Miss Rail News was a popular competition run by the Rail News newspaper. Launched in 1963, it served both the employees of British Rail (who received a free copy) and a wider community of rail aficionados (who paid 6d a copy).
Rail News was launched at precisely the moment that a self-consciously modern national railway was being managed into existence; it was to be both an important communications management tool and a highly successful newsstand magazine.
Making a national railway
With passenger numbers under pressure thanks to the rise of the private motor car, in the early 1960s Dr Richard Beeching of Imperial Chemical Industries had been appointed by the government to suggest ways to secure the future commercial viability of the rail network. In generating revenues through sales and by carrying paid for advertising, Rail News manifested some of this ethos. As the article makes plain, in 1967 the prizes awarded to successful Miss Rail News contestants were donated by advertisers.
It was also significant that Rail News was a national magazine, which replaced previous regional staff publications. In this, Rail News reflected the logic of Beeching’s 1963 report, The Reshaping of Britain’s Railways, which had claimed that 40% of the network carried only 3% of the passengers. The future would be a more centralised service of faster trains operating at more frequent and regular intervals between cities.
Competitions like Miss Rail News, where Majorie Talbot is celebrated as ‘the first London Midland Region Girl’ to win the title, enacted this process of nationalisation. As did the triumphant Miss Rail News ‘packed programme of visits to rail functions, dances, sports events and tours of rail installations’.
A culture of beauty pageants
Miss Rail News, which through the 1960s was judged by high-profile media figures such as Michael Aspel and Judith Chalmers, linked a mechanism for internal communications into a wider cultural form. The concept of Miss Rail News reflected the wider popularity of beauty pageants in post-war Britain.
After successfully staging ‘The Festival Bikini Contest’ at the Festival of Britain in 1951, dubbed ‘Miss World’ by the British press, husband and wife organisers Eric and Julia Morley developed ‘Miss World’ into a global media phenomenon. Rail News and the British Transport film magazines, which carried footage of the Miss Rail News contest, were following a path popularised by tabloids and independent television.
There are also several ways of thinking about the communication of Miss Rail News as a social phenomenon. It seems significant that this source predates important workplace legislation such as 1975 Equal Pay Act. The picture caption of Majorie Talbot feeding the pigeons, or her characterisation as ‘slim and fun-loving’, are also redolent of a time before high-profile feminist protests against Miss World and similar competitions in the 1970s. Communication norms were different then.
A new feminised workforce?
However, Miss Rail News was arguably as much a harbinger of change as a residue of an old format. Beeching’s intervention significantly impacted the skills required by the rail industry. It demanded increasing numbers of better qualified but more geographically concentrated technicians and planners, while reducing opportunities for low-paid male labourers. It is perhaps no coincidence – and a portent of the future – that one of the finalists (Sue Jones) is a technician assistant in the research division.
Here it is significant that Miss Rail News both goes on exotic holidays and answers questions such as ‘What is a free-living nematode?’ In this sense Miss Rail News balances the communication need to both promote more liberal and permissive values demanded by the growth of new leisure industries, while also beginning to champion ‘feminine’ skills, tastes and abilities in the workforce. Indeed, judges like Aspel (who presented Miss World on television) and Judith Chalmers (then a presenter on BBC radio’s Women’s Hour) represent this dichotomy. We might see beauty competitions like Miss Rail News as representing a kind of social management.
And interestingly, while beauty pageants might seem like an outdated practice, which has faded from internal communication practices in the UK and has long been abandoned by Rail News (which continues to be published to this day), Miss World has become a global phenomenon and remains one of the most watched, if not the most watched, televised events of the twenty-first century.
While internal communication tends to be understood mainly in rational terms, as Miss Rail News illustrates the ephemeral, the ridiculous, and the hyperbolic have also been important tools for communication.