Tuesday, May 11, 2004

100 years ago: A letter was printed in response to an editorial piece condemning the "scandalous pamphlet" issued by the York City Temperance Electoral Campaign Committee, although the writer admitted he hadn't seen it, and so would make no comment upon the pamphlet itself. Instead he commented that if the journalist who wrote it had seen what was witnessed by local residents, and fitly described as the saddest and most distressing sight on Knavesmire during the races, he would have refrained from such eulogising remarks about the lack of drunkenness. One recent incident recounted was of two respectably-attired young women, of girlish appearance, leaving the racecourse, so thoroughly incapable of maintaining an upright carriage that neither could help the other, although one fell repeatedly, and had to be lifted to her feet. A tour round the city on a Friday or Saturday night, just prior to and after closing time, would be a startling revelation and eye-opener to many thoughtful citizens, and a sad object lesson to even our magistrates, he concluded. The editor of the paper had the last word though, pointing out that while no one denied that there was drunkenness in York, it did not prove there were "hosts of drunkards".

50 years ago: Claims were being made that the young generation of the country was effete and flabby, but columnist John Blunt called for a stop to this "boring commentary by weary, dreary wiseacres". He contended that if all the youths were guilty as charged, then Roger Bannister wouldn't have run a mile in under four minutes. He, and the other young men and women of Britain and the Commonwealth that had been trying to achieve the same record, had not let themselves be brought down by the "nothing's-as-good-as-it-was tongue cluckers". Blunt was careful to point out, though, that this achievement, like the conquering of Everest, was achieved by a team, with their roots in the British tradition of sportmanship, saying that in this case Chataway sacrificed his own record ambitions to help his old rival. "Knocking tenths of a second off a record makes the story," Blunt concluded, "but it's sportmanship that make the moral."

10 years ago: The answer to a peculiar sand fall in North Yorkshire was blowing in the wind, according to Leeds weather centre. People in Kirkbymoorside woke one morning to find sand had fallen from the sky and covered their cars, and there was more in Farndale, where one man wondered if it was some form of pollution from Teeside or from sandy beaches on the east coast - but there had been hardly any wind in the night to blow it there. However, the duty forecaster at the weather centre cleared the matter up. He said that it was indeed sand, but not from the east coast. In fact it had blown in from the Sahara Desert. This had happened before and is not that unusual, the sand having got high enough up in the atmosphere to have travelled this far before it fell again.

Updated: 08:30 Tuesday, May 11, 2004