100 years ago

“Knowledge” wrote: “I got the enclosed (Chief Constable’s notice re lights-out) left at my place of business yesterday with a request to pay what attention I could to it and minimise the lights I was using in accordance with the leaflet, but you can understand my surprise when going to the post last night I noticed that the clock in the Courts of Justice shone out as bright as ever, while the other lighted tower clocks were extinguished.

"Where, I ask, sir, is the sense of such an appeal from the city authorities, when the lights in the clock over the Chief Constable’s own offices are left burning as a veritable landmark should an air raid be attempted?

"I fail also to see why we should extinguish or even lower our shop lights when the electric lamps and gas lamps are left to burn merry and bright.”


50 years ago

There was nothing more lost than a lost sheep. And one which turned up from nowhere, and seemed to belong to nobody, had puzzled police and farmers in the East Riding.

The animal – a three-year-old Suffolk ram – wandered into Mr Peter Wilkinson’s North Farm at Scorby, Gate Helmsley, on December 29.

Pocklington police made a note: “Property found – one sheep” and began to check with other local farmers. Mr Wilkinson made the ram comfortable for a few days – until it went for a walk again, to turn up a short while later on the neighbouring farm of Mr John Ford. It was still there – almost a month after police started trying to trace the owner.

The difficulty, said a Pocklington police spokesman, is that the animal carries no distinguishing marks of any kind.


25 years ago

The Yorkshire coast was back on the European pollution blacklist after four of its main tourist beaches failed sewage contamination tests.

Scarborough’s North Bay was condemned again after being given the all-clear in 1988, and Staithes, Sandsend and Flamborough South Landing were also judged unclean. Only one Yorkshire Beach – Flamborough South Landing – had failed the test in 1988. But this deterioration was not matched throughout the country as a whole.

There was a ten per cent improvement on 1988, from 66 per cent to 76 per cent, partly due to the good weather, experts believed.

The leader of the Sons of Neptune, the Scarborough environmental pressure group, said Britain’s beaches would remain polluted as long as sewage was dumped untreated in the sea. A £29 million pipe to take sewage further out to sea was under construction in Scarborough and would be finished for the 1992 bathing season, said a spokesman for Yorkshire Water.