Ernest Marples, Baron Marples

Alfred Ernest Marples, Baron Marples PC (born December 9, 1907 in Levenshulme, Manchester , † July 6, 1978 in Monaco ) was a British politician of the Conservative Party and a building contractor . From 1957 to 1964 he was Minister in the British Cabinet. In 1975 he left his home country under dubious circumstances and moved to the south of France.

Early years

Ernest Marples was born to a construction worker and well-known Manchester Labor Party activist and his wife, who worked in a hat factory. Marples received a scholarship to Stretford Grammar School . At the age of 14 he was already active in the Labor Party , but also made money selling cigarettes and candy to football fans in Manchester. He himself played soccer for a team from the YMCA . After finishing school, he worked as a miner, postman, cook and accountant. In 1941 he was drafted into the Royal Artillery and rose to captain . In 1944 he was discharged from the army for health reasons.

Political career

After his discharge from the army, Ernest Marples became a member of the Conservative Party and in 1945 elected to the British Parliament for the Wallasey constituency. 1951 appointed him Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the State Secretary in his cabinet from 1951 to 1955. From 1957 to 1964 he served as a minister under the Prime Ministers Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home .

In 1957 Macmillian appointed Ernest Marples postmaster general , whose authority at the time managed the telephone network. The self-dialing facility was set up under Marples, which made telephone operators superfluous for national telephone calls . On June 2, 1957 he introduced the lottery tickets and later the postcodes .

From 1959 to 1964, Marples was Minister of Transport . As such, he led, among other things, parking meters one, the provisional license , an annual TÜV (English = MOT) and today's standard yellow lines on British roads. The Transport Act 1962 dissolved the British Transport Commission , which oversaw railways, canals and freight traffic on the roads; instead the British Railways Board was formed. In addition, the criteria according to which railway lines could be closed have been simplified. The law was a "momentous legislation on the railway since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act of 1854" (Engl .: "most momentous piece of legislation in the field of railway law to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1854" ) designated. The government appointed Dr. Richard Beeching as Chairman of the British Railways Board with instructions to minimize the railroad's growing losses and make them profitable. The following closings of railway lines, which cut a third of the rail network, were called Beeching Cuts .

In 1974 Marples withdrew from Parliament and was promoted to life peer that same year as Baron Marples of Wallasey in Cheshire .

Business interests

In the late 1940s, Ernest Marples was the director of a company called Kirk & Kirk that helped build the Brunswick Wharf Power Station . Together with the civil engineer Reginald Ridgway (1908-2002) he founded the construction company Marples Ridgway and Partners . In the following years the company built power stations in England, a hydroelectric power station in Scotland , roads in Ethiopia and England, and a port in Jamaica. In 1964 the company was taken over by the Bath and Portland Group .

Conflicts of Interest

After Ernest Marples became Secretary of State in 1951, he gave up his post as managing director of Marples Ridgway , but still held 80 percent of the shares. When he became Minister of Transport in 1959, he undertook to sell his shares in the company, as otherwise it would have violated the House of Commons rules on conflicts of interest. When the Evening Standard reported in 1960 that Marples Ridgway had won the tender to build a flyover , the so-called Hammersmith Flyover , and the Department of Transportation supported the rejection of a lower offer by the London County Council , the sale had not yet taken place.

An initial attempt by Marples to sell his shares in the company was not accepted by the Justice Department as he tried to use his business partner, Reg Ridgway, as a front man to buy back the shares later. Thereupon Marples sold the company shares to his wife Ruth on the same terms, which was only known later. At that time the shares were valued at between £ 350,000 and £ 400,000 .

In 1959, shortly after becoming Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples opened the first section of the M1 motorway . Although his company was not directly entrusted with the highway construction, it was later assumed that Marples Ridgeway "certainly had a finger in the pie" (Eng. "Had his fingers in the game"). Marples Ridgway also built the flyover in Hammersmith in London for 1.3 million pounds, and then the transfer to Chiswick . The company was involved in all major road projects in the UK during the 1950s and 1960s, including upgrading the £ 4.1 million M1 to London, which was then known as the Hendon Urban Motorway .

Marples himself was an avid cyclist and did not have a license for many years. He was a member of the National Cycling Charity (CTC). He wrote the quote: “If you make conditions right, there's a great future for cycling. If you make them wrong, there's none. "

When Lord Denning presented his investigation into the Profumo affair and the alleged relationship between Defense Secretary Duncan Sandys and the Duchess of Argyll in 1963 , he confirmed to MacMillan that Ernest Marples had also had contact with prostitutes. However, this aspect was not mentioned in Denning's report.

Escape to Monaco

In 1975 Ernest Marples left for Monaco, ironically by train. Among the journalists who Marples' researched motives was also the editor of the Daily Mirror , Richard Stott . He reported that Marples had tried since the 1970s to prevent a revaluation of his assets by the tax authorities, which he apparently failed. So he decided to leave Great Britain before the tax payment of 1975, taking with him two million pounds, which he had smuggled to Monaco through his Liechtenstein company. He had traveled on the night ferry, stowed his belongings in tea boxes and left his apartment in Belgravia full of furniture and clothes. Marples claimed he paid more taxes than necessary for 30 years. The Treasury Department froze its properties in the UK for ten years, but most of the money was already in Monaco and Liechtenstein.

