From our archives:

85 years ago

In the village of Clifford, near Boston Spa, there had been some considerable excitement and indignation after a statue of the Blessed Virgin had been taken from the Church of England during a funeral service and carried through the street to the Roman Catholic Church by Mr Conrad Carnes, of Willow Grove, a retired bank official. Mr Carnes who had forced entry into the church, maintained that the statue belonged to the Roman Catholic Church and he was only taking it to its proper place. And sixty children from York’s Scattered Homes had completed a fortnight of their three weeks’ camp at Primrose Valley, and there was not the slightest doubt that they had derived great benefit. The children not subjected to any rigorous camp discipline, were encouraged daily to paddle in the shallow water.

50 years ago

All the signs pointed at Miami Beach, Florida, to former Vice-President Richard Nixon being nominated as the Republican Party’s contender for American Presidency in November. Mr Nixon was a firm favourite over his two rivals, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and California’s Governor, ex-film star Ronald Reagan. And a start had been made on re-erecting a memorial in York Minster to the Archbishop Walter de Grey, without its exquisite painted stone coffin lid. The lid which had been dismantled earlier that year, was now being preserved and was likely to go on show to the public at a later date, in the new chamber created underground beneath the huge Central Tower of the Minster.

20 years ago

Drunken yobs who had brought fear to the streets of York during the previous year’s Ebor races had been warned: Keep out of town. Police leave had been cancelled to double the number of officers on duty during the event and one York hotel was planning for staff to man the barricades to keep troublemakers at bay. According to a set of declassified documents dating from the time of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, York would have been at the forefront of rebuilding Britain if the country was hit by a nuclear attack. The unveiled Ministry of Defence dossier stated that in the event of an all-out nuclear attack on the UK, York would have been the centre of one of 12 regional governments running the country.