scottish civil engineer. Auckland Geddes had originally set sail for the east in 1857, and had established a private practice after undertaking railway survey and construction work on behalf of the Indian government – a clear example of the so-called ‘diaspora of British engineering’ in the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁵ The family moved to Edinburgh a year after Geddes’s birth, and following a disruptive childhood in which he was ‘asked to leave’ a succession of public schools, he was eventually educated at the Oxford Military Academy. Geddes’s studies were ultimately competent enough for him to pass the preliminary examination for entry into Woolwich. However, rather than follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer (albeit along the military rather than civil path), the impetuous young Geddes ‘set sail on a passenger liner to New York with ten pounds … and an introduction to family friends in Pittsburgh’.¹⁰⁶

The army’s short-term loss was its long-term gain. Over the following twenty years, Eric Geddes accumulated the breadth of knowledge and expertise required to fulfil the various roles he was asked to perform during the First World War. His professional education began in America, where he initially worked in occupations as diverse as theatrical agent, bar tender, typewriter salesman for Remington and labourer at Andrew Carnegie’s steel works.¹⁰⁷ Both Remington and Carnegie were recognized innovators, and operated at the forefront of the systematic management ideology that spread across America and into Europe around the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁰⁸ Remington was among the first private enterprises to experiment with modern office equipment – such as the typewriters Geddes sold for them – and had been swift to adopt the card index as an organizational tool following its transmission from the library sector.¹⁰⁹ Carnegie’s Pittsburgh steel works possessed a global reputation for the ‘perfection’ of its response to the challenges of modern big-business organization.¹¹⁰ Whether the experience provided Geddes with similar insights into labour conditions as those espoused by Taylor and his disciples is unclear from the surviving records, but throughout his career Geddes extolled the virtues of manual labour for giving the budding manager ‘sympathy with the point of view of the working man, the value of which cannot be exaggerated’.¹¹¹ By the time Geddes held high office in the railway industry, as Gourvish’s research has demonstrated, managerial positions were increasingly held by men who benefited from the ‘initial advantages of birth and education’ rather than those who had climbed the internal ladder from the shop floor. Before 1890, nobody in the role of general manager at a prominent British railway company had attended university. After 1890 there were eight graduates appointed to the position, five of them among the eighteen appointments made after 1910.¹¹²

Geddes’s first contact with the railway industry took place in America. Transport, he claimed after the war, soon became ‘my religion. It interests me more than anything else. Transport contains elements that are not appreciated by the uninitiated’.¹¹³ He clearly showed an aptitude for the sector, as he progressed swiftly from the position of station agent at a lumber-loading station in Virginia through to assistant yardmaster in a freight yard of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. With further promotions Geddes became the car tracer for the southern group of railroads known as the big four. The American railways of the late nineteenth century were pioneers in modern management techniques, having faced the challenges associated with efficiently coordinating the energies and efforts of large numbers of employees earlier than the huge industrial concerns established by the likes of Carnegie and Henry Ford.¹¹⁴ Illness impaired Geddes’s ability to continue climbing the managerial ladder and to further absorb the methods and working practices of America’s emerging corporations. He returned to Edinburgh in August 1895.

The United States provided Geddes with skills that proved invaluable the next time his ‘volcanic energy’ proved too large to be contained by the British Isles.¹¹⁵ After his recovery in Scotland, Geddes’s experiences in the railway and logging industries – assisted in good measure by his father’s contacts – secured him a managerial role on a forest clearance project in the Himalayas. Part of the job called for the construction and operation of a light railway system, which was linked up to the Powayan Steam Tramway. Geddes oversaw the line’s construction and managed the network, the efficiency of which so impressed an agent of the Rohilkund and Kumaon Railway (who happened to have been a former employee of Geddes’s father) that the company assumed control of the line. Thence began Geddes’s second rise in the railway industry. In 1901 he became the Rohilkund and Kumaon’s traffic superintendent and moved to the prominent railway junction at Bareilly with his wife, Alice Stokes, whose brother Claude was an officer in the Indian army. His wife’s ill health, exacerbated by the Indian climate, compelled Geddes to seek employment with a British railway company during a period of leave in 1903. His endeavours proved unsuccessful. However, upon his return to the sub-continent Geddes became reacquainted with the army he had decided not to join after he left school, and gained the opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a railway administrator to none other than Lord Kitchener.

