LIMITING OF SPEED

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 104, 4 May 1935, Page 36

LIMITING OF SPEED

ENFORCEMENT OF ACT

A CAMOUFLAGED POLICE

Addressing a meeting at Chelmsford just before the new speed limit in certain areas of Britain became enforceable, the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, said: "Does anyone deny that today there is a toll of the road which is a disgrace to all of us? If that is so, what are we going to do about it? Whatever you think of the speed limit it is an experiment, and, Parliament having so directed, it will be carried out. '

"The ordinary methods of trapping which everybody has known in the past, and which are operated today not against the joy-riders but against commercial vehicles, will be continued. But I told Parliament that in my view it would be a good and proper thing to have cruising cars, and that is the method we shall adopt. "I trust we shall receive the cooperation of the public in trying to carry out this difficult task for the one sole purpose of stemming the destruction of elderly people and children in the lamentable numbers which the records show week by week." The introduction of the speed limit and the use of plain-clothes police were defended by Captain H. F. Crookshank, M.P, for Gainsborough and

Under Secretary of State for Home Affairs, in.a speech near Lincoln.

The question whether there should or should not be a speed limit had been settled for the time being by Parliament, he said, and therefore all criticism which was based on the idea that the speed limit was wrong was really irrelevant. Criticism had been directed against the use of plainclothes police, but if only uniformed police were employed it was likely that the law would be observed only so long as they were in sight. The knowledge that police were being employed in plain clothes would act as a deterrent to excessive speeding..