Road safety champion is victim of hate campaign

Yvonne Clarke, of Wellington Gardens, has spoken for the first time of the harassment she received following her quest for traffic calming in North Trade Road.

Yvonne says she and her disabled daughter have also been on the receiving end of four-letter tirades from members of the public.

Yvonne began campaigning for improved safety measures after she was clipped by a lorry, which had mounted the kerb trying to get past traffic and parked cars.

The incident, in May 2010, left Yvonne’s hand in plaster.

Following her campaign, East Sussex County Council agreed to a number of safety measures on the road between Wellington Gardens and the police station, including raised pavements, higher kerbstones, bollards and partial double yellow lines.

But when the work began, so did the abuse.

Yvonne said: “When the workmen came in, people got really huffy about being held up.

“I said ‘it’s for our safety’.”

But things soon took a turn for the worse, with Yvonne and her 26-year-old daughter, who has the mental age of a four-year-old, being shouted and sworn at in the street.

Then one afternoon in July 2012, a pair of underpants, full of faeces, were thrown into Yvonne’s garden.

A few months later the family’s dead pet rabbit, awaiting burial, was neatly removed from a tightly sealed box.

A few days letter the animal’s severed head and leg were dumped in the garden.

And just days later, Yvonne’s outdoor fairy lights were cut to pieces by vandals.

Yvonne, who at the time was recovering from a serious operation following a cancer scare, said the incidents left her traumatised.

She said: “I would not go out my house for a long period of time.

“I went to the police and they gave me a poster to put in my window to say I had a CCTV camera.

“When it got worse, they told me to go to my housing association.”

Yvonne said that although the traffic calming measures had worked for a time, vehicles parking near the police station are causing fresh problems.

And last Friday (June 21) history almost repeated itself when a bus mounted the kerb, narrowly missing Yvonne’s daughter.

Yvonne said: “Ever since those yellow lines went in, I have had nothing but people vent at me, saying ‘you’ve made the road worse, it’s down to you’.

“People were having a go at me that the lines were not enough.

“It got really uncomfortable.”

She added: “I want people to leave me alone and get off their backsides and do something.

“I cannot do any more.”