100 years ago

Mrs Pankhurst had started her “hunger strike” at Holloway Prison. The suffragette leader had been committed, at the Epsom Police Court the previous day, for trial at the Guildford Summer Assizes, on a charge of inciting “persons unknown” to blow up Mr Lloyd George’s house at Walton-on-the-Hill on February 18.

Mrs Pankhurst had arrived at Holloway Prison from Epsom in the Surrey police motor car at a quarter to five. Her daughter, Sylvia Pankhurst, was also there on “hunger strike,” but they would not be allowed to be together. “I shall take no food from the moment I enter the prison,” declared Mrs Pankhurst, in a final statement before the gates of Holloway closed on her.

The prison authorities could, if they thought fit, order that she be forcibly fed, and with a woman of Mrs Pankhurst’s determination this order would possibly have to be sternly enforced.

50 years ago

The Doctors’ Hostel at York City Hospital was not warm enough to attract potential overseas housemen. This was the opinion of the hospital’s house committee, which was asking that a scheme of heating should be expedited.

The management committee had decided that a report on the various types of heating should be obtained with approximate costs. January had been a record month for York Maternity Hospital, with 199 babies. Commenting on this figure, the chairman of the Special Hospitals House Committee, Councillor JM Wood, said it was appropriate that it should happen in National Productivity Year.

25 years ago

Valuable ceiling paintings thought to be 300 years old had been removed from Nunnington Hall for urgent repairs.

It had taken freelance conservator Richard Watkiss two days working on scaffolding to remove the set of panels and prepare them for the journey back to his Wiltshire studio. Two of the panels were more than 6ft square and two 3ft square. It was hoped they would be restored and back at the hall in time for the start of the visitors’ season in April. Experts believed they were the work of Flemish-born artist Jacob Huysmans, who was known to have been paid £25 in 1686 by the then owner Lord Preston, for a painting for the Great Staircase.

The ceiling panels were taken from Lord Preston’s own dressing room and the canvases showed the coat of arms and crests of Lord Preston and his wife, Lady Ann Howard. The paintings, said to have been done with “delightful naiveté” might have been the work of a journeyman painter but were more likely to have been an extra commission given to Huysmans when painting for the Great Staircase.