100 years ago

A remarkable operation had been performed in Paris, when two baby girls, named Suzanne and Madeleine, who had been born joined together by a fibro-cartilaginous tissue, were separated into two perfectly formed children.

The operation had been carried out in a private nursing home by Dr Le Filliatre, a well-known Paris surgeon. The danger the surgeon had had to reckon with was that some important organs might have been common to both babies. Radiography had not given any definite indications on the subject. The result appeared to prove that Suzanne and Madeleine had each her complete complement of vital organs.

A special set of tiny instruments had been made for the operations - a doll’s set - as the ordinary instruments would have been too clumsy for this “surgical jewellery work,” to use the surgeon’s phrase. The operation had lasted a quarter of an hour, and the twins were doing as well as could be expected.

 

50 years ago

British Railways were again being asked to cut the working week of about 380,000 railwaymen, from 42 hours to 40 as union leaders and representatives of the Railways Board came together in London at a meeting of the Railway Staff National Council.

This was the second stage of the railway negotiating procedure, the board having already rejected the claim at the first stage in June the previous year. Current negotiations resulted from a claim from two of the three unions only, the National Union of Railwaymen and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen in respect of operating staff.

Most of the clerical staff already had a working week of 40 hours or less. Railway shopmen had also announced their intention of submitting again the claim for a 40-hour week for 80,000 engineering workers which had previously been rejected by the Wages Board.

 

25 years ago

Mink, once bred for their fur, had wiped out whole populations of water voles on the North York Moors. An expert claimed that mink, whose ancestors had escaped from fur farms, had invaded all waterways in the area.

As a result there were no voles to be found in the Dove, Seven, or Rye rivers on the moors. Dr Roy Brown, a wildlife mammal specialist who had discovered the first mink living wild in England in 1959, said all riverside nesting birds as well as small mammals were threatened by the ferocious hunters.

Otters, too, had now all but disappeared from the moors, he added. Mink had been released from farms in large numbers during the war when the fur market collapsed. The animals had been breeding rapidly since then.