The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1910-04-13 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

STOP PRESS.  THE NWTON ACCIDENT,  On inquiry at the Clatterbridge Ttpspital late last night we were inf6rmed that the young man. Viii. cent Cross. of Irby, who received injuries in the collision with a motor car owned by Mr. Butterworth, of West Kirby, is still in the same I conditicn in which he lay last week. The injuries are such as to render Le the case feanTdoetthest shouldous.l h In any se y case it. vice ,the young man will be an in* valid for a very long time. 14 ifillgthqm • ,•  marked him down, meaning to have a talk with him later, but for the moment I was too btuiy to do more than nod to him. I saw, however, that he went up to talk to Katie at her stall, and that Katie asked him to go away; and then he went off to the bar to have a drink.  "I was on the point of following him, but something prevented me. A messenger came to me from the manager, and I had to go up to his room. It was a thousand pities. If only I'd had fi-,e minutes conversation with Holloway then, the thing that happened wouldn't have occurred. I knew and I should have :ten sure to tell him but no matter. I mustn't anticipate. "The manager kept me abou half an hour. When I got back into the Hall it was about five minutes to ten—the time when Orridge's turn came on. The place wait cro*ded, as it always was at that our. The attendants uncovered the tank, and rigged up a railing, and pressed the spectators back behind it. I looked round involuntarily to see if young Holloway was anywhere near, and I saw that he was standing a little way out of the crush, close behind Katie's stall, which had been covered up with tarpaulin, so that the water might not be splashed over it. He still had that wild look in his eyes which had frightened Katie; and he was craning his neck to gaze up at the roof, where the sack was being drawn over the head of the diver as he stood upon his hanging platform. "Then came the call for silence, and all the talking and even the shuffling of feet stopped. We heard the voice from far above us loudly counting, 'one.—two.—three.' We saw the man in the sack rhythmically swaying his body in preparation for his plunge. An? then—  "Yes, then, just as he was letting himself go—just as it was too late for him to stop himself—l happened to turn my head, and there I saw young Holloway put his hands to his month and yell like a madman in the midst of the expectant hush: "'Stop, man! Wait a minute!' "You can guess what happened then. The diver had been startled, and his dive was queered. He was not diving at all, but had just lost his balance and fallen. It was no use for him now to count his 'one two --three ' in the ,sack. ...He_ never knew how near he was to the water, be he flofi*d into it anyhow. There was a splash, and then a thud, and when they lifted the body out—" "Good God!" I interrupted. "You don't mean to tell me that Orridge---" "It wasn't Or2idge after all. It was the understudy. For some reason or other he'd come on a night sooner than had been intended, and Holloway had murdered the wrong man by mistake. Katie and I were the only two persona in the Hall who knew." And Holloway?" I asked. "He was running for his life, and the crowd were after him. They caught him before he got to the door, and you may guess it was only a battered remnant of him that the police rescued and carried off to the police. station. I believe he's in Broadmoor now. But that, at any rate, is the true story of the last high dive at the Royal Emporium. The coroner's jury, of course, brought in a rider about 'dangerous exhibitions,' but there was hardly any need of that. The Emporium might have advertised for another diver for a long time before it would have found one ; and Orridge, at any rate, was never likely to want to perform the feat again, even if Katie would have let him."