SYDNEY BRIDGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 283, 30 November 1933, Page 26

SYDNEY BRIDGE.

| FORTIETH SUICIDE. PARAPETS TO BE NETTED. GOVERNMENT ACTS AT T-AST. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, November 23. The constant recurrence of suicides at the bridge, and the pressure of public opinion, have induced the Government to take action, and the Premier, Mr. Stevens, has announced that some sort of protection is to be erected to defeat or delay those bent on self-destruction. No doubt Ministers liave fully realised their responsibility in the matter, but their long hesitation is not difficult to understand. However, last Monday the bridge claimed another victim—one Bryan Angell—a man of 35, highly educated, a linguist, who had taught in India and also had been manager of a tea plantation there. He was apparently out of work and destitute, and he seems to have been driven to his end by desperation. Perhaps the accidental fact that Angell was a nephew of Sir A. Conan Doyle lent a certain additional personal interest to his case. . But his was the fortieth bridge tragedy—though three of the victims have survived—and Cabinet has now decided that the work of "making the bridge safe" shall be put in hand at once. Elaborate Entanglement. I'i is not quite clear what form the protection is to take. Mr. Newell, Commissioner for Eoads, who has charge of the bridge, has informed the newspapers that the steel standards carrying the existing hand-rail will be carried lip to a height of nearly 9ft, and bent inward, that the standards and the parapet will bo wired to prevent anyone from crawling through, and that, -probably, the whole pathway on either side of the bridge will be transformed into a sort of tunnel covered in by wire mesh "similar to that placed on safety fences along the road." It is not an inviting prospect, though we are assured that it "will not detract from the beauty of the bridge." It will be an elaborate entanglement. requiring four or five miles of wire and costing £5000 or more. But everybody seems satisfied that something effectual is being done at last — more especially the "Telegraph," which can justly claim that it has led the agitation to save would-be suicides from this special temptation.

The "Telegraph" has pointed out that "one person has jumped or fallen from the bridge every 15 days since it was

opened," and that once every 17 days since the opening the bridge has claimed a human life. Perhaps it has drawn a rash inference from these facts when it maintains that, according to statistical theory, it has become a mathematical certainty—that with the bridge left undefended "another desperate man or woman would thus find death" every 17 days. However this may be, it seems that the truth of the prediction is not to be tested by experience, and if human life can be saved here by the expenditure of a few thousand pounds the experiment seems well worth making.