LEG DROPPED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 175, 3 November 1941, Page 3

LEG DROPPED

BY PARACHUTE

TO LEGLESS ACE

When the Royal Air Force flew over northern France and dropped a new artificial leg to their legless comrade, Wing-Commander Bader, D.5.0., D.F.C., they drCAV the world's attention to the "work of British chaftsmeji who are, giving new limbs to those maimed by war

and otlierwi.se

Bader's leg came from a factory in London where a hundred British citizens, both servicemcn and civilians, arc fitted each week with new artificial legs that are ii miracle of mechanical efficiency. Behind the quiet fitting rooms large workshops hum with drilling machines, sawmills, lathes and presses at which 300 craftsmen work in wood, leather and metal.

Since 1931, the workshops have made all the artificial legs supplied to the public by the U.K. Ministry of Pensions, and they send out component parts to the Dominions and the United States. The largest organisation of its kind in the world, It owes its origin to a Col. J. E. Hanger who, losing his leg fighting for the South in the American Civil War, had the idea of making an artificial leg for himself. Many thousands of people everywhere are to-day walking naturally again on legs built in Britain since 1915 by his successors. Not all of them have the bound(ess vitality of Bader, who, legless <is he was, won his D.S.O. by leading a Canadian squadron of Hurrb eancs 'which dived straight into a lightly packed formation of 70 to (00 raiders and brought eleven of them down. But main- of these lcg(ess men and women will again be lble to cycle, play tennis or golf, ride on horseback, drive a car, pilot an aeroplane or even to dancc. Filling an artificial leg is a difficult job made easier by the cooperation of the patient. Wing. Commander Bader, who could turn a double somersault, was always eager to try out new devices and to offer suggestions. Only a fortnight before he baled out in France, he was in the leg-makers' office explaining what he would do if Ik; found; it necessary to descend by parachute. To avoid jarring the delicate mechanism of the legs he planned to slither to the ground on his buttocks, a trick remembered from liis Rugby football days.