The Russo-Japanese War, which broke out in February 1904, provided the catalyst for the meeting between Geddes and Kitchener. The Russians began to deploy troops to their frontiers upon the declaration of hostilities, to meet any force Britain may have decided to send north from India in support of its Japanese ally.¹¹⁶ The build-up of soldiers on the Afghan border fed into longstanding British concerns over Russian intentions on the north-west frontier, and led Kitchener to call for the conveyance of an all-arms force to the area as quickly as possible.¹¹⁷ Several lines intersected in and around Bareilly, which made the junction a key component of any large-scale troop movements and placed a significant responsibility upon the Rohilkund and Kumaon to ensure a smooth concentration. Geddes devised the programme of movements with such efficiency that Kitchener personally congratulated him for its success.¹¹⁸ It proved to be Geddes’s final act in India. At the end of 1904 he was offered the post of claims agent at the North-Eastern Railway, then under the management of George Gibb. For the next decade the structure and working practices Gibb had introduced to the North-Eastern played a critical role in Geddes’s maturation into the recognized transport expert he had become by August 1914.¹¹⁹

As the North-Eastern Railway provided the organizational culture within which Geddes obtained most of his pre-war experience, it is essential to establish both how the company operated and what Geddes learned from the North-Eastern’s approach to the administration of a large-scale organization. The British railways had confronted increasingly difficult operating conditions from the 1870s onwards, caused by rising expenditure on resources and augmented by parliamentary controls designed to limit the companies’ opportunities to shift price rises onto customers. The restrictive legislative situation produced an industrial environment in which efficient operating procedures became vital to the sustenance of profitability. However, contemporary observers such as William Acworth and George Paish believed that most British railway companies were unresponsive – and their managers too conservatively minded – to cope with the challenges that faced them. Acworth and Paish, although they stopped short of labelling Britain’s railway managers ‘donkeys’, did compare their abilities unfavourably with those of their counterparts on the American railways.¹²⁰

Thanks to Gibb’s progressive attitude, contemporary observers did not consider the North-Eastern to be part of the conservative trend in late nineteenth-century British railway management. Instead, the North-Eastern was held up as one of the too-few British companies to have revolutionized their working practices and organizational systems through the implementation of innovations developed across the Atlantic.¹²¹ Gibb, upon becoming general manager in 1891, was convinced that the North-Eastern’s extant managerial framework was defective and included ‘few men in the higher grade of management who could give him a critical assessment of operating procedures which had remained basically unchanged’ for over thirty years.¹²² The by then traditional practice of promotion from within, coupled to an absence of managerial education opportunities, had created an executive branch that suffered from narrowness of vision and deficiencies in original thought. Subsequent historical analysis of the period has broadly accepted that Gibb’s observations were applicable across the British railway industry.¹²³

Gibb’s response to such insularity of experience was the establishment of a traffic apprenticeship scheme, which provided Geddes with his introduction to the North-Eastern in 1904. The management development programme, created in 1897, focused on ‘young blood, some of it not long out of the universities’ and those from within the company who displayed the potential for higher appointments.¹²⁴ Ralph Wedgwood, the scheme’s first graduate and the BEF’s director of docks from 1917, typified the class of outsider Gibb sought to attract to the North-Eastern. A descendant of the famous pottery family with a degree in classics from Cambridge, Wedgwood possessed no experience in the railway industry prior to his arrival in York at the start of his apprenticeship. J. George Beharrell, who had entered the North-Eastern as a junior clerk in the secretary’s office in 1888, was invited to participate in the scheme in 1902. By the time Geddes arrived in 1904 the traffic apprenticeship scheme had been refined into one that offered a carefully planned, comprehensive overview of the company’s work. The programme was ‘designed to allow the employee to move around the system experiencing the work of various grades of labour, as well as that of supervisory and management levels’.¹²⁵ Geddes, rather than being expected to learn ‘on the job’ through traditional but haphazard methods, received the benefits of a planned introduction to best practice upon his entry to the company.

The traffic apprenticeship scheme promoted the emergence of a unified managerial culture, which was diffused throughout the multitude of departments within which its graduates were employed. In 1907 the North-Eastern employed almost 48,000 workers, spread across the entire breadth of the company’s network and engaged in myriad tasks that demanded close coordination. Geddes outlined the variety of tasks for which specialist working units had to be created in a 1910 lecture delivered to the York railway and lecture debating society:

The quantity of separate sections within the company reflected the increasing complexity of the railway industry and its corresponding demand for further specialization of duties. The traffic apprenticeship scheme reduced the need for overwhelming, time-consuming, and initiative-stifling central control of the North-Eastern’s multiple business activities. Senior managers were relieved of administrative duties, which could be confidently devolved to talented junior executives ‘on the spot’. The subsequent freedom from the burden of detail allowed those at the top to focus upon considerations of strategy and procedure, just as the existence of a competent staff – whose shared ethos increased the likelihood that predictable decisions would be made when required – liberated the army commander from the need to micro-manage his forces.

