Pioneer behind the road code

A motorist from 1898, when he owned a Benz, he had been one of the earliest life members of the (Royal) Automobile Club and in 1926 had introduced a private Bill to make insurance compulsory for motor vehicles (though his opponents argued that if motorists were covered by insurance, they would be "encouraged to recklessness").

But right at the end of his career he was a prime mover in the introduction of a major - and long overdue - piece of motoring legislation whose continuing legacy is the Highway Code.

Remarkably, there was no Ministry of Transport in this country before 1919, and one of the first things the first minister, Sir Eric Geddes, set in train was a review of road traffic law. It was long overdue, for the Motor Car Act which had come into force in 1904 should only have run until 1906, but pressure of business ensured that Parliament went on extending the increasingly obsolete Act year after year.

This parliamentary inertia continued to hinder the implementation of a new Road Traffic Bill. The Ministry of Transport Committee produced its first draft in February 1922, proposing that new speed limits be fixed and that exceeding them would constitute "dangerous driving" unless the driver could prove otherwise.

But then the old glacial progress resumed, little work was done on the Bill, Transport Ministers came and went and the 1903 Act continued to be renewed annually. The Act's blanket 20mph speed limit had long been overtaken by technical development and so was universally ignored.

Ten years after the debate had begun, and 26 years late, the Road Traffic Bill was introduced into Parliament in December 1929. Ministry of Transport officials had taken advantage of a change of Government that year to get their Bill into the parliamentary schedule, and the new socialist Transport Minister, Herbert Morrison, had the Bill classified "essential". It did, after all, address the problem of road safety, which was preoccupying the press, with 6,000 killed and 140,000 injured on the roads every year (though motorists only made up a third of this total).

This was far more than the number of road accidents that occur today, when the roads, whatever the anti-motoring lobby may say, are safer than they have ever been - and Britons are also the safest motorists in Europe.

Earl Russell, who had been appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, moved the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords on December 5, 1929, remarking: "I wish my noble friend Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who chafed as I did at the delay of this long overdue legislation, were still among us today, though I have little doubt if he were that he would give me plenty of trouble in committee."

The speed limit was abolished, and Russell remarked: "I am convinced that if there had never been a speed limit and if attention had been directed to the real matter from the first, the toll of killed and injured would have been far smaller than it is."

The difficulties of deciding what speeds were dangerous were pointed out by Viscount Brentford (formerly Sir William Joynson-Hicks) a former Home Secretary who had been chairman of the Automobile Association for 15 years: "A friend of mine ... I will not say boasted, but actually mentioned that in the summer of this year, in driving from London to Southampton, he had actually touched 104 miles an hour ... I think we must make a quite definite announcement to the motorists of the country that while we are removing the speed Iimit they must drive with absolute care and consideration for the rest of His Majesty's subjects."

Tacked on to the Bill was what Brentford referred to as "the Minister's penny code of law". The first Highway Code was a pretty concise document, and while it didn't have the force of law, it was pointed out that in the event of any mishap on the highway, the fact that the code had not been observed could be used as evidence to determine liability.

The abolition of the speed limit had little effect on the overall level of road casualties but it was only five years before the 30 mph limit in built-up areas was introduced, along with the driving test, which Russell (who had died not long after seeing the Road Traffic Act safely on to the Statute Book) had declared "had absolutely no value".

Knowledge of the Highway Code became an indispensable part of that test and those of us who learnt to drive when there were still plenty of horse-drawn vehicles on the roads will still remember having to learn the significance of an impenetrable sequence of whip signals illustrated in the code. These were memorably caricatured by the cartoonist Fougasse in an hilarious little book entitled You have been Warned published to coincide with the introduction of the driving test. This classic of motoring humour summed up the Highway Code as "the road-user's Statute of Liberty and Magna Carta of the Road" and illustrated a wonderfully vague hand signal: "I am going to TURN to the LEFT or the RIGHT or SLOW down or SKID or STOP or maybe DASH across and ask the WAY from the policeman on POINT duty."

It may have all been in fun, but haven't we all seen a signal uncomfortably like that during our motoring careers?