n his memory and cost him the brother, who was his co-director.
Renault had entered cars driven by himself, his brother, Marcel, and another driver named Oury.
The race turned out to be a deadly fiasco. It was stopped at Bordeaux after an unbelievable series of accidents in which fast cars crashed on 16th century hump-backed bridges or broke their axles on bumps in the road that were all right for a dog cart but calamitous for a car.
Less than half the cars which started the race reached Bordeaux. The rest were charred and shattered ruins, death traps for their drivers and mechanics.
Spectators were knocked down like ninepins as the out-of-control cars ran amok among the crowds lining the route. A soldier died trying to shield a child. Onlookers crowding round a blazing car were killed when a following one smashed into it.
The terrible tragedy put an end to town-to-town races, apart from those on properly controlled road circuits cleared of stray crowds, and it nearly put an end to Louis Renault.
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Posted in Famous news stories, Historical articles, History, Industry, Institutions, Labour Party, Politics, Trade on Thursday, 20 February 2014
This edited article about the General Strike first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 559 published on 30 September 1972.
Volunteer bus drivers were protected during the General Strike of 1926 by John Keay
Overnight, the country seemed to have died. Docks, factories, mines and power stations were idle. There were no trains, buses or newspapers . . . half of Britain was on strike against poverty, but the other half was determined to keep the country alive.
The soldiers stood with their guns at the ready, their eyes wary and watchful. There had been no trouble yet, but the tenseness, the almost eerie calm of the strikers lining the roads to the London docks might explode into violence at any moment.
Inside the dock gates, some of the older men loading lorries with meat and flour were wilting under the effort, for they were quite unused to this strenuous labour that hardened the hands and mesmerised the mind with its tedium. The undergraduates who worked with them were naturally more energetic, but were just as obviously strangers to dock-work. Their expressions lacked the sullen glower of the strikers in the crowd outside. Their faces were free of the undernourished grey, and the lines stamped by poverty and restive envy of those to whom life had been less generous.
This strange reversal of roles, in which solicitors, stockbrokers, students and other members of the middle class temporarily assumed the tasks of labourers, occurred on 9th May, 1926, at a time when want and insecurity still marked the lives of many British working men.
All over Britain, overcrowded slums polluted towns and cities, spawning a population whose health was suspect, whose work was menial and could be dangerous, and whose diet sometimes barely skirted starvation level.
After World War I, it was to people like this that employers addressed demands that wages should be cut.
The protests were, naturally, vigorous and, at first, seemed successful. After strike action by railwaymen in 1919, proposals to reduce their wages were withdrawn. And though miners’ pay was forced down in 1921, the mine-owners three years later conceded a rise and a seven instead of an eight-hour day.
The basic conflict however, remained; and it remained at its most aggressive in the mining industry where, despite sporadic flickers upwards, exports were falling in the face of European competition.
In this situation, employers and employed took firm and stubbornly opposing stands.
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Posted in Historical articles, History, Industry, Philanthropy, Politics on Wednesday, 19 February 2014
This edited article about the Victorians first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 557 published on 16 September 1972.
Victorian England was, in many ways, a tremendously exciting place. It was a period bursting with energy and inventiveness. Enormous strides were made in science, particularly in