While having far too many military casualties of war in my family tree, I came across two (among a few more) who were members of Britain’s Merchant Navy who died in the Second World War.
Charles Matthews Cater (my second cousin, twice removed) was the Master of the SS Yat Shing (Hong Kong), a British merchant vessel that had been absorbed into Britain’s Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) during the First World War. Charles had served on various ships during his Merchant Navy career, but at the time of the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, the Yat Shing was in Aberdeen Naval Harbour, in the British Protectorate.
During the invasion, on 16th December 1941, the ship came under fire from Japanese forces and Charles was killed. He left a wife and two teenaged children in Honiton, Devon.
The ship survived and was requisitioned by Japanese forces, who renamed her Nissho Maru. She hit a mine off Yawata, Japan, on 17th July 1945 and sank. The wreck was raised and broken up in 1950.
Guy Roy Humphry (my third cousin, twice removed) was a seaman on the British freighter SS Empire Surf (Sunderland). The Empire Surf was not Guy’s first ship, but the ship itself was new and in convoy was making a ballast run, so empty of cargo, from Manchester to Jacksonville, Florida, in the United States.
In the early hours of 14th January 1942, the Empire Surf was attacked by German U-Boat, U-43, and sank, someway south of Iceland. There were forty-seven men listed as dead or missing, and six survivors who were picked up by HMS Alisma. Guy was among the missing, presumed dead. He was just 20 years old.
Charles, Guy, and I share a common ancestor, Daniel Cater (1830-1906) of Kingskerswell, Devon. Daniel is my great-great-great uncle, Charles’ grandfather and Guy’s great-grandfather.
Both men’s names are listed on the Merchant Navy Memorial in Tower Hill, London, Charles on panel 120 and Guy on panel 26.
Details pertaining to the British and Commonwealth war dead in the twentieth and twenty-first century can be gleaned from the excellent website and database of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission: http://www.cwgc.org.
I had been invited to an interview for a Clerical Officer’s job in Central London. I’m not giving any secrets away, given that this was almost fifty years ago, but it was with the Ministry of Defence. Where the job was in the MoD I had no idea, it was just a general vacancy, but I didn’t really care. My mum was quite keen for me to get on, and was more pleased than I was, I think, when I received the travel warrant for a train ticket to London.
I’d only been to London twice before, and never on my own, so it was quite the adventure getting the train, and then the Underground to Holborn, for my interview at Sentinel House.
I didn’t know it then, but Sentinel House was the centre of the Civilian Management organisation for the Ministry. It was quite a smart looking, eight-storey block, all white and green on the outside. Inside it was calm and surprisingly quiet, which helped settle my nerves. For this interview I was wiser, and even as it progressed, I felt I was doing well. Indeed, I was on my way home as the powers that be called my home and told my mum that I had the job.
As an aside, Sentinel House still stands, but it’s bigger than it was, and is now a hotel!
Sentinel House today
The administration was a wee bit taxing. More forms to complete, and I had to arrange some accommodation, which even then wasn’t easy in Central London. The Civil Service had a tie up with something called the London Hostels Association, and they organised a bed for me in a grand old house in Leinster Gardens, which is a very smart address in Bayswater, just a stone’s throw from the north side of Hyde Park. That’s all that was grand, though, as I was up in the roof and sharing a room with three other young men. We had a sink in the room as I remember, but toilet and bathing facilities were down the hallway and shared with many others. The hostel provided breakfast and an evening meal in the rent, but the food was dire. However, my room mates were fine, and it wasn’t so far removed from the boarding school I’d attended less than a year before.
On my room mates, only one of them was a Civil Servant, the others were a student from Ghana, and an office worker from Wood Green, and I never worked out why he didn’t want to stay at home rather than pay for the hostel.
It was just a short walk to Lancaster Gate Tube station, and on my first day in Town, a Sunday, I did a dry run on the Tube to Sentinel House, then had a wander around Oxford Street, although not before buying a Nicholson’s paperback A to Z street map book. I kept that book for decades.
Come my first working day, heading down into the Underground, I was struck by two things. One was the noise of the money going into the ticket machines in the street-level booking hall, and the other was the absolute absence of human voices once on the train. Absolutely no one spoke. This, I was to discover, was standard commuting practice.
