THE LAWS AGAINST NOISE
By R. H. CECIL
WE all live in a mounting volume of din. It is measured in " phons " at the National Physical Laboratory, where the scientists decide how much of it we ought to be able to stand. Every now and then a new law appears, declaring this noise or that to be unlawful in stated circumstances, and is applauded. But it is seldom enforced ; it seems to get drowned in the very noise it was designed to still.
A few months ago, when Sir Oswald Mosley's street-corner meet- ings in East London were providing the magistrates with " insulting behaviour " cases and the home-going business public with special evening reading, there was a widespread demand that the use of loud-speakers in the street should be prohibited. Some supporters of this proposal thought the ban should apply only to political meetings, because open-air religious meetings were resorting more and more to the t.se of loud-speaker vans and should not be penalised for the sins of the Fascists. Some M.P.s thought, on the other hand, that political meetings should be precisely the ones to be exempted, since the advent of the loud-speaker had made open-air oratory properly audible (and had vanquished the heckler) for the first time ; it should not, they said, be banned merely because a negligible extra-Parliamentary party had misused it as a means of attacking the Jews. One also heard the view that the ban would amount to a rejection of the means of progress, the behaviour of the Luddites brought up to date.
No one seemed to remember that ten years before, the County Councils of London, Middlesex, Hertford and Surrey (to name only a few) had armed themselves with the following by-law: "No person shall sound or play upon any musical or noisy instrument or sing in any street or public place within too yards of any shop, dwelling house, or office to the annoyance or disturbance of any inmate or occupier thereof, after being requested to desist by any constable, or by any inmate or occupier so annoyed or disturbed."
It .even went on to meet one of the objections: " This by-law shall not apply to properly-conducted religious services, except where the request to desist is made on the ground of the serious illness of any inmate of the house." Strictly regarded, the exception might involve some liturgical bias in the interpretation of " properly- conducted," but the intention may have been to outlaw the meeting that opens with a decorous hymn and proceeds to a provocative political harangue.
Now what is a bellowing loud-speaker if it is not someone " sounding upon a noisy instrument " ? Most lawyers, briefed to defend the first microphone orator to be charged under this by-law, would no doubt try to establish that " noisy " was ejusdem generis with " musical," and must therefore mean barrel-organs, cornets, banjoes and other para-musical engines—not, at any rate, cavernous reproductions of the human voice talking. But the presence of the word " sound " as a verb should defeat them, and the pronouncement of a conviction and fine would reaffirm the King's peace. Won't somebody try it, please ? You need only be the annoyed or disturbed occupant or " inmate " of a shop, dwelling-house or office within too yards of the infernal thing and ask the man using it to stop. As there is no likelihood whatsoever that he will take any notice, you will need a policeman handy to get his name and address by seeing his identity card. Thereafter, if the police seem reluctant to take action, you can yourself get a summons issued by a magistrate. You will have started a great libertarian movement, and laurels will be tenderly deposited round your statue on anniversaries of the House of Lords' final judgement in the case.
Thus should we rid our street-corners of the political stentor.
We could now turn our attention to the zealots who drive about in loud-speaker vans and fill the reverberating streets with hoarse roars of invitation to public meetings. Even the borough councils do this in London, though by what process their town clerks dispose of the L.C.C. by-law I do not know. They began it during the war when they organised " savings weeks," but then they broke the by-law beyond all doubt by sandwiching their sermons on thrift between bursts of martial music. The thing has gone on at intervals ever since, one borough regularly resorting to it as a means of announcing " holidays-at-home " attractions in the neighbourhood to people who are trying desperately to work. The town-crier's bell is being supplanted by the municipal crooner.
A few years ago a motorist staged a practical adaptation of one of Sir Alan Herbert's Misleading Cases in the Common Law. He
drove about the centre of London with a powerful loud-speaker attached to the radiator of his car, a small microphone beside his driving mirror, and an amplifier below the dash-board, howling to other drivers such directions as he thought necessary to ensure their safety and his own unobstructed passage. He told the police that he first thought of it when he was faced to follow a horse- driven dray for about two miles at midnight—when by virtue of another benevolent regulation the use of his motor-horn was un- lawful. " I know of no law to prevent one man speaking to another after it p.m.," he said. " You can't say I'm doing more than giving audible warning of approach, and that's always been an obligation, not a crime." The police scratched their heads; and, as commonly happens when the police have scratched their heads, they prosecuted him for " insulting behaviour." The by-law about noisy instruments escaped notice again—a great pity, for this was the kind of man who, once he had studied it, would have prosecuted the next policeman he found marshalling pedestrian traffic by loud- speaker.
There is already a provision in many local Police Acts that penalises the use of any " noisy instrument " for the purpose of " calling persons together, or announcing any show or entertainment, or hawking, selling, distributing, or collecting any article whatso- ever, or obtaining money or alms." This enactment survives from the eighteen-thirties, when the competitive sale of muffins, " sweet lavender" and winkles called for adventitious mechanical aids. It may perhaps not apply to the orator whose gathering of admirers amounts to a " meeting " before he actually begins to bawl, and there is certainly an official reluctance to use it. Meanwhile, the volume of noise amounts steadily—and a general election approaches.
Recently I forced my way, head down, into an electrical shop to buy some lamp-globes. The entrance was guarded by a massive radio cabinet emitting rather more noise than the Brass. Band Festival at the Albert Hall ; and to make himself audible to me the shop assistant used his practised hands as a trumpet. When we had shrieked unintelligibly into each other's ears for a time, he went and toned down the noise a little. The manager saw him do it, and rather crossly turned it up again. I came away defeated. Now in some localities (but not, I found, in this one) borough councils have made a by-law saying that
" no person shall in or in connection with any shop, business premises, or other place which adjoins any street, operate any wireless loud-speaker, gramophone, or other musical instrument worked by mechanical means, in such a manner as to cause annoyance to occupants of any premises, or to passengers." If there are other municipalities which have not thought fit to adopt such a by-law, I respectfully commend it to their notice ; they can invoke section 16 of the Local Government Act, 1888, as their authority. To put it no higher, they would be doing something to ensure that their own loud-speakers got a fair hearing in the streets.
There are laws to control factory whistles, noisy animals, street shouting, whistling for cabs, steam organs at fairs, squeaky brakes on carts, rattling loads on lorries, defective exhaust-silencers and motor-horns at night. (It is an odd fact, by the way, that the one about motor-horns was 're-enacted in 1941, when the blitz was thundering nightly at its worst.) These, it seems to me, deal with the minutiae of metropolitan din, and I don't mind so much if they are enforced no more freqUently than the law against shaking door- mats. But I do not understand why it should be so widely assumed that nothing can be done about the loud-speaker until M.P.s can be induced to jeopardise their own electoral prospects. The local authorities can cope with this.
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