Egmont Tragedy Linked With War

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1043, 6 August 1930, Page 1

Egmont Tragedy Linked With War

MAN SAVED UNDER FIRE BROTHER RECOVERS BODY Special to THE SUN STRATFORD, Today. There is a strange coincidence in connection with the death on the mountain of Lance Gibson. From August 3, 1930, when Gibson set out to rescue Walter Hall on Mount Egmont, to August 3, 1918, in France is a far cry, but there is a grim association. On August 3, 1918, a New Zealand machine-gun party was cut off from the New Zealand lines near Bapaume, and the whole of the gun crew was killed with the exception of three men—a lieutenant, a sergeant and a machine-gunner. The machine-gunner was wounded and the lieutenant, in attempting to get him to safety, was himself mortally wounded. The sergeant, assisted by the machinegunner, who was able to give some help, got the officer back to the reserve lines under heavy fire, but there he died. The sergeant was Gibson and the officer Lieutenant J. N. Thomson, brother to Mr. Percy Thomson, Mayor of Stratford, who 12 years later w-ent out searching for Gibson and helped to carry his dead body in.