At Sentinel House I was given yet more paperwork, and told to report to somewhere called St. Giles’ Court, about a ten minute walk away in St. Giles’ High Street. I don’t know why, but I had an idea in my head that the building would be some baronial hall, or regency palace, but it was nothing of the sort. It was, in fact, a red-brick McAlpine office building, post-war, and although eight storeys high, looked squat because it was so huge. Inside was worse because it didn’t look as it had been painted since the 1950s, and there wasn’t a scrap of carpet on the floor, just a hard linoleum finish. So that was why Sentinel House was so quiet, it had carpets.
I took the lift to the eighth floor (there was a phone in the lift, with its own London 01 number), and reported to the registry of the Directorate of Strategic Electronic Radar, shortened to DSLR. Everything was an abbreviation the MoD, as I was soon to find out. But all that will be in the next episode, as the next chapter could go on a bit. I need to keep the chapters short to keep readers awake at least a little.
For the record, St Giles’ Court is no more, likewise Castlewood House, its mirror image building on New Oxford Street. Both have been demolished and replaced with new and exciting, er, office blocks.
What replaced St Giles’ Court. Definitely not a red-brick McAlpine block.
Now a few years into retirement, I felt I wanted to document my working life. It isn’t a thrilling tale, but its level of excitement is not important because it’s more for my benefit than anyone else’s, and I know what’s coming next.
It’s not one long tome, thank goodness, as I’ll split it into sections, and the first one has to be the introduction.
I left school in 1976, halfway through my two-year A-Level courses. That was partly because I was fed up with school and wanted to earn my own money, but also partly because my first year had been completed at a British Families Education Service school in what was then West Germany, but my Civil Servant dad had been posted back to the UK and, try as I might, I couldn’t get him to pull the right strings to allow me to stay in Germany for the second year, even though it would have been possible. My dad’s new posting was in Surrey, but he snagged us a Government-owned house close to Farnborough in Hampshire. The local sixth-form college ran a different A-Level syllabus, which would have required me to start my first year over again. For someone already done with school, I opted for the world of work.
Now is the time for regret. I really really should have completed my A-Levels, then tried for university. Not only would that have opened a lot of doors for me, but university education was free then. But I knew best, and now I really wish I hadn’t.
Back in 1976, the work situation for young people wasn’t as dire as it is today, so I had a fairly broad range of work to choose from, even without A-Levels or a degree. I knew I wanted to work in the public sector somewhere, so that I wasn’t helping to make obscene profits for the Robber Barons – I was a socialist at heart even then. My first disappointment, though, was going to the Job Centre to sign on, only to find that I couldn’t get Unemployment Benefit as I hadn’t paid any contributions, which I suppose was fair. I did, though, browse the jobs on offer and opted to apply for a labouring position while I set to and applied for the Civil Service.
I was at the bottom of the greasy pole that is the world of paid employment.
I have many people in my family tree who were lost to war, and those lost to the First and Second World Wars are largely well documented by Britain’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission. (www.cwgc.org). Most were young men serving in the armies of Britain, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, but one jumped out recently because the Royal Air Force is greatly under-represented in my family; his name was Sergeant Archie Pascoe RAF VR, a flight engineer on Lancaster bombers, lost over Germany on the night of 4th December 1944.
Archie was born in April 1922, in Buckland-in-the-Moor, Devon, to Francis Pascoe and his wife Helena Maud Caunter. In my family tree, Archie is shown as my third cousin, twice removed, related to my mother’s side of the family.
There are precious few documents relating to Archie until his marriage in 1944. He missed the 1921 Census, the 1931 Census was lost to fire, and I can’t find him in the 1939 National Register, but from information gleaned from the Widecombe-in-the-Moor website (www.widecombe-in-the-moor.com), it looks like Archie joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 when he was eighteen. Curiously, he joined first as a bandsman, but quickly transferred to aircrew.
Archie Married Constance Rowena Evans in Neath, Glamorgan, Wales in July 1944 when they were both posted to the same RAF Station.
Mark III Lancaster, most likely not ND932
On the afternoon of 4th December 1944, Archie boarded 619 (B) Squadron Lancaster MkIII, ND932, at RAF Strubby in Lincolnshire. The aircraft was captained by Flying Officer Stanley Victor of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF)*, and headed for a bombing sortie to Heilbronn in Southern Germany. Before reaching the target, Lancaster ND932 was hit by fire from a German night fighter, and crashed sixty miles short of Heilbronn. The only crew member to survive was one of the air gunners, Flight Sergeant Gordon Goudy RCAF.
