A PERILOUS PLUNGE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXII, Issue LXXII, 25 May 1917, Page 5

A PERILOUS PLUNGE.

DAMAGE—£3OO. Writing on the 16th instant the Sydney correspondent of the Wellington Post says: A man named William Matthews, who lives in a brick cottage on the Armidale road, near Tamworth, was awakened in an extraordinary manner in the early hours of last Friday morning. A number iof motor cars filled with merry people were returning along the Armidale road from a social. The cars were travelling at a high speed, which was not decreased when the seteond car tried to pass the first one. It gradually overhauled the leader, Dut, unhappily, the front wheetfs of the second car touched the hack wheels of the first. Thereupon the first car spun round, plunged down an embankment, passed miraculously between a telegraph pole and an alignment post, passed through a fence as if there were no fence there' crashed through the brick wall of a, bedroom in which William Matthews was asleep, went right through the second wall, emerged on to a verandah, and was at last stopped by getting tied up in a creeper which grew luxuriantly over the verandah.

There were seven persons in the car, and, incredible) as it may seem, although they were nearly all cut, scratched, and bruised slightly not tone was seriously injured. The most severe shock was sustained by the said William Matthews, who, in the words of a neighbor, "is a religious kind of bloke, and 'c was just scared stiff." The damage to the car and to the cottage is estimated at £300.