Note: This article originally appeared in Wessex Chronicle Volume 14, Issue 3 (Autumn 2013)
“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be developed without electrification.” Such was Lenin’s reasoning in 1920; western capitalists after the First World War were no less eager to switch-on the countryside. In central Wessex, an organisation was created specifically to do the job.
In the towns, the 1882 Electric Lighting Act had allowed councils to apply for powers to run their own electricity supply undertakings. Private companies were let in where the council was less interested, though subject to the council’s right of buy-out after a number of years.
Portsmouth was among the first councils to make use of the new powers, in 1894. Those that did, that went on to run electric trams, and later trolley-buses, were able to benefit from supplying their other enterprises from their own power stations. The Edwardian era saw the rise of a new breed of privately-owned ‘power companies’, set up to build larger power stations selling in bulk to a wide area, such as a conurbation or a coalfield. More deeply rural areas remained off the map, electrically speaking, at the start of the 1920s.
There was no shortage of claims for what electricity could do to reverse the drift from the countryside to the towns, allowing rural craft industries to flourish free from the need for fixed power. Its use in agriculture – especially on dairy and poultry farms – was urged on efficiency grounds and there were many charmingly exotic, if impractical, schemes for electric ploughing and ‘electroculture’. Farmers found it increasingly difficult to attract wives without the offer of electric light and appliances in the farmhouse, and the 1939 electrical propaganda film The Village that Found Itself also made play with the role of rural housewives as a pressure group for electrification. However, distribution costs were inevitably higher than in the towns and rural incomes were not. In the case of agricultural labourers, they were a good deal lower. Progress had to be incremental, especially as, unlike in France, no public subsidy was available.
Some councils responded by extending their supply beyond the municipal boundaries. Most were cautious about providing a service, even at a higher price, to non-ratepayers and the common urban distribution voltage of the time – 6.6 kV – was in any case insufficient to supply the rural hinterland economically. Private enterprise holding companies with interests in electricity supply thought bigger, either expanding existing subsidiaries well-placed to exploit rural demand or – if the gap was simply too great – creating a new one. With their broad base of assets and skills, holding companies could secure access to capital on a scale beyond what was achievable by smaller undertakings that, individually, were liable to be seen as a riskier investment.
The Wessex Electricity Company
One of the larger holding companies, the Greater London & Counties Trust, was backed by the wealthy, Chicago-based Utilities Power & Light Corporation. In 1927, still in Thomas Hardy’s lifetime, the GLCT obtained a special Act of Parliament establishing the Wessex Electricity Company, known to the industry as ‘the Wessex Co’. It brought together a range of interests that the GLCT had in the Thames valley, with the aim of creating an integrated supply system for the area. Extra powers were soon being sought, but were never fully exercised, to serve every shire in Wessex.
The Americans’ timing was no accident. Legislation to facilitate construction of the National Grid had been passed in 1926; the last of its 26,265 pylons was erected, in the New Forest, in 1933. The primary Grid routes included a single corridor from London to Reading and from Exeter to Plymouth. Between Reading and Exeter a northerly route ran via Oxford and Bristol and a southerly one via Southampton and Dorchester. Both ran through areas of relatively high population density within the Wessex Co’s actual or potential territory. (Density is very relative: for the Wessex Co overall it was about 300 persons per square mile, compared with over 2,500 even in suburban west London.)
Above:
(Left) 132 kV Grid routes, and main power stations/substations, as completed in 1933.
(Right) The Wessex Co, and its Isle of Wight associate, in 1931. Solid white lines indicate the company’s existing local power lines, dotted lines those proposed.
At its inception, the ‘National’ Grid was in fact a series of regional interconnection schemes, centrally managed but operating largely independently of each other, designed to allow local undertakings to share excess supply and demand. Although inter-regional tie-lines did exist, most had a capacity of no more than 50 MW at normal loading. The Grid was not designed essentially for long-distance transmission; that was a priority that emerged as southern affluence grew but historic investment in plant remained bound to the northern coalfields. The Grid was also expanded during the Second World War to move energy from now under-used stations in the south-east to areas of munitions activity, such as Gloucester. Moving electricity around always comes at a cost because of the energy dissipated: combined losses from transmission and distribution in the UK are currently 7% of output.
Early in 1928, the GLCT bought Edmundsons Electricity Corporation, another large holding company, and most GLCT electrical interests were to be brought together under the Edmundsons management. Disquiet at once grew over the rapid expansion of a vital industry under foreign direction. It was not quelled by patently false assurances that such control was more apparent than real and that the British board were simply using American money at low interest rates to electrify southern England. Investigations followed but the Cabinet twice decided to take no action.
