Fifty years ago, one Binsted man’s Friday night drive turned into a tale of broken glass, a bleeding hand and a firm dressing down from the local magistrates.

The Alton Herald of July 27, 1975, reported the misadventure, which began—like many such stories of the era—at the pub. After an evening at The Star public house, the man set off home along the A31 in his van. Unfortunately for him, his route and driving caught the eye of a patrolling police car.

This incident took place not long after the UK had begun cracking down on drink-driving with formal legislation. The landmark Road Safety Act of 1967 had introduced the country’s first legal alcohol limit for drivers, making it an offence to be behind the wheel with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

By today’s standards, that limit was relatively high, roughly twice the strength of the current legal threshold used in modern breathalyser tests.

By 1975, the law was in force, but enforcement still relied heavily on observation and instinct. In this case, the officer claimed the van drifted over the white line and didn’t seem to handle an s-bend very convincingly.

The officer flashed his lights three or four times and finally caught up with the driver as he turned into the forecourt of The Retreat, not far from his home. But the story didn’t end with a routine stop.

As the police approached, the driver wandered off toward the side of his house, apparently to let the dog out, while the officers tried to ask why he hadn’t pulled over sooner. That’s when things turned physical.

According to police, as the man reached his front door, one officer gently caught hold of his shoulder, at which point the man “dipped away” and fell through the glass pane of his own door, badly cutting his hand. The man’s version? He claimed he was pushed in the back, tripped over the doorstep, and went crashing through the glass. Either way, it wasn’t how anyone expected the evening to go.

“I don’t know quite what happened then. I was in shock,” he told the court later. “You’d have thought I’d committed murder the way they went on.”

A second officer arrived on the scene after hearing the commotion and found his colleague standing by while the man shouted and clutched his bleeding hand. The officers said they could smell alcohol on his breath and asked him to take a breath test.

“No bloody chance,” came the reply. “What for? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He refused the test, telling the police they were only suspicious because he was driving a van. When they took him to Alton Police Station, he still wouldn’t comply, refusing to give a breath sample, or to provide blood or urine for testing.

With blood still “dripping from his hand,” according to police, he was eventually taken to Basingstoke District Hospital for treatment. The injury wasn’t serious, but the legal consequences would be.

In court the following week, the driver told magistrates that he hadn’t refused the breath test out of defiance, but because he wanted medical treatment first. The bench, led by chairman Mr G. E. Coke, was not convinced.

After a short adjournment, the magistrates returned with their verdict: guilty on both charges—refusing to take a breath test and failing to provide a specimen. He was fined a total of £90 (equivalent to around £900 today) and disqualified from driving for a year.

Looking back five decades later, the incident is a snapshot of a different time: when breathalysers were new, glass door panes weren’t toughened, and police stops could end up with a trip to hospital as well as the cells.

All in all, it stands as a timeless warning that even the quietest drive home from the pub can go badly wrong if you’ve had one too many.