The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 21

FOOD FOR THE HUNGRY SIGHT for the blind HEALING for the Leper HOMES for the despairing (CIS provides a Tent Home for destitjrr Air 2 PImu fiva itt you an ihrt an rou un ip3 ir to Hon Trtuunr Rl Hon. Jm Griffith. P.C., M.P WAR ON WANT Marflr Road. London, S. WEEKEND REVIEW January 13, 1963 Regional planning is in the wind.

Last week, a Minister was put in charge of one unemployment area, and there are rumours of big new authorities to govern others. Yet Britain's best-deftned region the Highlands seems about to lose its railways and its first prosperity for decades. Below, Neal Ascherson argues that if its anarchic transport were put under unified command, the Government could find the Highlands a ready-made pilot area for a great regional experiment. bridge, at remote Highland settlements. Three weeks ago, Rollo launched his scheme to equip Highland schools with lathes to make lathe-parts, the schools to serve in turn as satellites of a central machine-toot plant somewhere in the region.

But it is State-controlled industry which dominates fortunes here. Dounreay. bringing hundreds of jobs and an influx of well-paid young technicians, has trebled the population of Thurso and revived the Caithness farmers. At Fort William, the paper firm of Wiggins-Teape is to build a pulp mill for 1.200 workers to process the enormous Highland output of the Forestry Commission. The Highlands and Islands form a distinct economic region, alien to the re-t of Britain with their peasant agriculture and their transport difficulties.

But even without any general policy of development, this region is showing clear signs of growth. What would happen to this precarious revival if the railways were shut 7 Four big lines are in serious danger. The first is the North line up the east coast to Wick and Thurso. The second is the Kyle line. The third is the West Highland line, running up from Glasgow to Fort William and on to the little port of Mallaig.

The fourth is the main artery from Perth to Inverness. Caithness, the green nose of Britain, is inaccessible by road and air for many days of the year. Most goods, including the glassware, travel by rail. Dounreay itself supplies its Materials Testing Reactor with coffins 40-ton containers of ttTHE Highlands have got to go to hell in the new setup, of course," said the ex-Minister, fresh out of office. A month later I stood in the new glass factory at Wick, boldly raised by local energy and savings, and watched 50 Caithness boys and girls turning out glassware which a Swede might covet Here was the reviving future of northern Scotland which now hangs in the balance.

The "new set-up" of Dr. Beeching's railway closures to be announced very soon could tip that balance back to hopeless emigration and decay. The Provost of Wick is an engine-driver. A huge figure, built on the Roy Welensky scale. Mr.

Dunnett range in an Argyllshire farm kitchen the collies snore in front of a sealed grate, while the crofter's wife hots up her cloutie dumplin' on Calor gas Outside, her man contemplates, if he does not always practise, revolutionary methods of re-seed mg pastures Crofting agriculture is winning through to something approaching an even keel; anybody who believes that it is an unpopular way of life should note that no fewer than 137 people made application recently for two holdings vacant near Fort William. Along with this has come a small but brave industrial revival. Many little Highland towns are now centres of new growth, fighting away from LIFELINE IN JEOPARDY HIGHLAND REPORT FROM NEAL ASCHERSON national decline of 8 per cent It is hard to exaggerate tie bitterness of North Scottish railwaymen confronted with these figures. Mr. Tom Mackenzie, Inverness magistrate and railway linesman, spoke of deliberate sabotage by the British Transport Commission.

Such explanations take too little account of the slow improvement of roads and haulage vehicles over 20 years but everybody in the Highlands has his own story of railway dunderheadedness to tell. On the credit side, the arrival of the diesels has helped to slash the annual loss on Highland railways (over 500,000 in 1959) by perhaps 1 00,000. The freight rates became adjustable in 1957, and the new Scottish Railways Board which took office on New Year's Day will have further power to vary charges. But for several lines, the board and the diesels have probably come too late. Highland railways will, foresee-ably, always run at a loss.

That is accepted by staff and users alike. But they contend that their railways should be a public service first, a profit-making concern afterwards. One county clerk put it We can't hope to succeed in an attack on the principles of putting railways on an economic basis; what we are concerned with is the application of these principles to outlying areas." A promise Their other contention is that no alternative transport system exists. If the railway goes, the bus and lorry services and the roads to run them on would simply not be there. Air services have obvious limitations, and are weathering a very bumpy storm; B.E.A.

has just raised Scottish fares by up to 20 per cent and there is a threat to replace it on Highland and Hebrides routes by private airlines. The new vehicle ferries, fitted out with cocktail bars and overnight berths, are magnificent for the Hebrideans, but can only make the railway lines to Kyle and Mallaig appear less necessary. Mr. Michael Noble, the new Secretary of State for Scotland, is a pleasant Argyllshire landowner, whose glory rests more on his farming and on the plumage of his Highland dress (green kilt, pink shirt, scarlet stockings) than on proven administrative ability. But he has promised that no railway will be closed until adequate alternative services can be provided.

