BATHING TRAGEDIES

Southland Times, Issue 22131, 27 September 1933, Page 2

BATHING TRAGEDIES

GALLANT FATHER’S FATE. TRYING TO SAVE SON. On a holiday visit to Oxfordshire recently, Mr Arthur Stokes, aged 66, a magistrate and retired farmer from Northamptonshire, lost his life by drowning at Twyford Mill, near Banbury, in trying to save his married son, after first rescuing his daughter-in-law. The son’s wife got into difficulties in a pond, and her husband, Mr John Wallace Stokes, aged 35, also a farmer, went to her assistance. He could not swim, and disappeared. Mr Stokes, senior, jumped into the water and succeeded in saving his daughter-in-law and then went to search for his son. He got into difficulties, however, and both were drowned. Farm hands and others ran to the scene, and Mrs Stokes was taken to the mill, where she and her husband lived. Mr Stokes, senior, leaves a wife, and his son a wife and family. A large crowd cheered a boy of 12, Fred Snarey, of Castle Hill, Reading who, having learnt to swim only a month previously, dived into the river Kennet and rescued Ernest Charles, aged six, who had fallen in while fishing. Charles had sunk twice when Fred, who lives in the same house, reached him.

A policeman took the boys home in an ambulance, and, as their mothers were out, put them to bed. Gwyneth James, aged 23, and Peggy Ashton, aged 15, of Llanharan, Glamorgan, were drowned while bathing at Sandy Bay, Porthcawl. They were members of a Sunday-school party who had gone to the seaside for the annual outing, and were playing with a large ball in the sea near the Black Rock, around which there are dangerous currents.

A coastguard who noticed the two girls shouted a warning through a megaphone, but apparently they did not hear him. They got into difficulties, and three young men succeeded in bringing them ashore, where artificial respiration was applied for over an hour and a-half without success. Miss James was to have been married next month. Her fiance arrived on the scene soon after the accident.