Thursday, June 1, 2006

  • 100 years ago
    Since money prizes were offered to owners of tram and omnibus tickets bearing certain numbers many children had placed their lives in jeopardy in attempting to collect tickets, and at least one fatal accident had occurred. The victim, a little girl of seven, named Edith Jane Pavier, was endeavouring to pick up a ticket, which lay under an omnibus resting at the terminus when the vehicle started, and she was run over. Edwin Harbert, the conductor of the omnibus, said he gave the driver the signal to start, being ignorant of the fact that the girl was under the omnibus. He had no doubt that she was attempting to pick up a ticket, which he afterwards found on the spot. "Since prizes for tickets have been offered," he added, "the omnibuses have been surrounded by children. I have cautioned them over and over again." The coroner's jury, which inquired into the case, returned a verdict of accidental death, exonerated the driver and conductor of the omnibus, offered their sympathy to the mother of the child, and condemned the prize giving.
  • 50 years ago
    As already announced, the third-class would officially disappear from British Railways from the following Sunday, leaving only two classes, first and second. Not that this, as far as could be seen, made very much difference, except perhaps to the BR's sign writers. The change, which would also apply to shipping services connected with the British Transport Commission, was being made to conform with the abolition of the third class on the railways of Western Europe. But although travelling second-class might have given us illusions of grandeur, the fare would be the same as for the former third-class. For some time, however, we would be issued with third-class tickets, until the existing stocks were exhausted.
  • 25 years ago
    Mrs Thatcher was to be pressed in Parliament this week to discourage weekly payment of wages in cash and to encourage, instead, monthly payments by cheque. Mr Gwilym Roberts, Labour MP for Cannock, said such a change would save "millions of pounds of administrative work" and would also eradicate the security problem of armed attacks on security vans carrying large sums of money for wages. He said: "In Britain about 64 per cent of workers are still paid weekly and in cash, whereas in West Germany and France about 90 per cent of workers are paid by cheque on a monthly basis. At the moment in Britain, a great deal of computer time and other energies are spent on weekly cash payments to workers and their calculations with all the complications of tax."