County Borough of Derby Police traffic officer's note book, compiled in 1941, and filled with manuscript signed statements relating to traffic offences.

15.5 x 7.5 cm notebook, 108 pp (4 pp blank). With 102 pp of manuscript, in the hand of the anonymous police officer, on 53 numbered two-page openings. Stapled. In original brown wraps. Good, on lightly-aged paper, in slightly-worn binding. Manuscript statements relating to around thirty cases in two sequences, one, of 35 pp, beginning at one end of the notebook (openings 1 to 18), and the other, of 67 pp, at the other (backwards over openings 53 to 20). The longer sequence begins with statements by the officer himself, with the results of court hearings given in red ink in the margins of three cases. For example, Leslie Hand is fined 7s 6d and disqualified for 'driving a motor lorry when being under the age of 16 years'; and when asked 'why she had not produced the Identity Card within the specified period of 48 hours', Nellie Mavis Lowe replies 'I have no license [sic]'. There follow a number of statements written out by the officer and signed by various individuals: William George Moseley, being 'very busy servicing aircraft', fails to report his car's collision with a white dog; Andrew Bruce drives the 'Bentley m/car' of 'Mr. Wright' to 'the Dog Track', 'under the impression that as the car had to be insured before it could be taxed that I was covered by that Insurance'. The shorter sequence (openings 1 to 18) consists of the statements of ten individuals, signed by them but written out by the police officer. These range from the case of 15-year-old apprentice fitter George Owen Mountford, knocked off his 'pedal cycle' by an oncoming lorry ('had he been keeping to his correct side there would have been no accident'), to 31-year-old Stanley Fantom (false name?), stationed at RAF Martlesham Heath, whose 'motor cycle combination' collided with a lorry which 'gave me no choice to avoid an accident he just turned the lorry across the road without any signal whatsoever'. Other cases give a taste of wartime conditions: Ernest Heald declares that he was 'unaware that the van was being used for the purpose of conveying my nephew & other persons to Williamshorpe Colliery to play cricket', using fuel obtained on 'Petrol Coupons', and therefore 'only for business purposes'. Gunner Thomas Pringle Hay, stationed at Alvaston Camp, describes an accident he is in, together with a 'soldier friend'. Printed note by Captain H. Rawlings, Chief Constable, County Borough of Derby Police, in red ink on inside front wrap, and two pages of printed text, the first concerning the description of suspects, the second carrying a nine-point memorandum 'regarding Statements made by Persons suspected of Crime or by Prisoners in Police Custody'.