100 years ago

Private Jackson, of the East Yorkshire Regiment, had spoken of the admiration which the uniform of the British troops excited in the French soldier.

As a Frenchman had put it to Private Jackson, “Anglais, no can see far off; Frenchman, him see plain.”

Private Jackson described a grim incident of the battlefield. A hedge divided two fields, and through that hedge the Germans had disappeared, leaving gaps.

For these gaps our troops made. It was found that the Germans had trained their guns on these spaces, and they inflicted considerable losses on the troops before they could “make good.”

“I was one of the last of my company to go through,” said Private Jackson, “and when I got up nine of our men were lying round the gap, some of them dead. As I was about to pass through, two of them, who had been pretty badly hit, shouted out, “Good luck to you old chap. Give us a cigarette.”


50 years ago

The English spa was a long time dying. Its demise had been forecast often enough, but after Buxton closed the municipal thermal baths the previous September and Harrogate announced the closure of the Royal Baths in 1968 the end of the spa business seemed to be in sight.

But not a bit of it. Not at Buxton, not at Harrogate, and certainly not at Bath, where a successful annual festival had been grafted on to the attraction of the city as Britain's most graceful spa.

What had happened at Buxton and Harrogate, in fact, was that the spa treatment business was being transferred to hospitals - largely because of the heavy demand. Patients who needed it would get treatment under the National Health Service.


25 years ago

World chess champion Garry Kasparov had stopped all speculation that machines might be mentally superior to man when he trounced the world's most highly rated chess computer in two short games in New York.

Kasparov had beaten “Deep Thought” in 53 moves in the first game and 37 moves in the second. The computer had resigned both times. Both games had been all but over by the 20th move. “He has just beaten it with an ease we couldn't have imagined,” said Shelby Lyman, television commentator.

Chess masters said the champion had won with quiet but aggressive play which simply wore down the computer. Before the games, Kasparov said though the computer was good it did not have enough “fantasy, intuition and imagination.”

After the games, he said: “They can improve it very much in the future. In two or three years it will be strong against a reasonable grandmaster.”