SEARCH FOR BALL LOST 17 YEARS AGO

Shannon News, 9 July 1929, Page 4

SEARCH FOR BALL LOST 17 YEARS AGO

GOLFER’S VAIN QUEST,

JOURNEY FROM LONDON TO VICTORIA FALLS.

Amusing results have followed the publication of a story in the South African newspapers of a Scottish tourist who had come all the way to Rhodesia to search for a golf ball he lost On a visit to the Victoria Falls 17 years ago.

The tourist was Mr William Blane, C.8.E., special correspondent for the journal Engineer, London, and a past chief of the Caledonian Society of London. The story he -told at the time (says the Capetown correspondent of the Herald) was that while staying at the Falls hotel 17 years ago, he lost a golf ball in an attempt to drive it 100 yards across the chasm on to Livingstone Island. The first ball Mr Blane drove unfortunately dropped into the water, but the second sailed across the chasm and landed in the tangled undergrowth of the island. It was in this tropical vegetation that Mr Biane, returning after 17 years, said he would have to search. He was not without hope when lie went north from Bulawayo, bu-t the ball was not found.

Meantime news of the great expedition to the Falls had had world-wide circulation —the optimism of the' Scot, or perhaps it was his memory of his determination not to write the ball off as lost until the hopelessness of the search had been fully demonstrated, having appealed to the newspaperreading public. From Rhodesia Mr Blanc went on a tour of the Union, and everywhere he went the question was the same: “Well aid you find that ball?” In a letter Mr Blanc describes ■ his experiences a's follows:—“The ball lasted me until I got home. Everybody on the Union greeted rnc with the question, ‘Did you find the ball?’ When I went on Balmoral Castle to go home, the captain arranged that I should sit at his table. ‘Why this distinction?’ I asked. ‘Well, it’s that ball/ he replied. ‘Bid you find it?’ . “Three days from Southampton, in the course of dinner, a wireless message vas handod to me. It was from the curator a,t the Victoria Falls, and it read: ‘Ball found. Condition not too bad.’ On the night before lauding a ball was served in my soup, purporting to have been dropped on deck from an aeroplane, Alas! it was a' Dunlop, and Dunlop balls were not made in 1911!”