Geddes acquired a substantial appreciation of the challenges involved in freight rail operations as chief goods manager at the North-Eastern Railway between 1907 and 1912. His efforts in the goods department prepared him for the wartime challenge of supplying an army that demanded colossal amounts of work to be performed by limited pools of human and material resources. During the period 1899–1912 the North-Eastern improved its earnings per freight train by 87 per cent. In part these improvements were due to new loading practices implemented across the industry, but one historian has also suggested that the application of working methods based on statistical analysis played a considerable role in the North-Eastern’s particularly notable rise. Data compiled by Beharrell – who became Geddes’s assistant for the rest of their careers – was applied to measures that led to ‘more work being done but [by] fewer trains, thus giving greater line capacity throughout the system … a smaller number of engines employed, economy in rolling stock, repairs, renewals, and … staff’.¹²⁷ In 1912 the North-Eastern’s goods train mileage stood at roughly the same level as it had in 1906. However, over the same period the gross tonnage hauled over its lines increased substantially and its receipts per goods train mile rose from 75.2d in 1900 to 132.91d in 1912.¹²⁸

Geddes’s performance at the North-Eastern Railway marked him out as the ‘coming man’ in the railway industry. Both the LSWR and the Buenos Aires Southern and Western Combine attempted to lure Geddes away from York with promises of substantial wage increases and the title of general manager. The North-Eastern responded by promoting Geddes to the role of deputy general manager and renegotiating his salary. Upon taking up his new position Geddes became the highest paid railway official in Britain. According to Sir Hugh Bell, a North-Eastern director, it was a decision the company ‘never regretted’.¹²⁹ With the incumbent general manager, Alexander Kaye Butterworth, scheduled to retire in 1916, Geddes’s rise to the top of the company appeared to have its trajectory mapped out – he was considered the North-Eastern’s general-manager-in-waiting by his colleagues. Yet while Butterworth’s presence temporarily obstructed Geddes’s path to the general manager’s office, the former’s religiosity acted to reconnect the latter to the institution he had almost joined after leaving school and assisted with aplomb while in India: the army.

Upon replacing Sir George Gibb as general manager of the North-Eastern in 1906, Butterworth received a commission into the ERSC. However, the quasi-military status evoked by his membership of the corps sat uneasily alongside Butterworth’s faith and he resigned his commission in January 1907.¹³⁰ The North-Eastern was represented in the ERSC by the company’s engineer, Charles Harrison (commissioned 1900), and from 1910 by its traffic superintendent, Henry Watson, but there was no representation of the North-Eastern’s senior management in the corps for six years. The corps’ rules of qualification were explicit: only general managers were permitted to hold commissions. Yet on Geddes’s appointment as deputy – and in a further demonstration of the company’s long-term ambitions for the man they had paid handsomely to retain – Butterworth began to lobby the ERSC to relax its entry criteria. Geddes’s first recorded appearance at a meeting of the REC took place in December 1912, before – thanks to his superior’s representations – he obtained his commission and became Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Geddes on 27 January 1913. He was the only deputy general manager of a railway company to gain admission to the ERSC before the First World War, and played an active role in the REC’s deliberations in the final years of peace.¹³¹

Conclusion

Eric Geddes only briefly participated in the vibrant civil–military exchanges that characterized the peacetime relationship between Britain’s army, government and prominent railway companies – and upon whose foundations a successful wartime partnership was constructed. The interactions of civilian and military figures assumed both practical and academic forms in the eighty years that preceded the First World War, and took place within a variety of domestic and imperial settings. As the railways spread across the British landscape almost every government department became invested in their efficient use, while army officers acquired a central position in the state’s governance of the nascent railway industry. Further afield, the widespread construction of railways across the empire provided the Royal Engineers in particular with ample opportunities to construct and operate railways, and officers with experience gained in China, South Africa, Nigeria and on multiple Indian railways served in prominent roles on the western front between 1914 and 1918.¹³² Similarly, Auckland Geddes and his eldest son represented just two of the many civil engineers and railway officials who obtained valuable experience of railway construction and operation across the empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The creation and maintenance of a productive partnership between Britain’s largest railway companies and the army during this period relied upon two complementary factors. On the one hand, the military proved keen to engage with and exploit the knowledge of those who emerged as specialists in the industry. Through the establishment of vocational courses at their vast workshops and their contributions of academic expertise to the administrative staff course offered to soldiers at the LSE, Britain’s railway companies imparted skills and knowledge to those tasked with the military application of railway technology. In the creation of civil–military bodies such as the ERSC, the army underlined its respect for the opinions and observations of those whose transportation experience lay beyond the military sphere – in the operation and management of railways and docks, in civil engineering, and in the direction of the great contracting firms. On the other hand, the provision of transport for the army’s annual manoeuvres, the development of timetables for the emergency movement of British forces around Britain and the identification of supply problems in the event of war each demanded substantial resource commitments from Britain’s transport enterprises and ensured they were thoroughly conversant with the needs of a modern, industrial army.

