100 years ago

The Weston (Bath) Parish Council had discussed the question of the recent depredations by wasps in the recreation ground.

It was stated that they had shown a great partiality to the copies of bylaws affixed to the notice boards, making marauding excursions, and conveying fragments of the parish council regulations in triumph to their nests.

Complete sets of bylaws had disappeared in this way. The council decided to coat the new copies of bylaws with varnish.

The annual plague of wasps was beginning to harass residents of Bath and neighbourhood, though they were not exhibiting the fondness for bylaws that was betrayed by neighbouring swarms.


50 years ago

About 5,000 factory workers of Rowntree and Co Ltd, York, who had started their fortnight’s holiday on Monday, would be fanning out, not only to various parts of England, but further afield.

Tangier was the destination of three women overlookers, and a party of 29 people from the Rowntree Youth Club was going to Calella, Spain.

A woman in the cream department was going on a coach tour to Poland and Czechoslovakia with her Polish husband, who would be seeing his mother for the first time in 20 years.

Despite the mass exodus, there would be no break in the dispatch of orders for home and export markets, as about 2,000 men and women would remain at work. Before setting out for their annual holidays the 300 employees at Cravens’ two factories in York completed a record export job for the United States.

During July alone 29½ tons of toffee and assorted boilings would be sent to Liverpool docks on the way to New York and San Francisco. Further substantial orders would be assembled after the works holidays for the Christmas trade in the United States.


25 years ago

Rowntree was to spend £15.5 million on a new Polo Mints plant to be built on the York factory site.

The introduction of new technology would mean about 25 job losses, but these were expected to be met by natural wastage.

The news of the Polo Mint investment followed an announcement by Rowntree in March that it was to build a £13 million cocoa processing plant. The investment in the Polo Mint plant would increase capacity by 30 per cent to meet the challenge of the 1990s.

About ten per cent of Polo mints were currently exported, mostly to the Middle East and Far East. But, given the involvement of Nestlé and the opening up of the European market in 1992, exports to the Continent, it was thought, could be a feature of the future.