"The Commissioner of Police thinks it advisable to call upon all owners and drivers of motor vehicles to do what is in their power to reduce the annoyance caused, especially at night, by the use of unsuitable devices for unnecessarily intensifying either the timbre or volume of the sound emitted."
Anyone who has ever been woken at 3am by the droning and banging of a modified Audi RS3 or somesuch would second that plea – yet it's one that was circulated 115 years ago.
At that time, the only regulation governing vehicle noise compelled use of a horn at hazardous junctures. Little wonder there was a "growing volume of complaints against the nerve-racking, strident noises" of Britain's fast-growing motoring set.
We felt "the seriousness of car noises was greatly exaggerated", but regardless just five months later "the agitation culminated in the issue of a further regulation by the Local Government Board, prohibiting the use of cut-outs" – devices that let a car's exhaust gas avoid its silencer to boost power.
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This was "fairly sweeping, as it not only prohibits use of cut-outs but practically insists upon the use of silencers which shall deaden the noise of the exhaust blast very considerably" – all caused by those few "of caddish propensities".
Moreover, we complained, no curbs had been placed on the far greater irritants that were "lumbering traction engines that shake the very foundations of the houses they pass" and "iron-tyred horse vehicles of all sorts".
By summer 1928, traffic noise – described by one MP as "inflicting considerable suffering and being a general menace to health" – had come to the fore again. In just the past year, some 10,600 drivers had been prosecuted for excessive noise, and consequently a broad-based committee was set up to investigate. Its recommendation, delivered the next spring, was more regulation.
Thus, from August 1929, "use of any car which causes any excessive noise either directly or as a result of any defect, lack of repair or faulty adjustment or loading" was illegal.
There remained one big problem, though, as reader EJ Burrow noted: "Unless some method is invented for its reasonable enforcement, the law is likely to become a futile absurdity, more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The police seem utterly at a loss as to how to approach the subject."