Such support was provided willingly during the period before 1914, even when the army’s interactions with civilian expertise were redeployed from domestic, purely defensive applications to those of a more blurred and potentially aggressive nature. Only Alexander Kaye Butterworth, the general manager of the North-Eastern Railway and a man of ‘strong religious scruples’,¹³³ chose to sever the connections that bound the higher echelons of the railway industry to the army before August 1914 – and even he was persuaded to take his place alongside colleagues from Britain’s other strategically important lines following the outbreak of war. The REC, upon which Butterworth sat throughout the conflict, represented the ultimate manifestation of both sides’ commitment to the development of fruitful and harmonious relations between civilian and military experts. From August 1914 onwards, at an organizational level, the committee provided the foundations upon which Britain’s evolving domestic response to the war’s transport demands was constructed. However, the REC did not provide the platform from which Britain’s global response to transport requirements of an industrial war were met. Instead, the army’s exploitation of civilian knowledge and experience beyond British shores took place on an individual basis. For Geddes, the benefits of the tripartite pre-war relationship between army, government and the railways were most clearly evident from the summer of 1916 onwards. Yet for the BEF the interactions between Britain’s transport experts, the military and the state bore fruit far sooner. In the first instance, the nature of their collaboration had profound implications for the nation’s entry into the conflict.

______________

¹ Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser., lxix (18 Feb. 1915), col. 1313; lxx (22 Feb. 1915), cols. 7–8; lxxi (4 May 1915), cols. 976–7.

² A. Fox, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 2017), p. 165.

³ D. Turner, ‘Unlocking the early railway manager – a project to follow’, Turnip Rail, 2011 <http://turniprail.blogspot.com/2011/04/unlocking-early-railway-manager-project.html> [accessed 11 Sept. 2018].

⁴ D. K. Drummond, Crewe: Railway Town, Company, and People, 1840–1914 (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 59–60; F. McKenna, The Railway Workers, 1840–1970 (London, 1980), pp. 30–4; TNA, ZLIB 29/691, ‘Education and advancement of the railway clerk’ by E. C. Geddes, 1910, p. 1.

⁵ H. A. Young, ‘Practical economy in the army’, Royal United Services Institution. Journal, l (1906), 1281–5, at p. 1282.

⁶ McKenna, The Railway Workers, pp. 22–3.

⁷ E. M. Spiers, Engines for Empire: the Victorian Army and its use of Railways (Manchester, 2015), p. 6; J. N. Westwood, Railways at War (London, 1980), p. 6.

⁸ Spiers, Engines for Empire, p. 149.

⁹ D. Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 1996), p. 15.

¹⁰ For a brief discussion of the literature produced during this period, see E. A. Pratt, The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest, 1833–1914 (London, 1916), pp. 2–8.

¹¹ Quoted in Pratt, Rise of Rail Power, pp. 6–7.

¹² D. E. Showalter, ‘Soldiers and steam: railways and the military in Prussia, 1832 to 1848’, Historian, xxxiv (1972), 242–59.

¹³ Spiers, Engines for Empire, pp. 24–7.

¹⁴ E. A. Pratt, British Railways and the Great War: Organisation, Efforts, Difficulties and Achievements (2 vols., London, 1921), ii. 958–60; D. Stevenson, ‘War by timetable? The railway race before 1914’, Past & Present, clxii (1999), 163–94, at pp. 171–2.

¹⁵ H. A. Vallance, The Highland Railway: the History of the Railways of the Scottish Highlands (5 vols., Newton Abbot, 1969), ii. 102–6.

¹⁶ P. S. Bagwell and P. J. Lyth, Transport in Britain: from Canal Lock to Gridlock (London, 2006), p. 54; W. C. Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes toward State Intervention, 1833–1848 (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 108–9.

¹⁷ Quoted in H. Parris, Government and the Railways in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1965), p. 26.

