Thursday, April 14, 2005

100 years ago: The restoration of St William's College in York had commenced, but such was its extremely dilapidated condition that it was expected to be three years before it was fully restored. While "all the citizens of York and probably the greater number of visitors" were acquainted with the exterior of the "quaint red-washed edifice with its numerous small windows and overhanging storeys", few had seen the interior. The massive recessed perpendicular doorway, surmounted by a carved figure almost indistinguishable by age and neglect, led into a spacious square courtyard. This showed years of neglect, as did the many rooms, through which a dank and damp atmosphere now pervaded, thought to have come from the clearing of the cellars.

50 years ago: John Blunt thought it was amazing what a television programme could do to people: before George Orwell's "gruesome" Nineteen-Eighty-Four was produced, he thought that less than one in ten viewers had heard of that sinister character Big Brother. Now the title was bandied about everywhere, both flippantly and seriously, and often attached to the most unlikely characters, as some people took the "hands-off-my-sacred-liberties" attitude just a little too far. His example was a "very vocal minority faction" in Darlington, one of the four areas carrying out an experiment to test the effect of adding one-millionth part of fluoride to every pint of their tap water. The amount was the same that South Shields householders had been consuming for generations, and as it was "reputed" to stop dental decay. The columnist thought this came under the local council's automatic mandate of looking after the people's best interests, and he didn't believe it would lead to officials to dosing the public with any drugs they chose, as one individual feared.

25 years ago: Plesiosaurus zetlandicus was on the move again. However, the 18 ft-long sea lizard would not be rampaging anywhere. He was on his way to Oxford in the back of a lorry from the Yorkshire Museum, where he was one of the favourite exhibits. The fossil, which was 180 million years old, was on loan to the University Museum at Oxford for six months, where it would be used in research work and be given a thorough clean-up. It was named after the Earl of Zetland, on whose land it was found, near Whitby, and was believed to be unique as it had a large head and a short neck, plesiosauruses usually having a long neck.

Updated: 16:47 Wednesday, April 13, 2005