This tantalising photograph, together with its caption, show that, by 1928, motor vehicle usage in the southwest of England had risen enough to need officers dedicated to policing the roads for the first time.
Primary research into the Watch Committee records of the Museum of Policing in Devon & Cornwall has yielded frustratingly few entries on the subject – although the Exeter City Watch Committee Minutes of 1928 do have a little more to tell.
They include an entry where it was agreed to hire a motorcycle for 5 Shillings (styled 5s) per day (equivalent to £13.40 back then), demonstrating that they, too, were coming to the conclusion that there was a need for the police to have motorised transport, though it isn’t clear if it was used for roads policing or swift response to reported incidents.
Entries suggest that the watch committee discussed buying a motorcycle second hand for £37, but imply that they settled upon hiring the motorbike from time to time, before later hiring it for 35s per week instead. Much later in the year entries seem to suggest it was eventually purchased for £42, 10s. Public procurement at its finest!
Also, the Museum has a sergeant’s examination paper from 1928 which includes a mathematics section. One question asks the candidate to calculate the speed of a car moving between two points 100m apart, from the time taken to pass between them. The speed limit was 20 miles per hour in this period, however it’s worth noting that when the limit was abolished by the 1930 Road Traffic Act, the reason given was that it was “universally ignored!”
In 1928 the Journal of Policing which was published countrywide and which included articles about current innovations in policing, includes an article interrogating different styles of automated traffic management signals that had been trialled in cities across the UK and the world at that time. An entry in the Exeter Watch Committee minutes records that the government were installing the first traffic lights in 1930 alongside passing the Road Traffic Act, and that the police were moving to increase their ability to enforce these changes.
Another article discusses vehicle headlights and the dangers of them being too bright – or not bright enough – with particular focus on the perilous job of the unfortunate points policeman positioned at junctions after dark. The article concludes that a black uniform with white gauntlets and gaiters, alongside hooded lights, so as not to dazzle the police officer, would be the safest combination. We know that when on points duty in Devonian cities officers wore white gauntlet gloves and white hats with dark blue uniforms, sometimes with greatcoats. We hold a number of associated uniform items in the collection, but we don’t know if this uniform was adopted before or after the article!
Points policing has been used in our cities for much longer, of course We know that Plymouth had police on points duty as early as the turn of the century to assist pedestrians and traffic to negotiate one particularly notorious Union Street junction, where the traffic would have been a developing mix of motor and horse-drawn vehicles. We also know that social concern was mounting over the increasing number of motor vehicles and the speed that they were able to attain over the course of the early 1900’s, and especially so by the late 1920’s.
In 1929, the ‘Safety First’ initiative took hold in Britain, prompting Chief Constables to take more punitive measures to ensure motorists complied with the law. Exasperated by the high rate of accidents and fatalities in Plymouth, the city’s Chief Constable, Mr Herbert Hards Sanders, provided a blunt warning to Plymouth’s motorists:
“Be civil to the policeman, and he will be civil to you. Remember the policeman on point duty has a very difficult task. Don’t make it more arduous by asking him questions. Don’t pull up and leave your car on the wrong side of the road. It is always dangerous to pass a stationary tramcar on the near side. There is great improvement in the driving of motorists compared with five years ago. Help it to improve still more.”
