Where were the police?


This is set in 1950's England when the police would regard minor driving offences as very, very serious. Indeed drivers of small delivery vans would face the full heavy handed arm of the law if they so much as went a few miles over the speed limit. Yet here were gangs of maniacs driving heavy trucks at dangerous speeds likely to cause death and destruction over the same route dozens of times a day, every day, week after week and getting away with it. In real life all the drivers would have been prosecuted within a few days.

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there was no speed limit when this film was shot

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'there was no speed limit when this film was shot'

I take it this is some kind of a joke.

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no, check it out

there was only a 30 mph in built up areas but everywhere else there wasnt one until the early to mid 60s i believe

most cars werent very capable of breaking any kind of speed limit weve got now

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My mother recalls an event in the 1950's in England, this guy Eric who drove a delivery van was stopped by a police officer for exceeding 30 mph (the legal speed limit for a goods vehicle) by a mere 4 to 5 mph. He was prosecuted, summoned to appear in court and was severely punished.

My mother considers the acts of dangerous driving in this film outrageous - reckless driving through villages putting the lives of pedestrians, children, car drivers, cyclists etc at serious risk would never have been tolerated. The police would have stamped on that haulage firm with the full force of the law resulting in prosecutions and prison terms.

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its a film

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there was a goods vehichle speed limit of 20mph on all roads at this time

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20 mph speed limit for Goods Vehicles was abolished in 1930, twenty seven years before this film was made. It was re-introduced for a short time in 1940 but only during the hours of darkness in an attempt to prevent accidents.



"Hi, yeah its me. Err......I forgot my mantra"

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Of course the film wouldn't have worked without the speeding scenes, etc. However, I do believe in reality, the local driving populace of the area it was set in would have complained to their antics and then, had the Police investigate fully. Apart from dangerous driving, the company itself and its employees all seemed to be somewhat 'suspect' and worthy of investigation by the Inland Revenue (Tax), etc.

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Historically, speeding has only really come so heavily under the eyes of the police and British government in more recent years, mainly due to the use of modern technology which has enabled limits to be so rigorously enforced. Whilst I expect there were cases of very zealous traffic policing as quoted in the example given here, this would have been very far from the norm- speed detection equipment available to the force at the time would have been minimal and almost certainly highly inaccurate; speedometers fitted to vehicles today are not 100% accurate due to manufacturing tolerances and even changes such as tyre air pressure, etc- in those days a typical speedometer would almost certainly be nowhere near accurate enough to detect a 4 mph variation, especially at higher speeds.

Speeding was much less of a concern in this country up until the sixties, for many reasons: there was practically no congestion on the roads and a more sparse population nationwide; the country was a lot less urbanised; the vast majority of vehicles on the road up until that time weren't capable of very high speeds- in the fifties, an average family car would top out at around 60-70 mph and be much happier cruising about at around 40-50 mph. You must remember, a lot of big-selling cars in this period still only had three gears, low compression ratios, low gearing, dreadful carbs, sidevalve engines and skinny crossply tyres on tall, even skinnier wheels with live rear axles and often, still had beam front axles and lever shock absorbers- high speeds and any kind of decent handling was the sole preserve of luxury cars and sportscars.

But, on the subject of speed limits, here are the actual facts:

Between 1930 and 1965, there were practically no limits outside of urban areas. However, an experimental national speed limit of 70 mph was introduced in 1965 following a series of crashes, mainly in poor visibilty conditions. The limit was formally adopted in 1967 and remains to this day.

Also, it's worth remembering that the way the trucks are portrayed in the film is via speeded-up filming; there's absolutely no way those trucks could attain anything like the speeds depicted, especially fully laden with cargo. So you can reasonably assume that, were the film a real-life scenario, then the trucks wouldn't be travelling at speeds high by comparison to anything else on the roads at the time, they'd simply be going faster than they themselves were designed to do so safely- this is where the real danger would lie; the speed per se would not be a big issue.

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Kew dodges with perkins diesel engines as used in the film were maybe capable of 45 mph tops, nowhere near that when loaded. The 20mph speed limit was still in force for goods vehicles with an unladen weight of more than 3 tons, if less you could do 30.
Its well documented that the film was made using the "slow cranking" technique to make the trucks appear faster.
If anyone is interested the trucks belonged to a firm called "drinkwater" based in willesden, London, and many of the locations were the company's own quarries.

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If you watch the film, when Joe yately is given his initial test drive and the truck is reversing into the shed you can clearly see the "20" badge on the back, I was unable to find out when the 20 limit was changed for HGVs but I would guess 1959 at the earliest to coincide with the start of the motorway era.

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To all you crooked, psychotic, future time travelling and espionage tv cult figures moonlighting as road haulage drivers please can I offer a plea on behalf of the nation's pedalists? Think once! Think twice!! Think bike!!! (with acknowledgements to Edward Judd.)

Supernatural perhaps, baloney perhaps not

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Ah, those good old COI public information films, eh? So much more brutal than todays versions!

