Friday, October 8, 2004

100 years ago: What a pandemonium there would be were the ladies of our towns and cities to adopt the latest degradation for improving the elegance of the figure, in the opinion of one columnist. According to a fashion writer in the World, the most ungraceful form can be transformed into one of sylph-like proportions by daily practice at horn-blowing. By this means we are told that waists can be reduced, flat chests inflated, hips broadened and lungs strengthened, to say nothing of reducing weight. Just imagine, asked the columnist, the women of York having "ten good blasts a day" on a French horn: "one trembles to think what would be the result."

50 years ago: Demolition of the bomb-damaged shop premises at 50 and 51 Coney Street in York was to begin towards the end of next month. The architects, from Leeds, had already submitted plans for the new building, designed to conform with the Georgian architecture of Coney Street, which had now been accepted. Though the plans had been on the drawing board for many years, a licence for the building had only recently been granted. The new property, owned by Queen's College, Oxford, would consist of three floors: the ground floor would be let as a shop and the remainder as offices. It was estimated that the premises would be ready for occupation by April 1956.

25 years ago: North Yorkshire traffic police had speeding motorists in their sights, as senior officers introduced a new gun-shaped radar device which could "book" rogue drivers in a split second. The American gadgets, which cost £1,000, had been dubbed "radar guns" and their first victims were already beginning to filter through court. They used the Doppler effect, a "spin-off" of radar, to calculate the speed of drivers anything up to a mile away, although by the time they got to that distance the guns had a wide spread, and they struggled to read individual speeds in a line of traffic. A reporter was present when a police officer was using one the guns from a Malton Road lay-by near York, and saw the driver of an articulated lorry stopped for doing 38 mph in a 30 mph zone. When asked, the driver accused the police of using "sneaky" tactics to find wrongdoers.

Updated: 09:10 Friday, October 08, 2004