PARENTS’ SACRIFICE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 316, 29 March 1928, Page 12

PARENTS’ SACRIFICE

DIED FOR CHILDREN TRAGEDY OF BLAZING FARMHOUSE Waking early one morning to find their lonely farmhouse near Lydeard St. Lawrence, eight miles north-west of Taunton, in a blaze, Mr. Roland Edgar Blaeklidge, a retired army officer, and his wife, rushed to the bedroom where their two children—Elsie, aged 12, and Ethel, aged seven—were sleeping, and quickly lowered them from the window on to a portico, from which they reached the ground in safety. In the same way they saved the children’s grandmother, Mrs. Smethers, who was also asleep in the house, but when they themselves were about to escape from the flames the floor of the room collapsed beneath them, and they vanished before (heir children’s eyes into the fiercely burning room below. Mrs. Smethers fell from the portico and broke a leg, and was unable to move. When the flames were subdued, the charred remains of Mr. and Mrs. Blaeklidge were found in the blackened ruins of their home. Mr. William Bawden, another neighbour, who was the first to reach the blazing farmhouse, found the two little girls, clad only in their nightdresses, huddled together in pitiful distress in their dead father’s motor-car. They ■ were cared for at the house of the j vicar. It is thought that the fire was started by a wooden beam at the back 1 of the kitchen fireplace catching alight. 1 Mr. Blaeklidge was 37, and his wife ; 33. <