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@clubman
Of all the breakages that can happen, this must be one of the worst. It happened when I was climbing, rather slowly, up a hill near Beaconsfield - by a miracle I managed to stay upright with no connection between the bars and the front wheel. I'd just done about twenty hilly miles, so if it had broken on a descent I probably would not be here to tell you about it.
It's not obvious from the pic, but this steerer has rather thin walls at the top, and you may be able to see that a little way below the break there is a 'step' where the wall thickness is reduced. Another factor which may have contributed was that I was using a relatively modern handlebar stem which had an outside diameter of 22 mm. At that time I hadn't realised that the correct English size is 22.2 mm, which is,' as any fule kno' (Molesworth) seven eighths of an inch. I suspect that although the difference is small, it does cause so additional stress on the steerer when the headclip bolt is tightened.
If I'm right about this, it's another example of an imperial to metric cock up. Some one who had been in the bike repair trade long enough to remember when headclips were still fairly common said this fracture wasn't all that rare then. I wonder how many injuries have been caused by this?
A possible safety measure here is to use an expander bolt stem, so even if the steerer does break you will still have some control.
I've run out of time for now, there's a bit more to follow on other frame failures.