¹⁸ L. T. C. Rolt, Red for Danger: a History of Railway Accidents and Railway Safety (4th edn., Newton Abbot, 1982), pp. 17–18.

¹⁹ An Act for Regulating Railways (Parl. Papers 1840 [97], xcvii).

²⁰ Lubenow, The Politics of Government Growth, p. 108.

²¹ T. R. Gourvish, Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway: a Study of Management (Leicester, 1972).

²² G. P. Neele, Railway Reminiscences (London, 1904), p. 8.

²³ Gourvish, Mark Huish, pp. 54–5, 177–8, 259–60; ‘Obituary: William Cawkwell, 1807–1897’, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, cxxix (1897), 398–400.

²⁴ G. B. Sinclair, The Staff Corps: the History of the Engineer and Logistic Staff Corps RE (Chatham, 2001), p. 11.

²⁵ Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Consider the Defences of the United Kingdom, (Parl. Papers 1860 [2682], xxiii), p. x. On the Anglo-French rivalry in naval innovation during the 19th century, see B. Wilson, Empire of the Deep: the Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2014), pp. 483–93.

²⁶ Defences of the United Kingdom, pp. ix–x, xviii.

²⁷ C. E. C. Townsend, All Rank and No File: a History of the Engineer and Railway Staff Corps RE, 1865–1965 (London, 1969), p. 2.

²⁸ Sinclair, The Staff Corps, p. 14.

²⁹ Townsend, All Rank and No File, p. 4.

³⁰ Sinclair, The Staff Corps, p. 15.

³¹ Townsend, All Rank and No File, p. 7.

³² Townsend, All Rank and No File, p. 8.

³³ Sinclair, The Staff Corps, pp. 21–3.

³⁴ TNA, WO 114/114, territorial force: establishment and strengths, 1908–1914.

³⁵ S. Fay, The War Office at War (London, 1937), p. 39.

³⁶ M. Stancombe, ‘The Staff Corps: a civilian resource for the military’, ICE Proceedings, clvii (2004), 22–6.

³⁷ Townsend, All Rank and No File, p. 17.

³⁸ Sinclair, The Staff Corps, p. 28.

³⁹ TNA, WO 33/56, War Office: reports, memoranda and papers (O and A series), report of committee assembled to consider working of railways of Great Britain and Ireland in the event of general mobilisation, 22 May 1896.

⁴⁰ TNA, WO 33/56, report of committee assembled to consider working of railways of Great Britain and Ireland, p. 2.

⁴¹ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 13.

⁴² TNA, WO 32/9184, formation of permanent council to advise on railway matters, Wood to Brodrick, 15 Apr. 1897.

⁴³ TNA, WO 32/9185, reorganisation of council, Lake to Nicholson, 21 Oct. 1902; Clarke to Harrison, 16 Jan. 1903; the ARC, 7 Feb. 1903.

⁴⁴ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 14–15.

⁴⁵ Nuffield College Library (NCL), papers of John Edward Bernard Seely, Lord Mottistone, Mottistone 11/6, sub-committee to consider the desirability of an enquiry into the question of local transportation and distribution of food supplies in time of war, Appendix 1: note submitted by the secretary for the consideration of the sub-committee, 17 Jan. 1910, p. 5.

⁴⁶ S. Cobb, Preparing for Blockade 1885–1914: Naval Contingency for Economic Warfare (Farnham, 2013), pp. 189, 194–204, 222–3.

⁴⁷ NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/6, sub-committee, Appendix 2: preliminary report by Sir Frederic Bolton on an investigation into some of the conditions of supplies of commodities to and from the United Kingdom, and, in particular, as to how these would be affected by any interference with the trade of our ports in time of war, and the measures which might be taken to avert, or deal with, the difficulties which would arise under such circumstances, 7 Dec. 1909, p. 7.

⁴⁸ See Table 1 and explanatory notes in J. Armstrong, ‘The role of coastal shipping in UK transport: an estimate of comparative traffic movements in 1910’, Journal of Transport History, viii (1987), 164–78, at pp. 167–8; NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/7, interim report of the sub-committee (CID) on the local transportation and distribution of supplies in time of war, 24 Jan. 1911, p. 6.

⁴⁹ Armstrong, ‘The role of coastal shipping in UK transport’, pp. 166–8.

⁵⁰ NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/6, sub-committee, Appendix 2: preliminary report by Sir Frederic Bolton, p. 12.

⁵¹ NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/6, sub-committee, Report of the sub-committee, 22 March 1910, p. 3.

⁵² C. M. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012), pp. 204–13; Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 31–2.

