TRAGIC WEEK-END.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 205, 30 August 1926, Page 10

TRAGIC WEEK-END.

SIX AWFUL DEATHS.

SYDNEY, LAUNCESTON, ADELAIDE. FOUR IN SYDNEY. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, August 26. A terrific motor smash and a railway accident were responsible for four deaths in Sydney at the week-end, while unusual accidents at Launceston and Adelaide resulted in the deaths of two men. The motor smash occurred at Pyrmont on Saturday night, when the back wheel of a car, in which six men were returning from a football match, collapsed and overturned the vehicle, which crashed into a telegraph pole. John Oscar Anderson, a seaman, aged 37, was killed outright, while Jack Davidson, 58, a labourer, was fatally injured. The driver escaped injury altogether, while three others were fortunate to escape with comparatively light wounds. One of them was Dudley Millard, firstgrade Rugby League footballer from Balmain, who escaped with a cut over the right eye. The car was smashed to matchwood. On Monday, in the Redfern railway yards, two railway carpenters were run down and cut to pieces by an engine which was running tender first. The men, Francis Wilkinson and George Schubert, carpenter and assistant respectively, were on their way to work, and stepped from one line to avoid a train, only to get right in front of the fast-running engine. The whistle was sounded, but owing to the heavy traffic they did not hear it, apparently. Their bodies were so frightfully mutilated that the engine had to be raised to allow of the collection of the fragments. At Adelaide on Friday Peter Dickson, a telephone mechanic, was killed, and two others injured as the result of the explosion of a cylinder at a smelting works. Two men were heating a cylinder over a fire near which Dickson was working when it exploded, one end striking Dickson's head and reducing it practically to a pulp. Death, of course, was instantaneous. The others were seriously injured, but are recovering. Dickson was a young married man, with a child ten months old. A ghastly fate befell Clarence Prior, 30, an engineer, at McHugh's pottery works, Launceston, on Monday. He was standing on a plank oiling the bearings of the machinery used to carry clay to the works, when he slipped and was caught between two big cog wheels which were travelling at 1000 revolutions a minute. His body was shattered out of all human resemblance. It is believed he stood on a moving wheel, which drew him into the cogs.