CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21056, 7 March 1940, Page 12

CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS

INCIDENTS OF BLACKOUT GIRL WITH HER HAT AFIRE Air Mail Service.) LONDON, Feb. 8 The queerest accidents of 1939 make, as a whole, a catalogue of tragedies; but the queerest of them all involved nothing more fatal than a blow on the jaw for a young man in Hyde Park, says Reynolds News. It happened that a girl strolling in the park on a hot summer day was naturally annoyed when a young man she had never seen before snatched off her lovely new hat. Not being of the passive sort she gave him a blow in the face, and then apologised. A glass ornament on her hat, acting like a magnifying glass, had concentrated sun rays and set the hat on fire, and the quick-witted young man had snatched it off just in time to keep the flames from spreading to her hair. An Oklahoma farmer electrocuted himself with a bucket of water. He had run into a high-tension pylon near his house. The grass caught fire. He ran indoors and fetched a bucket of water and poured it on the grass.

For a split second the column of water hitting barbed wire in contact with the high-tension cable made a contact. A split second was long enough. The farmer fell back dead, electrocuted by a 4000 volt current. A fireman in South London had better luck. Corrugated iron fell from a blazing building near the electric railway. The fireman fell back on the live line—and got up safely. He had been sitting on the hose. A bird-watcher from Memphis, Tennessee, has a believe-it-or-not story. He says a bird flew up to its nest in the church steeple with a live match in its beak. The match struck as the bird flew, past a window pane. The nest caught fire. So did the church. The first casualty a North London A.R.P. first aid station had to deal with was a swan that flew into telegraph wires. Switched on the Light Two Tottenham sisters woke up in neighbouring beds in the same hospital after being run down in different suburbs—but in the same black-out. Mr Joseph Schoelling, of Salt Lake City, had an adventure on a bicycle. He crashed into a car. looped the loop unintentionally, and next moment found himself riding across the roof of the saloon. In Jersey City, Joseph C. Fayder was brushing his teeth when his 15-months-old son said “Daddy” for the first time. Mr Fayder was so overcome with astonishment he swallowed the toothbrush. The black-out has a part in many of Britain’s 1939 chapter of accidents. A Weymouth grocer was hauled out of his bed because a side of bacori had fallen down in his shop and switched the light on. One woman, at Wakefield, died from exposure after being lost in the black-out. Two A.T.S. women walked into the Thames at Windsor; a bicyclist rode into the river at Great Yarmouth and was fished out by a chandler’s boy who had gone down to the bank to empty the teapot. Framlingham, little Suffolk market town, had the year’s best black-out mix-up. There was a fire. The policeinspector, running through the dark to ring the church bell, which is also the fire-bell, fell and split his head. When he found the alarm could not be raised the fire superintendent drove the engine off himself. Meanwhile somebody had broken into the church and rang the bell. The firemen turned up to find the engine gone. And because the church bell is also a supplementary airraid warning most of Framlingham was out of bed and on the way to the cellar. British black-out deaths, which exceed the total of British war casualties. affect mainly pedestrians, 60