Edward Thompson: Wartime C.M.E. Discussion

But then the UK had ample coal to convert to electricity. Hungary for example which is developing electric traction in the 1930s is not known for its hydroelectricity. (Nor for that its coal)

 

I would think that back in the day, if you had lots of coal you would burn it in a steam locomotive. What fuel did Hungary use to generate its electricity?

 

About V2 level as boiler diameter could have been the same.A little less than Britannia because three cylinder locomotives are not so frugal as two cylindered

 

Exactly. It was readily available, cheap and didn't need large amounts of new infrastructure - masts, wires, transformers etc

Much of Europe had to rebuild its infrastructure from scratch, so it made sense to go for modern equipment from the start. The UK was broke, and most infrastructure was still operational

 

But that doesn’t make sense. As noted widespread electrification started in the 1930s in Europe and continued after WW2. The postwar electrification in Europe is clearly a continuation of earlier development. In the UK you have complacency and short termism about coal ‘we have it and it is cheap so no need to develop anything beyond steam engines’. Germany has coal, as does France and so on. It seems to me that on Europe they did a better job of embracing modern technology. I tend to view the cheap coal argument as something of a canard to defend what is basically poor thinking by uk managers whose decisions were framed by short termism. I get that the short term costs of electrification are high but the long term gains are greater.

You have electrification in the UK in urban areas, you have schemes like out of Liverpool Street, the DC lines out of Euston, Woodhead, the Southern etc. But with the exception of the southern, it is mostly small sections rather than ‘central location to central location’. But it is not as if it was impossible to electrify.

Post war the UK goes down two dead end paths. First steam modernisation and then dieselisation. (The access to resources argument doesn’t work here because until North Sea oil, the uk has no oil).

So to go back to Fiennes and the earlier point about thermo efficiency vs labour costs, when Europe was looking to develop electricity and or diesel technology, the UK was still trying to develop nineteenth century steam technology.

The fact that 50+ years after east coast electrification had been investigated it finally took place shows repeated poor judgement (and continued poor judgement) when it comes to developing a longer term strategy for the rail network.

Now to go back to Thompson, the question for me, is if he had remained in office, or even taken the BR cme job that riddles took, whether or not when modernisation of BR came about if he would have pushed electrification and dieselisation rather than churning out slightly updated versions of what had gone before. In essence, would Thompson have been likely to radically break with steam? How radical could Thompson have been?

 

I don't have a copy to hand either , (the missus took it to the charity shop . don't ask me why), but what GF said was HNG gave us 2000hp when what we wanted was 3000hp.
he did not mention what loco was to be used to provide 3000hp.

(subject to correction by someone who DOES have the book)

 

another consideration would have been the reduction in coal requirement . the miners were already strike happy without telling them there would be redundancies.

 

Yet in these "advanced" countries steam in many cases lasted longer than in the UK.

 

In France the Government, from the 1840s onwards, provided large amounts of funding for railway infrastructure. The railway companies generally built their lines as concessions (like the Channel Tunnel is now) with ownership reverting to the government after the concession period ended in return for govt investment at the start. I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised if early French electrification was encouraged by a higher level of government infrastructure investment at that time too.

 

it really was not as simple as you seem to think . yep the Germans had coal . they also had the $ billions provided by the Marshall Plan . we , were stuck with our debt to the US to repay under punitive terms .
the French are not coal rich , hence the higher standards they set their loco mechaniciens (drivers ) . it also is the reason they were keen to use oil burning steam locos.
I do not get why many on here seem to think electrification was the obvious answer . -it was a pipe dream , and still is to an extent . WE DID NOT HAVE THE DOSH - it is that simple.
we tried to develop steam because although it is imperfect it was the best we could do at the time .
I tried to give a flavour of '50 Britain in an earlier post .failed apparently.

we had to export all we could just to survive .we still had an empire which we had to support . we still had conscription to a standing army because empire brings responsibilities . we were fighting the Mau Mau , we were doing the same in Cyprus trying to keep a lid on things .more in Malaya ,and Suez fouled up our oil supply ,plus more stuff in the middle east which never seems to go away. we still had a large Navy and Airforce all of which we could not avoid while the Empire existed , then there was the Berlin Airlift ,mainly supported by us , and a small matter of trying to stop India turning into a bloodbath .oh , and the BAOR
in between all that we were trying to rebuild cities ,factories and industry , and rehouse thousands of homeless people .

honestly , you youngunns just don't have a damn clue

 

The last West German steam locomotive was built in 1959, the evening star was what 1960. Maybe in these more advanced countries they didn’t choose to scrap things after less than a decade of use, hence a more evolutionary end to steam rather than the start stop start approach that governed the UK postwar.

