STRANGE ACCIDENTS

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 68, 21 March 1931, Page 24

STRANGE ACCIDENTS

- Lindruni, the great billiard player, lost three teeth the other day because some luggage fell on him from the rack of a railway carriage. Sineo then someone has been killed by an electrified clothes line. It is still possible, of course, to be killed^4n the old-fashioned way. Even in a motoring age I suppose one may end as William the First did (writes "Bamee" in the "News Chronicle"). To be killed by a glancing arrow, as was the second William, one must needs be an explorer among suspicious and primitive savages. Yet queer old accidents still persist. How many modern children have emulated the unfortunate young Jellyby whose head became firmly fixed in the area railings? Not so very long ago a boy's head got stuck between the balusters of London Bridge, and all the resources of the London Fire Brigade were required to extricate him. Then there was the unhappy child who was sucked through the 12-inch outlet pipe at the Torquay baths and was eventually rescued from the sea. It is still possible in the streets of a

civilised city during a galo to be knocked over by a falling chimney-pot, though the risk of being knocked out by things thrown from wnidows has fortunately not survived into this more decorous period. All sorts of fantastic risks have been introduced, of course, by flying. A spanner dropped from a great height is a weapon in the hands of blind Fate —a veritable bolt from the blue—that may kill a ploughman, an arekdeacon, a tax collector, or merely break the glass of a suburban cucumber frame. Perhaps it is their haphazard nature —the product of chains of grotesquely related incidents—that gives a peculiar stamp to so many modern accidents. Imagine Chapman hitting a sixer out of Lord's, and the ball ricocheting against the spectacles of an aged pedestrian of St. John's Wood, causing him, thus blinded, to trip over a dog that frightens a horse that bolts with a van, and eventually collides, with fatal results, with a file of sandwiehmen in Baker street.