Green Cross Code

Green Cross Man
Take it from Green Cross Man
First appearance	1970

The Green Cross Code is a brand created by the National Road Safety Committee (now the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, RoSPA) to raise awareness of pedestrian road safety in the United Kingdom. The multimedia Green Cross Code campaign began in 1970 and continues today.

The Green Cross Code replaced the earlier Kerb Drill (below) pedestrian safety campaign; the Kerb Drill's military style ("Halt! Quick march!") was deemed confusing to children by safety authorities.

Prior to the introduction of the Green Cross campaign, a series of puppet animation public information films, featuring Tufty Fluffytail and narrated by Bernard Cribbins OBE were in regular broadcast rotation across the UK. Tufty Fluffytail, a childlike red squirrel character, was created in 1953 by Elsie Mills MBE to introduce clear and simple safety messages to children. The success of the character led to the creation in 1961 of the Tufty Club for children under five years of age. Under its auspices more than 30,000 Tufty books about road safety were issued to parents. At its peak there were nearly 25,000 branches of the Tufty Club throughout the UK, and by the early 1970s an estimated two million children were members. The movement continued into the 1980s.

The Green Cross Code itself is a short step-by-step procedure designed to enable pedestrians to cross streets safely. While the Code has undergone several changes over the years, the basic tenets ("Stop, Look, Listen, Think" or "Stop Look Listen Live".) have remained more or less the same. The 2005 version of the Green Cross Code reads as follows:

The Green Cross Man is a costumed superhero character created in 1970 as an aid to teaching young children the Green Cross Code, and for promoting general road safety. British actor David Prowse MBE, best known for playing Darth Vader in Star Wars, played the character in a series of Public Information Films (PIFs) sponsored by the Central Office of Information for the UK Department of the Environment. The light-hearted spots ran on UK television from 1975 to 1990.

...
Wikipedia