⁵³ Fay, The War Office at War, p. 18.

⁵⁴ NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/175, report from the general managers of the Great Central, Great Northern, Great Western, London and North-Western, London and South-Western and Midland Railway Companies to the Right Hon. Lieutenant-Colonel J. Seely, on the provisioning of London in the event of war, 1 Aug. 1911, pp. 2–3.

⁵⁵ NCL, Mottistone papers, Mottistone 11/175, report from the general managers, p. 3.

⁵⁶ Clark, The Sleepwalkers, p. 213.

⁵⁷ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 41–2.

⁵⁸ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 39.

⁵⁹ TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council, proceedings of communications board, Brade to Cooper, 13 Feb. 1913.

⁶⁰ TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council, Communications Board.

⁶¹ Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 44.

⁶² TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council, notes of proceedings of the first meeting held at the Board of Trade at 11:30 a.m., 30 May 1913, p. 3.

⁶³ TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council, notes of proceedings of the second meeting held at the Board of Trade at 3:30 p.m., 22 July 1913, p. 2; J. A. B. Hamilton, Britain’s Railways in World War I (London, 1947), p. 24.

⁶⁴ TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council, notes of proceedings of the third meeting held at the Board of Trade at 3 p.m., 4 Nov. 1913, p. 2.

⁶⁵ T. R. Gourvish, ‘A British business elite: the chief executive managers of the railway industry, 1850–1922’, Business History Review, xlvii (1973), 289–316, at pp. 315–16.

⁶⁶ Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into War Office Organisation (Parl. Papers 1901 [Cd. 580], xl), p. 1. The companies consulted were the Army and Navy Co-operative Society; the Civil Service Co-operative Society; Armstrong, Whitworth and Company; the Midland Railway; the London and North-Western Railway; Vickers, Sons and Maxim; Rylands and Sons; the Great Northern Railway; and the Co-operative Wholesale Society. See Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee Appointed to Inquire into War Office Organisation, Together with Appendices, Digest, and Index (Parl. Papers 1901 [Cd. 581], xl), pp. 443–9.

⁶⁷ Royal Commission on London Traffic (8 vols., London, 1905–6).

⁶⁸ ‘Royal commission on London traffic’, Commercial Motor, 20 July 1905, p. 12.

⁶⁹ Gourvish, ‘A British business elite’, p. 290.

⁷⁰ Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the System of Purchase and Sale of Commissions in the Army (Parl. Papers 1857 [2267], xviii), p. 293.

⁷¹ S. Bidwell and D. Graham, Coalitions, Politicians and Generals: Some Aspects of Command in Two World Wars (London, 1993), p. 14.

⁷² G. L. Herrera, ‘Inventing the railroad and rifle revolution: information, military innovation and the rise of Germany’, Journal of Strategic Studies, xxvii (2004), 243–71, at p. 253.

⁷³ M. Peschaud, Politique et fonctionnement des transports par chemin de fer pendant la guerre (Paris, 1926), pp. 37–41.

⁷⁴ Herrera, ‘Inventing the railroad and rifle revolution’; F. P. Jacqmin, Les chemins de fer pendant la guerre de 1870–1871: leçons faites en 1872 à l’École des Ponts-et-Chaussées, (2nd. edn., Paris, 1874); Pratt, Rise of Rail Power, pp. 122–3, 154–5; V. Murray, ‘Transportation in war’, Royal Engineers Journal, lvi (1942), 202–32, at pp. 204–7.

⁷⁵ W. H. Chaloner, The Social and Economic Development of Crewe, 1780–1923 (Manchester, 1950), p. 273.

⁷⁶ G. Findlay, The Working and Management of an English Railway (London, 1889), pp. 287–8; G. R. S. Darroch, Deeds of a Great Railway: a Record of the Enterprise and Achievements of the London and North-Western Railway Company during the Great War (London, 1920), pp. 22–3.

⁷⁷ TNA, WO 32/6164, instructions for officers while undergoing training in mechanical engineering at Chatham, instructions for officers while undergoing a course of instruction in mechanical engineering at H.M. dockyard, Chatham, May 1901.

⁷⁸ TNA, WO 32/6164, instructions for officers, instructions for officers joining the Midland Railway Company’s locomotive works for a course in mechanical engineering, 24 Aug. 1894, p. 1.

⁷⁹ TNA, WO 32/6164, instructions for officers, instructions for officers joining the Midland Railway Company’s locomotive works, p. 2.

⁸⁰ IWM, private papers of Brigadier R. Micklem, 87/8/1, Ralph Micklem – an autobiography. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in this passage are taken from this source.

