* Traffic blues
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Back to anniversaries agaip—last Saturday was the 25th birthday of "B" department of the Metropolitan Police, the department which controls transport and traffic work through nine branches. The Secretary of State in 1919 sanctioned the establishment of a department to deal with "all matters connected with the circulation of traffic in the metropolis". In terms of 1969 that's quite a task, and very efficiently they tackle it on the whole.
Digging back through the historical material which Scotland Yard sent me, I was amused to learn that before the Highway Act of 1835 which introduced the rule of the road and made "furious driving" a statutory offence, only the 17th-century Sunday Observance Acts related to traffic regulation —so presumably you could blind about regardless for six days but on the seventh only in dire peril. Earlier still, Sir Robert Peel's lads had to keep an eye on the traffic, largely because "public carriages ... had to be subject to a large measure of supervision". What price the Red Arrows!