WELL DONE!

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 809, 8 February 1910, Page 3

WELL DONE!

THE KING’S GREETING TO A BOY HERO. LUNCHEON AT THE PALACE. In the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace on Monday, December 13th, the King held an investiture, and conferred the honours and decorations which were bestowed in his Majesty’s birthday honours list. There was i long procession of notable people. Then last of all came a little lad with firm step, frank brown eyes, and flushed cheeks. This boy was Thomas William Lewis, the hero of the Newport Dock disaster. A Court official read out to the King an account of the boy’s bravery in volunteering to go down into a pit which teemed threats of death. When this recital was finished the King said in deep, kindly tones, ‘‘Well done!” and handed to the lad a case containing the Albert medal ‘‘for saving life.” The boy dropped to one k’iee on the cushioned stool at the foot of the throne and kissed the outstretched hand of the King.

The King then gave the boy his hand to shake, and said, ‘‘Well done ; good luck.” The boy would have left the Throne Room as others had, but the King motioned to two gentlemen ushers, and they conducted the boy to the Stewards’ Room, where he was royally entertained with chicken, roast beef, and pudding. Describing his impressions during his audience with the King, the boy afterwards said ; ‘‘l was not afraid. The King is a nice gentleman, I kissed the King’s hand. I saw two others do it. That’s a thing not many have done. The palace is a fine big place, and my father said he thought he would sink to the knee in the carpets. They offered me the pick of the King’s nine, but I had lemonade. We saw the kitchens and the cellars afterwards.”

Lewis looked a smart little figure before the King in a blue serge suit and a green and black tie, which he wore because his mother is an Irishwoman. On Tuesday the boy returned to the naval base at Rosyth, where he is working out his time as an apprentice engineer.

On July 2nd last, Tom Lewis, then a lad of fifteen, was standing with a group of other lads watching the efforts of engineers and navvies to rescue the men imprisoned by the collapse of a great timbered trench in the Newport Docks. Far down below the surface, amid a horrible tangle of timber, mud, sand and machinery, were men, dying and dead. One of the men could be heard groaning at some unknown depth in the heart of the pit. He might be anything from twenty to seventy feet below. He was certainly helpless, pinned down, doomed jf left there to a terrible death froqi the slow-rising tide which had broken through the sea wall into the trench. There was the additional possibility that a further collapse of the sand and timbers would crush the life out of the man, or of anyone who went down to his rescue.

There were men in plenty who would have gone down to help the sufferer, but they could not. The openings between the tangled timber were so small that only a slim lad could slip between them.

The rescuers called for a lad to go down, and Tom Lewis volunteered. He was small lor his age, his work as a boilermaker’s lad, tossing hot rivets to the riveters, had made him hard and strong, and he was brave. And he went down.

Tom Lewis told again the story of his wonderful deed in short, simple words. “I was down there,” he said, “for two hours and a quarter. The man was about thirty feet down. I dimed down by the timbers, I had no rope round me. The man was pinned by his hand and his feet. He said, Tve been here three days,’ but it wasn’t nore than three hours. Then he said, ‘Get a hamper and chisel and cut my out.’ I called up for a hammer and chisel. They sent them down to me with a saw and some candles. I stuck the the caudles against some timbers and lighted them. “It was hard work cutting the timbers with a chisel. I was lying across the body of a dead man all the time, and I could hear the blood dropping from him. After a long time I got my man’s hand free. Then I hung down and worked at his foot. At last the men above said I must come up because the sand was shifting again, So I came up. An hour later the man worked his way out with the saw which I gave him. He was the last to come out alive.”