Google Earth 2026
The bodies of the crew were initially interred at Unterriexingen cemetery, near Heilbronn, but later reinterred at the Durnbach War Cemetery south of Munich. As with all British and Commonwealth servicemen killed overseas, their graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Although the youngest of eight Pascoe children, their parents were hit hard. Francis Pascoe, Archie’s father, died in 1946 and was buried in the churchyard at Buckland-in-the-Moor, and his gravestone was annotated with Archie’s name and date of passing. His mother, Helena, was interred in the same grave when she died in 1971.
St Peter’s Church, Buckland-in-the-Moor
I was surprised at the amount of information that’s available about WWII aircrew, particularly Bomber Command aircrew, on the Internet. Aside from the military aspects, the Widecombe-in-the-Moor village website has a page dedicated to Archie, as it does for all the local men lost in the two World Wars. I have no doubt that there is other information out there, but the Widecombe page is nice, informal round up for a local lad.
Of course, I marvel, as I always do, at the young age of the wartime combatants. I cannot imagine flying across Germany in a Lancaster bomber at the age of 22, and I grieve for the parents of all these young men; how devastating their loss must have been. Lest we forget.
* Three other crew members were RCAF, and I’m grateful to the Canadian Aircraft Serial Personnel Information Resource (CASPIR) website, part of the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum at Hamilton, Ontario, for the information relating to the aircraft and its crew (www.caspir.warplane.com)
Delving around in the Hill family tree, my maternal grandmother’s side of things, and I came across an interesting story concerning the husband of a third cousin of mine. His name was William Charles Morse, and she was Hilda May Seaward.
Hilda was born in Plymouth in 1902, the daughter of Walter and Mary Seaward. Walter was a Plate Layer on the Great Western Railway, and they lived on Laira Bridge Road, Plymouth. There was a tangle of Great Western Railway lines in Plymouth at the turn of the twentieth century, so Walter would have been kept busy.
William Charles Morse was born to William Henry Morse and Amy Jane Turner in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland in 1899. While William’s mother Amy was Irish, from County Kildare, his father was English, from Cornwall, and serving in the British Royal Navy, stationed in Ireland at the time.
The family returned to England in 1905, to Plymouth, and it was there that young William joined the Royal Marines in 1914, at the tender age of fifteen. He saw action in the First World War aboard HMS Erin at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. HMS Erin was a Dreadnought class battleship that had been built in England but destined for the Ottoman Empire. She was captured in 1914 and renamed Erin. The Battle of Jutland was a decisive naval battle in the first war, and William was lucky to survive; one of my wife’s relatives died during that battle and like so many others, his name is on the Royal Navy monument in Plymouth.
William and Hilda married in 1922 and raised five children, all born in Plymouth. I haven’t been able to trace William’s record of service post 1919, so I don’t know which ships he was posted to, but he stayed in the Service and Hilda stayed based in Plymouth.
Then in 1937, as a Corporal in the Royal Marines, William met an untimely death when his bicycle collided with a tram rail that stood proud of the street, on Ebrington Street to be precise, and he died the following day in the Royal Naval Hospital from a fractured skull and the resulting haemorrhage. He was thirty-seven years old.
A cutting from the Western Morning News of Jul 2nd, 1938, details how Hilda successfully sued Plymouth City Council for negligence and was awarded total compensation of £850 (about £75,000 in today’s money).
Her lawyer was none other than Dingle Foot MP, former Lord Mayor of Plymouth and brother of the Right-Honourable Michael Foot MP, who was later to become the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. Dingle Foot was one of the founding partners in the firm of Messrs. Foot and Bowden, lawyers, which still trades today (as Foot Anstey) and has employed both my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law at various times.
Hilda died at the age of ninety-one, in Plymouth, in 1993. I haven’t yet looked at the Morse children, but I’m sure there are some tales to tell with them as well.
My great-grandfather Joseph (1834-1913) married Jane Pickersgill (1847-1887), sister of Leeds Bookmaker “Honest Joe” Pickersgill. Honest Joe made a lot of money from betting, and his five children were afforded all the luxuries that England could offer at the turn of the twentieth century. Joe’s second daughter, Maud (1882-1928), married Harold Nickols Jnr. (1885-1933), the son of Harold Nickols Snr. (1848-1925). The Nickols family owned the Joppa Tannery in Kirkstall, Leeds, and were themselves wealthy and well connected.
