Transport: Blackout

Britishers take all their community enterprises very seriously. In bomb-wary London last week some 8,000,000 Britishers night after night played blackout as earnestly as if it had been a bridge drive: ^ An omnibus, rumbling cumbrously across Harrow Road, its headlights painted dark blue, its horn mute, struck and killed a woman. A coroner’s jury exonerated the bus driver. The woman had gone strolling clad from hat to shoes entirely in black.

> A lawyer, Arthur Nash, climbed wearily to his walk-up flat, flipped a light switch. Indignant neighbors gathered in the street, threatened to stone the building. Hauled into court, Lawyer Nash was fined £15 (about $75) and tongue-lashed: “It is immaterial . . . whether you wish to endanger your own life, but to endanger the lives of your neighbors is nothing short of brutal.”

> Britain’s Ministry of Transport, coming to grips with a problem unique in traffic history, 1) prescribed light clothing, white gas-mask covers or a newspaper carried in full view for pedestrians, 2) restricted private cars to essential business, 3) stiffened penalties for drivers who failed to whiten their running boards and bumpers, mask side and rear lights under at least two thicknesses of newspaper, to paint headlights black or blue, 4) splashed white paint on sandbagged doorways lest passers-by bark their shins, 5) permitted no one but police and ARPers to use sirens, horns, whistles, or bells, 6) conscripted civilians to rescue lost pedestrians.

> Busmen groused because in the dark many a passenger paid his fare with counterfeit coins.

> Leicester Square’s bawds pounded their beats, carried white gas masks, like virtuous women.

> Evacuation of 650,000 children snarled London’s underground (subway) train schedules.

> Some 3,000 of London’s 10,000 taxis were commandeered for emergency fire detail duty. The remaining 7,000 cabbies grumbled. Said one: “We can still get around when we know the city, but it’s a blinkin’ nuisance, and when the fogs come it will be terrible. … I pick up only two or three fares a night because passengers can’t tell a cab from anything else on wheels.”

> An earnest blackout player suggested that pedestrians wear tail lights.