Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars

Before I start moaning about our namby-pamby, mollycoddled, airbagged society, I had better admit that those Victorians—those tough old Victorians, whose children died in droves, those Victorians who lived cheek by jowl with death and pestilence—were so terrified of the new motorised machines that they make the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents look positively gung-ho.

It really is true that during the first few years of the automobile’s existence in the UK it was regulated by the Red Flag Act, originally designed for traction engines. This measure restricted speeds to four miles an hour in the country and two miles an hour in the town, and required every ‘road locomotive’ to have three attendants, one to walk no fewer than sixty yards in front carrying a red flag.

Admittedly, this insanity was soon repealed but it wasn’t long before British MPs were engaged in their characteristic activity—whipping up public panic about some new threat to health and safety, then demanding legislation. By 1909 the car was still only about as powerful as a kind of motorised sewing machine, yet some Liberal MP was so wet as to stand up in parliament and warn the electorate about ‘wandering machines, travelling at an incredible rate of speed’ (i.e. 4mph).

Adumbrating one of the major themes for ’elf ’n’ safety campaigners for the next hundred years, this Liberal went on to have a pop at drink-driving. ‘You can see them on Sunday afternoon,’ said the anti-car Isaiah, ‘piled 20 or 30 feet deep outside the new popular inns, while their occupants regale themselves within.’ Already, it seems, the car was associated with sin: unnatural speed, disrespect for the Sabbath and alcoholic intoxication!

His warnings were quite counterproductive, of course, since anybody listening to his speech would have been filled with an immediate desire to drive to the pub. Humanity fell on the car with greed and amazement.

It was as though, as a species, we had found the biggest technical improvement in our lives in a million years of evolution. By replacing the four legs of a horse with four rolling wheels we stumbled on something as important, and as naturally suited to human dimensions, and as obvious, in retrospect, as the shoe—or the wheel itself.

Between 1919 and 1939 the number of cars on the roads in Britain went up twenty times, with the millionth Morris rolling off the Cowley production lines shortly before the Second World War, and as the invention began to percolate down through the socioeconomic groups, it began to democratise the planet. Until the First World War, it was a luxury item. As Hilaire Belloc puts it:

The rich arrived in pairs

And also in Rolls-Royces.

They talked of their affairs

In loud and strident voices.

But even as he wrote, a production breakthrough had taken place in America.

He went on to say:

The poor arrived in Fords

Whose features they resembled.

They laughed to see so many lords

And ladies all assembled.

And there we have it, in the merriment of those Ford-driving folk: the chirpy insolence of democracy. They knew that in spirit and in essence a Ford was the same as a Roller; though the rich man might still have his castle and the poor man might still be at his gate, they both possessed implements as essentially alike as one fork is like another, and although one fork may be of steel and one may be of gold, they will be equally suited to their task.

From the very beginning, rich and not-sorich had basically the same set of four wheels propelled by the same internal combustion engine, and controlled by the same steering wheel, and above all we human beings found that the car created a great equality in our ability to occupy, at any one time, that rectangular patch of road beneath the chassis.

It is in the nature of the machine and the design of roads that we must wait in the same traffic and stop at the same lights, and it is significant that it was only in some of the worst left-wing tyrannies, such as the Soviet Union, that for part of the twentieth century the ruling elites had car lanes reserved for themselves. Everywhere else the car levelled and democratised the experience of motion, and it is no wonder that the spread of the car coincided with the spread of universal suffrage in the west and with female emancipation.

Even more completely than a bicycle, a car neutralises any female disadvantage in strength. It gives her a cabin, a door that locks, a place to put her stuff. It allows her to be Madame Bovary without having to worry about the discretion of the coachman, and in spite of all the efforts by the male sex to blacken their name, the overwhelming statistical evidence is that women drive better and more safely than men. They may fail their three-point turns, on average, more than male driving test candidates, but having passed, they have fewer accidents and attract far lower insurance premiums.

It is a sign of male desperation, and failure to adjust, that throughout the twentieth century we find deprecation of female driving skills—even from the finest stylists of English literature. One thinks of Evelyn Waugh and his ho-ho account of Mrs Stitch, bowling along the pavement in her glossy black machine until she ends up in a male urinal. Then note how two of the greatest American novels of the last century revolve around exactly the same sexist plot device—viz. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. Remember: in both cases a man takes the rap for a woman’s fatal and incompetent driving. Isn’t that typical, eh? Blame the woman.

Ever since Eve, ever since Pandora, the male sex has muttered the same essentially protectionist mantra, that the womenfolk can’t be trusted with the technology, and if you seriously want to restrict the freedoms of the female sex and you seriously believe that modern western values are deplorable, then you actually continue to ban women from driving at all—as they do in Saudi Arabia, home of Osama bin Laden.

But for the British male and the American male and the rest of the western male sex, there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the sight of women at the wheel of a car. If you were going to let them drive, then you might as well let them vote as well, because apart from anything else, if you continued to deny the vote to female drivers, then the suffragettes would eventually stop hurling themselves under the hooves of horses and start running you down on street corners.

Yes, it was the car that made it impossible and ludicrous to deny women the political equality that had eluded them for 40,000 years, and for that achievement alone all remaining feminists should go outside now and reverentially kiss the hubcaps of the first automobile they see.

It was the car, too, that liberated the poor, that mobilised the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, that gave the victims of the Depression the chance to build a new life in California.

How did Herbert Hoover win the 1928 presidential election? With what vision did he inspire and enthuse the American electorate? He promised a ‘chicken in every pot—and a car in every garage, to boot’.

And what was it, 60 years later, that finally brought down communism? It was a car. It wasn’t just that the Ossies drove their Trabants round the Berlin Wall and through Hungary in such an unstoppable tide that in 1990 the East German state collapsed. The Trabant was not merely the instrument of revolution; it incarnated the point and necessity of the revolution.

