to save us from ourselves when it came to motoring started with the Road Traffic Act 1930, and you could, thus, call it the very glimmer of health and safety culture.
First ever driving tests
Like so many other motoring firsts, the first ever driving test was taken in France, under the Paris Police Ordinance of 14 August 1893. It was introduced on a voluntary basis in Britain on 13 March 1935 but did not become official in Great Britain until 1 April 1935, and was not compulsory until 1 June 1935. The first driving test pass certificate in the UK was awarded on 16 March 1935 to the rather ironically named Mr R.E.L. Beere of Kensington.
As the Road Traffic Act came into effect, the UK police were becoming a motorised force and one major development was in its fledgling stages, which would totally change policing and the way in which the police used vehicles. The technology was called … radio.
Radio was first used by the British police in 1923. Again, the Crossleys enter our story here because the very first radio experiments were conducted using these cars with hilariously large bedstead-type aerials fitted. Nottingham and Lancashire Police were also at the forefront of this, only a year after the Met.
The introduction of police boxes had shown that communication was key to keeping pace with faster society, so it was logical that the next move should be radio. However, in the 1920s talking radio was not yet available; instead, police vehicles used Morse code radio telegraph. There were plenty of (mainly) men around in this era who understood this because it had been taught in the military, so that was the basis of the system fitted to cars. Its reflection of the change in health and safety culture is very evident. Today you are, quite rightly, not allowed to drive even an automatic car with a small mobile phone. These police drivers were expected to drive a car with a crash gearbox while tapping out a Morse code message, listening and translating while wearing a headset. The job of radio operator soon became the norm as the equipment was moved to the back seat.
World War I and the telegraph
World War I was the engine of much technological change, including wireless telegraphy, which used Morse code, and later what was then called radio telephony, which transmitted a voice. Both were refined and made more secure during the conflict, while radio communication took great leaps forward. Telegraphy was famously used by two-seater planes doing artillery observation (known as art-obs) above the trenches, where they tracked troop movements in order to improve the aim of their side’s own gunners if they were firing beyond the line of sight, by giving signals to the aimers to shoot slightly to one side, further or less far. This was a fluid operation, as wind conditions changed almost minute by minute, so having instant updates was important. The early planes in question had a long aerial hanging underneath them which was wound in and out on a drum so they did not drag it along when flying to and from the observation area. The industrial production of radio valves made telephony a practical proposition, however, and in 1916 the Royal Flying Corps started developing this, which meant that planes could tell ground stations where shells were landing by voice rather than coded message. In this embryonic stage this was a one-way signal; those manning the ground station would raise a flag to show they could hear. By 1918, the British had mastered plane-to-plane radio communication, which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. After the war, this first generation of radio operators became the roots of the amateur radio movement, something that would lead to broadcast radio.
The first major police operation that was assisted by using radio telegraphy was the 1923 Epsom Derby, where the force used aircraft as well as the Crossleys for traffic control, not crime prevention. The Met arranged for the use of a radio-equipped Vickers (Type 61) Vulcan fixed-wing passenger aircraft to cover the Derby traffic. This bi-plane was unwieldy and under-powered; its single 360hp Rolls-Royce Eagle engine gave it a maximum speed of about 105mph, but it had restricted banking capabilities and very restrictive small windows so it was unsuitable for observation duties, especially over the confines of the Epsom Racecourse. It was, wonderfully, nicknamed the ‘Flying Pig’. The blue and silver Vulcan the police used, G-EBBL, was operated by Instone Airline Ltd and it carried the name ‘City of Antwerp’. The head of the Met’s Traffic Department, that man Arthur Bassom, was taken aloft along with two police wireless operators and their equipment by Donald Robins, the Instone pilot. The police team were in constant touch with Percy Laurie, who was in charge of the control room at Epsom, from where dispatch riders took instructions to traffic officers at the affected road junctions.
From these beginnings the radio technology developed quickly, and although we are not covering it in detail here, make no mistake, the organisation of police force cars into the categories of use discussed in the following chapters only happened because the police relied ever more on the improving radio technology.
| Operator: | ‘Police emergency, how can I help?’ |
| Caller: | ‘A bloke’s going berserk with a knife down at the Rose and Crown.’ |
| Operator: | ‘OK, we’ll get a unit to you straight away.’ |
| Operator: | ‘Foxtrot five-one.’ |
| Crew: | ‘Foxtrot five-one go ahead.’ |
| Operator: | ‘Make the Rose and Crown pub in the High Street, male going berserk with a knife.’ |
| Crew: | ‘Foxtrot five-one making.’ |
A typical ‘send the area car’ call. All over the country, every hour of every day, divisional area cars and their crews will be dispatched to attend local emergency calls just like that one. This was something I was all too familiar with during my time in the police force. The area car is the emergency response unit for each shift, the backbone of the force – the real front-line cops.
The divisional area car, or response car as some forces call them these days, will generally be a mid-range saloon or estate with a fair degree of performance. The aim is to get a double-crewed unit to the scene of any local emergency as quickly as possible. It’s worth noting at this point that your area-car officers are usually hand picked because they have a lot of front-line experience, are trusted to make life or death decisions, to take control of certain situations and have driving skills that are way above the average, having completed a four-week intensive driving course. Current-day models undertaking this role include the BMW 320d, Skoda Octavia vRS, Ford Mondeo 2.0d and the Vauxhall Insignia.
A Vauxhall Insignia area