Ralph Bennett
British transport administrator
Ralph Featherstone Bennett FIMechE, FCILT, FRSA (3 December 1923 – 10 November 2015) was a British transport administrator who was general manager of Manchester City Transport from 1965 to 1968 and chairman of the London Transport Executive from 1978 to 1980. Bennett introduced one-man operation to buses in Manchester and London and promoted London Underground's extension of the Piccadilly line to Heathrow Airport and the construction of the Jubilee line.
Career
Bennett was born in Plymouth, Devon on 3 December 1923. After an education at Plympton Grammar School and Plymouth Technical College, he joined Plymouth City Council's Transport Department as an articled clerk in 1940. From 1955 to 1958 he was deputy general manager of transport in Plymouth before becoming general manager of transport in Great Yarmouth (1958–60), Bolton (1960–65) and Manchester (1965–68).
When at Manchester, he changed the name of the Manchester Corporation Transport Department to Manchester City Transport and ended trolley bus operations in 1966. He introduced one-man operation on buses for the first time in 1966, commissioning the Mancunian double-decker bus for this purpose and reforming the fare collection system.
In 1968, Bennett joined the London Transport Board and served as a member of this until 1970 and then of its successor, the London Transport Executive (LTE), until 1980; being its deputy chairman from 1971 to 1978 and its chairman from 1978 to 1980. As in Manchester, he introduced one-man operation on buses and simplified the fare system, though he retained conductors and Routemaster buses for operations on busy central London routes. Bennett supported the London Underground's extension of the Piccadilly line to Heathrow Airport (opened 1977) and the construction of the first section of the Jubilee line (opened 1979).
“Ralph Bennett” enters the record as british transport administrator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ralph, Bennett and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralph Bennett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.