100 years ago

The suffragists were certainly responsible for many of the disquieting features of modern life, but it would have been idle to deny that other people were taking the opportunity to perpetrate mischief in their name.

In a Border town some boys had been playing football in a factory yard.

The ball had gone through one of the windows, but before the lads sought fresh pastures they placarded the house with the usual legend, “Votes for Women.”

This was quite sufficient to start grave reflection on the impending collapse of the country among the workers for quite an hour of the following morning, at the end of which the real cause of the trouble had come to light.

50 years ago

An extension of the limit of British territorial waters, within which foreign fishermen were forbidden to operate, was likely to be announced in the House of Commons by Mr Edward Heath, Lord Privy Seal.

The fishing industry had asked for a 12-mile limit in place of the current three miles. The Government was understood to have examined the possibility of compromising with six miles.

Several North East European countries had extended their coastal limits, including Iceland which had imposed a 12-mile limit, subject to an agreement, effective until the following March, under which British vessels could work to a six-mile limit.

Denmark had imposed a six-mile limit round the Faroes, and proposed to increase it to 12 the following March. An extension of the British Coastal waters would enable a number of inshore fishing grounds, which had been over-fished to recover their productivity.

25 years ago

Cat rustling in the UK had reached epidemic proportions – and York was a blackspot.

These were the claims of National Petwatch, which was setting up a Petwatch Roadshow to gather nationwide information about thousands of cats and dogs, which, it claimed, went missing every year.

The roadshow would begin the following month, and York and Scarborough were on the list for visits. Petwatch, which had been set up in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, in 1983, claimed many pets ended up in laboratory experiments, in bloodsports, or as foreigners’ fur coats.

Their claims came after a recent outcry by York dog-lovers after several of their pets went missing in the city centre.

There was no official record of pet disappearances because unlike missing persons, the police were not required to log lost cats or dogs. So Petwatch was compiling its own dossier which, it said, revealed a booming business in stolen pets.