This week in history: Coco the Clown delivers road safety lesson to Stamford Hill kids

Coco the Clown visited children at the Super Cinema juniors’ club to give them a lesson in road safety.

Nicolai Poliakoff – the most famous clown in the UK at the time, whose persona inspired the fast food clown icon Ronald McDonald – began his lesson by collecting a crowd of youngsters at the kerbside. He then crossed the road with them, under the watchful eye of a policeman who held up the traffic in Stamford Hill.

Coco was mobbed inside the cinema by the cheering, enthusiastic children.

He then organised a competition between six of the kids to test their road safety awareness.

Bernice Levene and Michael Crane emerged as winners, and were presented with a road safety certificate.

The Gazette reported that Clown Coco had delighted the children with some of his well-known fooling, but left them with a serious thought: “Mind the roads.”