March 18

“Mothering Sunday,” which was a day appointed for a mothers’ festival, would fall on the following Sunday.

It was a day on which mothers were “at home” to their children, when family quarrels were forgotten, and when letters from distant sons and daughters reached the old home.

It was, in fact, the mothers’ “joyday” at the reunion of the family.

The violet was the emblem of the celebration. The mothers’ festival was perhaps more observed in the North of England and the Midlands than in London, but the observance was growing in London.

50 years ago

The setting of a date for the raising of the school leaving age to 16 years presented teachers with a whole host of questions to which answers had to be found in the not too distant future, said a York headmaster. Local authorities and teachers would be the ones who would have to find the answers.

This was one of the annoying habits of Ministers of the Crown, he said, they made the decisions and left others to do the work and make the sacrifices necessary to implement them. “Will the local authority be able, without impairing the progress of its development plan, to provide the extra places in our secondary schools?

Will the equipment and the facilities of the right sort for these adolescents be forthcoming in sufficient quantity and quality? Will we be provided with enough extra teachers to cope with the task of providing the kind of education suggested by the Newsom Committee?

Will the teachers who had to deal with this older age group welcome the prospect? Can the teaching profession learn to treat the 14 to 16 years age group as adults rather than schoolchildren?

These are but a few of the many questions to which we must try to find satisfactory answers, for I am very certain that this age group will not be tolerant – and rightly so – if we fail to offer something worthwhile in return for their extra year at school.”

25 years ago

Barges, it was hoped, could be using the River Foss in York again later in the year. Councillors had agreed a channel should be dredged along the now derelict waterway from the Ouse to Wormald’s Cut.

The £5,000 bill would be met by the York Civic Trust, but the main users were going to be barges taking newsprint to the new £10 million headquarters of the York and County Press in Walmgate. That would keep alive an age-old tradition of water deliveries to the parent company of the Yorkshire Evening Press, now the only commercial user of the river.