Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

AS THE long-awaited completion of the M65 approaches, older motorists in East Lancashire may look back to the thrill of their first-ever spin on a motorway - and to how, nearly 40 years ago, Jack Frost brought the experience to a sudden halt.

For Lancashire's pride in opening the country's first motorway - the 8-mile Preston by-pass that is now part of the M6 - was embarrassingly dented when seven weeks later it began to crumble and had to be shut.

Yet, before that event provoked outcry and a storm in the House of Commons, drivers travelled from all parts of the country just for the novel, foot-to-the-floor pleasure of tearing along its tarmac, even though the sensation lasted only a short-lived eight minutes.

For hardly had Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared the new motorway open on December 5, 1958, in a special ceremony at Samlesbury, than motorists swarmed on to it.

After pressing a button that automatically cut a white ribbon across the road, raised a barrier that became a flag-staff with the Union Jack on it and unveiled a commemorative plaque all at the same time, the Premier passed down the road in a landau-type Rolls-Royce at a sedate 40 mph.

Not so the new breed of motorway drivers. There was no speed limit on the road and drivers were actually encouraged to drive as fast as they safely could.

Cutting journey times by fast travel was, after all, the whole idea of the motorway. The 8 miles of new road, with its features of no stopping, motor vehicles only, no cross traffic, no right-hand turns and only one entry and exit point at Samlesbury, had been designed for speed. It was meant to cut the journey time from Cuerden, near Bamber Bridge, to Broughton, from the 90 minutes that it often took on the old road through Preston - along which there were an incredible 1,900 access points - to 12 minutes at the most and to as few as eight as it siphoned two million vehicles a year from the town's streets.

Yet, the first motorway drivers were critical of the design. Many said that, with just two lanes on each carriageway, it was too narrow for high-speed driving.

Alderman CW Doodson, chairman of the county highways committee, hit back at the carpers. The new motorway, he said, was much the same width as the much-vaunted German autobahns and, besides, one of the drivers who complained about it being too narrow had been trying to do 120 mph.

In fact, many would-be speedsters were reduced to a 2 mph crawl on the first weekend after the road opened as hordes of car-borne sightseers choked it to produce Bank Holiday-style traffic queues. But it was not long before someone driving too fast made history as the first person to crash on a motorway. A week after the opening a 22-year-old Penwortham man got three months in jail after he turned over a car he had taken and driven without consent.

Yet it was not long before the drivers' dream of no-limit motoring - first envisaged by Lancashire County Council in 1937 when it produced the blueprint for a motorway that would by-pass the bottle-neck towns of Preston, Lancaster, Wigan and Warrington - came to an abrupt halt because of the weather and Government penny-pinching on the specifications. The county surveyor, Accrington-born James Drake, had called for four drainage systems, one of each side of each carriageway. The Ministry of Transport said no and only two drains were laid, one per carriageway. As soon as the motorway opened, it began to pour with rain for weeks and then a sharp frost set it. The sodden foundations of the road froze and the surface began to break up as a thaw set in - the result of the temperature rising from 26 degrees of frost to 10 degrees above freezing in a single day.

Opening the motorway, Harold Macmillan said it would be remembered historically in same way as Sir Frank Whittle's first jet engine. But too soon it had bombed with the wrong sort of fame.

Only about one half of one per cent of the carriageway was affected, but it was enough to shut the £4million road for a fortnight. The Ministry ordered an investigation as the asphalt erupted and burst along ridges that had risen six inches high for lengths of up to 10 feet. The contractors refused to accept responsibility. They had done the job to the county's specification and satisfaction, they said.

But 350 workmen were rushed in as new drainage trenches were dug alongside the carriageways and filled with gravel and some 30 patches of tarmac were replaced, adding another £95,000 to the bill.

Meanwhile, MPs were indignant and the Opposition was furious when, resisting Labour demands for an independent inquiry, Transport Minister Harold Watkinson insisted in the Commons that no-one was to blame.

Angry West Ham North MP Arthur Lewis suggested that Mr Watkinson should ask the Russians how they managed to build roads in arctic Siberia without them suffering damage like Britain's new motorway had done - but he was given the cold shoulder.

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