His subjects find it hard to see how this can be done. Two-lane highways cannot be laid by magic in a day, and there are far too few bus lines to take over the railway's passengers Experienced Northerners agree that struggling towards Thurso over snowed-up roads in an unhealed charabanc is no fair alternative to doing it in a warm, reliable compartment with Scotch broth and bottles of Export just down the corridor. Norway's example In Britain's most clearly defined economic region, whose distinctive feature is difficult communications, the transport systems are in competition so uncontrolled that they are plundering each other to death and ruining the economy they were formed to serve. Low-priced private haulage has been allowed to loot the railways to the point of extinction. When Dr Beeching's plans come out, the Highland counties will go into battle.

But their statutory weapons are feeble. The dummy travellers' parliaments, the Transport Users' Consultative Committees, were prudently stripped of any right to object to rail closure last year, and Parliament is tired of the moans of Highland M.P.s. Probably, the clamour from the rest of Britain will drown the Northern voices. Hope comes, unexpectedly, from Norway. When the Scottish crowds cheered King Olaf this autumn, they were cheering in part for his kingdom.

Norway's arrangements have for years furnished envious allusions for Scots journalists and politicians, and just before the royal visit a delegation of the official Highland Panel had returned from Oslo with a report which ran round the North like a fiery cross. The highland nation of Norway, the panel proclaimed, had not only accepted its railways as a deficit public service, but was actually extending them. All forms of rural still wore his bib and brace and driver's cap as he stood in the town hall beneath a Raeburn of a predecessor and said Shutting the railways would strangle the remaining life out of the North. Most of our freight goes by rail, and the roads are impassable with drifts after a moderate winter storm. We would die a slow death." Startling change Everywhere in the Highlands the same words were repeated to me like 5 lesson The railway is The Lifeline." It is a common assumption in London that Provost Dunnett and the 300,000 people of the North and the Isles he speaks for are already dying their slow death let the lifeline be cut, then, and the oxygen saved.

But the decline of the Highlands, wasting since the eighteenth centurv. seems to be halting at last. Ten years have made a startling difference. Ruins seem fewer. There are watertight modern houses in new places and often cars standing outside them (one in three people in north-west Scotland has a car, which is well above the British average).

Suddenly it is harder to find an iron the nadir of Stornoway with its notorious 29 per cent unemployment. In Caithness, the county's businessmen have been marshalled by the Hon. Robin Sinclair. Lord Thurso's young and ingenious son. Farther down the east coast, the tiny colliery at Brora has been reopened as a miners' co-operative and sells coal to two distilleiies.

At Inverness, the Highland capital, there is a new welding-machine works. At Oban, under the improbable walls of a fake Roman Colosseum. Crofter Fishermen Ltd. shared out 90.000 profit on shellfish last year among 200 crofters, and is building a massive deep freeze at the railhead. The evangelist of industry in the Highlands is Mr.

John Rollo, chairman of the private Highland Fund and one of the truly singular personalities in Scottish life. An active Nationalist and boss of an engineering works at Bonnybridge the Lowlands, Rollo has conceived a mystical cult of the lathe" the only cieation of man which can reproduce itself, for a lathe can make another lathe." He has used his uncanny skill at transport costing to set up a chain of little factories, satellites to Bonny- gg i i'iii I STLART DINGER Provost Dunnett of Wick has problems. His town's lifeline may go and he's a railwayman inert plutonium from as far away as Denmark and Australia by special railway wagons. The Kyle line has an importance which is mostly social. Its intermediate stations act as railheads to districts ill-served by the miserable Highland road network, but the axe is very close to it indeed.

Road transport has been taking business off this railway at Kyle wholesale, and the new Klacbrayne vehicle ferries to the Western Isles will make it even less important economically. Real disaster, however, would follow the shutting of the West Highland line to Fort William. The pulp mill scheme would be struck dead. The Lochaber aluminium works, one ol the biggest plants in northern Scotland, would lose its supplies of Ghanaian ore and close down. Thousands of jobs, actual and projected, would vanish.

