The AA today is a wide-reaching organisation whose services range from insurance and breakdown cover to giving driving lessons and general advice. It’s perhaps hard to believe, then, that this trusted body has its origins in a law-dodging activist group.
The story begins in the pages of Autocar, dated 25 March 1905, with a delightfully sardonic letter from a motorist named Walter Gibbons, entitled To Circumvent Police Traps.
These Edwardian equivalents of speed cameras were stopwatch-wielding policemen “hidden in hedges or ditches by the side of the most open roads in the country”, as motoring pioneer Earl Russell later put it to the House of Lords.
Police traps had sprung up after the passing of 1903’s controversial Motor Car Act, which introduced driving licences, car registration, the offence of reckless driving and an increase in the national limit from 14mph to 20mph but also the possibility of fines or jail for those breaking it.
There was a long-standing distrust between motorists and the authorities, as Gibbons demonstrated: “Although the police may be honestly inclined, at the same time motorists are looked upon by the police much in the same manner as an angler would view a running stream: the fish are hidden under the waters, and by fair means or otherwise they must be caught.
“The police are inflexible; they have an electric timing apparatus, produced in court, including the bell and battery. The chief magistrate and his colleagues look in awe upon this instrument of torture.
An electrical timing apparatus! How easily is the conscience stifled!
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“Although the motorist may assure the magistrate that he dare not send the car round corners at such speeds as are attributed to him on a greasy road, and although he can show an undefiled licence, yet – ‘Certainly, I fine you £15 [that’s £1550 in today’s money]. You were timed by an electrical apparatus.’”
Neither the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) nor the Motor Union appeared inclined to enter into this fight, wrote Gibbons, and so a new organisation ought to be formed – perhaps named the Motorists’ Protection Association.
Just a few weeks later, a letter from Charles Jarrott, a famous racing driver and importer of cars – and a previous recipient of a court summons for furious driving – answered his call.