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I preferred the version as seen on "the young ones", which went "Think once, think twice, think don't drive your car on the pavement"

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The national speed limit is actually 60mph. It's only 70mph on dual carriageways and motorways.

The trucks are consistently doing about 50mph - this is emphasised throughout the film. The mechanic who first takes Tom out tells him that 50mph is a good speed and he doesn't want to go below 30mph or he'll lose his job. Laughable today.

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The speed limit was 40mph. When Tom goes to see the boss for the job he did ask about the speed limit, to which his boss answered that if you get a ticket the driver will have to pay for it himself. The speed the boss wanted his drivers to drive was a minimum of 50mph.

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These are Hell Drivers. Probably established a certain type of reputation amongst the local folk. It's either get outta the way or be killed. Hence the reason why none of the locals would dare complain to the filth otherwise G Red and his band of merry ment would come down and batter 'em. This may be the reason why the lcoal constabulary keep sshtum as well.

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'These are Hell Drivers. Probably established a certain type of reputation amongst the local folk. It's either get outta the way or be killed. Hence the reason why none of the locals would dare complain to the filth otherwise G Red and his band of merry ment would come down and batter 'em. This may be the reason why the lcoal constabulary keep sshtum as well.'

No, the police in Britain in the 1950's would not be intimidated by pathetic scumbags like Red. Three of my mother's uncles were police officers at that time, all three were hard guys who showed bravery and courage in confronting and disarming shotgun wielding criminals, knife wielding thugs etc. The reputation of criminals and thugs counted for nothing then, they were regarded with contempt and dealt with.

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I think for the purposes of this film, my answer is correct. In real life situations I don't believe these truck drivers would dare drive like that.

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There's a haulage and gravel firm near me and we call their drivers 'Hell Drivers'. They tend to go fast, leave mud all over the road, and not acknowledge when you let them in at a junction or otherwise!

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Heh, well done. I've had a frogeye Sprite, and a few Morris Minors. They'd do 75, but you'd better not have any reason to have to slow down in much of a hurry. Even the MG-A wasn't too terribly sporting. I've not had the pleasure of a Jowett, nor an Alvis, and certainly no Jensens, Astons, nor a ~sigh~ Morgan. But I certainly got an impression why there'd not been much need of a speed limit.
Still and all, it's a film. Not all that many of us drive like the Fast and the Furious, even here in California.

What I had in mind was boxing the compass.

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At home watching "Danger Man"!

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Used to use a 1955 Austin A50 (1500cc) as my daily driver about ten years ago. Was all original except for a one and a half inch lowering job at the front, conversion from dynamo to alternator for reliability reasons and swapped the crossplies to radials to stop it going sideways in the wet at 10 mph, which was always nerve-shredding. The engine had been replaced too at some point in the past, but only with a direct original replacement unit. Oh, also almost forgot the flame-thrower I fitted to the exhaust for a giggle.
Top speed I managed to attain was 60 mph on a dual carriageway with a fairly good run up. Whether it would have gone any faster if I hadn't run out of road I don't know, but by that time it was revving like crazy and was shaking so violently I thought it would vibrate to pieces. Great fun.
Ridiculously low gears probably hurt the top speed quite a bit but certainly did make for some fantastic tire-spinning launches, whether you intended to do so or not.
Point being that this was a remarkably average family car back in its day, something like a Mondeo or Vectra would be today, and believe me, speed is relative- 60 mph in something like that is a real experience that you know about at every stage, whereas in a modern car it's no effort at all and hardly noticeable. So there's no doubt that the speeds the trucks appear to be travelling in the film- and I mean visually by the under-cranking effect, rather than what else the clocks might say- would be terrifyingly hair-raising, even if it had been possible, which I think we all agree it wasn't by any means.
But as has also been said, I think this portrayal of super high speed is merely nothing more than a device to illustrate the notion that the drivers are really a breed apart and to show how insane their woking conditions are. It doesn't detract from the film overall.
Also, one of the previous posters' clarification about the national speed limit being 70 on motorways only and 60 elsewhere is of course correct; something I neglected to mention.

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As you say regarding the low gearing (no 5th or 6th gear to select) cars like the Morris 1000 would be straining their guts out over 65/70 mph.

When I was a taxi driver, I owned a diesel Morris Oxford (1489cc) for 6 years. I sold it when it was nearly 15 years old. This shiny black beast would do just over 70 downhill and was almost everything you could wish for in the late 1950s and a litre of diesel took you 9 or 10 miles. However, by April 1971 it went out of production in this country. Mine was just about the last one off the assembly line and was not exported like most of the others that year. They were virtually indestructable and ideal for a tough life on the road.

Come to think of it, a couple of near misses with the trucks on the film showed a Ford Consul and a Vauxhall Cresta. These must have been brand new at the time. I would imagine that a Dodge with a 2 speed axle would only exceed 50 mph if you went downhill and knocked it into neutral... not recommended if you are fond of life or licence!

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I assume. :)

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i just don't see things being that bad in 1950s england. the locals would have went crazy with the dangerous driving in this movie.

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