UPDATED APRIL 2024. The Management Quarterly was a card-covered booklet, whose circulation was restricted to BR management. The cover was marked ‘not for publication’, and its readers were exhorted to keep its contents “within the family”.  

No.1 came out in May 1964 following a Management Conference held at York, and the introduction to it was penned by the then-Chairman Dr Beeching. Presumably the aim was to keep all the different branches of management in such a diverse organisation abreast of plans and developments, and aware of what they should be doing and what other departments were up to.

We have here the first sixteen numbered editions, plus one supplement which provided a “Teach-in” on planning. They are dated between 1964 and 1969. The number of pages in the first one was only 14, but after that each issue varied between 23 and 61 pages, giving 703 pages in all. In the files these are shown mostly as two-page spreads.

We know that there were more issues, perhaps about twenty-two of them in total.

These ones certainly give an excellent insight into the behind-the-scenes BR management thinking in the immediate post-Beeching era. The corporate image advanced: BR changed from British Railways to British Rail, and the familiar double-arrow logo first appeared. The topics discussed varied widely – from BR’s advertising policy to the introduction of Freightliners, and from computers in offices to BR’s pest control services! You can see a full list of them all HERE.

The contents are occasionally illustrated by photographs, in two instances coloured ones. The files are arranged as they would be on a CD, complete with a facility to carry out a single word search on them all. It is a 'virtual CD', however, and is issued solely as this download.

One of the missing later editions has since become available for us to scan. Eventually it is hoped that we will be able to add others. If so and you have purchased the current version, you will be able to claim any extra ones free of charge. To do that just send an email to sales@gersociety.org.uk and request them. To find out if more have become available, keep an occasional eye on this entry: you will know that this has happened by looking at when it has been 'UPDATED...' at the very beginning.

If you add this to your cart and buy it, you will currently be able to download two items.  One is a link to click on. This will provide you with all the original files in a zipped folder. If you have Windows on a PC, right-click on the folder to get a menu and choose 'extract all...' or 'unzip...'.  The second item is the extra issue which we have been able to scan subsequently.