PORT CHALMERS FIRE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3769, 13 July 1907, Page 3

PORT CHALMERS FIRE.

Heartrending Details

Dunedin July 8

One of the fit st people to arrive on the scene of the fire by which Mrs Haberfield and her children lost their lives at Port Chalmers, says : —“ I noticed something ; it looked like a heap of sacks on the road. This was the man and bis daughter. The girl was found doubled up under the window from which she had jumped or had been thrown, a distance of about 16 feet. The girl was almost naked, and burned badly about the lower part of the body. We could not tell whether she was dead or not. Her wrist was bleeding so badly that I could not feel her pulse, so I put my head down and could just make out the faintest movement of the heart. Presently she uttered a groan and her head fell back. Her father was in a terrible state, bleeding freely, while his head arms, and legs were burned. He was on the point of swooning away, and kept saying ‘ Oh ray poor wife and my poor child.’ I went out and told the bystanders that there was a woman and a child in the blazing building. Someone, however, said that they were safe, but this was afterwards found to be a mistake. The inmates had been burnt by that time. When the brigade, whi.h arrived promptly, got the fire under, W. Dougherty, one of the firemen, was told to search the bed, but at first he could see nothing. While he was looking the flames broke out again in a corner of the bedroom, and he turned to play the hose on them. Presently he saw something white —the hose was washing the grime and soot off a human figure, and Dougherty exclaimed, ‘ Good God, there is a woman here.’ When the brigade and the police got inside with the lamps, they saw the bod3 7 , and on moving it found that the mother, driven into the corner near the window, had doubled herself over her three-year-old boy in a last endeavour to save his life. It must have been a gallant struggle. The child only had one leg burned and had evidently been suffocated. As for the woman, she was terribly burned, especially about the legs, back and head.’’

There is a consensus of opinion that Mr Haberfield’s conduct must have been of an uncommonly heroic kind. It was not only that he did everything possible while bleeding from a cut artery and otherwise injured, but people who visited the scene of the fire to-dav are quite unable to account for his entering the building the second time. As far as can be seen there is no way up to the window, and yet he managed to enter it a second time.