T E Lawrence and the Nanny State

The BBC remembers the death of T E Lawrence. More specifically, what his death ultimately led to. There’s a bit of speculation about whether he was speeding prior to the accident but even they have to admit that no one knows and there is no evidence that this was so; merely, that it was an accident.

He lost control and went over the handlebars. The Broughs didn’t have fantastic brakes.

Something of  an understatement when describing the skinny drum brakes fitted to pre-war machinery. The engine massively outperformed the brakes. My BSA of nineteen sixties vintage was much the same even with a more modest output. Braking was something destined to encourage belief in the divine.

However, the dark bit comes later on.  The assumption is that he wasn’t wearing a helmet. They weren’t exactly universal in the nineteen thirties.

His post-mortem examination established that Lawrence had suffered “severe lacerations and damage to the brain” when his unprotected head struck the ground. Had he survived, brain damage would probably have left him blind and unable to speak.

To which I would say, this was the best outcome. Here was an active man full of life. Reduced to a vegetable or dead? I know which I prefer.

We know from Cairns’ diaries that he was thinking very hard about head injuries to motorcyclists and crash helmets before World War Two. They were mentioned in his diaries and the first mention is around the time of TE Lawrence’s death,” explains Alex Green, consultant neurosurgeon at the Nuffield Department of Surgery in Oxford, which Cairns founded.

Okaaaay…

Cairns began to gather evidence on head injuries suffered by bikers. It was pioneering work.

Okaaaay…

It was more than six years after Lawrence’s death though before Cairns was ready with his first research. In October 1941, and by now consulting neurosurgeon to the Army, he published his initial results in the British Medical Journal. The article was entitled “Head Injuries in Motor-cyclists – the importance of the crash helmet”.

Hah! Well, yes, helmets will, indeed, reduce the incidence of death due to head injuries. They won’t reduce the incidence of death caused by other injuries and, importantly, a brain moving about inside the skull has a nasty habit of causing permanent brain injury. So, you reduce the fatalities and increase the brain injured paraplegics. Brilliant.

Of course, the research in itself is fine. Now we are aware of the risks we are taking and can make our own choices. I choose to wear a helmet and always will, because I like to keep my head warm, the flies out of my eyes, and in the event of a low-speed spill, it might well make a difference.  At high-speed, I’m toast anyways.

It revealed that in the 21 months before the start of WW2, 1,884 bikers had been killed on British roads. Of the cases Cairns studied, two-thirds suffered head injuries.

Things got even worse with the start of the blackouts prompted by air raids, despite petrol rationing reducing traffic. In the 21-month period from September 1939, 2,279 bikers died, or roughly 110 a month – an increase of 21%.

Well, yes… Piss poor lighting, piss poor lights on the bikes, shitty road surfaces and non-existent brakes. Not to mention those dreadful girder forks and ambivalent handling.

The contrast with modern figures is a stark one. In 2013, 331 bikers – roughly 28 a month – died on British roads, despite the huge rise in traffic volume.

You simply cannot draw a valid comparison. The handling and braking of a modern machine surpasses its pre-war predecessor by a magnitude of thousands to one. I’ve ridden and owned a range of machines from the nineteen fifties onwards, and you simply cannot compare them. The modern machine with its big, fat, sticky tyres, decent suspension, excellent brakes and ABS to boot, combined with lights that weren’t dreamt of then. No, you can’t draw that comparison at all. They go better, handle better and stop better.

Cairns was careful not to claim that crash helmets would solve everything. He was certain though that they would help.

Good, because they don’t. In certain circumstances, yes, they will help – low-speed spills. Much above 30mph and all they  do is provide comfort.

And this is where it all led:

Despite Cairns’s painstaking research and analysis though it was not until 1973 that the House of Commons voted to make wearing a crash helmet on a motorbike or moped mandatory.

Who would have thought, when T E Lawrence was killed, that his death would lead to this and what followed? Compulsory seatbelts, for example. And, gradually, for our own benefit, the law designed to protect us from our own choices. Little by little, the state has crept into our lives to force us to be safe. The 1973 legislation set about a cultural shift from personal responsibility  to the state looking after us by force. Even if, having assessed the risk for ourselves, we would prefer to take that risk. The state knows best.

The state is mother, the state is father…

Cairns’s evidence was not in doubt, and riders increasingly adopted helmets out of choice in the post-war years. For defenders of individual freedom however, that right to choose was sacred.

Precisely.

It’s seems likely Cairns would have been pleased. But how a free spirit like TE Lawrence would have reacted to being forced to wear a motorcycle helmet is another matter.

Oh, I don’t think we need spend too much time guessing that.