Reporter’s diary

Press, 20 January 1984, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Fund for girl

THE STORY yesterday about the daughter of a New Zealand woman being paralysed from the waist down after a lion attack in Africa prompted a call from a Christchurch friend of the child’s mother. Mr Hugh de Lautour had already heard of the accident, which happened four months ago, and had opened an appeal for funds to help the four-year-old girl. Mr de Lautour opened the Briar Stevens fund recently and has sent letters to friends of the family asking for funds. The money is primarily for medical expenses, but he is not restricting the use of the funds. They are for the family to use as it sees fit Anyone interested in giving money slfyuld address it to

The Briar Stevens Fund, c/H. F. and B. H. de Lautour, Yaldhurst, R.D. 1, Christchurch.

Painless >

A PLAQUE unveiled in London recently by the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland commemorates the first occasion on which an anaesthetic was given in England. The dental patient, a Miss Lonsdale, had a molar removed painlessly in a house in Gower Street in 1846. The house was the home of an expatriate American,. Dr Francis Boott He was sent the news of the first use of ether anaesthetic from Boston, Massachusetts. This discovery sent Dr Boott to James Robinson, a LoijJon

dentist, to make the first practical trial of ether for tooth extraction. Two days later a leading London surgeon, Robert Liston, amputated a leg of Frederick Churchill, a butler, who was put under ether at what is now University College Hospital. Pedal pay

A SHORTAGE of office cars yesterday left one reporter wondering whether to make a cross city journey bn foot or in a taxi. Suggestions about the office bicycle were rejected, although this may not have been the case if journalists worked under an award similar to that negotiated by the Council of Civil Service Unions in Britain. The “Financial Times” reports that for the

second year running a claim by the council for an increase in the mileage rate for pedal cycles has been granted. Civil servants cycling on official business will now get 4.1 pence for every mile they cover — a 7.9 per cent increase on last year’s rate. Demanding

THE MANOEUVRES listed on the present driving test application form which a London learner-driver could theoretically be asked to carry out include “turn right-hand and left-hand corners without dewiring.” This puzzling instruction has been explained by the Department of Transport as applying to trams, for which few people now require