100 years ago

An account had been given of a visit paid by a French journalist to one of the camps of wounded behind the centre of the French fighting line.

The men spoke of the horrible conditions of trench warfare, with the air poisoned by dead bodies that could not be removed because directly a head was lifted above the earth works it was a mark for artillery fire.

Without naming it, it referred to a jolly suburb of a large town, in the villas of which some British officers had installed themselves during an interval of rest. The correspondent had been very much struck to find them occupying themselves with golf, football, boating, and swimming; and, after speaking of their clean-shaved faces and carefully brushed uniforms, he observed: “The British troops fight like ours, but they dress and wash better.”

An officer had told the writer that the carnage on the Craonne plateau was such that, owing to the mass of German corpses, the aviators had now to fly high to avoid the pestilential odour.


50 years ago

The maypole on the village green at Aldborough, Boroughbridge, erected in 1903, was to come down shortly.

At the same time, it would be replaced by a new 45ft Scandinavian Red Pine, a few feet from the current site. The new pole, lying in a local farmyard, had been painted in red, white and blue stripes the previous week by Mr Stephenson, of Barwick-in-Elmet, who was an authority on maypole history.

Some weeks before, the Boroughbridge Fire Brigade had obliged by removing the top of the current pole - the “golden crown”. This was found to be made from the brass casing of a 1914-18 war shell and an Aldborough man, Mr Dickson Stephenson, had repaired it and increased its size to 22ins across by using the brass casing of a shell from the 1939-45 war.

The new pole, which had cost £30, was being erected by Aldborough and Boroughbridge Preservation Society.


25 years ago

Computer users today approached their terminals with trepidation amid fears that a Friday the 13th data-destroying “virus” was about to be unleashed.

Viruses are rogue programmes deliberately fed into systems to cause mayhem. They lie dormant for years before bursting into life when the host computer’s internal clock reaches a certain date.

Today, the unluckiest date in the calendar, a virus codenamed 1813 was due to come to life. British Rail had taken special steps to protect its £18 million computerised signalling centre at York.

Boffins believed they had developed a fail-safe system where any virus would lead to all the signals going to red.