Harold senior’s first wife, Harriet Fraser, died in 1898, and in 1908 Harold married Isabella Simson, nee McConnell, when he was fifty-nine, and she was thirty. Isabella, better known as “Belle”, was even then quite a character.
Belle had been born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1878 to William McConnell and his wife Eliza. William was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary before he became the Clerk of Petty Sessions in Kilkenny, so was very much part of the English establishment in Ireland, despite being Irish himself. Belle had plans, and married wealthy Scottish brewer James Simson (1849-1903) and moved to Edinburgh. James was the part-owner of James Simson and Sons, brewers established in Melrose by his father, also called James, but present in Edinburgh since 1864. Belle lived in the city in some luxury and bore James two children, Jenny and James Jnr. In 1869 James Simson and Sons merged with James Ewan McPherson & Co. to form Simson and McPherson Ltd. In 1900, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne business of Robert Deuchar Ltd bought the Simson breweries, which is most likely why on the Scottish census of 1901 James is listed as “Retired Brewer”.
James Simson died in 1903, and in his Probate records his estate’s value is listed as “Sealed”, and Belle was confirmed as the widow. I don’t know anything about Scottish law, but I suspect that there may have been claims on James’ estate other than any legacy to Belle.
By the time Belle married into the Nickols family, she was probably a wealthy woman in her own right, but her new husband was also very wealthy.
Harold Snr. fathered one child with Belle, Bridget, who was born in 1910. Harold, Belle, James and Jenny Simson, and Bridget, all lived in Seymour Place, Mayfair, London. You don’t need to be a native of London to know that Mayfair is perhaps the most prestigious address in that city.
Belle and Harold Nickols (undated)
Bridget, like her mother, had an eye for a wealthy man, and in 1932 she married Charles Allsopp, the Fourth Baron Hindlip. The name Allsopp, particularly with regard to the Allsopp’s Baronial title, rang a bell with me and, with a bit of time spent poring over the Allsopp family tree, I discovered that British TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp is the great-niece of Bridget’s husband, Charles Allsopp. The Nickols-Allsopp marriage, though, was very short lived and in 1934, Bridget married actor Harold Huth.
Harold Huth (undated)
I’d never come across Harold Huth, but in the world of film he was a well known silent-film and stage actor, film producer, and director. IMDb has reams about him, as does Wikipedia.
Bridget Nickols 1921
Harold and Bridget Huth, with their daughters Angela and Patricia 1944
Bridget and Harold Huth had two children together, Angela and Patricia, both of whom are writers and both of whom are still alive today. Angela Huth wrote, among other things, the novel “Land Girls”, which was made into a successful British TV series. She also wrote a memoir, which I haven’t read, but I did read an extract from it published in the Daily Mail in 2017. In it, Angela devotes quite a bit of time to her famously dotty grandmother Belle, of times spent with her in her London apartment on Piccadilly, and how she was famously very loose with her money. When Belle died in 1971 she left over £350,000 in her will. However, according to her granddaughter, most of that went to pay off years of accumulated debt.
All of the people I’ve listed do fully qualify to be in my family tree, although the links are tenuous in the extreme. I’ve written it all down partly for its novelty value, but partly as a counter to the vast majority of my family who were from working class stock and lived working class lives; these people were wealthy, but most of the family were not.
Back at the top of the story, with Honest Joe Pickersgill, my great-grandfather who married into that family was a shoemaker by trade, in Leeds. It’s ironic that Joe’s daughter married into the family of a Leeds leather producer, who may well have supplied leather for my great-grandfather to make shoes.
Another Armistice Day entry, and this concerns family member Robert McNeil Mayne, a native of Huntington County, Indiana. Robert was just 21 when he was killed in the US-lead Meuse-Argonne Offensive, late in the First World War. He died on November 1st, 1918, just ten days before the Armistice.
Robert was the only son of Arthur McNeill Mayne and his wife Laura Belle Purviance. He was the great-grandson of Henry Collins Mayne and Anna Robinson, who had left England in 1822 and made their way to New York. Robert and I share a common ancestor in Henry Collins Mayne’s father, Joshua Mayne.
Robert entered service on Feb 18th, 1918 at Fort Wayne and was assigned to Company E, 30th Engineers at Fort Meyer in Virginia. He embarked for France on June 28th, 1918 and was killed at Argonne Forest in Northern France four months later. Robert has the sad distinction of being the first boy from Huntington County to be killed in the Great War. He was buried where he fell.
