August 18 (From York Press)

August 18

12:10am Saturday 18th August 2012 in Way we were

100 years ago

For some time the Paris police had suspected a milk vendor of watering his milk.

Several times samples of milk from deliveries were submitted to the experts of the municipal laboratory, and each time these were declared to contain a large proportion of water.

The milk vendor protested his innocence, and even invited the police to witness the milking of his cows. This they did, but the pure milk samples which were taken away on these occasions were always found to be well-watered.

However, an inspector recently called quite unexpectedly and asked the vendor to milk a certain cow. The official, who kept a vigilant eye on the milker, noticed that he fumbled with his right hand in the vicinity of his waistcoat pocket.

“What are you doing?” Asked the inspector. “Oh, it is only my braces that hurt me,” answered the milk dealer; but in a second the inspector had unbuttoned the waistcoat, and discovered there an ingenious contrivance of two small rubber pipes, connected with rubber bags containing water.

By the pressure of his elbow on the bags the unscrupulous vendor could, with but little risk of detection, add a considerable quantity of water to the milk pail.

50 years ago

Mrs Sherri Finkbine, aged 30, the American woman who had feared her unborn baby was deformed because she had taken thalidomide, had had a legal abortion in hospital in Stockholm to terminate her pregnancy. The operation went normally and Mrs Finkbine was in a satisfactory condition. Mr Robert Finkbine said that the child that was to have been born to his wife was deformed. He said doctors had told him that the foetus showed clear signs of damage.

“Now we know beyond doubt that we were right in insisting on an abortion,” he added. “This certainly lifts a heavy load off my mind,”

he said. Mrs Finkbine, from Phoenix, Arizona, had taken thalidomide tablets early in her pregnancy and feared her child would be born deformed. She flew to Sweden after an American court had refused to grant permission for a legal abortion. The Swedish Medical Board had given permission the previous day for the operation to take place in Stockholm.

25 years ago

It was almost elbow-room only at York. Thousands of racegoers poured into the city for the threeday Ebor meeting at York Racecourse. With the school holidays swelling the unusually high number of seasonal summer visitors, it was the start of York’s most crowded three days of the year.

More than 90,000 were expected on Knavesmire for the event, which two years before had led to violence in the city streets. York Race Committee was now implementing stricter controls over alcohol