TERRIFYING minutes during which five-year-old Al Ward dangled perilously above a 60ft sheer drop down a cliff have been relived decades later.

Mr Ward, 43, made his first trip back to the Isle of Thanet nearly 40 years on from his ordeal to celebrate the new year with old friend Ramsgate plumber Mike Healy.

He revisited Newgate gap at Cliftonville where he was moments away from falling to his death in the late 1960s. “I had been playing hide and seek with my brother Julian. I was going to go behind the pavilion but thought he would find me too easily, so rushed to go behind the bushes near the bridge.

“I didn’t know there was such a drop and stopped suddenly. I was wearing new sandals and I slipped but as I went down I managed to grab a root and hang on.

“I was screaming for help, I was terrified. It felt like ages before anyone came.

“I was praying I could climb up but the roots I was clinging on to started to come out.”

One of the first people on the scene was a man with “a big flash camera” who Mr Ward understands was a press photographer.

He was ultimately rescued by a man he believes was an off-duty policeman.

“He lowered himself down with just a rope around him. He was very good,” Mr Ward recalled.

His rescuer hauled him to safely to the relief of the crowd that had gathered, including the fire brigade.

Mr Ward, a lumber worker from Andover, is keen to make contact with his rescuer or anyone else who remembers the incident.

He was told that a photograph taken of his predicament was made into a postcard.

At the time he was down from London on a holiday trip with his mother Eileen. They had been visiting her friend Hannah who he believes lived nearby on the Cliftonville seafront.

Mr Ward was shocked that the drop into the gap, surrounding a steep slipway to the beach by Queens Court, has only an inadequate low wall and single railing to prevent people falling.

And because there are still bushes there, the drop inches beyond is obscured.

“I am very surprised more has not been done to make this safe or that there have not been other serious accidents or deaths,” he added.

Newgate Gap Bridge was rebuilt in 2003.

Anyone who recalls the incident is asked to contact reporter Mary Louis at the Thanet Extra, 183 Northdown Road, Cliftonville CT9 2PA, telephone 01843 222777, e-mail mlouis@the kmgroup.co.uk