Here's a remarkable quotation from a judge that I found in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (24 July 1940).
After a defendant had been found not guilty of manslaughter and of dangerous driving, Mr Justice Stable said:
"I hope this will be a warning to him and I hope that he and other members of the public will appreciate that during June the whole forces of the German Empire succeeded in killing exactly 100 fewer people in this island with bombs than were killed by motorists by accidents."
(An anecdote, for which I cannot find the source....)
ReplyDeleteIn 1962 there was a skirmish of some sort on the Indian-Chinese border. The iIndian Army lost over 1,000 men as a consequence - not on the border itself, but in car crashes across the sub-continent as the Army was mobilised, troops deployed, leave cancelled etc.
According to the caption, the car in the photo was built in 1940, but the photo was taken in 1960.
ReplyDeleteTPTV has an entertaining 1936 short film about the new driving test. Average driving standards were improving in 1940 (!) thanks to the number of new motorists being trained by the services. In the film you'll note the absence of white lines etc. Before WW2, road markings were rarely used -- only the big roads out of London had central white lines, for example. More markings were used after the Americans arrived. However you can see in 1960s films that few urban roads were marked even then.
ReplyDeleteAllegedly more German army officers were killed driving confiscated Tatra 77/87 cars than in conflict in Czechoslovakia.
To be fair, June/July 1940 is the calm before the storm in terms of WW2 air-raids, (Although Sunderland and Newcastle seem to have been receiving heavier attention than London in those months, particularly from late July and a big raid was coming in August. The London 'Blitz' kicked off in September).
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