This is part of the collection of films made by Sheffield teacher William Gordon Gregory.  This is a graphic road safety film made by and for school children, commissioned by Sheffield Education Committee and Sheffield Watch Committee. Title – Sheffield Education Committee, Sheffield Watch Committee present a film concerning your safety. Title – Trouble on the road Acted by members of the city schools, city police, and the transport department. Motors, properties, traffic control – The...

This is part of the collection of films made by Sheffield teacher William Gordon Gregory.  This is a graphic road safety film made by and for school children, commissioned by Sheffield Education Committee and Sheffield Watch Committee. Title – Sheffield Education Committee, Sheffield Watch Committee present a film concerning your safety. Title – Trouble on the road Acted by members of the city schools, city police, and the transport department. Motors, properties, traffic control – The Police Transport Department. Story, Script, Photography, Direction – W G Gregory The film begins with a group of teenage girls and boys out hiking in the countryside and larking about.  One of the boys playfully has lots of bags hung around his shoulders by the others.  One girl gets something stuck in her foot, while another drinks from a cow trough.  Others look on, laughing.  She offers some to a boy, and then they start splashing each other.  As they chase each other, a car drives past and hits the two children. The next scene has a boy cycling fast down the middle of a road in Sheffield.  Despite a sign stating ‘Halt, Major Road Ahead’, the youth goes straight out and his cycle ends up being crushed by a lorry. The next clip has a young worker getting off a bus along Attercliffe Road, then and getting hit by a car as he walks around the back of the bus. Then a group of boys come out of a park and walk along the road, larking about, holding one of the boy’s caps high up on a pole.  A car suddenly appears and pins one of the school boys to the railings. Next two small girls sit at the side of a road holding dolls, while two more are skipping outside the front of a school.  Another is bouncing a ball, and as she chases it out into the road she is knocked over by a car. A newspaper headline for the “The Star” declares that 1,500 children are killed each year, as reported by the Chief Constable of Sheffield, Mr G S Lowe, and that 4,376 are crippled each month. The film then follows a tram as it journeys through Sheffield, and shows a dead cat and other images of traffic accidents.  Another headline states that Arthur Thomas Harrop, a discharged soldier, saw his own child killed.  There is an image of a dead child lying on a tram line along a road.  There is a further headline shown for Roy Royston, of High Bents, who has also been killed in a traffic accident, and for Jack Johnson, of Birfield Glen, who was hurled through a windscreen, with an accompanying image. Intertitle – Motors do it.  They kill.  Why don’t they stop?  See for yourself. There is a police demonstration of the braking distance of a police bus, using a mannequin, watched by a group of playful schoolboys.  As the bus is driven towards them the school boys throw the mannequin in front of it at the signal of a police officer holding a stopwatch.  The bus runs over the mannequin before it can stop.  A policeman holds up the measuring tape to the boys to show the stopping distance Intertitle – ‘You see for yourselves’.  With a dry road, with good brakes, with a good driver well prepared, a heavy vehicle cannot be stopped instantly.   The film re-shows parts of the different accident scenes already acted out. Intertitle – Hiking, cycling, working, playing, schoolboy, schoolgirl, if you go foolishly – your foolish second means: There are further gruesome images of the results of being hit by a vehicle, such as blood splattered children prone on the ground and draped over cars. Intertitle – Trouble on the road Similar images follow. End