⁸¹ Micklem was joined at the War Office in 1917 by his cousin Henry, who was responsible for ‘the supply of material for railways, light railways and roads including the supply of special road-making, maintenance and repairing equipment, plant and materials’. According to their boss, Sir Sam Fay, Henry’s workload was ‘A heavy business!’ See Fay, The War Office at War, pp. 46, 146.

⁸² E. M. Spiers, Haldane: an Army Reformer (Edinburgh, 1980).

⁸³ Haldane’s own account of this trip is given in R. B. Haldane, Richard Burdon Haldane: an Autobiography (London, 1929), pp. 200–9. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes in this passage are taken from this source.

⁸⁴ TNA, CAB 2/2, nos. 83–119, action to be taken in the event of intervention in a European war, 23 Aug. 1911, p. 7.

⁸⁵ Spiers, Haldane, p. 151; H. Strachan, ‘The British army, its general staff and the continental commitment, 1904–1914’, in The British General Staff: Reform and Innovation, c.1890–1939, ed. D. French and B. Holden Reid (London, 2002), pp. 75–94, at p. 87.

⁸⁶ G. Sloan, ‘Haldane’s Mackindergarten: a radical experiment in British military education?’, War in History, ixx (2012), 322–52, at p. 328.

⁸⁷ P. Grant, ‘Edward Ward, Halford Mackinder and the army administration course at the London School of Economics, 1907–1914’, in A Military Transformed? Adaptation and Innovation in the British Military, 1792–1945, ed. M. LoCicero, R. Mahoney and S. Mitchell (Solihull, 2014), pp. 97–109.

⁸⁸ Army. Report of the advisory board, LSE, on the first course at the LSE, January to July, 1907, for the training of officers for the higher appointments on the administrative staff of the army and for the charge of developmental services (Parl. Papers 1907 [Cd. 3696], xlix), p. 11; S. Pelizza, ‘Geopolitics, education, and empire: the political life of Sir Halford Mackinder, 1895–1925’ (unpublished University of Leeds PhD thesis, 2013), pp. 117–18.

⁸⁹ C. W. Gwynn, ‘The administrative course at the London School of Economics’, Royal Engineers Journal, vi (1907), 229–35, at p. 229.

⁹⁰ W. Funnell, ‘National efficiency, military accounting and the business of war’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, xvii (2006), 719–51, at p. 734.

⁹¹ Gwynn, The administrative course’, p. 231.

⁹² Sloan, ‘Haldane’s Mackindergarten’, p. 335; Report of the advisory board, first course, p. 5; Army. Report of the advisory board, LSE, on the fourth course at the LSE, October, 1909, to March, 1910, for the training of officers for the higher appointments on the administrative staff of the army and for the charge of departmental services (Parl. Papers 1910 [Cd. 5213], ix), p. 5.

⁹³ Grant, ‘Edward Ward, Halford Mackinder’, p. 107; Sloan, ‘Haldane’s Mackindergarten’, pp. 334–5.

⁹⁴ Report of the advisory board, fourth course, p. 5.

⁹⁵ Report of the advisory board, first course, p. 2.

⁹⁶ Report of the advisory board, first course, p. 6.

⁹⁷ Report of the advisory board, fourth course, p. 3.

⁹⁸ Report of the advisory board, LSE, on the third course at the LSE, October, 1908, to March, 1909, for the training of officers for the higher appointments on the administrative staff of the army and for the charge of departmental services (Parl. Papers 1909 [Cd. 4610], x), p. 3.

⁹⁹ Grant, ‘Edward Ward, Halford Mackinder’, p. 106; F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911).

¹⁰⁰ Report of the advisory board, first course, p. 14.

¹⁰¹ Funnell, ‘National efficiency’, p. 727.

¹⁰² Report of the advisory board, first course, p. 9.

¹⁰³ Parliamentary Archives (PA), papers of David Lloyd George, LG/D/1/2/1 Butterworth to Lloyd George, 27 May 1915; Pratt, British Railways and the Great War, i. 45.

¹⁰⁴ The quotation refers to the impression left by Geddes upon the British military attaché in Paris, Colonel Herman Le-Roy Lewis, after their first meeting. See PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/3/14/29, Le-Roy Lewis to Lloyd George, 22 Nov. 1916.

¹⁰⁵ A. C. Geddes, The Forging of a Family: a Family Story Studied in its Genetical, Cultural and Spiritual Aspects and a Testament of Personal Belief Founded Thereon (London, 1952), pp. 89–104; R. A. Buchanan, ‘The diaspora of British engineering’, Technology and Culture, xxvii (1986), 501–24.

