User:Trident13/MRBonavia
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Michael Bonavia was born in May 1909 and was educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he took a degree in economics. In the summer of 1931 he joined N. M. Rothschild & Sons, merchant bankers, at New Court, St Swithin's Lane, a historic street running parallel to Walbrook. He was a 'supernumerary', expected to learn the business. He was soon to find out that a Cambridge degree in economics cut very little ice but, being a young man of charm and discernment, he learned much of the Rothschild legend and of the fascinating, old-fashioned characters on their high stools, practically all of whom had settled there for life. Not so Michael, who, at the end of 1935, joined the Court Department of the University of London at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington.
One of his first jobs was to handle, successfully, the detailed arrangements for the celebration of the university's centenary, followed by the court's removal to Bloomsbury. Within a year, from being a very junior clerk in Rothschild's, he had become, albeit temporarily, the chief financial officer of the largest university in the British Empire. With the war the chairman of the court became Minister of Information and Michael remained as the university's representative in the Senate House, a species of service manager until he once more became Acting Clerk of the Court, having rejoined the university administration, which had moved to Richmond. He had had two years at the Ministry, living within its walls, a remarkable and sometimes hilarious experience to one with such an advanced yet cultured sense of humour. When Catriona, his first wife, died suddenly in 1943 he felt utterly unsettled and accepted a surprise offer to enter the steel industry. He was already a distinguished transport economist when, in 1945, he joined the London & North Eastern Railway in the office of the Chief General Manager, thus achieving his ambition of serving as a railwayman. His remarkable intellect and clarity of mind enabled him quickly to come to terms with the complexity of railway existence at headquarters, but he also had a certain determined charm which he could gently apply to work a far more experienced brother officer round to his point of view.
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When he joined the railway - indeed, right to the end of his career - his splendid intellect was at the service of others. We needed such people. He did not aspire to become a practical front-line railway officer, although he admired many of those dedicated men and wished he had their talent in a field that would not have come naturally to him. But then we admired him for many things, not least when the Channel tunnel project, of which he was Director, and to which he had given so much, was terminated abruptly in 1975 by a sudden government decision to pull out. Michael was deeply upset, although it was to his wife that he truly confided his disappointment, rather than his colleagues. So when we met in his last year of service one found no bitterness but the same interesting and considerate man whom I was to know better and to admire so much in our respective retirements. But his work bore fruit and was surely used in later years. It was a great joy to be invited to travel with Kethi on the inaugural train on 6 May 1994, to dive down to the depths of the Channel tunnel and to emerge, at long last, in France.
We had first met socially in 1954 when I was in charge of a large steam locomotive depot in south London and several hundred employees. He was the first man I had met from very high places outside my own department to whom I could talk on level terms. He asked me many questions about my railway life which I answered with suitable modesty, and this, I believe, he appreciated. Michael spent his working life with very senior officers. It never spoiled him. He never used important names to get his way or hectored people on their behalf. In retirement I would ask him about his former chiefs, and his assessments, even when critical, were very much to the point in the nicest possible way.
When the British Transport Staff College was set up in 1959, near Woking, Michael Bonavia was chosen as Director of Studies and the Principal was General W. D. A. Williams. Both were ideal appointments. The general, hospitable, convivial, a shrewd judge of character, was extremely acute and delegated extensively. Michael was the perfect foil, an excellent Director, academically punctilious, who would encourage anything of an intellectual nature and who was, in his charming way, a hard taskmaster. He chose four young Assistant Directors and 'Woking' quickly became an outstanding educational establishment which broadened the mind of many a budding young engineer and manager. Michael's departure coincided with my arrival as a student, so I could see at first hand what had been achieved in those first three years.
My wife and I spent happy days with Kethi and Michael at their home in Haslemere. Of course, being railwaymen, he and I would talk 'shop' for a time but Kethi's home, cultured but completely natural, was a reflection of them both, while the garden was Michael's pride and joy. He had many unusual specimens of trees and plants, whilst, indoors, his shelves were graced by unusual and interesting books on the art of gardening. Home from a hard day's work, he loved to walk round the garden with Kethi, a complete relaxation for them both. He maintained his interest in railways until his death. He was a distinguished author of academic studies and railway histories, as well as of The Channel Tunnel Story and London before I forget (Upton on Severn: Self-publishing Association, 1990), which he described to me as `rather lightweight'. However, the book is a joy to read, for Michael, with Kethi as his inspiration, not only looks back at his family but also at the London of his youth, bringing the great city and its people to life once more. It is dedicated `To Kethi, who has taught me to look again at the London I might have forgotten'.
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Thus Michael Bonavia, a man it was an honour to know and to call a friend.
Richard Hardy
The contribution of Michael Bonavia to our knowledge of the history of Britain's railways should not be underestimated. First, he was a prolific writer. While still in his twenties he wrote a sound textbook on the Economics of Transport (London: Nisbet, 1936), which attracted sufficient support to merit several editions, culminating in the seventh in 1954 (London: Nisbet and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In 1947-48 he lectured on inland transport as part of a series of University of London lectures on Britain's industrial future, which were published by Europa in 1948. When he retired from British rail in 1974 he embarked on a successful second career as a railway historian, combining the output of serious works, encouraged by Theo Barker (and others) and an appointment at the City of London Polytechnic, with more popular works written unashamedly `for the money'. Third, his views always attracted attention because, like only a handful of people (Arthur Pearson, John Elliot and Gerry Fiennes spring readily to mind) Michael was an 'insider' who wrote from first-hand experience. He had an intimate knowledge of the `Big Four' railways of the inter-war years, and more particularly the London & North Eastern, which he joined in 1945 as Assistant to the Chief General Manager, Miles Beevor.
