Monday, May 24, 2004

100 years ago: One of the oldest, as it is one of the best managed, village burial clubs was declared to be that at Cayton, which went back "practically out of memory." On Whit Monday the members did exactly the same thing that their great-great-grandfathers did on that day: they assemble to the music of pipe and tabor, cymbal and drum, link fingers, and wend their way, "it isn't a march," to the parish church, returning to the inn for a sumptuous spread, and thence to the green for gambols. Very serious and solemn was the business part of the programme, mystic almost the signs and responses, heart-wholed the enjoyment. Out of these village clubs and similar town guilds the great Friendly Societies had sprung, and it seems to columnist TT that in a very real sense these lusty offspring owed something to their aged and scarce prosperous parents. The villagers kept alive and nurtured the old spirit of social brotherhood, and though they might not relish at first being merged into a big society TT thought it would be really better for them. He also called for a Friendly Society village crusade, which he believed would benefit everybody.

50 years ago: At different times a strange and varied collection of objects have been brought to the newspaper office for the attention of Mr Nobody. They included a water vole, a live monkey, a complete wasps' nest, a spider's nest, and the largest egg laid by a hen in Yorkshire. Yesterday, he was shown his first, and hopefully last, mummified cat. It was discovered in the roof of a house in King's Court, York, by workmen carrying out repairs, who took the animal to the Yorkshire Museum. The curator was surprised at its state of preservation, especially its skin. Apparently the cat had been trapped between the spars and the plaster but it was difficult to understand how it came to be so well preserved. One of the workmen, who brought the cat in for Mr Nobody to see, told him that another mummified cat was discovered in the same place but it had somehow been lost under some debris.

10 years ago: An ornithologist at the Yorkshire Museum in York had discovered two rare birds in the museum's vaults. Victorian collectors shot the aquatic warbler and the white crowned black wheatear in southern France, the of each species recorded on French soil. The wheatear is usually found in North Africa and Saudi Arabia, and the warbler in Eastern Europe and West Africa. The birds were found whilst the ornithologist was researching the museum's 4,000 bird skins, but nothing was found with them to explain why they were in the museum's collection. "I have sent the details to the French, who are very excited about the find," the ornithologist said, "shooting birds for collecting persons was common in the Victorian era. They had a saying: 'what was hit was history, what was missed was mystery'."

Updated: 08:48 Monday, May 24, 2004