It was a horrible two-stroke belcher of brown particulate smoke that would have rusted as fast as the Italian Stallion, except that its shell was made of a weird commie resin strengthened by wool or cotton. Its top speed was 112kph and it was a living sputtering embodiment of the economic humiliation of socialism.

It wasn’t Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It wasn’t Margaret Thatcher. It was the daily misery of East Germans trying to get their Trabants to work, when they could turn on their televisions and see images of their West German counterparts and relatives roaring around in Golf GTIs. Yes, it was the car that spread capitalism and destroyed communism; no wonder Polish Pope John Paul II gave a Trabant a special blessing when he visited Sofia in 2002.

The car was at the centre of the most important events of the last century and was in many ways responsible for them; and still the motor revolution goes on because the number of cars is still growing, and growing fast.

When Leo and I crashed that Fiat in 1983, it was one of 18.6 million cars in the UK. Today there are 30.6 million registered cars. That’s right: the number of cars on UK roads has almost doubled in the last 25 years, and there are still about half a million new registrations a year; when you consider how much longer a car lasts these days, you can see that the British people are adding to their stock of viable cars far faster than they are adding to the number of indigenous British people.

We have, in other words, a car population boom. We have a crisis in car demography that some believe is as serious as the boom in the number of pensioners and the change in the dependency ratio. We seem to have more cars than our roads can support.

When I was at Oxford, you could get to London in little more than an hour; these days the traffic can start at junction six of the M40. I remember once being stuck in the Italian Stallion—a car with all the torque of a bath chair—and realising that I had 18 minutes to get from the traffic lights at Hillingdon (as they were) to a vital job interview in Mayfair, yet somehow we did it, me and the Fiat, in broad daylight, in mid-morning, and in conformity with the laws of the road. And where did I park?

In the last hundred years the car has

done more for human freedom, I

venture to suggest, than the aeroplane,

penicillin, the telephone and the

contraceptive pill put together.

Right outside, of course: slap bang outside the headquarters of GEC, because those were the days before traffic wardens all became bonus-hungry maniacs and, although the Italian Stallion was already showing signs of the terrible wasting disease that finished it off, although it could only go up steep hills in reverse (reverse being for some reason the most powerful gear), and although by now a horrible green fluid leaked from the radiator, those were the days when it was still cool and rare for a student to own any kind of car at all, and I will always be grateful to Ken Livingstone and the Inner London Education Authority for the maximum grant that enabled me to keep the Italian Stallion on the road, because it made me one of a tiny minority, and because I was one of a tiny minority I would park it all over the place.

My favourite parking spot was on the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk and sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket. But what did I care? The Italian Stallion had a James Bond feature that enabled me to beat the fuzz. As a means of eluding the law, it was far better than a gadget that squirted the road with oil or tintacks, or rear-firing cannon mounted by the exhaust. The Stallion had Belgian plates.

What were the poor parkies going to do? Contact Interpol? Ring up the Belgian police and ask them to track down my father’s squash partner Sue? Ha. I snapped my fingers at the parking tickets. I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until—for these were the days before they were even sheathed in plastic—the fines just disintegrated in the rain.

Before you get stroppy, let me hasten to say that I have more than made up for it since. With the many thousands of pounds I have paid to the parking enforcement departments of Islington, Camden and Oxfordshire, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have contributed enough, over the years, to pay for a full-time teacher’s salary, although if I know Islington the cash has probably gone on more traffic wardens, or the endless abstract creation and destruction of road humps.

There was an amazing optimism, in those days, about parking, a prelapsarian innocence, a belief that even on a double yellow you would probably get away with it for an hour or so. It is with incredulity that I look back at my happy-go-lucky parking style—because even in that Elysium, in 1983, a terrible new plague had just come ashore.

It had been invented thirty years earlier by one Frank Marugg, a musician with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a good friend of the sheriff, and it was designed to scare the pants off ticket-dodging swine like me. The first horrific sighting was in Pont Street, lovingly clamped round the wheel of a black Golf belonging to a record producer. From then on the yellow scourge spread like ragwort in our streets.

I remember in the mid-1980s rounding the corner of St James’s, where the Stallion was as usual stationed in defiance of all bylaws, and when I saw that evil metal gin about its forequarters I felt a sudden constriction in the throat: a spasm of rage and amazement.

How could they do this? By what right could the state take away my freedom of movement? Except that it wasn’t the state that had clamped my car, but a hireling of the state, a ruthless cowboy, and I was lucky compared to some.

In 25 years of tears, wails and ruined mornings, the clampers have immobilised a hearse with a corpse in the back, a Royal Mail van and a Good Samaritan who had stopped to help the victim of a hit-and-run driver. A disabled man of 82 was clamped in a pub car park because he walked out of the pub to post a letter before buying his usual half pint. The gangsters told him to pay £240 or see the fine increased even further. The other day they clamped the mayor of Middlesbrough while he opened a nursery.

If I sound bitter, it is because I am; yet the ruthlessness of the clampers is nothing next to the rapacity of their accomplices, the tow-truck operatives. An Englishman’s car used to be his castle, or at least his mobile fort. I mean it was unthinkable that some public authority could simply move it. Yet time and again I would arrive at my Spectator office in Holborn, park the car, go in and ask my then assistant Ann Sindall for some cash to put in the meter, and while she was rustling around in the desk I would look out of the window and—blow me down!—there it would be: my car towed ignominiously past with its rear in the air, and without so much as a by-your-leave.

Which left me with that bleached-out beaten feeling you get when you have succumbed to the might of the state, and then in my dejection I would remember the logic of what they were doing and I would see the other side of the story.