SEVERE BLIZZARD

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 104, 13 April 1933, Page 6

SEVERE BLIZZARD

WOMAN’S DARING DRIVE STEERING CROOKED COURSE. FURY OF FEBRUARY STORM. The intense severity of Britain’s great blizzard on Friday, Feb.uary 24, so paralysed communications of all kinds that the full story of its havoc was not revealed until tho following day. Although the worst of its fury was spent on Friday, the aftermath of the storm on Saturday resulted in an amazing hold-up of footba'l without parallel in the annals of si-ert. Of 44 big matches 23 were postponed Tho “Sunday Chionicle” bv telephone oily Saturday got tho first news after two days from villages cut off by the snowstorm. A dramatic story of a woman motorist’s perilous drive came from Nevin, one of a score of villages in the Lleyn Peninsula, South Carnarvonshire. Nothing had been heard of Nevin since Thursday night and the newspaper was the first to break the silence with a telephone call to the Nanhoron Hotel, Nevin. Mrs. 0. H. Parry, of the hotel, related how she braved the blizzard in her small car, skirted deep snow-drifts, dodged beneath fallen trees and steered a dangerous course amid uprooted telegraph poles and a tangle of wires. This she did to reestablish communication with Pwllheli, the nearest large town. Mrs. Parry told of the piled-up drifts, the wreck of two flying boats at Porthdinlleyn and her attempt to run the gauntlet of the storm. She succeeded on Saturday. “My car was a small one, otherwise I should never have got through,” she said. “I had to follow a corkscrew course, skirting drift after drift. In many places the trees had fallen across the road, carrying the telephone wires with them. The car just managed to crawl beneath them and eventually, after many adventures, we succeeded in reaching Pwllheli. The journey was full of thrills and I did not like passing beneath the fallen trees.” ROADS BECOME RIVERS. The snowdrifts melted so rapidly on Saturday in most parts of Britain that roads were turned into rivers. In Berkshire there were roads three feet under water. At Hyde, in Cheshire, water was flowing in cataracts from huge drifts, and ears, plunging through the water and slush, threw up great showers of muddy water. It was still snowing heavily on the Yorkshire Wolds, among other places, on Saturday, and many hundreds of travellers were still stranded in the Peak district, on the moors between Yorkshire and Lancashire and in Wales. Scores of villages were still isolated, and in many of them, where inroads into the food supplies had been made by hungry motorists sheltering from the blizzard, something approaching a famine had arisen. Thousands of motor cars, lorries and buses were still snowbound. At Standedge, between Manchester and Huddersfield, about 200 cars, charabancs and lorries were marooned. The demands on inns in the district were so great than many ran out of food and drink. But many people had spent the night in buses and cars, on the Pennines and the Yorkshire Wolds. There is a story of a baby ear by the Standedge roadside which was only discovered when somebody walked over it. There was no one inside. In Derbyshire snow ploughs had to be dug out of drifts in which they had stuck. BUNCH OF FORTY CARS. About 20 cars were abandoned on Blackstone Edge and there were 40 in the first 200 yards from the Hazel Grove tram terminus just beyond Stockport, Cheshire. Among the 70 motor vehicles abandoned on the main road between Burnley and Rawtenstall, Lancashire, was Burnley’s Black Maria, which was returning from Manchester, where prisoners had been deposited. A girl battled her way through the storm, after the bus on which she was travelling had been marooned, collapsed on reaching home at Crawshawbooth and went to bed seriously ill. An automobile association sergeant and patrol, with other helpers, battled their way through drifts 15ft. deep to a bus stranded at Broadhill, on the Manchester-Burnley road, and carried a woman passenger, who was ill, on a stretcher to an inn. The other passengers followed. There was a good deal of disorganisation on the railways. One passenger train was freed after being buried over 14 hours in a snowdrift between Llwyngwril and Barmouth, in Wales.