His father was Hubert Josiah Beeching, a reporter with the Kent Messenger newspaper, his mother a schoolteacher and his maternal grandfather a dockyard worker.

Shortly after his birth, Beeching's family moved to Maidstone where his brothers Kenneth (who was killed in the Second World War)[3][4] and John were born.

Beeching and his elder brother Geoffrey attended Imperial College of Science & Technology in London, where both read physics and took First Class honours degrees.

During the Second World War Beeching, at the age of 29, was lent by Mond Nickel on the recommendation of Dr Sykes at Firth Brown Steels to the Ministry of Supply, where he worked in its Armament Design and Research Departments at Fort Halstead.

Passenger services would be withdrawn from around 5,000 route miles accounting for an annual train mileage of 68 million and yielding, according to Beeching, a net saving of £18m per year.

Beeching was undeterred and argued that too many lines were running at a loss, and that his charge to shape a profitable railway made cuts a logical starting point.

[6] As one author puts it, Beeching "was expected to produce quick solutions to problems that were deep-seated and not susceptible to purely intellectual analysis.

"[11] Beeching was nevertheless instrumental in modernising many aspects of the railway network, particularly a greater emphasis on block trains which did not require expensive and time-consuming shunting en route.

Frank Cousins, the Labour Minister of Technology, told the House of Commons in November 1965 that Beeching had been dismissed by Tom Fraser.

In the 1965 Birthday Honours[17] it was announced that he would be made a life peer, and he was created Baron Beeching, of East Grinstead in the County of Sussex on 7 July 1965,[18] in the same year he became a director of Lloyds Bank.

The following year he became chairman of Associated Electrical Industries, a role he also held with Redland from 1970 to 1977, Furness Withy from 1973 to 1975 and the Economic Insurance Company.

[citation needed] Others have argued that it was ministers, not Beeching, who were responsible for any shortcomings in assessing the social case for retaining lines and that economies had been tried and largely failed; also that the road lobby was less significant than the Treasury in making policy, and the Labour Party was funded by rail unions.

[25] It is worth noting that the size, shape and level of service of the railway network in Great Britain was the subject of debate for many decades before the appointment of Beeching.

The British Railways Modernisation Plan of 1955 stated, "there will be a marked reduction in the stopping and branch-line services which are little used by the public and which, on any dispassionate review of the situation, should be largely handed over to road transport".

On the other hand, Hardy points out Beeching's political naïveté, and Fiennes notes that because a passenger service was producing a loss did not mean that it would continue to do so in the future.

Like Fiennes and Hardy, Terry Gourvish's business history of British Rail sees Beeching as having a positive effect on railway management while not achieving perfection.

Ian Hislop commented in 2008 that history has been somewhat unkind to "Britain's most hated civil servant", by forgetting that he proposed a much better bus service that ministers never delivered, and that in some ways he was used to do their "dirty work for them".

Hislop describes Beeching as "a technocrat [who] wasn't open to argument to romantic notions of rural England or the warp and weft of the train in our national identity.