SAFETY FIRST

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1042, 5 August 1930, Page 14

SAFETY FIRST

SOCIETY OF 50 YEARS AGO Recently there was celebrated in Loudon the jubilee of the street refuge, which was the fruit of the work , of a very interesting "safety first” j organisation 4f other days. On June 1, 18S0, street refuges were opened at crossings at the south end of King Street, opposite St. James's Palace, and at the south-west corner of the Haymarket in Pall Mall, and they were quickly followed by others. They were erected in response to a resolution passed in the House of Lords, demanding that vestries should take action, “in view of the increase in the number of persons'injured by the passage of vehicles.” but there was one refuge which was put up by a private individual, and was the scene of an ironic tragedy. It was one in S— James’s Street, where there are now seven, and it was paid for by a well-known clubman named Plerrepoint, who had felt the need of it as he crossed the busy road when emerging from White’s. ' On the day after it was completed he was displaying it to friends, and, pointing out his name upon it, when, stepping into the road to admire it, he was knocked down by a carriage and killed. The body, whose president. Viscount Templedown, moved the House of Lords to ask for street refuges, rejoiced in the name of the Soeiety for the Prevention of Street Accidents and Furious Driving in the Metropolis. The number of persons killed on the London streets in the year this society was formed—viz., IS79—was 157, and the number injured was 3,342, these figures being very inconsiderable compared with those of fcst year (1,362 and 55,645 respectively). Nevertheless, the Society for the Prevention of Street Accidents and Furious Driving in the Metropolis had a lively conviction that something really must be done. The causes of street dangers cited make curious reading—boys running behind vehicles and throwing stones at horses; children playing cricket on the pavement and flying shuttlecocks in the street; vehicles unliglited after sunset; and, of course, the peccant ways of drivers, particularly of cabmen. The society soon died of over-zeal, people thinking c went too far with its proposals to post horsemen on the streets to chase furious drivers, and to collect a fund to enable the victims of fast driving to claim comj pensation. But the society not only left, as a legacy, street refuges, but street ambulances, the first of which were placed, at its instigation, at the Mansion House, Charing Cross, and other focal points.