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  • Promoting Road Safety
  • Mike Esbester (bio)

Where are they going, the couple on the motorbike that adorns this issue’s cover? Somewhere exciting, no doubt, and at great speed, with the wind billowing through the man’s scarf and the woman’s hair. They are young and free, making the most of 1960s Britain, about to roar past the viewer and off into the distance. Wherever they are going, this 1969 road safety poster tells us, they are getting there safely—because they are wearing their safety helmets (fig. 1).

This image is a fitting one for the cover of a special issue devoted to the international history of road safety, not least because safety education—using persuasive methods to try to convince people to change their behavior and act more safely—has been deployed for over 100 years and has reached virtually every nation in the world. It represents a particular approach to road safety, though by no means the only one; engineering, training, and enforcement solutions often run alongside educative campaigns. Yet as artifacts, road safety education materials like this poster tell us a lot about prevalent perceptions of danger and people’s interactions with automotive technologies, and about responsibilities for managing risks in everyday life. How should dangers posed by particular technologies be addressed? Who should be responsible for protecting individuals? What role, if any, should the state play?

In Britain, the educative approach to preventing deaths and injuries was well established by 1969. Drawing on the American “Safety First” movement, safety education was introduced into the workplace by the railway industry in 1913. It soon spread across other industries and other areas of society—chiefly road safety, from 1917, but also home safety after 1930. A huge range of methods were used: posters, booklets, films, songs, exhibitions, children’s games, safety quizzes and competitions, “safety weeks,” staged crashes to raise awareness, talks, and messages printed on [End Page 493] bookmarks, cigarette cards, milk bottle tops, and even on Christmas wrapping paper and bars of soap. Hundreds of millions of items have been produced and disseminated over the last 100 years in Britain alone, making safety education a massively significant sociocultural phenomenon.


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Fig 1.

1969 British road safety poster, issued by the Central Office of Information and produced by Philip Castle.

(Source: Author’s collection. Reprinted courtesy of Philip Castle.)

This material gives us insight into debates surrounding safety and harm reduction. Before 1939 most safety education was produced by voluntary [End Page 494] bodies like the National “Safety First” Association, formed of concerned individuals coming together in their spare time to try to do something for what they saw as the civic good. The British state was hands-off in its approach to questions of personal safety, drawing on a long-standing tradition of reluctance to intervene too closely in the lives of its citizens—even if this intervention only meant offering advice about safe ways to cross a road, ride a bicycle, or drive a car. Only in 1934, in response to mounting public pressure about the rising toll of deaths and injuries on Britain’s roads, did the government make a limited financial contribution to the costs of the first national road safety campaign, something not repeated until part way through the Second World War.

The changed priorities of war meant that the state took a more active role in preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens. People became military resources, vital to the fighting (whether on the home front or overseas). As a result, road safety (and of course work safety) campaigns came under the remit of new government departments, the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of War Transport. After the war, the state accepted that it could play a role in the reduction of unintended deaths and injuries on the roads, something that formed one part of the work of the new Central Office of Information (COI), along with other matters of public interest such as health promotion.

The poster shown here was produced in 1969 by the COI as part of its road safety work. This became increasingly important after 1945...

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