But this will not be allowed to happen. Last Friday's announcement of a deal between British Railways and the pulp mill ensured that the line as far as Fort William would stay open until 1985, at least. Its extension to Mallaig, another railway town, is in greater danger British Railways are the biggest employers in the whole Mallaig district, whose roads are hardly fit for regular or even holiday traffic. Worst of all would be the damage to possibilities of further growth and permanent recovery in the Highlands. And deeper still is the psychological damage done to the people themselves.

A railway in a bleak land gives a comforting assurance that one is not cut off. 'Sabotage' charge Up the North line run the powerful diesel locomotives, the curious tinkle of their motors sounding across the high moors when buses are abandoned in snow and cars swivel helplessly on black ice. On the Kyle line, local people can still travel on goods trains if they want to first-class fare, at their own risk. At Achnasheen station, a place of fewer than 25 people serves a hinterland nf more than 2,000 in the Gair-loch district alone, and the train from lmerness is met by vehicles which fan out with goods and passengers oer a huge area of Ross-shire. Yet Highlanders, still emigrating, are gradually less willing to use their trains Passenger traffic fell by 19 per cent between 1938 and 1958 (the national drop was 12 per cent), and the freight tonnage fell by 15.2 per cent, compared to a BRENTFORD'S DIRECT FROM FACTOR Now the Woolwich helps more people than ever before BRI-rmOM RTTH) SHEETS PAIR All our ihcl art inn aiu.un ml nol teeomls inferior nude ipeciaJty tot Lheprti opportunity Lo hrlns ctir luxury fitted lhect tMreci from i be factory lo eci hody- ai price thai cannot be Oeaien i3 rmr order nkJmi COLOURS HI TLOJI tlHITI JJLiA 1 7 5911 it th 67M1 un 79'i! nu 89 11 Ll TOP QUALITY EASY TO WASH OL'ICK DRY NON-IRON Prilled Fllto (.

Matctdnc WARM TV WINTER Boiitw i Unci I 9 ech A I i COOL IN SUMMER BRUSHED NYLON FITTED SHEETS Fr lhoc hc er warmth i ideal tnr RhcumalLt niAenro ai Brl Nylon Sheet. PER PAIR Pmk Blue Ll'at and Vthhe (Stale 2nd hoUc rtf PI Ca ibncl IT A ecn doabl IS mcfa A I eir then ORF than it OtK LUXURIOUS NYLON BEDSPREADS lla-htwelahl kdinreidi mrr OrlslnalH practical loo" Eay i0 wajh drip SALE 49 11, 691 dry. non-Iron. Match the loIou' of our irtoctx pic Pink. Blue transport in Norway were co-ordinated under regional authorities which orchestrated bus.

train, ship and aircraft into one co-operating network. And yet the Norwegian loss on railways was a quarter higher than that of the whole Scottish Region of British Railways. (Norwegian State Railways lost 8 million annually on a 22 million turnover: Scottish Region, its neck already caressed by the descending axe, loses 12 million on turnover exactly double.) Stalinist fallacy A second and supporting opinion may shortly arrive in the Kilbrandon-Cameron report on Highland railways. Rumoured to have been held back six months to save Dr. Beeching's thunder, this part of the report is expected to urge subsidies and a single authority to order all Highland transport.

If such a transport joint command were set up. a full Highland Authority might not be far behind it. For years crofters and landowners alike have been pestering the hanks of knotted telephone wire which pass for a Scottish administration to grant them the right to attack their own difficulties in their own way. They don't want an authority to preserve their country as a part of Iron Age folkways. They want it because they are convinced that a period of autonomy is the only way to nurse their part of Britain up to the rigorous health standard imposed by the national economy.

Here is just that thinking which is moving the Government towards a regional development policy and away from the Stalinist fallacy (hat only centralised bureaucracies promote growth. The Highlands, once equipped with a single transport command, would offer a unique field for experiment in regional planning. But if the railways are allowed to close, that great opportunity will already have been lost. Ntal Aichersan. 30.

urn born in Edinburgh and worked on The Scotsman fretnrv he loined Tia Observer" 1960. Lilac, oreen or Matr Htiaie NYLON VELVET Br ik. rri In Riknrled roloun Uaihablc ipdn it ni, ion veivi turtain Si lire Dim Ever since 1847, the Woolwich Equitable Building Society has been providing home-seekers with loans to buy houses, and savers with a wise investment for their money. Now, at the end of the Woolwich's 115th year of service, more people than ever before are buying homes with the help of the Woolwich, or investing in 'Woolwich' shares. The Woolwich is now a 225,000,000 Society.

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