LETTER ROM JOHANNESBURG.
The following extracts from a letter received from Mr J. A. Clark, junr., now residing at Johannesburg, will be of interest to his numerous friends :— ' Since my last letter I have been in charge of the drilling machine at No 2 shaft and the Great South Nourse mine, which is 25s a day, besides a bonus. In the other shaft a ter- j rible accident occurred where four men were blasting 53 holes ; through some blunder the shots began to explode prematurely, and there was a terrible time. After the explosion the four men were found lying huddled up in the bottom with lumps of stone all over them and blood spattered all over the place. We took them out alive and off to the hospital, but three of them are terribly mutilated, and one of them, a young New Zealander, named Ranton, will probably lose his eyesight, besides four fingers. It is not expected the men will lose their lives but they will be terribly disfigured and it is a truly wonderful thing how they came out alive. That day the mine captain came over to my room and asked me to go on as shift boss in the No 1 shaft, where it is all black labour excepting the machine men and timber men. I have a pretty easy time as shift boss, but there is a lot of responsibility for one can't leave the blackfellows for half an hour without something going wrong. Yesterday we had another bad accident in the No 2 shaft. A young man, aged 18, a fitter, missed his footing and fell to the bottom of the shaft, a distance of 400 feet, and was killed. His father is drill sharpener and when the body was brought to the surface his grief was something terrible to behold, and it broke me up completely for it was heartbreaking. We are having dreadful weather here. Floods are the order of the day, and one afternoon the surface water went down No 1 shaft to such an extent that all work had to be knocked off. If things go on favourably 1 hope to be able to pay you a visil for Christmas, and shall be glad tc see the old faces again, for af tei ; all South Africa isn't a patch or New Zealand to live in.'
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Bibliographic details
Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4594, 4 May 1904, Page 2
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395LETTER ROM JOHANNESBURG. Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4594, 4 May 1904, Page 2
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