¹⁰⁶ K. Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), pp. 1–2; Geddes, The Forging of a Family, pp. 117–26.

¹⁰⁷ Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 2.

¹⁰⁸ D. Nelson, ‘Scientific management, systematic management, and labor, 1880–1915’, Business History Review, xlviii (1974), 479–500.

¹⁰⁹ M. Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929, trans. P. Krapp (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. 105–6.

¹¹⁰ G. Brown, Sabotage: a Study in Industrial Conflict (Nottingham, 1977), pp. 121–2.

¹¹¹ Geddes to Ferguson, quoted in Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 2.

¹¹² Gourvish, ‘A British business elite’, pp. 293–7; T. R. Gourvish, ‘The rise of the professions’, in Later Victorian Britain, 1867–1900, ed. T.R. Gourvish and A. O’Day (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 13–35, at p. 29.

¹¹³ Geddes to Lord Riddell, 28 Aug. 1919, quoted in K. Grieves, ‘Sir Eric Geddes, Lloyd George and the transport problem, 1918–21’, Journal of Transport History, xiii (1992), 23–42, at p. 31.

¹¹⁴ A. D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

¹¹⁵ Geddes, The Forging of a Family, p. 202.

¹¹⁶ P. Towle, ‘The Russo-Japanese War and the defence of India’, Military Affairs, xliv (1980), 111–17, at p. 112.

¹¹⁷ National Library of Scotland (NLS), papers of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Acc. 3155/2D, diary entries, 13 June to 3 Oct. 1904 provide occasional references to Kitchener’s concentration on mobilization questions during this period, alongside demonstrating Haig’s own appreciation of the army’s dependence on reliable transportation.

¹¹⁸ R. J. Irving and R. P. T. Davenport-Hines, ‘Geddes, Sir Eric Campbell (1875–1937)’, in Dictionary of Business Biography: a Biographical Dictionary of Business Leaders Active in Britain in the Period 1860–1980, ed. D. J. Jeremy (5 vols., London, 1984), ii. 507–16, at pp. 507–8.

¹¹⁹ R. Bell, Twenty-Five Years of the North Eastern Railway, 1898–1922 (London, 1951), p. 30.

¹²⁰ W. M. Acworth, ‘Railway economics’, Econ. Jour., ii (1892), 392–8; G. Paish, The British Railway Position (London, 1902), pp. 5–6, 14–15.

¹²¹ Paish, British Railway Position, p. 235; N. Crafts, T. Leunig and A. Mulatu, ‘Were British railway companies well managed in the early twentieth century?’, Econ. Hist. Rev., lxi (2008), 842–66.

¹²² R. J. Irving, The North Eastern Railway Company, 1870–1914: an Economic History (Leicester, 1976), pp. 214–15.

¹²³ For a synthesis of the existing literature, see D. A. Turner, ‘Managing the “royal road”: the London & South Western Railway 1870–1911’ (unpublished University of York PhD thesis, 2013), pp. 14–18.

¹²⁴ Irving, North Eastern Railway, pp. 215–16.

¹²⁵ T. Strangleman, ‘Railway and grade: the historical construction of contemporary identities’ (unpublished Durham University PhD thesis, 1998), p. 45.

¹²⁶ TNA, ZLIB 29/691, education and advancement of the railway clerk, pp. 5–6.

¹²⁷ Irving, North Eastern Railway, pp. 241–9, 281; Crafts, Leunig and Mulatu, ‘Were British railway companies well managed?’, p. 853.

¹²⁸ Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, pp. 6–7.

¹²⁹ PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/D/1/2/2, Bell to Lloyd George, 30 May 1915.

¹³⁰ Butterworth’s father George was the vicar of St Mary’s parish church in Deerhurst. Tragically, Butterworth’s son, also named George, did not share his father’s aversion to military service. A talented composer, and friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth enlisted in August 1914 and was shot in the head by a German sniper on 5 Aug. 1916. His name is recorded on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. See J. F. Addyman, ‘G. S. Kaye Butterworth, M. C.’, The North Eastern Express, xxxvii (1998), 64.

¹³¹ Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 10; TNA, WO 32/9188, re-constitution of council. A meeting took place in the QMG’s office on 10 Dec. 1912 to discuss the relationship between the REC and other permanent or temporary committees appointed to consider questions related to railway operations.

¹³² History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, ed. H. L. Pritchard (11 vols., Chatham, 1952), v. 666–8.

¹³³ Townsend, All Rank and No File, p. 45.