OSTEND TRAGEDY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 267, 7 August 1929, Page 11

OSTEND TRAGEDY

NINE MORE BODIES FOUND FIFTEEN BELIEVED TO BE LYING IN HARBOUR (United Press Association. —By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) Australian Press Association. Ostend, August 5. Nine more bodies of victims of the collision between the Joseph 111 and the Knocke have been recovered. Twenty-nine injured are in hospital, where one woman died. It is believed that there are still fifteen bodies lying in the harbour. [Messages published yesterday stated that it was estimated that there were 70 passengers on the motor-boat Joseph 111, which was cut in two by the pleasure boat Knocke and sank, and 15 bodies had been recovered.] LIVELY OSTEND SCENE OF THE TRAGEDY The moving account of the tragedy off the pier at Ostend recalls memories of that pleasant Belgian watering place (writes “H.P.”). People reading the cable messages will realise that it is now mid-summer and the height of the holiday season in Ostend, Belgium’s most popular and populous seaside resort ; and one of the lazy diversions of many is to wander down the long pier to see the ferry steamers from Dover arrive or leave. The pier is on one side of the mole on the other side of an artificial harbour, and both project into the Channel at a slight outward turn in the beach, which extends away southward to Westend and Nieuport, and northward to the Dutch border.

Ostend is very gay in the goldeu summer time. It has a very .fine casino, where one may flirt with fortune in luxurious surroundings; there is a really magnificent concert room, and a very fine orchestra, many of the members of vvjiich play through the season there to augment the salaries they receive as professors or nearprofessors in the Conservatoires of Brussels. Antwerp, Liege, and lesser centres. Ostend has a definite season. It opens at the beginning of June and closes at the end of September. When one says “closes” the word is not idly used. There are certain big stores—branches of those in Brussels and Paris —which open and close on certain dates, as do most of the big, five and six-story pensions on the waterfront. At the end of the season the furniture is all draped, the shutters are drawn to and bolted, and half of Ostend gets back to the larger cities, where there is business to be done in the winter time. Ostend itself hibernates.

Ostend (East End) is not the only Belgian watering-place. There is a tramway running north along the coast, by which one may travel to Wenduyne, Blankenberge (a favourite place for German holiday-makers before the War), Zeebrugge, Heyst, and Knocke. All face the Channel pleasantly. Then if one wishes to make a full day of it, there is a charabanc which will run one from Ostend through Sluis (on the border of Belgium and Holland), across the ferry to Walcheren Island (Flushing is the port), and there on to Middelburg, where one may witness a Dutch market in high fair, and even then get back to Ostend by 7 o’clock in the evening. If otherwise disposed there is the all-day trip to Ypres and the battle area that must be sacred for evermore. All this from Ostend —which is only a three-hour trip from Dover ir fine weather.