Railways in Britian and the United States, 1930-1940: Studies in economic and business history

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2002 by Gourvish, Terry

Geoffrey Channon, Railways in Britain and the United States, 1830-1940: studies in economic and business history, Ashgate, Aldershot (2001), 353 pp., L45.00.

Geoffrey Channon is one of Britain's leading post-war transport historians. His ambitious new monograph comes as something of a surprise. As the preface suggests, scholars have been waiting for this publication for some time now, and in the event it is not quite the book they were led to expect. The author, we had assumed, was writing a definitive modern history of the Great Western Railway, a business historian's alternative to MacDermot, perhaps, but here only about a third of the text is concerned with that company. Instead Channon has provided a much more valuable contribution to scholarship, a wide-ranging foray into comparative transport history, embracing two of the most interesting countries, Great Britain and the United States. In fact this book is as much a matter of business history as railway history. It is subtitled Studies in economic and business history, and the approach of that outstanding American business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr, appears at centre stage.

The first two chapters deal with Chandler's typology and the railway industries in the United States and Britain. Readers may be familiar with Channon's review article of The Visible Hand in this journal in 1981. His new material, drawing on subsequent contributions from scholars such as Gerald Crompton, Frank Dobbin, Robert Dawson Kennedy, Greg Thompson and Olivier Zunz, takes the analysis much further. In chapter 1, which deals with the United States, he provides a succinct literature review of railroad development while also highlighting the distinct limits to the contribution which the companies made to management practice generally. He also makes the very valid point that the intervention of the State in railroads represented another kind of `visible hand', something which Chandler fails to emphasise. In chapter 2, which examines the British case, there are some percipient observations which counter the once familiar view that nothing in Britain matched the importance which American railroads exerted in their economy. Channon makes good use of Peter Wardley's listing of the largest British companies, which is dominated by the railway industry, to point out that in the early twentieth century three British railway companies were larger (in employment terms) than all the US railroads with the exception of the Pennsylvania. High concentration levels and the complexities of oligopolistic competition came earlier in Britain and should not be underestimated. Chandler has asserted that the managerial challenge in Britain was less testing than in America, where the route mileage was ten times greater. Channon's response is that the nature of the challenge was different. British managers had to grapple with the operation of a comparatively dense, intensive and, above all, expensive network. Furthermore the industry was established in a comparatively short time, a case of `compressed development', and the acquisition of land was a much more complex affair. Given the recent revisionism to which Chandler's work has been subjected, there are few surprises here. Nevertheless, it should be recognised that Channon was one of the earliest critics of Chandler, and both scholars and students will welcome his more mature thoughts on the subject.

It has to be said that a fair amount of the material in this book has been published before. For example, there is the promotion of the Great Western Railway by Bristol capitalists, a substantial chapter that is as much a contribution to the economic and social history of Bristol as a piece of mere `railway history'. Subsequent chapters will also be familiar: on the Midland Railway's strategic extension to London St Pancras (still a classic dissection of decision making within Britain's railway companies), on railway competition and pooling, and on the Great Western after the Railways Act of 1921, which exposes the deep-seated failure of railway companies to combine responsibility for commercial and operating functions in their organisations. However, it should be emphasised that all this work has been subject to revision, and in particular to juxtaposition with subsequent scholarship. Its appearance in one place in a new form taking on board contributions such as those of Dresser and Ollerenshaw (on Bristol), Lamoureax, Raff and Temin (on theoretical perspectives in business history) and Crompton (on Britain's inter-war railways) greatly strengthens Channon's contribution to transport history. The book also contains newer material. There are three chapters on the recruitment, functions and interlocking business relations of the British railway director, based on the experience of the Great Western. Catching the eye here is a short but provocative piece on English landed society which reveals how the flagging fortunes and waning influence of some aristocrats were shored up by involvement in the railway industry, which was used as a stepping stone to broader links with commerce and industry. Last, but certainly not least, there is Channon's American work, the product of his fruitful studies at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington. In chapters 10 and 11 the Pennsylvania Railroad is put under the microscope of a British historian. Unlike the Great Western, which may be taken to be representative of a large British railway company, the Penn was not typical of America's larger railroads; indeed, in many ways, and especially organisationally, it was exceptional, and it would be dangerous to infer too much from such a case. However, in examining the company's industrial relations record Channon is able to point out that this exemplar of best practice had a labour management system which was less rule-bound than its organisational handbooks suggested. It allowed local practices to develop, and standardised only when pressed by organised labour to do so. Finally, the author addresses that old conundrum: why did British railway companies build most of their own locomotives while the American companies, by and large, did not? The path-dependence of the repair function provides one convincing hypothesis, but, of course, there are others, and readers interested in this topic are invited to consult the much fuller account of the British locomotive building industry in David Boughey's recent University of London Ph.D. thesis.