Marples is said to have fled not only because of the tax investigation, but also because of legal suits from tenants of his houses and former employees. He never returned to Great Britain and spent the rest of his life in his castle, the Château de Chaintré , with a vineyard near Mâcon in the Fleurie , where he had founded a company to produce wine as early as 1967. He died in the Center Hospitalier Princesse Grace in Monaco and is buried in the Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-cum-Hardy , a suburb of Manchester.

evaluation

Ernest Marples is described by benevolent viewers as "colorful" ("shimmering"), "dynamic" ("dynamic"), "energetic" and "impatient" ("impatient"). However, supporters of the British railroad chalk him up to this day to have been the "villain" ("rogue") in the drastic downsizing of the railway network and dub him with unsightly expressions such as "unsavory character" ("unsavory character").

Ernestmarples.com

In 2009 a website called ernestmarples.com was set up to campaign for free access to the Royal Mail's postal code database , which was chargeable. Free access has been possible since April 2010.

The initiators of the action later stated that they had chosen the name for the site because Marples had introduced the postcodes. They had no knowledge of the later events surrounding his person.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles Arthur: Who would really benefit of postcode data were free? . In: The Guardian , October 7, 2009. Retrieved September 10, 2013. 
2. ^ Otto Kahn-Freund: Transport Act, 1962 . In: Modern Law Review . 26, No. 2, March 1963, p. 174.
3. ↑ The Beeching Cuts on offtherailsbackontrack.co.uk ( Memento of the original from June 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ↑ Patrick Cracroft-Brennan: Life Peerages under the Life Peerages Act 1958 . In: Cracroft's Peerage . Heraldic Media Limited. October 21, 2008. Retrieved September 10, 2013.
5. ^ ^{A b c d e} Charles Loft: Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain . Routledge, 2006, ISBN 978-0-7146-5338-9 , p. 55.
6. ^ Ministers of the Crown (Private Interests) . In: Hansard . January 28, 1960. Retrieved September 20, 2013.
7. ^ ^{A b c} Terry Norm: Railways and Things The Age of Steam . In: History of Local Railways and Stations . town of Ammanford Web Site. October 1, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2013.
8. ^ David Henshaw: The Great Railway Conspiracy . Leading Edge Books, Hawes, North Yorkshire 1991, ISBN 978-0-948135-48-4 , p. 126.
9. ↑ Geoffrey Dudley, Jeremy Richardson: Why Does Policy Change ?: Lessons from British Transport Policy 1945-99 . Routledge, 2001, ISBN 978-0-415-16918-9 , p. 45.
10. ↑ Mick Hamer: Wheels within Wheels: Study of the Road Lobby . Routledge, 1987, ISBN 978-0-7102-1007-4 , p. 50.
11. ↑ Ernest Marples Opening Britains's first motorway on youtube.com
12. ^ Life in the fast lane - part two . In: The Guardian . January 22, 2011. Retrieved September 20, 2013: “the M1 was very much the darling of Ernest Marples, Minister of Transport in Harold Macmillan's Tory government in the 50s, who just happened to be a director of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering company specializing in road construction. Although the company didn't officially build the M1, it certainly had a finger in the pie. "
13. ↑ M1 . In: Hansard . April 21, 1967. Retrieved September 20, 2013.
14. ↑ Rothschild's Britain on hrisspivey.co.uk/
15. ↑ Duke Meets Cyclists 1963 on britishpathe.com
16. ^ Carlton Reid: "Road rugosity, the CTC member who became transport minister, and cycling in the rain at the London Olympics in 1948" on roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com v. April 19, 2012
17. ↑ John Franklin: "Principles of cycle planning". Cycling Futures seminar, Manchester, May 29, 2009, p. 12  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
18. ^ Richard Lamb: The Macmillan Years 1957-1963: The Unfolding Truth . John Murray, London 1995, ISBN 0-7195-5392-X , p. 482.
19. ^ Dominic Sandbrook: Never had it so good: a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles . Abacus , London 2006, ISBN 0-349-11530-3 , p. 674.
20. ^ Richard Stott: Dogs and lamposts . Hushion House Publishing, Toronto 2002, ISBN 1-84358-040-3 , pp. 166-171.
21. ^ The Glasgow Herald , June 28, 1967
22. ↑ roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com
23. ↑ Planning not beeching on aslef.org.uk ( Memento of the original from February 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
24. ↑ Who would really benefit if postcode data were free? on theguardian.com v. October 7, 2009
25. ↑ Interview with me about Ernest Marples on ernestmarples.com v. October 28, 2009 ( Memento of the original from January 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Ernest Marples at Hansard (English)
• Financial Scandal, Corruption and Censorship on ecologics.wordpress.com
• Photo of Ernest Marples with wife Ruth on npg.org.uk