On nationalisation he joined the secretariat of the British Transport Commission as Assistant Secretary (Development and Works) and later served as Principal Works and Development Officer (1949-56), Principal Officer (Modernisation) (1956-59) and founding Director of Studies at the British Transport Staff College, Woking (1959-62). He was a senior executive during the first decade or so of the British Railways Board, under Lord Beeching, Sir Stanley Raymond, Sir Henry Johnson and Lord Marsh. He could write about the sorry early history of the Channel tunnel from the standpoint of Project Director, 1966-67 and 1970-74 (The Channel Tunnel Story, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1987). Finally, Michael's undiminished enthusiasm for railways and railway history was remarkable. He continued writing and researching until the end, his books on the Big Four (The Four Great Railways, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980), a three-volume History of the LINER (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982-83), The History of the Southern Railway (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987) and The Cambridge Line (Shepperton: Ian Allan, 1995) being marvellously succinct accounts, `bridg[ing] the gap between the traditional form of popular railway history and academic "business history"' (Peter Butterfield, in this journal, September 1988, p. 216).
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Of the twenty or so books he wrote six deserve particular attention. In 1971 Michael published The Organisation of British Railways (Shepperton: Ian Allan). Based on a University of London Ph.D. thesis completed in 1968, it reviewed railway organisational structures from the establishment of the industry in the 1830s to the British Railways Board's new organisation of 1970, which was encouraged by the 1968 Transport Act and initiated with the help of the consultants McKinsey & Co. The book, while suitably analytical, contains the hallmark of Bonavia style: careful attention to detail combined with the occasional shaft of wit. Thus he observed that `small boys play trains, but grown-ups have a better game; they call it railway reorganisation' and found some irony in the fact that in 1953 a non-integrationist Conservative government created Area Boards yet gave them powers to embrace not only railways but the other activities of the BTC (pp. 179-80).
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Ten years later he wrote Railway Policy between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). The project arose from the inaugural conference of the Transport History Group in 1975, where Theo Barker expressed the view that a re-examination of the managerial strategies of the Big Four was overdue. Barker had in mind what would today be called a `witness seminar', bringing railway managers and academic historians together in open debate. In fact Michael conducted a series of private interviews which were published separately by the City of London Polytechnic in 1978. They form the basis of a much more complex and less damning judgement on railway strategy in this challenging period, beset as it was by recession, the collapse of the railways' staple traffics, the rise of road transport and the persistence of predecessor company systems and loyalties. Michael criticises the judgements of historians such as Aldcroft, though he perhaps leans a little too far in the direction of the insiders. Thus the disinvestment of the period was an aim rather than an abject failure, and critics of railway marketing and cost control were asked to recognise the very real constraints imposed on the companies by the regulatory framework. As this journal's reviewer noted, the book `succeeds in questioning the criteria and evidence of some of the judgements passed on the main-line companies by some historians' (G. L. Turnbull, March 1982, pp. 88-9).
Last, but certainly not least, Michael did much to extend our knowledge of railway operations and management after nationalisation. His important works here were The Nationalisation of British Transport: the early history of the British Transport Commission, 1948-53 (London: Macmillan, in association with the LSE, 1987), which explained the failure of transport integration, and drew on his earlier The Birth of British Rail (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), British Rail: the first twenty-five years (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1981) and The Twilight of British Rail? (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1985), which dealt with the difficulties of the early to mid 1980s. These are all short books, and not without some repetition, it is true, but, always provocative, they provide the essential framework and raise most of the key issues concerning railway operation under State ownership which others may test more fully. They also contain important findings in their own right.
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Bonavia's work is important, for example, in laying bare the limitations of the top managers of the BTC, whom he found rather drab and uninspiring (Birth of British Rail, p. 23). He was a trenchant critic of the Commission and Railway Executive for making such slow progress with automatic train control to prevent SPADs (signals passed at danger), a prescient observation (ibid., pp. 84-5) in view of the Clapham accident of 1989 and still a topical issue today. He rightly took a jaundiced view of the reorganisation of the BTC in 1955 which followed the appointment of General Sir Brian Robertson as chairman, the abolition of the Railway Executive and the Commission's assumption of executive responsibility for the railways. The resultant hierarchy of BTC, BTC committees, BTC sub-commissions (including a Railway Sub-commission), BTC General Staff, BTC divisions (including a Railway Central Staff) and railway regions unsurprisingly created administrative complexity, while its unfamiliarity encouraged discord and even disobedience in experienced railway managers, elements which Bonavia experienced at first hand (The Organisation of British Railways, p. 74; British Rail: the first twenty-five years, p. 215).
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s experience as a planner and investment manager also gave him insights into key elements in the history of railway investment, notably the ill-fated Modernisation Plan of 1955, which provided a substantial tranche of funding for the railways, but the misuse of which dogged the efforts of later managers to convince the Treasury of the need for higher levels of spending in the 1970s and 1980s. Bonavia revealed the 'plan' to be no more than an aggregation of desirable projects which had been dreamed up on an independent basis by the railway regions. The situation, which arose because the government had insisted on a quick response, was scarcely a recipe for successful investment on a large scale (The First twenty-five Years, pp. 94-6). He was also at HQ when Beeching became Chairman of the British Railways Board, and so has pertinent assessments not only of Beeching as a manager and strategist but of his ability to recruit managers. Most academic reviewers have criticised the superficiality of some of Michael Bonavia's writing but no one will deny that he combined enthusiasm for railways with the manager's knowledge of problems and the economist's awareness of the environment within which railways have operated for over a century.
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Terry Gourvish
Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2000 by Hardy, Richard, Gourvish, Terry << Page 1 Continued from page 3. Previous | Next
