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Talk:Sheila van Damm

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Driving

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Currently the article says "He encouraged her to learn to drive, at well below the legal age, and her first journey with him was to drive from London to Brighton". This is a little disingenuous for two reasons:

  1. Even today it is quite common for children to learn to drive long before they reach the legal age to take a test to obtain a licence. In Britain they just can't drive on the Queen's highway until they have a provisional licence, and for tractors that is 16 (learning-to-drive-a-tractor/age-limits)
  2. Driving tests to obtain a licence did not come in until 1935 and were suspended during WWII until 1946 (History of road safety, The Highway Code and the driving test § 3. Top 10 driving test facts)

So it was possible that before the driving test was introduced that there was no legal requirement as to age or compitence for obtaining a licence to drive (think about drone flying until recently, or driving a narrowboat on a canal), so a source is needed to state that the first journey was illegal (as the text implies) and not just eccentric. -- PBS (talk) 19:44, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]