Jayne’s legacy has saved lives
QUESTION Did the car crash that caused Jayne Mansfield’s death bring about vehicle safety reforms?
Underside bars or Mansfield bars, as they’re popularly known in the U.s., are the steel bars that hang from the back of a lorry or tractor trailer which are designed to stop a car before it rolls underneath the trailer.
They became mandatory in the U.s. following one of Hollywood’s most gruesome car crashes.
On June 28, 1967, actress Jayne Mansfield, the archetypal blonde bombshell, gave her final performance at Gus stevens restaurant & supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi.
in the early hours of the following morning, Mansfield was a passenger in a 1966 silver Buick electra travelling west on route 90 to new Orleans, where she had a TV interview booked.
she was sitting in the front seat with her young driver ronnie Harrison and her lover, the Hollywood lawyer samuel s. Brody. in the back were three of her five children, Miklos, Zoltan and Mariska, and her four chihuahuas.
Tragically, Harrison failed to see a truck that had stopped on the road in the path of their car which was travelling at speed.
The truck was obscured by a cloud of insecticide from a city council vehicle, spraying the swamps for mosquitoes.
The car ploughed into the back of the trailer, partly shearing off the roof and instantly killing the three adults in the front seat. Because of the height of the trailer, the children and two dogs survived. Mansfield’s death, aged just 34, sparked a road safety campaign that has saved many lives since.
Elizabeth Cox, Wilmslow, Cheshire.
QUESTION Did every one of Charles Dickens’s novels result in a change in the law?
CHarles diCkens (1812-70) did more than anyone to raise awareness of poverty and corruption in Victorian Britain, but it’s hard to tie any specific legislation to his works.
Take Oliver Twist (1837), his famous critique of the new Poor law (1834) that ensured that no ablebodied person could get poor relief unless they went to live in workhouses; an idea backed by the utilitarian idea that the workhouse would act as a deterrent so fewer people would claim poor relief. Yet, while this was reformed over the years, it wasn’t officially repealed until 1948. Bleak House (1832), the classic story of bloodsucking lawyers endlessly litigating the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in the Court of Chancery, was released at the same time as significant reforms were already taking place in the court.
That did not make it irrelevant — even today there is truth in the fact that the cost of the legal proceedings, particularly in small civil claims, often exceeds the damages that are obtained.
although dickens, through his journalism and novels, attacked certain targets — the brutal Yorkshire schools in nicholas nickleby, government bureaucracy, lethargy and nepotism in little dorrit, extremist utilitarianism in Hard Times, and schools and prison reform in david Copperfield — it’s hard to connect any specific reformist legislation to dickens’s influence.
He was more a powerful voice promoting change. Richard Court, Cambridge.