WIDOW GETS £600.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 643, 22 December 1932, Page 7

WIDOW GETS £6OO.

Result of Relief Worker’s Death. ACCIDENT NEAR RAXGIORA. A relief workers’ widow will receive £6OO compensation as a result of an unusual claim heard in the Arbitration Court yesterday. Cornelius O'Neill was employed on August 30, 1932, by the Rangiora Borough Council, and he and other men w’ere doing certain work for the North Canterbury Electric Power Board. The men were transported round the district in a motor lorry, and their work took them from within one to eighteen miles’ radius of the power house. On the day’ he met his death, O’Neill had been working at Tramway Road, a distance of ten miles from Rangiora. He had half an hour off for lunch and knocked off work at 4.15 or 4.30 p.m. and started the journey home. He was sitting at the back of the lorry with a tarpaulin wrapped round him, when a rope of the tarpaulin got caught in one of the lorry wheels. O’Neill was pulled off the lorry, his head striking some of the ironwork of the vehicle. He was killed instantaneously. O’Neill’s widow, Elizabeth Sarah O’Neill, of Rangiora. submitted that at the time of the accident, O’Neill was still on duty, that his duty did not finish till he got back to the power station, and that he owed a duty to his employer to be where he was at the time of the accident. The accident arose in the course of his employment. In entering judgment for the plaintiff against the Rangiora Borough Council for £591 Is 4d, and medical and funeral expenses, £23 18s, the president of the Court, Mr Justice Frazer, said there was no question in the Court’s mind that it w’as the duty of O’Neill to travel to and from work in the lorry. It was not a privilege, but a duty to travel by it. The local authority in the case was the Borough Council, for it applied for and accepted a grant from the Unemployment Board, and it was the body expressly authorised to undertake work either on its own behalf or on any other property. The Pow’er Board merely found scope for the employment of a certain number of men without in itself accepting any responsibility in the matter.