By 1932 the situation had changed dramatically. Utilities Power & Light were now in serious financial difficulties and, far from investing, began squeezing their British subsidiaries for every penny. How much cash was exported is now impossible to determine but the amount was certainly huge. For example, in 1935 the Americans cabled their British board instructing them to declare a tax-free dividend of 50% on the ordinary share capital. Pressure for change mounted and in 1936 the Americans sold out to a consortium led by British financial institutions. Edmundsons’ prices then fell rapidly amid fears of closer scrutiny by the regulators. The challenges faced in supplying rural consumers had been advanced as an explanation for the higher prices. To an extent this was true but they had also been a convenient excuse to conceal some outrageously creative accounting.
Although never an independent company, the Wessex Co enjoyed enough autonomy to develop its own public face and the abiding loyalty of its staff. That business model had been developed by the British Electric Traction and Tilling groups in the tramways and motorbus sector, where a local identity helped sustain local backing. In road transport, the local company structure survived both nationalisation and privatisation before dissolving in the drive for corporate uniformity during the 1990s. In electricity, Edmundsons’ policy by the end of the 1930s was one of vigorous amalgamation to reduce its subsidiaries to about 10, which meant that customers in its Wessex area ended up dealing directly with the Wessex Co itself. The result eventually achieved was seven large and compact geographical groups, including the Wessex Co, the Cornwall Electric Power Company, the East Anglian Electric Supply Company and the Isle of Wight Electric Light & Power Company.
One thing largely unchanged by the British takeover was the pivotal position of Edmundsons’ American Managing Director, Wade H. Hayes, who had transferred his loyalties to his adopted country. A Virginian, of conservative instincts, Hayes had studied at Columbia University and worked in journalism (becoming Sunday editor of the New York Tribune) as well as serving in the US Army, where he rose to the rank of Colonel and later Brigadier-General.
During the Second World War, Hayes raised his own Home Guard unit in London, the 1st American Motorised Squadron, despite the very real risk of losing his US citizenship (this being before Pearl Harbor). He had arrived in England in 1926 as an agent of the Chase National Bank, becoming Deputy Chairman of Edmundsons in 1932 and group Chairman in 1934. He played a leading role in the development of the Wessex Co and in the campaign that Edmundsons, in conjunction with Balfour Beatty, waged against nationalisation. It was a campaign they pursued long after the rest of the industry was adapting to the new reality. Fittingly, Hayes is the only American to have been elected to membership of the Carlton Club.
Oxford’s Electricity War
With the rise of the motor car, the once clear distinction between urban and rural living began to blur. The Wessex Co, operating over a regional area uniting both, was well-placed to respond. Others were determined to stress the value of more localised autonomy. In 1932, Oxford City Council exercised its right to buy out the local company franchise and immediately slashed prices. The result was a long legal battle for control of supply to Oxford’s suburbs. In the 42 years since the franchise had been granted, the city boundaries had been extended in line with new development. So should the right to acquire relate to the whole city as it now existed or to the more limited area of the city as it used to be?
In 1938 the House of Lords rejected the Council’s private Bill to take over the suburban assets, which served about a quarter of the city, including Cowley. This left Oxford’s electricity supply divided into inner and outer zones under separate control until 1948. Within the outer zone, the Council was not even allowed direct use of its own electricity for street lighting but had to buy-in at Wessex rates. But since the generating station at Osney was in the older part of town, it was the Council that supplied electricity in bulk to the Wessex Co. It seems the Council was contractually bound, by its company predecessor, to sell this electricity at the wholesale price, but had to buy it back at the retail price, including the Wessex Co’s tidy profit.
The urban ‘island’ now created within the Wessex area provided much material for political debate. Which offered the better deal for the consumer? A regional company applying economies of scale for the benefit of more remote areas (a more equal geography – wherever you live)? Or a local council without the profit motive to maximise monopoly prices (a more equal society – whatever your income)? The Bursar of Merton College, writing in The Spectator in 1938, was in no doubt which arrangement he preferred:
“One argument, and really only one, was urged by the Wessex Company, and this must have been regarded as decisive by the Lords, it was this—‘The Wessex Company have an enormous area of supply stretching from near Oxford to the South Coast and going West nearly to Bristol and Exeter. This area is almost entirely rural and in the few large towns such as Swindon or Reading the electricity is a municipal supply. Cheap electricity can only be given to rural areas if associated with urban areas, and the absorption of the O.E.C.[Oxford Electric Company] in Wessex is essential for the benefit of the rural dwellers on Salisbury Plain, or the wide expanses of Dorset.’ In other words, the citizens of Oxford are not to be allowed to assist their own working-class population to cheap electricity because those workers are required to pay high prices to subsidise agricultural labourers over an area of hundreds of square miles.
