AMAZING ESCAPES

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 208, 30 May 1936, Page 24

AMAZING ESCAPES

An Englishman’s Luck

Sitting in his home at Banbury, Oxfordshire, recently, a tall, vigorous man told an intervidwer the story of how, at the age of 36, he has eluded death more times than most men. Here are a few of the adventures which he has survived Flung over a precipice; collided with two lorries, while driving a small car; fought an octopus; escaped from a man-eating leopard. The man whom death has so far passed is Mr. G. Hamilton Snowball.

“My most recent brush with death occurred last January, when the car I was driving went out of control and plunged down a mountainside in Africa,” Mr. SnowbaL said. “I hung on to the wheel until I was knocked unconscious.

“When I came round I was lying in a dried riverbed. Apart from a head wound I was unscratched. A few yards from me was the ear completelywrecked; that was my 28th escape from death.

“When bathing off Port Sudan, I spotted a shark coming after me. 1 beat him to the beach by three yards. In the Low Archipelago my surf boat overturned and I found myself swimming with sharks all round me. But they missed me. “On the same trip a wounded leopard pounced on me and struck me down. My native boys saw it standing over me. They fled, and their action

, distracted the leopard’s attention. It. turned and ran after them.” A few weeks afterward, Mr. Snowball was attacked by a black mamba snake, then flung from a crashed lorry into a river infested with crocodiles. Home again in Britain he was involved in a car collison with two lorries when the entire upper part of his car was torn off. He was imscratched. “I have beaten off an octopus while pearl-diving, survived four head-on motor-crashes, and suffered 12 severe bouts of malaria in five years,” he stated. In 1918, when lie was an apprenticed engineer at Gateshead a piece of metal penetrated his eye. which had to be removed. In the hospital it was discovered that the metal bad missed piercing the brain by one-thousandth of an inch. Falling into the sea fully-clothed and muffled in a heavy winter overcoat was another of his adventures.

“While going over the battleship Lion, after her return from the Battle of Jutland,” he said, “I tripped over a coil of rope and pitched over the side. “A seaman, prodding in the water with a boathook, hitched it in my overcoat.”

Shortly afterward, while cliff-climb-ing, a rock gave way beneath him ami Mr. Snowball slithered 30ft. down the sheer face of the cliff until he clutched at a small tree. he had dislodged was smashed to pieces on the beach 350 ft. below.