Bottom line, policymakers in the UK made consistently bad decisions over a sustained period of time.

 

I'm not so sure, I heard somewhere that one of the main problems of running steam alongside Diesel was in maintaining two parallel sets of infrastructure.
I agree though, that the decisions on strategy are complex, and need to take into account all sorts of factors.

 

That isn't true. The UK actually received more Marshall Aid than another country cf https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/06...for-the-reconstruction-of-europe-5-june-1947/

The decision to maintain an empire - a bad decision
The decision to intervene in Suez etc - more bad decisions
Independence and partition of India - badly executed bad decisions

You think the UK had problems with its reconstruction. This is what Warsaw looked like in 1945 (85% of buildings destroyed). There is an even more shocking photo around you can see that shows the destruction.



That is just the destruction of property - what about people - so for Poland - thirty percent of all scientists and academics, fifty-seven percent of all lawyers, twenty two percent of judges and prosecutors, thirty nine percent of physicians and almost twenty percent of teachers and artists were killed. Thirty seven and a half percent of those who had received a higher education in the Second Republic perished during the war; thirty percent of those who obtained a secondary education at that time were killed; the losses among students at vocational schools reached fifty three percent.

So what does that do for rebuilding a country when you've lost that many skilled people, not just intellectuals but those with technical skills. The UK suffered but the rest Europe suffered more. Most of Europe had it worse than the UK.

 

That does not preclude that the UK suffered disproportionately compared to - I don't know - New Zealand? Dismissing the UK's own troubles during and post WW2 is, IMO, missing the point spectacularly.

You sound as if you want to dismiss that people in the UK suffered at all. Tell that to the people of Coventry, for a start.

 

Which I did not do. I pointed out right at the start of this branch of the discussion the postwar restrictions that Thompson was operating in.

My point about Poland and the rest of Europe is that in terms of wartime destruction some context when discussing the UK is necessary. At no point have I claimed that the UK didn’t suffer.

Thompson was operating in restricted conditions, those making decisions in the immediate aftermath in Europe were doing so in even more restricted conditions.

When European countries rebuilding their rail networks after WW2 embraced electrification, the UK was maintaining steam, then changed policy and went all in with diesel and rapidly withdrew all the steam stock life expired or not. Bad decision, compounded by bad decision, compounded by bad decision. This was a missed opportunity and we still see these kinds of poor short term decisions even now with the fiasco over the electrification of the mml and the lines out of Paddington.

 

Re the Marshall Plan. Our war debt that we repaid to the USA was £3.8bn, a bit more than the £2.7bn we received under the Marshall plan. Then there was the cost to the UK of all the war materiel we supplied to the USSR, for which we were not repaid. Post war UK finances is a complex subject.

 

the dosh from the Marshall plan was not a gift .the repayments were not on overly favourable terms . Thatchers gov finally cleared the debt . Gordon Brown stuffed us with a nice new one , (but that's another story)

you cant just dump an Empire . it brings responsibilities to millions of people . that it was done as quickly as it was , with relatively few problems is noteworthy.

Suez was a bad idea , but it didn't look that way to start with . our oil supply had effectively been cut off. what would you have done ?. it brought about the age of the supertanker and showed us we were losing our grip .

India - I agree - a monumental c..k up . thanks to Lord Louis Battenberg.

damage in Europe was terrible ….. but we never started it . had we not stood against Germany when we did for as long as we did the world would be a very different place .

none of which changes the fact we were skint ,broke, borassic ,and very , very,tired

 

Yes, but the wartime debt to the US was finally paid off in 2006! it wasn't the US giving with one hand and taking with the other. The basic point is that the UK received more Marshall Aid than any other single country including Germany. Whether successive UK governments chose to spend that money wisely is a different debate - as I've indicated over a period of years successive British policy makers in government and in business made bad decisions based on short termism, complacency and an inability to see the way the world was going.

The UK attempted to maintain its position as a world power (and failed), Germany, France and Italy etc invested infrastructure.

The BoP crisis did not help and de-colonialisation etc did not help (but lets not forget that France, Belgium, Netherlands are all de-colonialising at this time as well)

Case in point:

So investment in rebuilding, reconstructing, modernising industry and infrastructure was considerably less than in Germany.

All of which is a very long way from Edward Thompson and whether or not he would have embraced electrification given the chance.

 

That is a matter of debate.
The creation of Poland was an Anglo-Saxon affaire and neither Germay or Russia found it OK.
Russia and Germany agreed on cancelling it and it became a world war second half when England declared war on Germany.

 

Way, way, off topic, but a view of the causes of WWII that contains some truths yet focuses on the trigger for war to the exclusion of just about all of the genuinely causative factors.

Actually, on second thoughts, perhaps there are some similarities with the generally accepted view of Thompson!


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