He oversaw the expansion of post-war house building, the introduction of telephone Subscriber Trunk Dialling, Premium Bonds, traffic wardens, parking meters, drink driving controls and motorways. Passenger services on a number of local lines were ended that way, including Woofferton to Tenbury Wells in July 1961, [3] Much Wenlock to Wellington via Buildwas in July 1962, [4] and Tenbury Wells and Bewdley in August 1962. Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings. Very true, Beaching saved the railways, it could never had continued with the Victorian attitude of shifting everything to everywhere from race horses to coal, in the age of developing Road Transport.

The photographs were catalogued and added to the archive as MPLS 3/1/9-3/1/11, 3/2/11, 3/3/2, 3/4/7-3/4/16, 3/5/9-3/5/12, 3/6/1-3/6/11 and 3/7/1-3/7/3. Quite when Ernest Marples took possession of the car is not known, as he did not officially take ownership of the car until August 1968, when the Mini had evolved into the MkII version and the Cooper 1275S had long supplanted the 1071S. His father had been a renowned engineering charge-hand and Manchester Labour campaigner, and his mother had worked in a local hat factory. He opined: “On this magnificent road the speed which can easily be reached is so great that senses may be numbed and judgement warped.This first biography of Marples uses newly-available archives to examine public and private transport policy, the growing power of the pro-road lobby and the identification of personal freedom with driving. Shortly after he became a junior minister in November 1951, Marples resigned as managing director of Marples Ridgway but continued to hold some 80% of the firm's shares. It was six years before he finally agreed to let it go – and nothing had been done to it in all that time. At the same time the Labour Party at last got its act together and elected Harold Wilson as its new leader. Marples resigned from Parliament in 1974 and was later awarded a peerage as Baron Marples of Wallasey.

Marples was finding, like so many Ministers in the decades to come, that upsetting motorists was not a wise policy. Like it or not, car ownership boomed when Marples was Transport Secretary and buses were also posing a threat to the railways, as they were cheaper to run and able to serve more areas than a railway line. By the age of 14 he was already active in the labour movement, as well as earning money by selling cigarettes and sweets to Manchester football crowds. While the material is sound, the style is frustrating: I lost count of how many times we’re given a digressive preview of the future, e.In 1956 Marples married his former secretary Ruth Dobson (1919–2014), who on his elevation to the peerage in 1974 became Lady Marples. Labour had pledged to halt rail closures, but after election went on to oversee some of the most controversial closures in Beeching’s report. Following this initial work on the collection, additional material was donated to the Archives Centre in February 2020. Did the rail closure programme force more people onto the roads, or was the process of migration happening anyway?

As Minister of Transport, Marples oversaw the introduction of parking meters and the provisional driving licence in 1958 and two Transport Acts. Among the other closures in Section 7 was "* Kidderminster-Tenbury Wells" with a note "* Withdrawal already implemented", suggesting this Section was included in his report for completeness rather than as his personal recommendation.

The Conservatives served a full five-year term before succumbing to what many people thought was an inevitable defeat in October 1964 by a reinvigorated Labour Party, which promised a planned economy harnessing the best that new technology could offer. The Act was described as the "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854". The political consensus appears to have been a resounding ‘no’, and Britain’s fast road network became like the National Health Service, free at the point of use.

The Act also established new advisory bodies including the Central Transport Consultative Committee [note 1] with its Area Transport Users Consultative Committees (Area Committee or TUCC Transport Users Consultative Committee) to represent the interests of railway users at a national and local level.Emerging initially as a relatively dynamic, young thrusting politician in the comparatively placid world of 1950s Conservative politics, today there are more than a few clouds over his character namely the apparent conflict of interest between his pro-car transport reforms and personal business interests, his tax exile and his penchant for being whipped while wearing women's clothes. In June 1962 they announced that passenger services would be completely withdrawn between Shrewsbury and Bewdley (and also reduced south of Bewdley). Instead of having one aperture for the rear window and one for the boot, we ran them into one and turned it into a boxed channel.