OCTOPUS CLAMP THAT CLAMPED

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 220, 13 June 1936, Page 12

OCTOPUS CLAMP THAT CLAMPED

Predicament of Amateur

Wrestlers

POLICE SUMMONED TO UNTIE HUMAN KNOT

A policeman at Lower lliitt was summoned urgently last night to unravel a human knot. Two well-known Lower Hutt residents, both keen followers of wrestling, experimenetd with ’•Lofty" Blomfield's much-discussed octopus clamp. Guided by diagrams ami instructions, one man tried to put the hold on the other. He succeeded—and then, to his horror, lie found he was unable to loosen it. For fully 10 minutes he manoeuvred gingerly; to his own discomfort and the intense suffering of the man on whom the hold was aqiplied. It was useless: it was an octopus clamp and it remained as such. So must "Lofty" Blomlield have felt when ho was disqualified in tlie Wellington Town Hall tin May 25 after lie had so neatly tipplied the clamp to I’atil Boesch, only to find that he could not disentangle it.

By this time both men were feeling the strain acutely. 'What could be done? One course suggested itself—the reliable policeman, the man to help one out of any trouble. A member of the family was quickly dispatched, and the policeman arrived to find two painstricken men mysteriously interlocked in an intricate mass of limbs.

The policeman was unhurried and calm, but effective. Within one minute he had tlie octopus clamp untied, and the two exhausted would-be wrestlers lay back on the floor and panted their relief. The policeman unconcernedly returned to the police station. It was all in a day's work, after all.