25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, May 5, 1973

THE news that Rolls-Royce Motor shares will be on the market soon is encouraging for it means that no other car company will be able to absorb that British symbol of elegance and luxury. Many small investors will buy shares not because they hope to make money out of them, but because they will be anxious to support a unique enterprise which has carried British prestige all over the world for a great many years.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, May 5, 1948

PICNICS today are a far cry from taking a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee or a bottle of pop to Barrow Bridge. Nowadays they can mean anything up to a hundred miles in a motor coach, with lunch at one town and tea fifty miles on, all pre-arranged by enthusiastic organizers.

Whether they are enjoyed to the same extent by everybody is not so certain, judging from the remark made recently by a Bolton woman who asking is she was going on the picnic this year.

'Where are they going?' she asked, and being told that the trip was to a remote village in the Lake District, shook her head and said: 'Oh, no. We went somewhere like that last year, and there was nothing to do.'

125 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, May 6, 1873

SIR,- I am quite delighted with the action of the music Committee concerning the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, as I am sure we are far more likely to get thoroughly good musical entertainments at their hands than if left to the tender mercies of the Philharmonic Society. It is quite good enough for ordinary occasions, and on such occasions Brown, Jones and Robinson, whom we all know and often see in their working clothes, will do to fiddle and sing for us. But on such an extraordinary occasion as this our friends should gracefully retire and give place to - I will not say better men, but to men who come from a distance, and whom we have never a chance of seeing except in their Sunday clothes This is certainly a step in the right direction, but I do not think we should stop here, but carry out the principle here recognised in other matters. My suggestion is this. Could we not hire a Mayor and Council from some other town to officiate in place of our own worthy townsmen? Liverpool or Manchester might suit our purpose. The idea, I presume, is quite original, and as the plan has not been tried elsewhere it would have the advantage of perfect novelty. - Yours, Harpe.

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