Most who have studied the subject agree that the urban areas must help the rural areas, but can a more hopelessly illogical demand be conceived than that about 8,000 working men in Oxford should alone be called on to give the benefits of comparatively cheap electricity to Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire, while towns close by like Bournemouth, Reading, Bath, Bristol and Exeter, with a total population of over a million, contribute nothing whatever? For that matter what rural area does London help?”
It was the same question that plagued the expansion of mains water and sewerage in the countryside. Today, the roll-out of rural broadband has re-ignited familiar fears that the countryside is lagging behind the towns in access to essential modern services. France, with its huge rural lobby, is again looking to public subsidy, while Britain proceeds piecemeal.
In the case of electricity, the answer ultimately selected proved to be a medley of both options: regional organisation under State ownership. Implicit in this was that urban consumers (including the poorer ones) should cross-subsidise rural consumers (including the richer ones). Wider access to electricity for all was deemed more beneficial than cheaper electricity for a few.
Wessex into Southern?
The Wessex Co disappeared at nationalisation in 1948. Over its two decades’ existence it had changed the rural way of life. By 1939 every village in England of 500 people or more had been provided with an electricity service and the Wessex Co played its part in that achievement. A step-by-step account would require lengthy research in the archives but a snapshot is provided by considering what was handed over to the new nationalised industry.
The British Electricity Authority, responsible for generation and main transmission, inherited six power stations from the Wessex Co, at Newbury (Berks.), Andover and Lymington (Hants.), Frome and Yeovil (Som.) and Downton (Wilts.). A seventh, at Earley, near Reading, was built under war conditions in 1941-42 by the Central Electricity Board (the builders and managers of the Grid) but was operated on their behalf by Edmundsons, the Wessex Co’s parent. On the distribution side, the Southern Electricity Board took over a business organised into 14 districts based around Abingdon, Andover, Cirencester, Frome, Henley, Lymington, Marlow, Melksham, Newbury, Oxford (Rural), Salisbury (Rural), Shaftesbury, Wallingford and Yeovil. The Oxford (Rural) and Salisbury (Rural) labels indicated that the two city centres were excluded from the districts.
The Wessex Co’s last General Manager, based at Newbury, was an Australian, R.R.B. (Robert) Brown. In 1948 he became Deputy Chairman of the Southern Board and later served for 20 years as Chairman. He brought an aura of authority with him. When in 1967 the Board’s Principal Officers’ Conference reached Minute No. 1,000, the Secretary remarked on the fact that they had now made 1,000 decisions. Brown’s reported response was something like, ‘Yes, gentlemen, and I didn’t disagree with any of them.’ The Wessex Co was one of 48 undertakings combined to form the new Southern area. It contributed over two-thirds of the territory, but only a quarter of the population.
To make up the population to the national norm, a slice of west London was added, stretching as far in as Acton. Whatever it did for the figures, this was no way to create an identity. Some staff carried on doing things the Wessex way. It was heard said that those at Andover had ‘never really been nationalised’. In Hampshire especially, the Southern Board had to bring together staff from what had been intensely rival company groups, where personal disagreements had impeded integration. Where the new Sub-Areas and Districts followed pre-nationalisation boundaries, there was plenty of scope for managers to inculcate a spirit of friendly competition.
The Wessex electricity industry of today, post-privatisation, is dominated by three firms. Western Power Distribution is owned by Pennsylvania Power & Light and is therefore American. EDF – Electricité de France – is 85% owned by the French Government. SSE – formerly Scottish & Southern Energy – is based in Perth, Scotland. Remote control is back, but this time without even the facade of an identity respecting regional difference.
In its own time, the Wessex Co with its power stations, showrooms and vans must have had a very visible presence. Today it has vanished almost without trace. Hardly any information about it is to be found easily online. That is a pity, because among the makers of modern Wessex it deserves to be placed very highly indeed.
Further reading:
Leslie Hannah (1979), Electricity before Nationalisation, Macmillan
Clive Collier (1992), Southern Electric: a history, Southern Electric
