Historically – after the German bombing of Coventry in November 1940, for example – after an accident or disaster, the scene gets visited by the curious and gawpers, even getting in the way of emergency workers. A file at the National Archives at Kew touches on the various points of view, and what the authorities debated after a pair of disasters in 1972.
The file is the Home Office’s HO 287/1634 and the two crashes that prompted ‘morbid’ sight-seers was at Eltham (a train, June 11) and at Staines-Heathrow (an aircraft, June 18). The file opens with an August 1972 meeting between senior police officers, high-ups from the country’s two broadcasters of that era, the BBC and ITV, and Home Office officials. The meeting heard that TV news brought ‘a new dimension’, making crashes widely known; hence spectators. As the police said, their wireless messages went out ‘en clair’ in an emergency and reporters knew to monitor it.
The broadcasters fended off any suggestions that they might wait to report the news of a crash; or, avoid saying where it was, even if that might give the emergency services time to work. Met Police DAC John Gerrard said that reports of spectators impeding rescue operations were ‘exaggerated’. At the train crash, people came to offer help, he said. The air crash had happened on a Sunday afternoon, when the nearby A30 (Staines bypass) was already congested. Police noted that the crash was ‘relatively simple’, given that all on board were killed. Had anyone survived injured, it would have been difficult to get them to hospital. The Home Office suggested that the police give the Press Association (an agency widely used by the media) detail of any crash, and ask the public to stay away.
The police compared the public (that accepted when asked that they should move out of the way) with the Press (at Eltham, some Press photographers tried to take photos of casualties close-up). Broadcasters pointed out that news of the Staines crash was aired 45minutes after the event; and the first emergency response arrived after ten minutes (in other words, the 999 services did have some time, untroubled). Although some MPs called for making it an offence, to loiter near a disaster, the Home Office played any such idea down, and indeed sought to avoid discussion generally. The police had powers already to arrest people for obstruction; besides, in the middle of an emergency, manpower would be scarce.
A Daily Mirror reporter in a letter to a trade journal, kept in the file, gave the media’s grievances. According to the reporter, Scotland Yard’s ‘trendy’ plastic press pass (that gave conditions of use on the back), was ‘useless’. The reporter complained that at the air crash, a policeman threatened him with a dog and ordered him to open his camera and handover the film. Similarly, at Eltham, police man-handled photographers, the reporter alleged. The media, in sum, was sensitive to any efforts at censorship.
Altogether more warm and civilised were the letters that passed in July 1972 between the chairman of the BBC, Lord Hill, and the Conservative Home Secretary Reginald Maudling (‘Charles’ and ‘Reggie’). Hill gave the Beeb’s point of view; that editors had to cope with an often contradictory and confused flow of information. Hill was more accepting of a police appeal to the public to stay away from a disaster area (which would be treated as a piece of news in itself). According to the BBC’s argument, such airing of a disaster would put most people’s minds at ease. Meanwhile for the ITV companies, the ITA chairman Lord Aylestone wrote to Maudling the same month, that if the broadcasters did not give a location of a disaster, the public would only ring the broadcasters and ask; ‘and this kind of word of mouth communication has dangers of its own’, Aylestone wrote.
As a result, nothing much changed. The file records that among themselves civil servants did wonder about one or two ‘exemplary prosecutions’ if people refused to go away. The file included some newspaper reports quoting the gawpers, and ‘ghouls’ (so described by the Daily Mail) who stayed to eat sandwiches, looked for souvenirs, and arrived on foot after parking their cars miles away. One teenager complained it was all ‘a bit of a drag, rally. You can’t see any of the wreckage or anything’.
