GoKawiilOn 10th September 1897, a London taxi driver became the first person in Britain — and quite possibly the world — to be convicted of drink-driving.
At the time, there were no breathalysers, no legal blood-alcohol limit and the vehicle involved in the historic incident wasn’t even petrol-powered. It was an early type of electric taxi.
The driver was 25-year-old George Smith, who was driving one of the new Bersey electric cabs. According to news reports at the time, he was driving along New Bond Street around midnight when his cab began swerving across the road, mounted the pavement, and crashed into 165 New Bond Street.
He was arrested by Police Constable Russell and taken to nearby Vine Street Police Station, where a police surgeon certified that he was drunk.
The following day, he appeared at Marlborough Street Police Court, where he admitted that he had consumed “two or three glasses of beer”. Unsurprisingly, Smith pleaded guilty to being drunk while in charge of his cab and was fined 20 shillings, which would have been the equivalent of about a week’s wages at the time.
The magistrate warned Smith that drivers of the new machines needed to be particularly careful. Police, he observed, had developed ways of stopping a runaway horse, but stopping a runaway motor car was another matter entirely.
A law written before the motor car
Although Smith’s case was a motoring first, Britain already had legislation dealing with drunken people in charge of carriages.
Section 12 of the Licensing Act 1872 made it an offence to be drunk while in charge of a “carriage, horse, cattle, or steam engine” on a highway or in another public place. The maximum penalty was 40 shillings, or up to a month in prison.
When horseless carriages appeared a couple of decades later, the existing legislation for horsey carriages was used to deal with them as well. But with motoring becoming more popular the previous year, the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896 swept away some of the most restrictive rules introduced for motor cars.
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