NORTON Urban Council may soon own part of Malton.

At a stormy meeting on Friday night, the council decided unanimously to make the British Transport Commission an offer to take over not only Blackboards Road, but the whole of the bridge in Railway Street, half of which is in Malton.

At the same time the council declared that they were breaking off joint negotiations they have been conducting with Malton regarding the bridge.

Until Friday, the two urban councils had planned to jointly take over responsibility for the railway-owned bridge which links the two towns.

This move would enable Norton to take over Blackboards Road, which is in their area, and re-open it for road traffic.

What has angered the Norton councillors, allegedly, is that while the negotiations were still proceeding, Malton decided on specific conditions on which they would be prepared to take over their half of the bridge.

These conditions were that British Railways should first carry out satisfactorily all the repairs recommended in the report of the council’s consulting engineers; also that the railways should first pay the whole cost of the engineers report and make a capital contribution towards the future upkeep of the bridge.

The only conditions in Norton’s offer are that British Rail must make up Blackboards Road to their satisfaction and carry out all the work required to restore the bridge to a good state of repair as recommended by the consultants.

• MALTON is having its worst spell of unemployment for some years. There are about 175 people registered at the Employment Exchange in Saville Street, Malton, and 155 of them are actually claiming unemployment benefit.

Although quite a number of people have been thrown out of work by the weather, the situation is not attributable to any one cause. It is rather a case of a few men being laid off by a fairly large number of firms.

Although 175 sounds a lot for a thinly-populated district, it still represents only 2.9 per cent of the working population. There are very few women out of work and the demand for domestic help continues.

• THE Ryedale area, particularly the higher-lying localities, received more than the average snowfall during the weekend’s storm.

Many local people view the quantity of snow which fell as being about the biggest in living memory – certainly more than in 1947, and more reminiscent of the big blizzard of 1933.

From the Malton Gazette & Herald, Friday, March 14, 1958