When dreams of unlimited speed became reality
As Britain’s first proper motorway turns 60, Andrew Roberts tells hair-raising tales of its first intrepid drivers
As Ernest Marples, the minister of transport, officially opened the M1 motorway on Nov 2 1959 the very idea of speed-limit-free transport appeared almost science fiction. But now, you too could emulate Stirling Moss without being “gonged” for exceeding 40mph, all the while imagining yourself piloting a rakish new Jaguar Mk2 rather than an obsolete Austin.
To the average car owner, the stretch of motorway between Watford and Crick, to the east of Rugby, seemed almost alien, with its standardised Margaret Calvert/Jock Kinneir-designed signage and three traffic lanes.
Even the fleet of white-liveried Ford Zephyr Farnham Mk2 Estates, with their blue lights, appeared more akin to a US television crime drama of the period than British traffic policing.
People made special trips at weekends, London Transport laid on special buses for sightseers, and there was also the enticing prospect of dining on the move. From the outset, the M1 was to be the first British motorway with a service area, although this first consisted of just some fuel pumps.
However, the northbound Newport Pagnell café opened on Aug 15 1960 followed on Sept 13 by the northbound “Watford Gap”, where drivers were offered free ice cream on the first day.
Their southbound counterparts were established on Sept 30 and Oct 1 respectively, and the plan was for the Watford Gap sites to appeal to car owners. One haulier complained to the Liverpool Echo that “these posh transport cafés they are setting up are not the sort of places where you can call for a mug of tea, eggs, chips and sausages for a couple of bob”.
Further publicity followed in relation to the Automobile Association’s plans for providing a continuous breakdown service and how the RAC’s Land Rovers carried more than 300 spare parts and accessories.
There was also a spate of instructional films, one of which featured a Ford Zodiac-driving rotter who, according to the narrator Jack Warner, attempts “one of the deadly sins of the motorway” – a U-turn.
The Preston bypass, the country’s first motorway-standard road, had opened on Dec 5 1958, but drivers still needed to be informed of the dangers of using the hard shoulder for picnics, reversing up the slip roads and, at a time before the central barriers, changing direction. They were further advised to use the emergency telephones in the event of a breakdown, instead of flagging down a passing car. The police observed “an almost total lack of lane discipline in the first hours”, and Marples stated he had “never seen anyone going so fast and ignoring the rules and regulations”.
AA and RAC patrols were constantly attending to the thousands of cars that were wholly incapable of motorway travel. The AA reported “two cases of overheating, two drivers were out of petrol, two had punctures and one was out of oil”, all transpiring within the first half-hour of operations.
The MoT roadworthiness test was not introduced until 1960, which resulted in certain drivers taking to the M1 in a car that even Steptoe and Son might have rejected; Movietone newsreels featuring stricken pre-war Austins and the like became commonplace.
The first fatalities on the M1 occurred on Nov 6, when two lorry drivers were killed after a thick fog had reduced visibility to virtually zero.
Three days later a Triumph TR3 careered across the “no-man’s land” in the middle of the motorway and collided with an oncoming Austin Cambridge but, incredibly, both drivers only suffered minor injuries.
The Chief Constable of Birmingham City Police thought “unless a top-speed limit is imposed on the M1, I think we will have a repetition of the tragedies that have already occurred”. As it was, the 70mph restriction would not arrive until Dec 22 1965.
As for owners of more recent cars, even a short journey along the new motorway could highlight many and various outdated design tropes. Heaters and windscreen washers were frequently optional extras, while the Ford Popular 100E featured an appallingly inefficient vacuum-operated wiper system. The Morris Minor 1000 was still equipped with semaphore trafficators and many goods vehicles were devoid of any form of direction signalling.
The motoring writer Gordon Wilkins suggested banning all vehicles without flashing indicators and the Rootes Group threatened to withdraw the warranty from dealers who used the M1 for delivering a new model.
Anyone planning to take a customer’s Sunbeam or Humber for a quick trip were sternly warned that “the motorway is not the place for a car that has not yet been run in”.
Above all, the M1 was greeted as a harbinger of an exciting future, with advertisers rushing to associate their wares with the motorway, be they India tyres or the Vauxhall line-up for 1960.
This newspaper’s W A McKenzie thought the motorway had “come to this insular nation as an innovation as foreign as a ski-jump course or bull-fight ring”.
Compared with life in semi-detached suburbia, where the highlight of the week was a trip to the grocer’s in a second-hand Standard Vanguard, the M1 seemed almost impossibly exotic. It conveyed a promise of virtually limitless motoring – right up to the moment the radiator overheated.
Drivers needed to be informed of the dangers of using the hard shoulder for picnics