Ruth's key role in railway's survival
9:17am Friday 28th December 2007
Most people have a small but inextinguishable store of memories of where they were when they heard some life-affecting item of news. It could be good; it could be chillingly bad; or a moment of pure joy.
Where were you, if you are of a certain age, when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot or John Lennon murdered?
Can you still remember the feeling when a nurse said for the first time: "You have a baby son/daughter?" Who were you with when Jonny Wilkinson kicked that drop goal which gave England the Rugby World Cup four years ago?
A few days ago, I met a normally calm and self-controlled lady who was sitting at a set of traffic lights in the centre of Leeds - she still remembers which lights - when a news item she had been awaiting for months flashed up on the radio.
"I screamed for joy," Ruth Evans told me with a somewhat apologetic smile. "I papped my horn, wound down the windows, waved my arms and shouted with delight at passing pedestrians. And they looked at me as though I had gone completely mad."
That news, almost 20 years ago, was that the Government had decided to keep the Settle-Carlisle railway line open after years of campaigning by the then British Rail to close it down.
BR had said for years that the cost of maintaining the viaducts and tunnels on England's most scenic railway was prohibitive.
It claimed that the world-famous Ribblehead Viaduct was on the verge of collapsing - a claim proved to be totally false by a top railway engineer who happened to be the son of Barnes Wallis, the designer of the famous bouncing bomb used by the Dambusters.
But he was only one of the scores of witnesses who gave evidence to keep the line open in two long and often bitter public inquiries.
And one of them was Ruth Evans, Londoner turned passionate Yorkshirewoman, who brought to those inquiries some heavyweight economic material which may well have been instrumental in saving the line.
Ruth was born a long way from the Yorkshire Dales, in Greenwich, one of the leafier suburbs of South London. The daughter of an electrician, she won a place to the local grammar school, did a languages degree at college and ended up working in both the City of London and Zurich for a very posh Swiss bank. Little did she know this experience would be put to vital use some 220 miles north.
As a youngster, she had spent hours walking in the woods and meadows on the south bank of the River Thames. When she married a Yorkshire-born metallurgist and moved to Leeds, one of her first moves was to set out and explore the Dales along with her husband and their two sons.
"I fell in love with the Dales at first sight," she said at her home in Settle on the banks of the Ribble, a river about as different as it is possible to get from the Thames.
Being a great supporter of railways, she soon found herself leading guided walks through the Dales from various stations on the Settle-Carlisle.
Then the blow fell. In the mid-1980s, BR announced its plans to close the line and thus began one of the most protracted, acrimonious but eventually most successful campaigns ever fought by "ordinary" folk against "authority".
And it may well be that Ruth Evans played a key role in that campaign for, as a long-serving member of the Friends of the Settle-Carlisle, she used her skill as a banker to submit a paper outlining the economic and social costs of closing the line to local businesses.
This was Maggie Thatcher's time, remember, and business was important to that government!
Ruth stored another lifelong memory some years later when Prince Charles, another passionate Dales-lover, toured the line on his royal train with just 10 local people in his private carriage: "I had to choose those guests and, as you would expect, I made some friends and enemies that day," she said.
That is not the end of the story. Ruth organised the recent walk over Ribblehead with local writer and broadcaster Mike Harding and the Friends are at this very minute discussing even more spectacular walks ("elf & safety willing!").
These plans are, as yet, still secret. But watch this space.