Friday, April 2, 2004

100 years ago: A former tinner from Scarborough, who became a national cause celebre after he stole a turnip from a field whilst desperaately poor, was in the news again. He had been sent amounts of money while in gaol, by peo-ple who didn't think he should have been punished for being too proud to ask for a handout, and there was more than enough to have paid his fine. The rest of the money was being put to a good use, as he used it pay for passage to Toronto, where he could make a fresh start.

50 years ago: York, with its recorded history dating "back to the Romans and beyond", was full of those little curios and oddities which rarely find their way into the history books, according to Mr Nobody. The columnist wondered how many people knew the history of the pile of timber which stood, roofed against the weather, on a plot of land opposite St William's College. It belonged to Mr Frank Green, and came from when Pic-cadilly was being built in 1910, and several old houses had to be taken down to make room for the new thoroughfare. One of them was Parliament House, a timbered building in which Charles I was believed to have held his Parliament Committee when he was in York. When he bought the property, Mr Green or-dered the building to be dismantled and all the woodwork was carefully docketed and numbered. A blueprint was made, showing the position of every piece of timber and the wood was then stored on its present site. There it had remained for nearly 50 years, a wooden jigsaw puz-zle of a house steeped in history - a direct link with a king of England.

10 years ago: Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, but not, appar-ently, the people of York, declared the paper, in light of a new survey into preg-nancies in Britain. The results revealed that the baby boom in York was more of a baby slump, with only Cambridge and Southport having a lower rate. While Londoners were "whooping it up" with more than 125 pregnancies per thousand each year, "austere" York couples man-age only 65 per thousand. It also revealed "back to basics" Tykes in Northallerton produced the lowest num-ber of pregnancies outside marriage in the country.

Updated: 09:24 Friday, April 02, 2004