The Chamber of Mines and the readers of the English-medium press on the Witwatersrand were content to see the hard-pressed, unqualified and occasionally well-meaning conductors portrayed as ‘hospital orderlies’ - in line with the display of the Red Cross on coaches. They were, for the most part, totally out of their depth when it came to dealing with terminally ill or seriously sick patients in hospital coaches. A series of rail accidents towards the end of the First World War allowed two of the longest-serving conductors to point out ‘the futility of coping with an accident of any size without the present First Aid means at our disposal’, and to plead for any additional medical supplies including a ‘stove, so that [an] ample supply of hot water might be available for washing wounds, etc.

The magic of managerial words, deftly deployed, turned the ill, the walking wounded, the lunatics and others into ‘convalescents’ - who by the WNLA’s own admission left the hospital coaches in worse conditions than they had entered them. It was precisely part of this same unspoken 40-year-long tussle between the cash-starved, revenue-seeking Railway Administration on the one hand, and the profit-driven, cost-pairing initiatives of the Chamber of Mines on the other, that eventually led to the partial abandonment of the WNLA’s already minimal so-called Red Cross service.

Leslie Hannah, an eminent business historian, has shown how the ‘rationalisation’ of industry, which was favoured by the British Government (represented by the Bank of England), set the stage for the new ‘corporate economy’ which would characterise Britain for decades. The 1920s saw the creation by merger of ICI (chemicals), the Distillers Company (Scotch whisky) and Unilever (soap and margarine). A similar wave of mergers in Germany established IG Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke as the dominant chemical and steel producers respectively. (Both these companies were dissolved by the victorious Allies in 1945.)

A new management team and its advisers devised an all too common 1990s business strategy: to sell off boring bits to fund exciting acquisitions. But, like other companies, ICI found it easier to overpay for new businesses than to make rewarding disposals of old ones. Burdened with debt and finding growth elusive, the stock price was only a fraction of what it had been a decade earlier. What remained of Britain’s leading industrial company of the twentieth century was acquired in 2007 by the Dutch company AkzoNobel. Blair resigned the premiership in the same year.

The nearest approximation I have found is Li Ka-shing, a refugee from China who is now Hong Kong’s richest man. Li left school at the age of fifteen and set up a small business manufacturing plastic flowers. From these modest beginnings he developed the massive Hutchison Whampoa group, of which Eversholt, another rail rolling stock leasing company, is a subsidiary. None of the, admittedly small, sample of railway employees I interviewed had ever heard of Li, far less experienced resentment at his oppression or exploitation. If they did express resentment, it was – appropriately – directed at the management of First-Group and most of all at the Department for Transport. Li is svelte, noted for his relatively modest habits and second only to Bill Gates for the scale of his global philanthropy.