‘Do Your Worst!’

The Tiverton Gazette of early April 1925 carries a report from a court case headed ‘Stationary Car without Lights’. It goes on to describe the conversation between the police constable who found the car at Stoodleigh parked outside the owner’s house, and the owner himself. When the PC said that he would be reporting the offence, the owner responded, ‘All right, constable, do your worst, but I will get even with you some day’. In addition it was found that the owner had lied when he said that the lights weren’t working on the car. At the hearing the defendant (the owner) said that ‘he was sorry the offence had been committed; it was the first time that he had been in a court’. A fine of 7/6d (37.5p) was ‘inflicted’.

On April 6th 1925, ‘the Guardian’ published ‘Some hints on road practice for this year’s recruits to the ranks of motorists’. The first Highway Code was only published in 1931. Prior to this, in the 1920s, very little had been done to control, or legislate the use of the roads which still had large numbers of horse-drawn vehicles on them. There was a dramatic rise in the numbers of vehicles on the roads during the 1920s, by 1931 there were 2.3 million but there were 7000 deaths. Compare this with present day – in 2023 there were 41m vehicles and 1695 deaths.

In our archive collection we have several items relating to garages which were operating in Tiverton in the 1920s.