Annus Mirabilis

Here's another great period British film - this one from 1963; it depicts the recovery of British Railways from a heavy snowstorm. The British Invasion-style soundtrack fits curiously with the railway scenes, many of which underscore the awkwardness of Britain's transition from the industrial age to the modern era. This may be 1963, but only the film quality and the diesel engines distinguish the railway scenes here from those of "The Night Mail." Not much had changed since 1936: the manually-operated signal boxes were still warmed by coal fires, and all of the employees are well past middle age. The film clearly means to convey some sense of the importance and usefulness of the railway system - can't miss the passengers chuckling over all of the cars stuck in the snow - but it's a defensive assertion, made in the face of encroaching modernity, a last argument for the preservation of Things As They Are.

Philip Larkin designated 1963 as a watershed year in his famous "Annus Mirabilis," for reasons that have less than nothing to do with this blog:

"Sexual intercourse began

In Nineteen Sixty-Three

(which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the "Chatterley ban"

And the Beatles first LP."

It was certainly a memorable year in Britain, for a lot of reasons, intimately connected with the culture: apart from that LP and the ending of the Lord Chancellor's longstanding ban on the publication or sale of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, there was the Profumo Affair, another one of those salacious incidents that leave the impression of ineradicable change.

And of course, there was also the Beeching Axe. In March, 1963, the British Railways Board published "The Reshaping of British Railways," which recommended the wholesale closure of large segments of the railway system. In spite of rising losses and the clear need to conserve funds for modernization of the surviving system, there was an immediate outcry - the press dubbed the proposed plan "The Beeching Axe," after its author, Dr. Richard Beeching, and the folk singer Cyril Tawney commemorated it in song. In spite of the outcry, the government went ahead and pursued mass closures. Many branches vanished, as did the Great Central line from Nottingham down to London; the great Midland line from Settle to Carlisle narrowly escaped closure.

So when you see this video (or, for another taste of the same period, this one), you are seeing something of more than normal interest: this is a cameo of British Railways before the Beeching Axe fell. Steam has four years to run yet in revenue service; the Chatterley ban is still in force, and women wear white gloves in Pullman cars, while men run locomotives in frock coats. You might be forgiven for wondering what decade it is - because it's one of those moments where things are in the process of going two ways at once.