The Meuse-Argonne Offensive claimed 26,277 American lives, over 28,000 German lives, and an unknown number of French lives, of which Robert was just one. His name is recorded in the Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll 1914-1918.
Like all the other war dead in my family tree, Robert will be in my thoughts on Remembrance Day, November 11th.
I started looking into my family tree a short while before my father died in 2009, but didn’t get very far. I think Ancestry.com was around then, but I hadn’t signed up, and anyway I was heading off for my new life in Canada.
Finding myself with more time than I’d anticipated, I picked everything up again a few years later, and this time I did sign up with Ancestry, which opened up more doors than I thought possible. I now have a family tree with over fourteen thousand people listed (not all that I’d call very close relatives, to be fair), and many of them are, or were, situated in places that I didn’t know my family had reached.
Two things set the ball rolling in an unstoppable way. One was Mary, a native of Indiana, contacting me out of the blue, and the other was doing the Ancestry-linked DNA test.
I was, I will admit, perplexed that I appeared to have a relative from the United States. My family, my dad’s side at least, was pure Yorkshire, from Leeds, I thought. Goodness, how wrong I was. Mary pointed out that we had a common ancestor, Joshua Mayne (b. 1761), and everything fell into place from there. With Mary’s help, I was able to discover that one of Joshua’s offspring had left Britain in 1822, bound for New York, and from there had built a formidable Mayne dynasty in the New World. Not only that, another of Joshua’s sons had, in 1849, taken his young family to Durban in South Africa and had set up a similar Mayne dynasty there. To top it all, Mary established that Joshua himself, and his wife Elizabeth Collins, were not from Yorkshire at all, but had arrived in Leeds from Cork, Ireland in 1792.
The DNA test came up with equal amounts of potential contacts on my mother’s side of the family, as well as my dad’s, and that was an area I hadn’t addressed up to that point. Building up her side of the tree has shown that we were drawn from agricultural stock in the north of Devon, England, and while many of the family had stayed there and are there to this day, many more had moved away from the land for a new life in Canada and, ultimately, in the United States. Indeed, direct Devon relatives had made it to rural Southern Ontario 150 years before I did.
I haven’t yet found the outer limits of the family tree, either on my dad’s or my mum’s side. I can find very little about my paternal grandmother who’s father arrived in Leeds from Belfast, Ireland, at some point in the early 1880s, although my 24% Irish DNA is in part her legacy to me. Her mother was from Leeds, but her father was from Liverpool, and with a name like Garrett, the chances are that there’s Irish blood from him as well.
On the whole, both sides of my family are from poor stock. Some have done well, though, the South African connection has links to the DeBeers diamond industry. There was some conspicuous DeBeers-related wealth on show in the early twentieth century, with homes in Portman Square and Kensington in London, and even a family burial plot in a Royal Park, the Royal Brompton Cemetery in West London.
My grandfather married into, worked for, and eventually took over, the Pickersgill family business in Leeds in the 1920s. Joe Pickersgill, a very wealthy Turf Accountant, was said to have held the Prince of Wales own betting account in the 1910s and was a millionaire when he died in 1923.
On the American side of the tree, a distant cousin married Mariko Terasaki, the daughter of Hidenari Terasaki and Gwendoline Harold, in 1953. Hidenari was a Japanese diplomat who married Gwen, a Tennessee girl, and worked to avoid Japanese conflict with the USA in the late 1930s. Both were forced to flee to Japan after the Pearl Harbor attack, but Gwen wrote a book about her experiences which was made into the Hollywood movie A Bridge To The Sun. Mariko’s children, those that survive, are prominent peace campaigners, following their grandfather’s lead.
But most of my family tree is comprised of poor people doing poor people’s work, and very much echoing the social structure nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Farmers, farm workers, labourers, coal miners, and factory workers, all living in mostly poor conditions but surviving nonetheless. One thing that does jump out is the number of war deaths, at the moment numbering seventy-two. One of the first on my family recorded in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission databases was killed when his ship exploded in the Thames estuary in 1914. One of the latest was a young Canadian naval officer, killed two days after D-Day in 1944 when his ship was sunk in the English Channel.
As I’ve grown the tree, there have been a lot of fascinating stories come out about the individuals in it. In future posts here I’ll try to record some of their stories; not about my family necessarily, but the places they lived and the lives they led, which were in large part, entirely typical.
