60 YEARS OF SEAT BELTS IN BRITISH CARS

The Jensen 541S was quite a star of the 1960 London Motor Show. As compared with its 541R predecessor, it was four inches wider, lacked the familiar adjustable front air flap and featured a limited-slip differential and Dunlop disc brakes fore and aft. Furthermore, its specification was positively lavish, including a radio – and, for the first time on a British car, seat belts.

Two years earlier Saab fitted their 750GT with seat belts as standard equipment and Volvo patented the 3-point design. In the UK, a motorist could already fit after-market belts – as early as 1957 Kenning would sell you their Type D “Swaystop” (in tartan) for just 30 shillings. The 541S emphasised a theme of “safety”, as its standard equipment also included a fire extinguisher and a first aid kit.

Such a Grand Tourer was hardly within reach of the average motorist but by 1961 many popular family saloons began to feature bolt-points for belts. In 1962 all cars and light vans used by H M Government were so-equipped, but on the 24^th May of that year The Guardian noted ‘Whereas in Sweden about 60 per cent of all cars are fitted with safety belts, in Britain the proportion must be less than one in ten’.

And the first legal requirement relating to seat belts in the UK came into force with the passing of the Motor Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1966, which required anchorage points in all new vehicles. Subsequent amendments included the fitting of three-point belts in 1967 and, by the following year, their retro-fitting to post-1965 cars.

However, the wearing of front belts would not be obligatory until 1^st January 1983, and before then, the government relied on official safety campaigns. As early as 1959 Gordon Wilkins wrote in The Tatler ‘the facts are known; we need a propaganda effort to make vehicle-users act on them, similar to that which persuaded motor cyclists to use crash helmets’.

One challenge facing the Ministry of Transport and the Central Office of Information was those drivers who regarded themselves as the Stirling Moss of Acacia Avenue, To such types, wearing a belt was “unmanly”, and the February 1964 edition of Motor Sport featured this gem from the Editor:

I do not deny that lives and limbs have been preserved by safety-belts. But I do not use them in my car for the same reason that I do not take a parachute when I fly in a private or commercial aeroplane. Nor do I strap myself in bed, stand up with my arms outstretched in a railway carriage or sit with a Pyrene in my lap in front of the fire.

This gentlemen also added, in Alan Clark-like tones, ‘N.B. – I do believe in seat belts for sleepy passengers and all girl-friends’.

From the late 1960s through to the early 1980s the propaganda films strove to make belt wearing a standard part of everyday motoring -