Accidents and Incidents — fatal and otherwise
A Broken leg was sustained, on March 6th, by James Benge, a man in the employ of Messrs. Breeds & Co. He was carrying a can containing 1 cwt. of oil up the Oak passage, better known as the “Broken Light”, when he slipped and fell heavily to the ground. — A child was run over by a fly in All Saints street on the April 14th, and was much bruised, but no bones were broken. — On the following day Walter Weller fell from an upper window of Strickland’s corn warehouse in George street, and though considerably hurt, escaped without fractured limbs. — A broken thigh was sustained by James Jarrett — a man with a wife and seven children — on the 26th of April, by falling from a temporary scaffold whilst marbling the stair-case at 5 Breeds place. Tilden Chapman was also thrown down at the same time, but he fortunately caught hold of the hand-rail, or he would have fallen a depth of 30 feet. — Contusions and bruises befell James Drury, a bricklayer, on the 2nd of May by falling 20 feet from a scaffold at Mr. Thwaites’s new coal warehouse behind Wellington square. — Drowned while drunk was the case of Henry Beake, a workman at Messrs. Rock and Son’s coach factory. Thomas Balt, another workman, was the companion of the unfortunate man on the night of Friday, July 16th, and according to the evidence of the latter, the said Beake and Balt went to the Wellington inn and drank three pints of ale and some whiskey. Then they went out to Carlisle parade, taking with them are a pot of ale, some tobacco and some pipes. They sat there till after midnight and then went into the sea to bathe. Beake was drowned, and his body — an unusual circumstance —floated to the shore. Means for restoration were adopted by coastguards and policemen without success. The same men who attempted the resuscitation of Beake declared that Balt was drunk when he came out of the water, and there was no doubt that Beake was in the same condition. The drowned man was 25 years of age. — A miraculous escape from death or even fractured limbs resulted to an infant daughter of James White, sexton of All Saints, on the 31st of August. As this child, twelve months old, was sitting in the second floor window of Lavender’s house (late the Foresters’ Arms), it fell through a cracked pane of glass on to a sky-light close beneath the window, breaking through the same and falling down a depth of 11 feet on to a stair-case landing, by which, without being cut, it received a contusion of the head and for a time became in sensible, but recovered. — Nearly drowned in the week ending Sept. 18th, was a lad named Woolley, employed by Mr. Edward Bowmer. While bathing, he was carried ¾ of a mile out to sea, and was in imminent danger of sinking when he was picked up by “Admiral” Wingfield, who was out with a party of ladies in a small pleasure-boat. — A fractured leg befell Mr. Edward Morgan, a wholesale grocer, of Hastings in this way: — Having heard that a vessel, freighted with salt, for Hastings, was stranded near Romney, he proceeded in that direction, and at a spot beyond Rye, his gig collided with a post, by which Mr. Morgan fractured one leg. The bone was afterwards set, and the sufferer returned to Hastings the same night, in great pain. — A broken arm was the result of an accident to James Perry, on -
