STEEPLEJACKS' ORDEAL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3022, 20 October 1908, Page 3

STEEPLEJACKS' ORDEAL.

Ainsworth, a Bradford steeplejack, described one day last month to jurymen,-, who could not repress a shudder, how he was saved by a lucky clutch at a rope-end whilst falling with his comrade from a mill chimney 170 ft in height." Conway, the other steeplejack, was not so fortunate, and met an instantaneous death. The men had climbed the great stack in the usual way, by clamping ladder upon ladder to the brick until the ladders reached tc the top. tested every stave of the ladder twice in their dangerous work. At the end they sat on a plank placed across two staves. Suddenly one of the staves on which they reuted broke, the plank tilted beneath them, and instantly they were in the air, falling to the earth 170 ft below. As he fell a swinging rope whipped across Ainsworth's hand, and his fingers closed upon it. The jerk was terrible, but his grip was made marvellously strong by the knowledge that it * meant life or death. He hung, suspended, whilst .his comrade was already mangled and dead on the earth. His Jjold was precarious and slippery; by great muscular exertion he got his other hand to the rope. Then dangling, be struggled up slowly a terrible test of strength lasting several minutes. He won. He reached one of the ladders and hung there. Then, as he realised that he lived and was practically safe, he slowly descended to the group which had conveyed away his comrade's remains. Ainsworth denied that a flash of.' lightning, £e=n at the instant he fell, caused the catastrophe. The jury, in Conway's case, returned a verdict of "Accident."