Chapter 5: After Ashfield: The Post-war Chairmen

Previously I examined abstract statistical and financial records to pick apart the story of decline and failure as a series of political constructions rather than objective events. This chapter is here to further humanise that analysis by considering the role of personality and leadership in the same process of organisational story-telling. Here, the role of the dramatic is even more important than before because of the inevitable human drama associated with individual personalities. Here, the post-war chairmen are the guilty men of London’s public transport decline:

So begins Martin Eady (2016) in Chapter 14 of his study of industrial relations at London Transport, giving a fair summary of the core accusation. Elsewhere, London Transport’s post-war chairmen are described as ‘nonentities and placemen’ and their management ‘lacked cohesion’ (Wolmar, 2002, 2005). They were ‘not good leaders’ (Cutler, 1982) and as we have seen above, ‘unimaginative’ (Fuller, 2011).