AMAZING ACCIDENT

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 281, 12 November 1929, Page 7

AMAZING ACCIDENT

TWO UNCONSCIOUS MEN.

With two # men, unseeing, almost unconscious and smothered with blood sitting in the front, seat, with a shattered wind-scre.en and no steering wheel, a car swerved and swayed along the Kingston by-pass road recently, states the Surrey “Comet.” Motorists using the road were amazed at the spectacle—an amazement which rapidly turned to alarm —as the car pursued its zig-zag course unchecked. For two hundred yards or more it careered along wildly between the Malden, and Burl ington road crossings, until suddenlj a more violent swerve brought its off-side tire against the kerb on the wrong side of the road, and it came to a shuddering standstill. The engine, however, continued to roar uncontrolled, and grew so heated that it appeared likely that it might burst into flames. Still the two occupants made no movement, and a motorist who had been stopped by . the car's wild

career, with great presence of mind, opened the bonnet and tore away the leads to the sparking plugs to stop the racing engine.

The driver of the car was found to be suffering from a fractured skull and severe cuts on the face, and his companion from a fracture of the skull, fracture and laceration of the arm, and severe cuts on the face. How the accident happened which brought the injured men into this amazing plight is almost a mystery, but it appears that at a road junction the car became involved in a collision with a heavy motor lorry. It is stated that some part of the lorry, possibly the tail board, swept the top of the car, smashing the windscreen into the faces of the occupants, wrenching the top of the steering wheel completely off, and knocking both men unconscious, while they wore also severely cut by the flying glass.