Prisoners being taken under armed guard in buses, (Prison Dept '
Black Marias of today), have been shot at and seriously wounded.
It was also an age when local police boxes, truncheons, police whistles and "
black marias" were an accepted part of the bobby's arsenal in a world of petty larcenies and the occasional headline-grabbing gruesome murder.
White Maria (although we don't really need to call her White Maria as there are clearly no
Black Marias on the Conservative benches), is a 50-year-old mother-of-three who has managed to make a million pounds on her home in Wimbledon, South West London, and was helped by abusing parliamentary rules.
Shortly afterwards I had a dozen policemen and two
Black Marias at my door, arresting me and charging me with a crime I didn't even know had been committed.