Just before one in the morning on September 10, 1897, a taxi driver named George Smith lost control of his cab on New Bond Street, swerving across the road and crashing, smashing a water pipe and a front window. No one was hurt, cars of the era topped out at about 8mph, but Smith admitted to police that he had been drinking, and that confession was enough to convict him in what is recognised as the world’s first drink-driving case.
He was fined 20 shillings. There was no specific drunk-driving law to charge him under; the conviction rested entirely on his own admission, since officers otherwise had only their own snap judgement of a driver’s sobriety to go on. It would be almost a decade before any jurisdiction, enacted a dedicated drunk-driving law, and more than half a century before the breathalyser existed to test drivers objectively.