It’s been an education thus far, and I’d like to document as much of it as I can.
I get it, Microsoft is trying to take over the world and our descent in Windows 11 is the last straw. With the new computers we’re going to have to buy, they’ll soon be logging our toilet habits and how often we cut the grass, all in a great master plan to keep us docile and obedient.
OK, so I’m exaggerating somewhat. I’ve read some pretty hair-raising stuff about Microsoft’s plans for world domination, but fortunately I don’t believe everything I read on the Internet. Sure, I’d love to move to Linux, or something similar, but life is too short to waste on the techie-heaven of Unix-inspired products, wonderful though they may be. I’m also sharing a house with people who will happily give up some independence to Microsoft if it means they can watch their favourite videos, or upload decades-old pictures to the cloud, with little or no additional techie knowhow. Much as the anti-Windows crowd will call me, us, slaves to the ‘Soft, frankly we don’t care enough to be concerned.
All that said, I am a little miffed that three perfectly serviceable PCs in our house only have a year to struggle on using Windows 10. Two of the offending PCs are Microsoft Surface laptops, which tends to rub salt into the wound. However, doing a little digging, I realise that my outrage is perhaps a wee bit premature.
The HP desktop that can’t move to Windows 11 is eight years old, and the Surface laptops are seven and six years old, which in PC terms is geriatric. Sure, they’re all still working, but like cars, we tend to like a new one every now and again (acknowledging that not everyone can afford a car, let alone a new one every few years), and PCs are nothing like the cost of a new car. Is it just that because we’re being told we need a new PC that we’re resisting? It might just be the case.
I’ve signed up the three PCs for Windows 10 security updates and will look at getting new kit in the New Year, but I think, honestly, I should have been doing that anyway. That big old HP desktop is working now, but who is to say that it’ll keep going? They’re fickle things, Personal Computers.
So maybe Microsoft is doing me a good service here?
To the folks who worry about data collection and control, I’ll say this; check your phone’s habits before you worry about your PC.
As a final note, anyone suggesting that we move to Apple products can either send me the money to buy the overpriced hardware and software, or stay in their lane.
Now, how do I get that Windows 10 context menu back…
We’re having a little bit of an upset in Ontario at the moment, surrounding that bête noir, speed cameras.
The Province’s Premier, the one in charge, says that speed cameras are nothing but a cash-grab and that he’s going enact legislation to make them unusable. This in a Province where speed limits seem to be merely suggestions and efforts to curb speed (and therefore improve road safety) are at best, minimal.
I learned to drive in a country where speed cameras are used extensively, namely the UK. When I go back, which seems to be quite often these days, I’m immediately aware of the speed discipline that drivers employ; in Ontario the speed limit seems to be the absolute minimum, in the UK they are generally abided by, and plenty of people drive well within the limit. Tellingly, there are twice the number of cars in the UK than there are in Canada, but only half as many injuries and fatalities on the roads. From this we can reasonably deduce that speed cameras are, at least in part, a boon to road safety. So why is Ontario so against something that will aid road safety?
It’s political. That’s about the strength of it. Speeding is a curse in Ontario, and you’ll regularly read about drivers cussing one another out because they were driving at the speed limit and not some speed well north of it. “Hand your license in if you can’t do 20 over” is a common refrain from the speeding fraternity. It seems that posted speed limits impinge on people’s personal freedom to drive at whatever speed they like, and hang the road safety implications because, “Hey, I’m a good driver!”. Our politicians see this expression of personal freedom as a vote winner and are being aggressive in reducing what they see as limitations of drivers in the hope of winning over, or at least retaining, the support of the supposedly put-upon drivers of the Province. People who are killed or injured speeding? Pfffft. It’s eerily reminiscent of the argument for gun ownership in the US, death and injury seems to be an acceptable price for personal freedom.
I’m at a bit of a loss to follow this logic. Drivers can’t be trusted to obey posted limit signs, so why would a responsible government not put in place a cheap and effective method of control? It’s only a cash-grab if you speed, and is so easily avoidable, but it also comes with a free side order of road safety, so what’s not to love?
I guess it will take the death or injury of a politician’s loved one, or a large number of ordinary people, for things to change, which is really a very sad state of affairs for the twenty-first century. In the meantime I will drive to the limits, avoid any cash-grabs (if there are any left), and hope that no one in orbit get hurt by a speeding driver. What a life.
