IRISH TIMES ODDITIES: ALLEN FOSTERculls more stories from the archives of The Irish Times, available online at www.irishtimes.com/archive
A canny Scot
A Scotsman appeared at Liverpool Police Court yesterday with his head swathed in bandages. "That is all show," said an Irishman who was charged with hitting him with a kettle.
"He was walking about without bandages yesterday."
"Is that so?" asked the magistrate.
"Yes," replied the Scotsman.
"Why?"
"To keep them clean for today."
January 12th, 1928
200 miles in a canvas canoe
Mr WJ.Moore, JP of Tir-Owen, Ashby Gardens, Belfast, has completed a circuit of Co Down in a small canvas canoe built by himself. Mr Moore crossed Belfast Lough from Whitehouse to Bangor, and proceeded along the coast to Warrenpoint and Newry, returning to Belfast via the inland waterway to Portadown and the Lagan Canal, a distance of nearly 200 miles.
He used his canoe for sleeping in at night, and carried with him water and provisions.
August 13th, 1928
Hung by feet to save plane
Thirty-four-year-old Dundalk man Tony Watters averted a plane crash in Nova Scotia on Saturday by hanging by his feet from the plane to secure a landing wheel. Watters, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was held by the feet by fellow crew members while he fixed the wheel in flight. The plane, carrying 20 people, had circled the landing field at Greenwood for three hours while the crew and ground officers were deciding what to do. Watters, formerly, of Linenhall Street, Dundalk, is married to a Dundalk woman and they have a two-year-old daughter.
January 25th, 1960
Surprise for boy scout
While pushing his way through some dense undergrowth near Sirus Cove near Sydney, Australia, a boy scout came upon a bottle which he expected would contain the directions he was searching for. Instead, however, the bottle turned out to be full of sovereigns, five hundred of them, some having been minted in 1910. It is thought that they were proceeds from a robbery or a miser's cache.
October 21st, 1929
Direct evidence for the bench
The policeman watched. Terence Webb was behaving suspiciously.
The officer wondered whether to arrest him. Then Webb, a 23-year-old shoe repairer, of no fixed address, slipped around the corner, off Plumstead High Street, Woolwich, got into a car and started the engine. Immediately PC Victor Watchorn arrested him. At Woolwich yesterday, Webb was jailed for three months for attempting to take and drive away the car. He was also sentenced to three months, to run concurrently, for taking away another car. He had three previous convictions. "I knew he was guilty the minute he got into the car," PC Watchorn explained to the court. "You see, it was my car."
January 20th, 1956
Captain's message 40 years in sea
In 1887 Captain John Lee, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, sailed from this port and was not heard of again until this week, when the Government of Nova Scotia received from a German cable officer in Prussia a message which had been picked up in a bottle on the shores of the Baltic. It was the message written by Lee in 1887 as his ship sank, and must have floated about the ocean for nearly 40 years.
It is absolutely authentic, since all the details of the loss have been verified. The message ran: May 17th, 1887. To whom it may concern - Tell mother I died fighting - John Lee, Halifax.
November 9th, 1926