Private Managers and Public Patriots

After a narrow brush with bankruptcy in 1906, the financiers of the organisation which grew to be London Transport brought in new, dynamic and scientific management from America to expunge the taint of dishonest financial activity and restore procedural and pragmatic legitimacy to their project. This allowed Albert Stanley, the new managing director, and Sir Edgar Speyer, the new chairman, to successfully pursue a policy of steady amalgamation of bus, underground railway and tube companies 1907–1913. By the time of the start of the First World War, their organisation was known as the London Traffic Combine and had secured a dominant, though far from total, portion of London’s transport market. However, the outbreak of the First World War made Speyer’s position as a Liberal German Jew untenable, and he was forced out of Britain. Wartime hysteria meant that Sir Albert Stanley also had to fight hard for his own reputation, but he was successful in making himself both a patriot as well as a master of efficiency. He was ennobled as Lord Ashfield in 1920. By the early 1920s, he was the legitimate figurehead of a project to unify London’s transport that was finally consolidating its claims to pragmatic, procedural and moral legitimacy.